A man reads an Instagram post promising he can ten-times his performance with visualisation techniques. He spends thirty days visualising himself bench-pressing two hundred kilograms every morning for ten minutes. He adds zero additional physical practice. On day thirty he attempts the lift. Cannot move it off his chest. Concludes visualisation does not work. Posts about the failure. The "mental skills do not work" belief he just strengthened will impede his use of actual evidence-based mental skills later.
The visualisation literature does exist. The Paravlic 2018 meta-analysis documents that motor imagery moderately improves maximal voluntary strength — less than physical practice, but real. The PETTLEP framework (Holmes and Collins 2001) specifies the quality criteria that make imagery work. The naive "just visualise success" prescription bears almost no resemblance to the evidence-based version. The gap is the whole problem.
Inside this one
- Self-Determination Theory operationalised for training motivation
- Locke and Latham goal-setting with SMARTER and the process-versus-outcome distinction
- Paravlic 2018 meta-analysis on visualisation dose-response and the PETTLEP framework
- Cotterill 2014 pre-performance routine framework with the thirty-second-at-the-bar approach
- Cognitive reappraisal and structured post-event review for failure recovery
- Sport-psychology credential map — PhD, CMPC, BPS chartered — and what each scope covers
The standard it is held to
Every factual claim in this volume names its source, and every claim carries a confidence grade — settled, strong, emerging or contested. Where the evidence is thin, the text says so. How it’s made, in full → · What we’ve got wrong →