by Pete Vordenberg
Some of the most powerful experience I’ve had in sport have come through the combination of progressive relaxation and visualization – both as an athlete and a coach. While this old school practice is truly aimed at improving performance, it is practical for all kinds of benefits from better sleep to easier relationships. This is a two-part practice with two aims, the first being the ability to relax your body and ready your mind to do the second aim, which is mentally learning and rehearsing physical skills. This article will guide you through both.
Progressive relaxation
This practice is best performed lying down in bed or on a mat on the floor. But it can be done anywhere, anytime in any position. We’re aiming initially for physical relaxation, so get as comfy as you can. If possible, spread yourself out a bit as you will need and want a little space.
Shut your eyes
What we are going to do is progressively tense and relax sections of your body from the toes through the head. The guidance for each part of the body is the same. I will describe it for the toes and then we will move up from there.
Inhale…
…as you gently squeeze your toes on both feet, as if trying to grasp a pencil with them. Hold that squeeze for a count of two. Exhale as you release the squeeze. Drop the pencil. Feel the tension dissipate. Take a few easy breaths as you enjoy the pleasure of that sensation. Now inhale again as you squeeeeeze your toes again, a little harder this time and hold it a little longer. Hold your breath as you hold the squeeze. Focus your attention on your toes, feel the tension, the muscles of your feet and the pressure of the squeeze. Note that it is the entire foot that is tense, and the toes are just the way in to the feet. Then let it all go, the breath, the squeeze, the tension.
Take a few easy breaths…
…while keeping the attention on the pleasurable sensation of relaxation. Note the difference between the tense, tight squeeze and the loose, relaxed sensation. Paying attention is important, not so much for this particular session, but so that in the future you can find tension in your body with a quick scan, and, even without going through this routine, you will be able to let that tension go.
That is the basic guidance for each section of the body. We will now scoot up the body section by section. Obviously, each section we focus on deserves the same amount of attention, in fact some may require more.
Move up to your ankles and lower legs
This will likely be accompanied by pulling your toes back and apart as well. Start with an easy squeeze, identify the area that you are tensing up… ankle, shins, calves. Feel them as closely as you can as you pull in a breath. Note how the tension, while focused on the lower legs, is shared through the body. Perhaps your quads are a bit tight, your stomach and even your face. Let them be tense. One part of this practice is noticing that tension, being able to find those tense, tight spots. And the other part is being able to let that tension go. Purposefully creating the tension helps learn to release it. Release the tension and release your breath. Ahhhhhhhh. Do it again a bit harder and longer, but not to any point of pain just tension.
Take your time
While I am rushing the description, remember to take your time in the actual practice. Now move to the hips and butt. This is where lying down is easier than sitting in a chair. Squeezing the hips and butt probably includes more stomach and core as well. This is a place where a lot of people hold tension in their bodies. Feel that tension, feel the squeeze, your muscles tight and hard, your breath held and your attention held on those sensations. Let all three go suddenly and completely. Enjoy how incredible that feels.
All tension is released
Do you feel heavy, like you are starting to sink in to the bed or floor? Do you feel light, like there is no bed or floor? Give your lower body a gentile shake. Allow yourself to move and find comfort. Do your muscles lie loose on the bone? Do your legs and hips feel warm? Move up now to your lower back and stomach. Same routine. Keep that focus and attention on what you are feeling both in tension and in relaxation.
Chest and back are next
Squeeze your arms into your sides. Arch your back a bit as you pull your shoulders in and forward with your pecs. There is not a right way, just create tension. Inhale and squeeze. Exhale and release. Are you sinking into the bed or floor? How do your breaths feel? Are they easy and deep? Let yourself move if you need to. Wiggle, stretch, move, find ways to feel good, breathe as the breath comes. Then settle back into your position.
Now arms and hands
Squeeze your fists. Tense your biceps rather than your triceps. Focus on the fists. Let go. Release. Relax. Breathe. Are you feeling a tingle throughout your body? Are you feeling good?
Next are shoulders, triceps, neck and face
Allow your face to contort and tense. Squeeze your eyes tightly shut. Can you even tense your scalp? Start a bit easy. Feel your face, feel that tension in your eye sockets, in your mouth, cheeks and chin. The face can be its own series of relaxations – feeling all those little parts of the face. Notice how the face creates tension in other places, what else feels tight as the face tenses? The back of the head, the spine, the hands. Take a quick scan to identify as many tight spots as you can.
