The general answer is yes. See, for instance, Pearson et al. Curr Biol. 2008 18(13):982-6; Sherwood and Pearson PLoS One. 2010 5(12):e15217; and Byrne et al. Psychol Rev. 2007 114(2):340-75.
Synaptic strength (if I understand your question correctly), especially in relation to deliberate practice...that is more difficult to figure out. I’m not aware of any particular research on that topic (and it would be hellishly difficult to do). Whether (and if so, how much) visualization-gained improvements are transferable to real-world skills is also controversial.
I’ll indulge in one paragraph of guesswork here. Extrapyramidal centers (such as spine, basal ganglia, cerebellum) appear excluded during visualization exercises. Say you are visualizing a martial arts kata, and say that visualization does produce potentiation. Even in this case, all of the changes would be limited to the premotor area and the primary motor cortex—areas that are critical for actual movement execution (especially cerebellum, balance centers in the brainstem and spinal centers) would be unaffected. Worse, the changes in the high-level centers would be made without corrective input. When kata is then attempted in real life, these idealized neural plans might slam nose-first into unexpected feedback responses—therefore making things worse, not better. For this reason, I would personally eschew visualization as a training modality in any actual physical skill.
I think you’re probably right that visualization doesn’t work very well if used alone, and doesn’t work as well as executing the movements themselves, but there are a lot of situations where it makes sense to visualize something instead of actually doing it–and this seems to at least help.
For example, recently I had to teach myself the poomsae (taekwondo equivalent of kata) for my next belt testing by watching Youtube videos the night before. It obviously didn’t work for me to stand in front of the computer screen and do all of the movements–any move that took me sideways or backwards would result in me no longer being able to see the screen, and thus not knowing my next move. So I sat in a chair and visualized as hard as I could as I watched, making small movements with my hands and feet to represent kicks and punches, but imagining myself doing the whole movement. After 5 or 6 repetitions, I was able to stand up and go through the whole sequence in my living room, using my whole body.
Likely this worked because I already knew a whole bunch of basic moves, which were included in the poomsae, and just had to string them together in a new order, with transitions in between. (And even for the transitions, I’ve probably done almost every transition from one move to another at least once before ‘in real life.’)
I think a lot of athletes use visualization because, well, it’s not practical (or even possible) to train all the time. Your muscles have limits. Even if you don’t reach those limits, the training time booked on the rink or in the pool or whatever is limited. So you get the most out of it that you can, and then you take advance of “downtime”, which would otherwise be useless to training (i.e. sitting on public transit on the way home) to visualize. I don’t know if anyone’d done a study of this, but for athletes who are already training a lot, I expect doing some extra visualization on top of it helps.
This is possible, but I’m completely unfamiliar with any research on the topic, if there is any. That last paragraph of my comment above is pure guesswork, and I would love to see some data, if anyone can dig some out…
I remember some research indicating that muscles could be made to grow by just visualizing muscle workout, without any actual muscle movements. Its not quite the same to make muscles grow as to make (karate) movements more precise by visualizations. I would however have thought the muscle growth hypothesis much more unlikely than the karate training.
I do not have any references, and have no knowledge of the quality of the research done.
I think a lot of athletes use visualization because, well, it’s not practical (or even possible) to train all the time. Your muscles have limits. Even if you don’t reach those limits, the training time booked on the rink or in the pool or whatever is limited. So you get the most out of it that you can, and then you take advance of “downtime”, which would otherwise be useless to training (i.e. sitting on public transit on the way home) to visualize. I don’t know if anyone’d done a study of this, but for athletes who are already training a lot, I expect doing some extra visualization on top of it helps.
They have. It works much as you hypothesize. The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance had a couple of chapters on it if I recall.
Even in this case, all of the changes would be limited to the premotor area and the primary motor cortex—areas that are critical for actual movement execution (especially cerebellum, balance centers in the brainstem and spinal centers) would be unaffected. Worse, the changes in the high-level centers would be made without corrective input.
Do we know which parts of our nervous system gets altered by physical training?
My understanding is that stretching is largely a retraining of the nervous system. But I’ve wondered, which parts of the nervous system are being trained? Do the basal ganglia adjust their connections, or is it only centers higher up in the nervous system?
We do know, and it’s pretty much everything. From premotor area, over the motor cortex, through brainstem nuclei, cerebellar nuclei, cerebellar cortex, all the way down to spinal motor centers—everything can and does get retrained.
Not to mention associative connections with all other parts of the brain. Do an hour of any physical activity, and you’ll be changing at least a few synapses in pretty much every area of the brain. (Ok, fine, maybe there will be a few exceptions—say, hypothalamus—but they will be exceptions.)
Thanks. I’ve wondered what got retrained for a while, because in some way I can’t recall, I thought the locus of change in the system had practical implications for training, but couldn’t remember what they were.
As for your aversion to visualiztion, I think it flies in the face of a lot of data showing the benefit of visualization exercises. The theory goes that the brain is always simulating the feedback it expects to get, so that simulation system still runs while you visualize, so that you do get feedback, and therefore can train. The key is to train up that simulation so it is reliable when you do visualizations. The advantage is being able to train more, and train with a fresh simulated body, instead of a tiring real one.
The somatic work literature like Feldenkrais Hannah, Mabel Todd, and Lulu Sweigert have exercise for training that somatic sense. One thing in particular I remember are exercises where you close your eyes and move, trying to sense your final position, then open your eyes and get visual feedback about where you are. You can do that focusing on either the visual simulation, the proprioceptive feel, or both at once. Mabel Todd was big on knowing anatomy, so that your visualization could also draw on an accurate model of your bones and muscles when trying to make predictions. Visualize the bones moving. Visualize the the muscles lengthening and shortening. Do whatever you can to get accurate models in your head.
