By Olivier Poirier-Leroy on SwimSwam
Visualization is a popular mental training skill for building confidence and resilience on race day.
Michael Phelps was a big fan. Adam Peaty, Katie Ledecky, Missy Franklin, and countless other elite swimmers used visualization for building confidence, sharpening technique, and preparing for the demands of the Big Meet.
But like any skill, it has to be done properly to get the most from it.
And that means “feeling” as much of the visualization as possible.
Seeing vs Feeling Your Visualizations
Like most swimmers, when I went to bed at night I would often drift off towards imagining my future swims in competition.
This was mostly unstructured, and often veered into wishful thinking more than anything realistic or useful, but there were times where falling asleep afterward would be difficult because the visualization was real enough that my heart rate went up, my palms got sweaty, and butterflies danced around my belly.
An interesting study (Wilson et al., 2015) measured brain activity as swimmers mentally rehearsed swimming a 100 fast under two conditions:
Visual imagery. Swimmers watched themselves swim, either through their own eyes or as though watching a highlight reel. Kinesthetic imagery. Recreating the physical sensations of swimming, including movement, effort, and the feeling of paddling through the water.When they felt the swim, swimmers used much more cortical resources than just watching the swim in their mind. More simply, there’s a measurable difference between mentally rehearsing a fast swim and mentally experiencing what it feels like to swim that race.
Make Visualization as Realistic as Possible
The distinction between seeing versus feeling can, well, feel like we are splitting hairs a little bit, but being able to recreate the physical sensations of racing makes the visualization more real and can improve performance.
Smith et al. (2007) showed that a visualization approach that incorporated the senses improved penalty kick scores in a group of field hockey players by around 15% compared to 5.6% for those who did more traditional imagery work.
A separate experiment with gymnasts also saw improvement via this visualization model (PETTLEP) that was almost as effective as physical practice.
Group Improvement Physical practice 43.9% PETTLEP visualization 36.4% Traditional visualization 15.2% Control (stretching) No changeAlthough these experiments weren’t done with swimmers, they give us a handy principle for better visualization:
The more closely your mental rehearsal resembles the actual swim, the more awesomer and useful it comes.
It’s not just “seeing” what you are doing in the water more clearly than a freshly chlorinated pool, but recreating the physical environment, movement, timing, and emotions that come with your dream swim.
“The key to visualization is that it has to be very vivid.” – Bob BowmanSwimming Faster with Visualization
The next time you close your eyes and rehearse the big race:
Feel the texture of the starting block under your feet. Smell the chlorine in the air. The butterflies in your stomach, the sweaty palms, the nervous excitement behind the block. Feel the burn as you charge for home. Hear the sound of rushing water past your ears. Your hands and feet displacing more water than ever before.The more senses you can bring into the visualization, the more real the rehearsal becomes.
Don’t just see yourself swimming fast, but feel it, too.
MENTAL TRAINING FOR SWIMMERS MADE SIMPLE
Olivier Poirier-Leroy is a former national-level swimmer, 2x Olympic Trials qualifier, and author of Conquer the Pool: The Swimmer’s Ultimate Guide to a High-Performance Mindset.
Conquer the Pool gives swim coaches and competitive swimmers a practical blueprint for building confidence, setting better goals, staying focused on the process, bouncing back from setbacks, and performing under pressure.
The book combines sport psychology research, guided worksheets, and lessons from Olympic champions to help coaches make mental training a more consistent part of what their swimmers do every day.
Want to use Conquer the Pool with your team this season?
Click here to learn about team orders and get pricing for your swim club.
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