Let it all go
Feel it go
Feel the tension dissipate, even the eyes are loose in their sockets. Whereas your face was tight and contorted, now the skin is loose and saggy. Let gravity have you. Let your jaw sag. Let your shoulders sink. Let your chest open as your shoulders are pulled back. Let your breath do its thing without effort. Scan your body again starting at your toes. Where do you find some residual tension? Perhaps in the hips. Give them a little squeeze and release. Continue up your body.
This is the first part of the practice, and in itself, it is enough. Through this practice you enjoy the immediate benefits of progressively relaxing your entire body.
And that is enough
Along with your body, your mind will likely also find some peace and pleasure. You learn to identify tension and to relax those tense places and by doing so you can relieve pain in your hips, shoulders, neck, and back by discovering and letting go of that physical tension. You can relieve or head off a headache before it sets in. And all that is enough to make this practice worth doing. It isn’t something you have to learn or get better at to enjoy doing or benefit from doing. You just follow the process.
It is worth it, every time, anytime, and you can do it right now. On a bus, at your desk, car (eyes open!). It is a great practice when you wake up late at night and can’t sleep. It gives your mind something to do rather than stew. Your mind must attend to the toes, to the tension, to the face, to the relaxation rather than to whatever stresses or worries you have. And even if sleep doesn’t result (often it will), you will have at least relaxed your body if not your mind. It’s a wonderful skill to employ as you ready yourself for a speech or having a hard conversation, or for a race or hard workout.
Progressive relaxation can be an hour-long process or you can take as little has half a minute to scan your body, do a few light squeezes and some breaths and move on.
You can use your new found ability to monitor your body for tension even while skiing. Are you unnecessarily tense in the face, holding tension in your shoulders? Are you wasting energy and moving less freely and smoothly than you could? Try it, you may find yourself flowing down the trail with greater ease just by releasing tension.
There are no rules, just delightful outcomes.
Which brings us to the second part, visualization.
Visualization
Progressive relaxation is a great lead-in to visualization because visualization requires a mind that is open and creatively fertile for imagining our bodies in motion in great detail, for learning new skills, and even rehearsing the future in the way we want it to happen.
Like progressive relaxation, visualization is a step-by-step process, but it is a more fluid one, a more creative one. And even though there are outcomes with progressive relaxation, they don’t need to be explicitly aimed at or stated, as the process takes care of itself. Follow the process and you will reap the rewards.
Seeing goals come to be
With visualization it is helpful to begin with something specific you’d like to work on: a goal. Consider what you want to be able to do, to learn, to work on. That is what we are going to see ourselves doing.
In skiing this can be something very specific, like learning a specific aspect of technique (a process goal) or even just see ourselves going the right pace in an up-coming workout. It can also be something larger scale like learning a ski course and performing in a specific way (performance goal) in an up-coming race on that ski course. Even an outcome can successfully be visualized (outcome goal), such as seeing yourself winning a race. All of which are very valuable goals for visualization.
Tell yourself a story
By visualizing we are telling ourselves a story. The more details there are, the more real the story becomes. If we can tell ourselves this story in a way that we can see it, feel it and believe it, it can become a true story.
Visualization is itself a skill that takes practice. This doesn’t mean it has to be an all-consuming ordeal. In fact, like all skill-building, it is best done progressively and in manageable chunks.
The Visualization Process
Begin with progressive relaxation. From a relaxed state, let’s use the minds-eye to recall how something familiar looks and how it has felt to be there. As with relaxation, this is most easily done lying down or sitting comfortably with your eyes closed. Begin with something very specific and well known to you. As an example, let’s use the starting area where you put your skis on by the tree at Mountain Dell.
You know this spot. You have walked down the hill to this tree many times. You can recall details of this spot, the walk to this spot, your boots sinking and slipping in the snow as you walk, the tree itself, the barren grass near the tree, the well-trod snow, packed hard by feet and skis, the trail coming up the hill toward this spot, the trail bending away down the hill away from this spot. With your eyes closed you can see it all. Here, you have put your skis on the snow just so, across the angle of the slope so they don’t slide away. You have leaned on one pole as you used the other to clear your boot of snow, and then you clear the snow from the other boot. You have leaned over, looking down to carefully align your boot in the binding, clipped the binding closed, put your other foot down on the other ski, clipped that binding closed. These are things you have done, in this spot, many times and you can see yourself, feel yourself doing this now.
