Visualization For Youth Sports - A Parent's Guide To Helping Your Kid Visualize

Summary

• Visualization practices can help your athlete with the mental game. It doesn’t take long and it can be the difference that takes your athlete to the next level.
• First, find a quiet place with no distraction for your athlete.
• You can do this anytime during the day. I have read it is best in the morning, before the conscious mind fully wakes. Other research say nighttime. What ever time of day you decide, will work. Just make sure you make the time to do it.
• Secondly, do what I call “Check-In”. Starting with breathing. I find most people will fix their posture naturally when focusing on breathing. Then check-in with your vision, hearing, and what the body is feeling. Take time as you check-in with each of these senses. Last item to check-in is the mind.
• When checking-in with the mind, I really want to focus on that little voice in there. That voice can be positive or negative. Helpful or destructive. Remind your athlete that they need to be aware of the differences. They also have the choice to listen to the voice or change it.
• Now we are ready to visualize playing sports. We can start with visualizing individual skills or movements. Then situation in a game or match.
• Guide your athlete by making them aware of the sounds, the smells, the feelings both physically and emotionally. Pay close attention to the little voice as well. What they practice in these sessions will most likely be what they do in a game.
• Don’t over do the visualization sessions with your athlete. Start with small amounts of time and make it fun.

Full Transcript

Hey, it's David Sabi here with Kid to Athlete. We're going over visualization. And so if you want your kid to level up as an athlete, you're going to want to practice that mental game and that includes visualizing their movements, their games, their practices, their shots. So you're going to want to kind of key into this. And you as a parent can help your kid get started in visualizations. Now there are coaches out there, there are sports psychologists out there that can help increase that mental game to a whole nother level. But again, as a parent, if you want to just get your kids started, we can do that.

So let's get started. How do you do that? Well, the first one is setting. You want to pick the right setting. You want a quiet place so that your athlete can focus on what you're saying or how you're guiding them. Now they're not going to be necessarily visualizing in quiet places only, but what I'm looking for is just for starters, we want a quiet place so that your athlete can just focus. Now you don't need much time, two to five minutes. Really that's all you need and you can do it anytime during the day. At this point, it doesn't really matter what time of the day. Just get those two to five minutes of practice in.

Although I do have to say there have been things I've read that say the morning is the best time to do visualization practice because your conscious mind hasn't really woken up yet, and you are more likely to let that visual stuff sink in.

Then I've read something like nighttime is the best time because again, you're about to go to sleep. Your brain is starting to shut certain things down. And visualizing at that point is going to be the best time to really absorb. Plus when you go to sleep, that's when you really lock things in is during sleep. So right now your kid is getting started in visualizing and just kind of working with that anytime of the day for now. But as your kid starts to do it on their own, then they can choose morning, night, or whenever. That's setting. That's what we want to focus on for just getting the right spot.

After that, we're going to do what I call check-in. Check-in is basically a checklist of things that I want you to kind of go through so that you can be aware of so that you can just kind of get yourself gathered and centered. And it starts with breathing or your breath. And what I like about this is anytime I say focus on your breathing or focused on your breath, what people will do is they tend to sit up nice and tall and they get in a position that is basically just perfect alignment. You don't have to do visualization sitting up. You can do it lying down. But when you focus on your breathing, you tend to just line things up a little bit better.

So focusing on breathing means inhale through the nose, really fill up the lungs. You want to push that air down to your stomach. Use the diaphragm. I want the bottom of your lungs to be full. And so that's what you're doing when you inhale. When you exhale, just exhale normally. So first one is breath.

The next one is vision. What do you see? If your eyes are open, you'll see different things. If your eyes what I prefer is closed, you won't see anything which is again, you're just being aware of your senses. So we've checked into breath, we checked and see what we see. Now let's check into what we hear. If it's quiet, then you might hear the buzzing of lights or the clock ticking, right? It's again just something that you just want to be aware of. You're not going to necessarily focus on that. You're just kind of just checking in.

We've got breath. We've got vision. We got what we're hearing. Now we are feeling. We're going into the body. Do you feel any tense spots, any tightness? So if you find or if your athletes says, "I'm a little tight in my shoulders," don't just tell them to relax. I've found that the best way to have somebody relax is again focus on the breathing. And when they inhale, tell them to tense up. And when they exhale, then relax. Because if let's say your shoulders are up high, I've had clients that I tell them, "Okay, relax your shoulders." They're like, "WelL, how?" So inhale, tense up those shoulders, exhale, relax everything. It does much better than just saying, "Relax." Just telling somebody to relax is like saying, "Laugh." It's not going to be very relaxing or they're not just going to bust out laughing.

