Rhythmic Acuracy in Mental Practice

A team of researchers recruited 21 national level judo blackbelts to see how speeding up or slowing down imagery of an already well learned series of moves might affect real time performance. Speeding ut the movements in their mental practice led to faster performance, they found. Likewise, slower physical execution of these techniques led to slower physical execution and a drop in technique speed. The athletes were then divided into three training groups. One group would visualize performing these moves more quickly than they did in the pretest. A second group, the slower group, would mentally rehearse executing these techniques more slowly than they normally would. And a third group, the control group, would do no imagery practice, but simply