{"id":12041,"date":"2016-07-01T09:44:39","date_gmt":"2016-07-01T16:44:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.drjimtaylor.com\/4.0\/?p=12041"},"modified":"2016-07-01T09:44:39","modified_gmt":"2016-07-01T16:44:39","slug":"mental-training-works-says-research","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.drjimtaylor.com\/4.0\/mental-training-works-says-research\/","title":{"rendered":"Mental Training Works, says Research"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.drjimtaylor.com\/4.0\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/mental-training.jpg\"><img fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-12042\" src=\"https:\/\/www.drjimtaylor.com\/4.0\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/mental-training-300x295.jpg\" alt=\"mental training\" width=\"264\" height=\"260\" \/><\/a>A <a href=\"https:\/\/blog.frontiersin.org\/2016\/06\/30\/thinking-i-can-do-better-really-can-improve-performance\/\">recent study<\/a> has demonstrated that mental training, even when used briefly online, does, in fact, work. The study, involving more than 44,000 participants, found that both self-talk and imagery, whether focused on the process or the outcome, improved effort, intensity, the experience of pleasant emotions, and performance on a competitive online task.<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">From the study, &#8220;The greatest improvements were seen in self-talk-outcome (telling yourself, \u201cI can beat my best score\u201d), self-talk-process (telling yourself, \u201cI can react quicker this time\u201d), imagery-outcome (imagining yourself playing the game and beating your best score), and imagery-process (imagining yourself playing and reacting quicker than last time).<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">They also found a short motivational video could improve performance. Participants watched a short video before playing the online game. The coach for these videos was, none other than, four-time Olympic gold medalist Michael Johnson, an athlete known for advocating mental preparedness in addition to physical training.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>If significant results can come from such a brief intervention, imagine the benefits of an ongoing mental training program.<\/p>\n<p>Another great reason to enroll in my upcoming\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.taylorprimeperformance.com\/prime-sport-101-train-your-mind-6-week-mental-training-course\/\"><em>Prime Sport 101: Train Your Mind like a Champion<\/em><\/a> online mental training course!<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s the full reference for the study:\u00a0Andrew M. Lane, Peter Totterdell, Ian MacDonald, Tracey J. Devonport, Andrew P. Friesen, Christopher J. Beedie, Damian Stanley, Alan Nevill. <strong>Brief Online Training Enhances Competitive Performance: Findings of the BBC Lab UK Psychological Skills Intervention Study<\/strong>. <em>Frontiers in Psychology<\/em>, 2016; 7 DOI: <a href=\"http:\/\/dx.doi.org\/10.3389\/fpsyg.2016.00413\">10.3389\/fpsyg.2016.00413<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A recent study has demonstrated that mental training, even when used briefly online, does, in fact, work. The study, involving more than 44,000 participants, found that both self-talk and imagery, whether focused on the process or the outcome, improved effort, intensity, the experience of pleasant emotions, and performance on a competitive online task. From the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1517],"tags":[74,1130,394,186,155],"class_list":["post-12041","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sports","tag-athletes","tag-mental-skills","tag-mental-training","tag-performance","tag-sport-psychology"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drjimtaylor.com\/4.0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12041","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drjimtaylor.com\/4.0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drjimtaylor.com\/4.0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drjimtaylor.com\/4.0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drjimtaylor.com\/4.0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12041"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.drjimtaylor.com\/4.0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12041\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drjimtaylor.com\/4.0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12041"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drjimtaylor.com\/4.0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12041"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drjimtaylor.com\/4.0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12041"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}