The Simple Science of Visualization (And How to Actually Do It With Your Team)

 💪 Your athletes can train their mind like they train their body. Steal our 3-minute routine + prompts! Grab more visualization tips → https://coachfreetraining.com

Coaches, if you’ve wondered whether visualization actually moves the needle for high school athletes, this is your playbook. I unpack the simple sports psychology behind it, then show you exactly how to run fast, effective visualization drills your players will buy into—so they’re calmer, more confident, and ready for big games and pressure moments. 🧠⚡️

I’m Coach Bre, a mental performance coach for girl athletes, Co-Founder of The Elite Competitor, and a long-time head volleyball coach and 4-time state champion. 🏐🏆

🎯 In this video you’ll learn:
✔️ Why visualization works (the brain treats it like real reps)
✔️ How to introduce it without awkwardness
✔️ 3 simple prompts for skills, pressure resets, and pre-game calm
✔️ A 5-minute daily routine (BRAVE) that locks in focus
✔️ Quick drills you can run in practice, on the bus, or in the locker room
✔️ How to pair visualization with a 2-second SnapBack reset for faster recovery

🕓 Key Moments
00:00 Introduction to Visualization
01:14 The Science Behind Visualization
03:24 Benefits of Visualization for Athletes
06:29 Implementing Visualization in Practice
09:19 Visualization Before Games
11:05 Success Stories: State Championships
15:09 Overcoming Awkwardness and Resistance
17:26 Final Tips and Resources

Why this matters: Athletes don’t rise to the occasion—they fall to the level of their mental performance. Use these coaching strategies to build real mental toughness, faster resets, and peak performance when the lights are brightest.

📢 Coaches — comment below: Which visualization prompt will you try first (skill rep, pressure reset, or pre-game calm)?👇

📌 Free Tools & Next Steps
🔹 Grab our in-depth FREE training → https://coachfreetraining.com
🔹 Follow us on IG → @elitecompetitorcoach
🔹 Follow us on TikTok→ @coachhergame

🔔 Subscribe for More → Never miss an episode of Coach Her Game!

Head to coachfreetraining.com to grab our free training for coaches to quickly level-up your team's mental game!

