# Motor imagery improves athletes performance
One way top athletes practice is by doing it purely from their mind, visualising new techniques.
# References
Doty, Into The Magic Shop (p. 134).
Just as athletes who visualize or imagine themselves performing a skill over and over again in their head - the perfect jump sho, the hole-in-one, a home run hit high past center field - are changing their physiology and creating neural patterns in their brain that actually enable their muscles to perform in new ways, I was using visual imagery to create new neural pathways in my own brain. The brain doesn't distinguish between an experience that is intensely imagined and an experience that is real.