How to Exercise When Ill - Some Facts about Mental Training

Normally you would be reminded of physical exercise if you hear the word training. And certainly, if you need to build stamina and muscle, a real workout, like running, weight lifting or swimming will be needed to get your body into shape. But there is another side to the effects of exercising, in that it hones your skills, enhances muscle coordination, teaches you to move exactly as prescribed by your particular sport's guidelines etc.

In the last analysis, all that physical training does if it is not building muscle or stamina is beating certain pathways in your nervous system that mean you can move as elegantly and precisely as desired, be it in golf, gymnastics or figure skating. This goes for all sports, soccer requires as much precision in hitting a ball in the right place with adequate force (not too hard, not too little), to score a goal as any other discipline.

And the more often you practise these movements yourself, the more accomplished you become. The more you watch others, be it your coach, your team-mates or your competitors, the better the state-of-the-art typical motion will be picked up by your brain and wired into your system.

When you follow training statistics over the years then one can see clearly that training periods became longer and longer, and in most cases you'll find, the earlier (as a child) an athlete began to train, the more time he or she devoted to training during their lifetime the better their chance to become a champion, if their coach was any good.

However, there is only so much time you can devote to your training before you overexert yourself and any further second invested will become counterproductive. Most world class athletes are working out near that threshold. And if they're hurt and have to suspend physical training it is often near catastrophic.

As we've seen, in the last analysis there are these two sides to training: the physical stimulation of muscle and building stamina and the preparation of neural pathways. The latter does not have to be done by physical exercise alone! As studies have shown (and many a past athlete knew instinctively), just mentally rehearsing an exercise will build these pathways just as well. And what's more: if it is a potentially dangerous move you need to learn (and even with the "right" golf swing you can damage a cartilage or strain a muscle!), you can practice dry runs that way, before you ever make that move for the first time. The most fascinating result of some studies was that this mental training built muscle as if you had exercised physically. The gain was only about half the gain of real physical exercise which is why we still recommend the real workout if you want to get ahead in your sport, but it was significant. If you want to loose weight, just lying on your couch and watching a mental training video won't help you much.

But imagine you were ill and not allowed to exercise or if you were mortified or just feeling apprehensive about a new move that you need to master in your sport but are afraid to practise - then mental training is the exact remedy!

How to train mentally

You need to mentally repeat and emulate the exact moves you are meant to practise. If you already have vivid pictures of what you need to do, then just repeat these in your mind over and over - you will just become better and better at what you seem to already be good at. If you want to learn from the masters in the field you must watch them practise over and over until their perfected movements become your own. You do this by watching videos. That said, you need to

- Make sure you can tell if the person you are using as your guide is performing correctly - you don't want to learn any substandard moves. Mental training allows you to train alongside the best in class!

- Identify the most complicated and crucial moves and look at these repeatedly (loop over that part of the video over and over again). As all your moves are subconscious anyways, you do not always need to look at the sequences consciously nor fixedly! Rather, just let a certain movement play again and again while you're doing the washing-up, reading, doing some repairs or so. It would be enough if you looked at it from the corner of your eye! Your eyes have kind of peripheral vision, as you can check: look straight ahead, then move your fingers outwards and sideways until they begin to disappear. If your eyesight is not impaired you will find that your eyes can spot your fingers at an angle of more than 180 degrees!

- Play the videos in full and the special scenes repeatedly as long as you like, and when you can't, e.g. if you ride a bus or whenever you find idle time that you cannot use any better, then mentally rehearse these scenes, now picturing yourself in them, as if YOU were the one who did those moves.

Keep a log or diary of certain measures that pertain to your particular sport that describe your progress (e.g. height jumped, time run etc.) in the discipline you practise and compare your results over time. When you feel that you have done enough in one field, try and get hold of a typical video of another crucial set of movements and do the same. Every few weeks also review the old material. If you can even get someone to film you doing these movements from preferably the very same angles that your video role models were shown from, then you can even compare how you figure (try to get a second opinion as well if you know someone who you feel you can let in on your perfectly legal little secret!).


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Franz Rasch, a business and educational consultant specializing in speed learning, memory enhancement. He develops training materials and methods to increase intelligence and creativity. You can find more memory-friendly resources at CaptainMnemo that he contributes to.