You are standing on your skis, using tiny muscles unconsciously to hold yourself in place as you put first one hand through your pole strap, and pull it tight, attaching the velcro, and then the other strap. You are seeing yourself do this very act as a creative memory right now, you can feel the snug familiarity of those straps, of your hand around the pole, your feet on the skis attached at the binding. You can both feel and see this, as something you have done so many times, in this very spot.
Take a minute now…
…standing here on your skis, with your poles on. What else do you notice? Is the snow fresh and cold? Or is the snow old and crusty? Is the air warm or is it cold – a sensation you can feel in your fingers or on your cheeks. Where is the sun in the sky? What time of day is it? You can imagine all of these things because you have experienced each of them many times. Remembering this place and these actions, the details of them, and even how they feel is visualization. But rather than seeing something you want to have happen, you are seeing what has already happened. An easier task!
Yet, even this can be difficult because there are inevitable distractions. One minute you are at Mountain Dell getting ready to go for a ski, the next minute you are remembering something you left off your grocery list, or are back in a conversation you had yesterday. Fine! That is good! Your mind is alive and working. There is nothing wrong with these thoughts. But now come back to Mountain Dell by focusing on specific details that bring you into that moment more clearly.
From a place to a moment
The next step is to remember a specific part of a specific day out skiing. Think back to a specific part of a specific ski that is clear in your memory: a great race or a great day skiing. Within that day, a moment that is clear for you. Recall the sights, sounds, smells, perhaps what you were wearing, certainly what feelings stand out from that moment. In essence, relive, recall that moment in detail. Don’t tell the story. Relive it. See it again, be there again. This is a method to learn the tools of visualization. You will turn these tools from recreating an experience to creating a new one.
Writing the future
The next step is to invent that new experience, a day, a moment within a day, that you want to have happen. By trying this, you can see how it is very similar to the act of remembering.
Here is an example using our familiar Mountain Mell experience but making a new story from it. Here are words, but what you are trying to do is experience this, see it, feel it. It is a story you live, not tell.
The snow is fresh and new
You can see that there is snow in the tree at the start of Mountain Dell. And you can see your breath with each exhalation. You pull your hat down over your ears a little more because of the cold. You can feel that cold on the tip of your nose. You look down the hill, plant your poles in the snow, which squeaks with cold friction. You can feel your stomach tense, your lats flex as you put pressure on the poles, the straps come tighter across the meat of your hands, your eyes are fixed ahead of you down that first hill, the fresh tracks, the new corduroy, the sparkles in the cold snow. You push down on the poles, the skis resist at first, then move, and slide and your feet are snug in your boots, your weight centered over your feet and over your skis, and you are away!
Now we have gone from purely remembering a place in detail and our familiar actions in that place to imagining ourselves in a new experience using those familiar details.
Take a lap on Mitten
You know every inch of this trail. You can see the compression at the bottom of the first hill, the short steeper section that rises up toward the intersection, the left turn, you can feel the cold air on your nose and cheeks, you feel your body working, see the trail beneath you… ski the loop, see it, be there.
When you become distracted, find a detail to bring you back. What is your breathing like on this part of the course? Here comes the sharp corner at the bottom of Mitten. You bend your knees, flex at the ankle, your body is low and centered and stable, your hands are in front of you and you are looking through the corner, ahead, always looking ahead where you want to go, your feet are quick and agile stepping around the corner and into the gradual uphill that follows.
Yes, your mind wanders
It wanders even while out skiing as well as here visualizing. Use one detail to bring you back. Which skis are you on? What jacket are you wearing? How do your legs feel – are they springy, are they strong and stable? Is the sun bright? Use one thing and return. No blame or shame or frustration with becoming distracted or losing focus.
Return now
That’s all. Let’s say you’ve been wanting to improve your V2, and this is the place, this gradual uphill is the place to try your new V2 technique. You watched your favorite World Cup skier on TV and can see them executing that V2 technique as they charge up a gradual hill in a race that is not unlike this one.
We are using memory, the minds-eye, key-words and cues as well as sensation to be in this moment, to make this moment as real as possible. To be there. With practice you can be there to such a degree that you are performing this task in a very real way.
This is visualization
You are performing a task in your mind that you will perform physically in the future. You are very literally practicing your sport, improving at it, becoming more comfortable doing it, and even learning and ingraining a new skill.
Ten Key Ideas for Developing the Skill of Visualization
1. Practice seeing yourself from the inside looking out. See yourself skiing as you would see yourself and your surroundings while out skiing – through your own eyes. Use sensation to augment what you see, feel how you want it to feel, as well as see how you want it to look.