Transcript

1:04

I'll never forget this. When I was in high school before a big game, our coach actually had us go into a dark room, sit us down, and she led us through something called visualization. I had no idea what it was at the time, but she talked us through what the match was going to look like. Uh, talked us through doing some skills, things like that. And although there were some giggles and you know, not everyone taking it seriously, I remember afterwards. Feeling a lot more calm, a lot more relaxed, a lot more ready to play. I do remember playing really well in that game, whether that was coincidence or not. After that, I was like, huh, visualization. That's actually something that could work. So if you're a coach who is in this boat where you're wondering if visualization can be a tool to help your team manage nerves, uh, perform better under stress and overall just elevate their game, then this episode is for you. If I haven't met you, I'm Coach Bree. I am a mental performance coach for girl athletes. I'm also a 14 year head volleyball coach. I've led my team to four state championships, and you better believe that visualization has been a part of every one of those seasons. So in this episode, I'm gonna break down why visualization actually works. How to introduce it to your team without it feeling awkward and how to do it with your team so that they can start using this really simple but effective tool. Let's get into it. Why? Why visualization? Works in the first place. So let's talk a little science here. Visualization isn't actually just some like fluffy WOOWOO stuff. There's actual research behind it that shows it can change the brain and body in ways that drastically improve performance. Now, you might be familiar with one of the earliest and most famous studies around visualization. Coming outta the University of Chicago, they split students into three groups for 20 days, and every day, one group. Practiced free throws. So these were basketball players. They practiced free throws physically. The other group visualized free throws, and then the other group didn't practice at all. So there were three groups at the end of these 20 days at the end of all of this practicing or lack of the physical group. So the one that. Actually did the free throws, they improved their free throw shooting percentage by 24%. The visualization group, the ones that just visualized, they didn't actually do any physical practicing, improved their free throw percentage by 23%. So almost identical to physically practicing. And then of course, the group that didn't do anything didn't improve at all. And that's when people actually started realizing that the brain actually treats. Imagined practice a lot like physical practice. So when athletes do this correctly, when I say correctly, that just means that they are recruiting all of the senses that they need. So they are seeing what they would see, they feel what they would feel. I'll talk a little bit about all of that. When they visualize, they actually recruit the same neural pathways as if they're doing it in real life. So it's like they're getting extra reps by just sitting there and doing nothing physically, but mentally they're actually able to put themselves in that moment before they get there. And it does a lot of other things. It helps athletes actually. Feel more, feel more calm and confident going into competitions because their brain and their body is like, Hey, I've actually already been here. So they're actually preparing themselves in another way. Now, we'll little note here, visualization doesn't replace physical practice, although in this study where the, the free throws and clearly visualization does. Improve performance. But we also know that that paired with your athletes training physically, because that's what you are doing in practice, you're giving them really solid reps and you're preparing them physically that trained with them. Doing some of these things mentally is really where the magic happens. Okay. The other thing it is that it speeds up recovery after injury. So if you do have athletes that are sidelined with injury or they're just out for a period of time. Visualization is actually a tool that I give those athletes, um, right away so that they can actually feel like they're accomplishing something. They can see themselves, they actually can return without some of that fear of injury, holding them back. And they're also getting some reps while they are recovering. It calms the nervous system. So as I described, when I visualize as an athlete. I just feel a lot more calm. And for your athletes that have a lot of pre-game anxiety or pre-performance anxiety, visualization is great because it lowers cortisol, reduces the heart rate, teaches athletes how to regulate emotions, and so it also helps with some of that stress response that happens as a normal part of. Of being an athlete and of competing. And like I said, it also builds confidence, right? When we have seen ourselves in a moment before it actually happens, we feel more confident. And your athletes do too. They're like, okay, I actually can kind of rehearse what's going to happen. And sometimes I hear from athletes, they're like, well, I don't know if I can visualize. I, I don't know how, maybe I'm. You know, part of the percentage that can't visualize. There is a very small percentage of people who don't have the capability to visualize. It's like 1% of the population and the rest just need to learn the skill of seeing, seeing themselves do these things. And that's what I'm gonna help you teach your athletes to do now in this episode. But. The thing about it is that we're actually always visualizing, you are always thinking about the future, and this is what I tell athletes as well. I'm like, you're, you're always thinking about what's gonna happen. That game that's coming up. You're, you're, you're thinking already about it. And because our brain has a negativity bias, it's probably actually thinking of the worst case scenario. It's thinking of you messing up and it's letting kind of some of those nerves take over. It's actually not preparing you in the way to show up confidently and how you wanna play. A lot of times our brain actually. It takes us to places to try and protect us, but to the place of like, well, what if I don't play well? And so you're already actually thinking about it when you have like a big test or a presentation or you're like, you have a conversation coming up that like, uh, with somebody that you're dreading, you visualize those things. You think about it ahead of time. You play out in your mind how it's going to go. That is visualization. And one of the first things that I do with athletes also to help them understand visualization as I have'em close their eyes and actually like. Take'em through a really short visualization where they imagine kind of coming into a kitchen and seeing a lemon on a cutting board, and I take'em through, like they're cutting the lemon in half and they're squeezing it and the juice is coming out, and then they imagine like putting it in their mouth and licking the lemon with the tip of their tongue. Like I take them through all of this and afterwards they're like, oh my gosh, my, my mouth was watering. Like it, like I was actually doing it. And I'm like, see visualization. Does work, you're able to imagine those things and your body physically responds when you do it. That's how you know you're doing it right? So, um, if you do get that from athletes, you can just say like, you know. Um, yeah, I