From Couch to Ultra Marathon with Mental Imagery

On second glance I wondered why such an old technique was grabbing the headlines — mental imagery has been around for decades.

But let’s first get into this recent piece of research because is is fascinating and shows the power of mental techniques. Interesting most of all because it is a scientific analysis and not the usual anecdotal stories that flood the motivational literature.

So what did the researchers from the University of Plymouth find?

First off they first found 31 non-runners who wanted to get fitter and put them through a Motivational Interviewing (MI) intervention. A methodology often used in counselling to explore, develop and verbalise their need for change. These were then left to their own devices for 5 months.

They were then contacted and asked if they would consider completing an ultra marathon (50km+). Out of the 31, 15 expressed an interest. These were then assigned to two groups. One group again went through an MI intervention and the other group went through an MI intervention plus a mental imagery process — called Functional Imagery (FI). This involved imaging in sensory detail near future outcomes.

What was the result?

This is interesting because both groups had been through what is considered standard technique that has proven to be effective to a degree — Motivational Interviewing and the difference was the Functional Imagery.

Well, from the first group of 8 runners who had MI, only 4 started the race, and 2 finished. Arguably still not bad because running an ultra marathon,starting from zero is an immense achievement. But when we look at the second group of the 7 who had Functional Imagery all 7 started and 6 finished the race. This is an amazing difference!

Now the obvious caveat is this is a small population group of only 15 runners. But I should note that most sports studies are small scale studies because of the difficulty of recruiting and monitoring a lot of athletes simultaneously. But nevertheless the results are so clear cut it warrants a lot of follow up

This technique developed by Plymouth university has also been used for weight loss with those using FI losing five times as much weight as those not!

“It shows that multi-sensory imagery is the key difference between those who reach the starting line and then go on to finish, and those who do not — showing it is critical to maintaining changes and pushing the boundaries of physical and mental performance.” Jon Rhodes

With such good results you may wonder why I called these old techniques. The reason is that mental imagery has been around a long, long time. I’ve been using it in sports scenarios for nigh on 25 years. And some of this seems to be very similar to what these researchers have been using (i.e. using multi-sensory imagery). Though they seem to have tweaked this and giving a very specific protocol to this based on near future scenarios — so kudos to them.

This also seems to really tap into motivation and shifting mindsets — so we should also be applying this and similar techniques to more aspects of our lives!