2. Allow distraction to arise when and as it does and then bring yourself back to the task. Small, familiar details help make it real and bring you back on task. This is helpful within visualization and within the actual task, as distractions happen then too.
3. Just as in learning a new aspect of technique while skiing, focus on just one change you want to make. What single thing are you working on today? That can be a concrete technical detail or it can be a feeling. Technique is made up of parts, but it is also vitally a flow and feeling. It can be just as important to find that flow as it is to perform a singular task.
Practice both.
It is very helpful to imitate how your ski heroes ski, visualize yourself feeling like they look.
Where will your arms be at the start of the motion. You’ll be able to see your hands in that position. How fast do they move down and back? How deep do the knees bend, how quickly? You can see and feel this. Where are you above your feet? What can you see as you look down? How does your favorite skier flow from ski to ski, how do they flow through the terrain. See yourself and feel how you imagine that flow feels.
4. Practice seeing terrain. See yourself moving through specific terrain, flowing through undulations, working consistently up a long hill, navigating a tricky downhill. See yourself successfully moving through terrain. Use the terrain you know. And…
5. Learn and memorize a new ski course. You have practiced doing this by skiing a course you already know very well. Then when you go to a new place to race a new course, keep your eyes open and your attention on the course as you ski it. Start by remembering key parts of the course and where they are – a tricky downhill, a key uphill – and attach simple key words that represent a strategy for those parts of the course. Hands forward and knees bent on this downhill. Relaxed, steady rhythm, controlled breathing on this long uphill. Link it all together in your mind and practice skiing it before settling down to bed.
6. In visualization, practice those specific sections of the course performing those key cues exactly as you want to perform them. Workouts are a great place to practice this. See yourself performing your next workout in that specific place just as you want to perform it. Interval workouts are particularly effective as you often repeat small sections of trail over and over – so learn that section of trail, see it, know it, and ski it how you want to ski it, feeling how you want to feel.
7. Use sensation, feeling, and emotion to make it real and to achieve the emotional state you want to have in those situations. Feel the way you want to feel. Smooth, controlled, strong, powerful, fast, energetic, relaxed. Use words to support the feelings you are evoking. This may include accepting and working with emotional states rather than trying to change or judge them.
For example, you may be very nervous before a race. Anticipating and knowing that about yourself is very useful. You know you get nervous. You’ve gotten nervous many times before. It isn’t a surprise, and though it can be uncomfortable it isn’t negative. It is how your mind and your body anticipate a race. See yourself conducting your warm up feeling those nerves, acknowledge that you are nervous and that you are doing the warm up your body needs to perform, that you have your race bib, your water bottle, you know where your race skis are, you know your start time, that in spite of the discomfort of your nerves you have it together.
While you don’t need to change anything about how you feel to have a great race, you also have tools to calm down. You are anchored in the task and details of your warm up, you are focused on what you are doing right now, not on what may or may not happen later.
8. Have a plan. Practice it in workouts – how to warm up for a workout is practice for how you warm up in races. As an example, TUNA Juniors know the “3-2-1 Warmup” is three minutes of L3, rest, two minutes of L4, rest, one minute of L5. Visualize this plan as well as practice it.
9. Be ready for the plan to go totally off the rails. Plans don’t always work out. Not only is that ok, but that should be expected. You will fall in races, you may break a pole in races, lose your glasses, you may show up late to a race and not get to do the warm up you practiced.
Stuff happens all the time. It happens at the Olympics and at the WCS, to the fastest and everyone else. Resilience in the face of unforeseen occurrences is also a skill. When you are visualizing and you become distracted you simply return to the task and keep going.
The same is true when your plan disintegrates. You find yourself on your butt with a broken pole, you get up and keep going. The task has not changed – you are going to ski your best regardless of the situation. Sticky skis, slow skis, slick wax, broken pole, not feeling great, not skiing as well as you could, but you always ski as well as you can. See yourself doing that, being that kind of skier.
10. Enjoy it. You can begin by just exercising your ability to visualize, by seeing places and doing things in your mind that are very familiar. Practice a little and build up. Like the sport itself, visualization should be a positive addition to your life, not a chore. It is an opportunity to enjoy doing a task beautifully, as perfectly as you can imagine doing it.
Visualization is creating a story. Life is inhabiting the story we tell ourselves. This is a very powerful opportunity to take a more deliberate role in writing your story.