So what we're looking at is again, checking breath first, what you see, what you hear, what you feel. The last one on the checklist is going to be the mind, specifically that little voice that is talking to you in your head. Your kid is probably thinking, "Why are we doing this? What is this all about?" So I want them to just be aware of that voice and remind them that they have the choice to either listen to that voice or not to, or they can change it. So if it's a negative tone or that voice is kind of negative, they can change it to positive. This is going to be very important in playing any sport that they decided to do. So understanding that they have control of that little voice and that little voice is actually very powerful. So we're not going to get into that too much right now, but we're going to go start to go into visualizing because we've just finished our check-in list, right? So we've checked breath, vision, hearing, what you feel in your body, and then that little voice checking in with the mind.

So the third thing, the third thing is simply the actual visualizing what you want. So let's take an example. I just kind of walk you through an example of let's say a basketball player wanting to practice their free throw shots, right? Practicing just mentally is going to be great because now they have a lot of control. They can focus on their performance. They can kind of see themselves doing a perfect shot. So when you're guiding somebody set the scene up. You can say, "Okay, you're on a basketball court." And you can kind of go two ways here. You can have them alone or you can have them as in the game, right? You can have them being a part of a team with a crowd and a lot of people.

But let's start off alone. So you've got your athlete on a basketball court. You tell them there's only one light on and it's on them and the basket, right? So everything else is dark and you don't see the stands. You can't see anything but where you are. And then here's where you can kind of guide them. "Okay, you're working on your free throw shot." And throw some senses in there. "Is it cold on the court? Do you smell the ball every time you make a basket? Do you hear the net?" Just start to kind of get the senses involved, trying to get some feeling in there and just see. "Do you feel calm when you're taking a shot?" Because all of that plays a big part of when they're actually doing it. So they want to kind of mimic the same thing when they're actually practicing, but they have to get an idea of what it should feel like just mentally.

From there you can then decide to go, depending on how advanced your athlete is, you can go into game time. And now we can start to throw in external things. "Now you're on a free throw shot. You've got the crowd going crazy. You've got one second. You got to make this basket or you lose." You start throwing a little bit of pressure and you start to add in more things. When you start to do that, you can recenter them and start to guide them in. "Okay, so crowds going crazy. Coach is yelling. The players are relying on you, all this stuff. How do you feel? Do you feel calm? Do you feel like you are... Do you hear the crowd or you don't hear the crowd? You can feel the ball. Things move in slow motion. What is it that you really want?"

And what you want your athletes to do hopefully is to be calm when there's a lot of pressure. And again this is mentally so they can control a lot of that. And then they can just focus on their technique, focus on their form. When they're visualizing themselves, they can do it internally or externally. So meeting, visualize with them actually being the one in themselves, basically bouncing the ball, taking the shot, or they can have a view of watching themselves take the shot.

There are certain reasons why you want to go internal versus external. Right now it doesn't really matter as long as they feel comfortable, and they can switch in back and forth. The internal one can be good for practicing your shot as well as the external one, practicing your shot, just watching yourself do the shot. But when you're talking about pressure, trying to feel calm like what you're feeling like I feel centered, I know the crowd's going crazy, then internal probably would be best.

So from there you've got your athlete just practicing visually what they're doing. And that's a good start for just visualizing. So again, they can do it alone where it's just them in the ball practicing their move or their shot or whatever they're trying to do, or they can be in a game under pressure with all of these different things going on and just trying to feel calm, trying not to be overwhelmed by what they need to do, but to be able to start to think of, okay, in this situation, this is what I want to do.

That's why visualization is going to be so important because when they get into those situations, things just will kind of be more familiar. And anytime you're familiar with the situation, you're going to think a little bit quicker. You'd be a little bit more calm and it's going to be a little bit more powerful for that athlete. So do not ignore visualizing your movements, your situations. And it is a huge part of the game to the point where even professional athletes nowadays are finding sports psychologists, they're finding mental training coaches that will do nothing but work on that mental game, visualizing and really focusing on controlling everything that happens in the mind.

Okay, well thanks for watching. If you liked this video, give it a thumbs up, hit that Subscribe button, and please share this video with somebody that you think can benefit from this information. And if you'd like to see anything else, leave a comment. Let me know what you'd like to learn or see or hear about, and hopefully I can make another video on that. Until next time, take care.