hear you. Sometimes it takes a little bit of practice, um, and there's a couple different ways you can do it, but the reality is that you're visualizing all the time. You're already thinking about tomorrow's game and how it's all gonna play out. So let's put a good image in your head of what's going to happen. So here's how I do it. Here's how I us use visualization in my program. Um, here's how I do it inside our plug and play Elite Mental Game for teams. This is our mental training program for coaches of high school sports, and it's a very simple way for you to literally just like. Plug and play mental training. I have visualizations in there for you that you can play for your athletes. They can download them to their phones, put on their, you know, have, have their headphones on and they can listen to me doing a visualization. You don't actually. Have to do very much at all. Okay. But here's what I do. So I do visualization before every single practice. It doesn't take very long. So before our practice, we do something called the 3, 2, 1, brave. It's like our five minute daily mindset routine that gets us physically and mentally ready to practice it actually. Saves me a lot of practice time because they're already coming in focused and I don't have to spend 20 minutes trying to like, get'em focused in, into what we're doing. Okay, so three, two, and Brave. Um, three stands for three affirmations. They're writing down the affirmations for, um, the season. Now this is found ahead of time through a different workshop, but they're writing those down. They get two minutes of journal. Either I will prompt it with something that I want them to think about or they can just kinda get their thoughts out. One thing, they're grateful for one piece of evidence that one of their affirmations is coming true. So they do that every day, and then I lead them through something called brave. It's a visualization that takes about three minutes. It's an acronym, so the B stands for breath. We do five intentional breaths, so there's some breath work incorporated here. They inhale, they say their reset word at the top of their inhale, and that's custom to them. They've also found that ahead of time on their exhale. They're just kind of letting go anything that's not serving them. We do that five times. Okay, so five breaths with a reset word at the top. That's what the R stands for, is reset. The A stands for affirmation. So those three affirmations that they just wrote down, one by one, I have them actually say their affirmation to their themselves. The V stands for visualization, so they actually visualize that affirmation as if it's happening real time. Before we get into brave, we actually have our athletes. You know, write down situations, um, that represent what they could visualize. So an example of an affirmation might be, I'm a fast, aggressive defender, and a visualization for that is they're seeing themselves lay out for a ball in practice, like a ball that they don't think they can get and they get a touch on it. I actually have'em come up with like a several different scenarios that they could visualize. To represent that affirmation. And they only do one of them during, um, the brave visualization. So they do that for their three affirmations. Um, the e stands for just energetic shift. There should, there should be like a little bit of an energy shift after the brave visualization because they're ready to go. So that whole routine, like I said, takes five to seven minutes, not very long. It's part of their pre-practice when they come into the gym. If you wanna know more about how to set this up with your team, that's exactly what I go over at our. Free coach training. So go to coach free training.com. I break down 3, 2, 1, brave and how I do it. Um, and I also talk about plug and play Elite Mental Game for teams. If you want a really easy way to like literally plug and play this into your program. So I do that before every practice, a short visualization called Brave. We also visualize before every game, so I will either do the Brave Visualization. Before the game because they're familiar with that. Or I will do like a pre-competition visualization, so I'll walk'em through what they're about to experience. Um, I have several different visual visualizations that I rotate through before a game. Some are more calming, some are more like helping them walk through what they're going to see and do. It kind of depends on like what the game vibe is. Like who are we playing, you know, is this the state championship? I do have a story about the last state championship that we were in and the visualization that we did the night before. It was pretty, pretty good. Um. But I, I mix it up depending on like what we need. Um, the other really cool thing about plug and play that I was talking about is that you get access to all those visualizations. So you've got a whole visualization vault, uh, is what I call it. You can either play them for athletes, you can, um, like over a speaker. You can have them download them to their phone. Like I said, they can listen to them themselves. Or I put all the scripts in there. So if you're a coach that wants to read them to your athletes and you can just read my script and they can sit there, um, and visualize. So that's how I do it. I do it before practice and I do it before every game, and it really does work. So I'm gonna talk in a second about like, if this feels awkward, if you're like, I'm treading into this zone of like, I'm feeling a little uncomfortable. I don't know how they're gonna respond. This is something totally new for me, new for my athletes. I'll talk about how to, how I address that because it was new for me at one time too. Okay. But it really does work. Athletes. Athletes really do like it. They don't have a lot of time in their days to just like. Sit for two minutes and either meditate or visualize. And we know the, the studies around meditation, mindfulness, visualization, like there's, there's so much around how effective it is. So giving athletes space to be able to do that, like my athletes gimme feedback that they, they really appreciate and really love it. So, two quick stories though. So the first state championship that we won, um, with me as the coach in 2021, we visualized, I, I kind of refrain from visualizing like. Winning. Okay. Because it, it kind of, it, it depends, it depends on like the season, like, you know, where we're at. So that whole season I hadn't really visualized like. Winning. You know, a lot of things that we visualize, like the things that lead to winning, right? We visualize being good teammates, we visualize the skills, we visualize coming back from mistakes, like all of that. But like focusing on the outcome for me, I have a hard time with that because I'm like, well, you gotta put in the work to be able to do that. But it was before the state championship, like the, um, in the locker room before and I'm like, you know what? We're gonna go for it. We're gonna visualize hoisting that trophy up dog piling in the middle of the court. Like I had taken them through like kinda a really cool visualization leading up to that. And then like culminated with like. Seeing us like win and just the, you know, celebration, like let loose how that's going to feel, all of that. And so we head into the state championship. Um, it was a battle in the championship and we won, um, in the fourth set. And it was exactly how we visualized, like we hoisted the trophy, we dog piled the middle, you know, it was, it was pretty epic. And