The belief is that the visualization itself works by simulating the feedback, and one of the keys is to train that
Even in this case, all of the changes would be limited to the premotor area and the primary motor cortex—areas that are critical for actual movement execution (especially cerebellum, balance centers in the brainstem and spinal centers) would be unaffected. Worse, the changes in the high-level centers would be made without corrective inpu
I was under the impression that visualization did improve actual movement execution. Let me see if I can find the research.
The general answer is yes. See, for instance, Pearson et al. Curr Biol. 2008 18(13):982-6; Sherwood and Pearson PLoS One. 2010 5(12):e15217; and Byrne et al. Psychol Rev. 2007 114(2):340-75.
Synaptic strength (if I understand your question correctly), especially in relation to deliberate practice...that is more difficult to figure out. I’m not aware of any particular research on that topic (and it would be hellishly difficult to do). Whether (and if so, how much) visualization-gained improvements are transferable to real-world skills is also controversial.
I’ll indulge in one paragraph of guesswork here. Extrapyramidal centers (such as spine, basal ganglia, cerebellum) appear excluded during visualization exercises. Say you are visualizing a martial arts kata, and say that visualization does produce potentiation. Even in this case, all of the changes would be limited to the premotor area and the primary motor cortex—areas that are critical for actual movement execution (especially cerebellum, balance centers in the brainstem and spinal centers) would be unaffected. Worse, the changes in the high-level centers would be made without corrective input. When kata is then attempted in real life, these idealized neural plans might slam nose-first into unexpected feedback responses—therefore making things worse, not better. For this reason, I would personally eschew visualization as a training modality in any actual physical skill.
I think you’re probably right that visualization doesn’t work very well if used alone, and doesn’t work as well as executing the movements themselves, but there are a lot of situations where it makes sense to visualize something instead of actually doing it–and this seems to at least help.
For example, recently I had to teach myself the poomsae (taekwondo equivalent of kata) for my next belt testing by watching Youtube videos the night before. It obviously didn’t work for me to stand in front of the computer screen and do all of the movements–any move that took me sideways or backwards would result in me no longer being able to see the screen, and thus not knowing my next move. So I sat in a chair and visualized as hard as I could as I watched, making small movements with my hands and feet to represent kicks and punches, but imagining myself doing the whole movement. After 5 or 6 repetitions, I was able to stand up and go through the whole sequence in my living room, using my whole body.
Likely this worked because I already knew a whole bunch of basic moves, which were included in the poomsae, and just had to string them together in a new order, with transitions in between. (And even for the transitions, I’ve probably done almost every transition from one move to another at least once before ‘in real life.’)
I think a lot of athletes use visualization because, well, it’s not practical (or even possible) to train all the time. Your muscles have limits. Even if you don’t reach those limits, the training time booked on the rink or in the pool or whatever is limited. So you get the most out of it that you can, and then you take advance of “downtime”, which would otherwise be useless to training (i.e. sitting on public transit on the way home) to visualize. I don’t know if anyone’d done a study of this, but for athletes who are already training a lot, I expect doing some extra visualization on top of it helps.
This is possible, but I’m completely unfamiliar with any research on the topic, if there is any. That last paragraph of my comment above is pure guesswork, and I would love to see some data, if anyone can dig some out…
I remember some research indicating that muscles could be made to grow by just visualizing muscle workout, without any actual muscle movements. Its not quite the same to make muscles grow as to make (karate) movements more precise by visualizations. I would however have thought the muscle growth hypothesis much more unlikely than the karate training.
I do not have any references, and have no knowledge of the quality of the research done.
They have. It works much as you hypothesize. The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance had a couple of chapters on it if I recall.
Do we know which parts of our nervous system gets altered by physical training?
My understanding is that stretching is largely a retraining of the nervous system. But I’ve wondered, which parts of the nervous system are being trained? Do the basal ganglia adjust their connections, or is it only centers higher up in the nervous system?
We do know, and it’s pretty much everything. From premotor area, over the motor cortex, through brainstem nuclei, cerebellar nuclei, cerebellar cortex, all the way down to spinal motor centers—everything can and does get retrained.
Not to mention associative connections with all other parts of the brain. Do an hour of any physical activity, and you’ll be changing at least a few synapses in pretty much every area of the brain. (Ok, fine, maybe there will be a few exceptions—say, hypothalamus—but they will be exceptions.)
Thanks. I’ve wondered what got retrained for a while, because in some way I can’t recall, I thought the locus of change in the system had practical implications for training, but couldn’t remember what they were.
As for your aversion to visualiztion, I think it flies in the face of a lot of data showing the benefit of visualization exercises. The theory goes that the brain is always simulating the feedback it expects to get, so that simulation system still runs while you visualize, so that you do get feedback, and therefore can train. The key is to train up that simulation so it is reliable when you do visualizations. The advantage is being able to train more, and train with a fresh simulated body, instead of a tiring real one.
The somatic work literature like Feldenkrais Hannah, Mabel Todd, and Lulu Sweigert have exercise for training that somatic sense. One thing in particular I remember are exercises where you close your eyes and move, trying to sense your final position, then open your eyes and get visual feedback about where you are. You can do that focusing on either the visual simulation, the proprioceptive feel, or both at once. Mabel Todd was big on knowing anatomy, so that your visualization could also draw on an accurate model of your bones and muscles when trying to make predictions. Visualize the bones moving. Visualize the the muscles lengthening and shortening. Do whatever you can to get accurate models in your head.
The belief is that the visualization itself works by simulating the feedback, and one of the keys is to train that
I was under the impression that visualization did improve actual movement execution. Let me see if I can find the research.