Visualization: A Powerful Tool for Heavy Lifting

Most lifters have heard the term visualization.

This is the practice of visualizing a perfect lift in your mind before you actually do one.

That is a pretty vague description. About the same level of insight as “The Red Sox play baseball”.

Visualization done well can enhance powerlifting performance by cutting down on needless mistakes and helping master the difficult skill of muscle control.

 

What visualization is and what it aint

Visualization is deliberately creating images in your mind of how you will do a perfect lift. You see a self-created series of images in your mind of you doing a perfect squat, bench press or deadlift.

This imagination procedure helps you replicate the perfect (or close to perfect) lift when moving real weights.

There is a huge volume of research that supports this idea. If you have a clear mental image of a high-quality lift, your body will work to reproduce that lift when you are doing the real thing.

This used to be fuzzy-woo-woo but for the last decade or so it has been one of the key practices used by major league pro athletes to execute precision parts of their game.

Every major league sports franchise has a mental skills coach who works with players to use visualization and other mental practices to reach their highest level of performance.

Understand that visualization is not watching some half assed YouTube video demonstrating a lift and then going off and trying to do what I just saw.

My observations in gyms over the past few years leads me to believe that most of the people who watch videos in the gym appear to learn little and promptly forget anything they just viewed.

IMHO this is in part because few people have any set of techniques for converting what they viewed into how they actually lift.

 

A primer for effective visualization

There are specific steps that I believe must be taken to get the full benefit of visualization.

The first of these is to develop a complete mental video of how you will execute a perfect lift. This is entirely inside your mind.

It will be quite detailed and will probably take a fair amount of practice to fully develop.

Lets use a squat as an example.

A complete mental video follows this sequence:

• Standing on platform
• Approaching the bar
• Setting up under the bar
• Lift off the rack
• Walk back to position for squat
• Standing fully erect prepared to squat
• Hearing the referees command to squat
• Initial descent sitting back
• Chest up throughout descent
• Reaching just above parallel
• Going below parallel
• Reversing the thrust to come up
• Coming out of the hole with chest leading
• Standing fully erect
• Hearing referee command to rack it

This is an abbreviated listbut I think you get the idea that it is essential to have a mental image of every part of the squat movement.

The other thing that almost no one talks about, that I believe is essential, is to develop a clear mental picture of what each stage FEELS LIKE.

Learning the feel of a perfect lift will enable you to keep improving your technique and allow you to make minor adjustments during a heavy lift.

With consistent practice you can develop the ability to anticipate and sense what every part of the lift should feel like if you are doing a perfect lift.

 

Practice Can Make Perfect

The best way to use visualization as a key tool in your training is to use it on every rep in your work sets.

If you do a total of fifteen squats in your heavy work sets, you should be actively creating sensory feedback every moment you are lifting each of these 15 squats.

You will find that constantly practicing sensory feedback during the lift will build your skills of muscle control. It will also tighten the link between your visualization and what you can actually lift.

Make a systematic effort to be constantly aware of how different parts of the lift feel and what you must do when things dont feel right.

After practicing this for many months you will very likely develop the power of full mental control over each of your power lifts.

 

Coda

Mental skills are another important tool in our kit for getting the most out of our training. The weights are heavy enough without us giving away any advantage we can gain.

Lift Big!

Richard