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Many elite athletes and adherents of physical culture attest that on
the advance level, accomplishing physical feats are all in the mind.
To these select few, the training of the mind is as important if not
more vital than the training of the body. Visualization is a
powerful training tool that a martial artist or any athlete can
harness to achieve maximum performance.
In their book The Mental Athlete (Ballantine,
1987), Kay Porter and Judy Foster states, “Each time you see
yourself performing exactly the way you want to perform, you
physically create neural patterns in your brain. These patterns are
like small tracks permanently engraved on the brain cell. To your
brain, a neural pattern is a neural pattern, whether it is created
by a physical act or a mental act. Your brain sends messages to the
muscles and the muscles react.”
In the book The Filipino Martial Arts by Dan
Inosanto (Know Now, 1980), the late Floro Villabrille, the
undisputed champion of many stick fighting death matches in the
Philippines and Hawaii, relates how he used visualization as a part
of his training. He says, “Before a fight, I go to the mountains
alone, I pretend my enemy is there. I imagine being attacked and in
my imagination I fight for real. I keep this up until my mind is
ready for the kill. I can’t lose. When I enter the ring, nobody
can beat me. I already know that man is beaten.”
Among the tips of Porter and Foster that I found
most useful is the one that admonishes athletes to watch their
favorite player in video over and over again. The aim as they stated
earlier, is to create the ideal neural pattern in the brain. It is
interesting to note that many years back, the legendary Bruce Lee
has used a similar method as described by one of his students and
publisher of Black Belt Magazine Mito Uyehara. “Bruce’s boxing
idol was Muhammad Ali who was the greatest heavyweight he had ever
seen. Bruce used to watch Ali’s film over and over again until he
knew most of his movements. To adopt some of his techniques, Bruce
would watch Ali’s film through a reflection of a mirror. Since
Bruce stance was south paw and Ali’s is orthodox, he could view
Ali’s fighting in south paw through a mirror.”
Though a potent tool, a martial artist must not
see mental training as a panacea. Since one of the primary goals of
the martial arts is the unification of mind and body, it would
therefore definitely pay off to hone both the mental and the
physical.
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