then on the way home, my senior setter. She was like, Pree, you know that visualization you did before, before the game? She's like, I saw it. I felt it. Like it literally made me cry and then we got to actually do it. And so the fact that, that that player who visualized in the locker room with her team before and she ended up like. Crying in the visualization because she was experiencing it with all of her emotions and then she was able to bring that to life. Now we didn't really actually talk about the visualization or like the, um, science be behind how that happens, right? Like when we put intentions out and then we work to. You know, make them happen. But, um, they had the skills to back up. They were, they were capable of being able to do this, but the way that it culminated and the way that she actually like, bought in so much to it that she had that physical reaction. Like, that's what we're looking for when it comes to visualization. The second story was from this last state championship 2024. Um, I had a player on my team this, uh, she's a senior, she was a defensive specialist. She had made varsity, she worked her way up from C team. She didn't start playing until she was a sophomore and she made varsity her. Senior season, but she put in a lot of work ahead of time to make it to like, that was her goal, was to make varsity. Um, and her dad actually took her to like a private sports psychologist to give her some mental training skills because she knew, like he knew how bad she wanted it, and he was like pulling out all the stops. He was like, I was paying, you know. Like$200 per session for her to see this. Um, the sports psychologist, uh, these private sessions, and she, I mean, she played lights out in the state championship. She was like, had her best, best performance of her career. It was amazing. And when I was talking to her dad, um, he said, you know, so I asked her, I said, Hey, so those, those sessions with your sports psychologist, that that must have paid off, right? And she goes, no. Oh my gosh. It was the visualization that we did with Brie the night before, the night before the state championship, we did this body scan visualization where we like imagined this color coming through our body and I, I chose red and I saw it and I just, when I was out there in the state championship in the game, all I could imagine was like this. Red color filling my body and giving me, anyways, he was like, what? I just wasted thousands of thousands of dollars on a sports psych colorist when you could have done this visualization with Brie the night before. And I'm like, yeah, uh, yeah, you could have. Okay. So anyways, all that to say like it really does work and we sometimes, as coaches, we just have to get over our ego in introducing something new to our players because this is a tool that has a lot of science behind it that actually does work. Now, not all of your athletes are gonna be bought into it. Just like everything, and I choose to not focus on those athletes. I can lay out like the benefits of it, how well it works, how well it served our teams. Um, and if athletes still choose to not engage in it, I just ask that they sit there quietly, like, use this time to just sit and, and not do anything. Okay. Don't distract people, but, um, you know, be respectful, but I'm not worried about them. Okay. I am focusing on the other 90% that are actually taking it seriously and doing it. So how to introduce it. Introduce it if it feels awkward. First of all, you're that old saying like. It's only awkward if you make it awkward. So if you're gonna go in there and just be like all weird about it, then they're gonna be weird about it. So just be honest. You could just be like, Hey, this is, we're gonna do something different. It might feel different, but it's a tool that's proven to help nerves build confidence, play your best when it matters. And you can even ask like, who's heard of visualization? And to make it really easy, I actually have a couple YouTube videos that you can just play for your team. Um, I'll link them below, but I have a body scan visualization. Um, that I, the one that I actually did before state, and then I have one to reduce stress. So these aren't visualizations where you're, they're seeing themselves play, but there's a lot of different types. Right? So there is like visualization to help with like stress and relaxation. I do a lot of those, like before big games, like the night before or the practice before. There's visualizations of them doing the skills. That's like a lot more technical visualization. And so, um, and then there's meditation. So we also do meditation, which is a lot more like mindfulness and relaxation. So I have two videos on my YouTube that you can just play for them. There's a little intro into like, before both of them. That's like for you as a coach, you can just fast forward and start playing when the visualization starts. So that could be like. A good intro to it. Um, and the other thing is like, you just frame this like reps, you know, start small. Don't do it longer than like a minute or so when you first start. Um, like I said, use my resources in plug and play elite mental game for teams. Like I said, there's this. Whole visualization vault in there. There's scripts that you can use, you can just play the visual visualizations for your athletes. So that's a way just to make it very simple, but if you're confident with how you present it, you like talk about the benefits. Um, and I, you know, you can outline in some of the benefits that we, that you've heard just in this episode. Um, and then just do it, like, just do it. Either play a video, read the script, um, you know, do one yourself like. I wasn't, when I first started, I was super nervous and I was like, oh, are people not gonna take this seriously? And it's like, if you take it seriously, they will too. Um, and then I just had to just get more confident with it. But I'll say if you're just starting out, like go the easy route. Use plug and play. Like just literally play the visualizations for your team. So if you want more information about plug and play, um, I'll link that below as well. But go to coach free training.com. You can learn all about it. There's also a discount for plug and play when you go to that training. Okay, so. Hopefully that's a good starting place. I will say that visualization is one of the simplest, it's like the, the lowest hanging fruit when it comes to mental training for your team. You know, if you're like, I just wanna start infusing some skills, visualization would be like my top three. The other ones being a snapback routine, so some way to come back from, um, mistakes and then some sort of self-talk. So like how to. Um, talk to yourself when you are having a hard time, when you are down, when you're like, you know, wanting to, to give up and a draw, like self-talk is also really important. So those are like, visualization though is like one of those top three skills and because there's so much science behind it and because it's, it works. Um, I, I definitely recommend as a coach that you just start small. Um, use the resources that I have for you on my YouTube channel on the free training plug and play lead mental game for teams. Like we just make it super simple for you. All right, coaches, let me know below. Do you do visualization with your team? Um, or are you going to start? I would love to hear, and I am Coach Bree, I'm a mental performance coach for athletes, and I'll see you in the next episode of The Coach Your Game podcast.