Topics: Motor Imagery (Visualization)
Impacted skills: tennis serve, volleyball serve, baseball pitching, softball pitching, football/soccer penalty kick
Researchers: Nicolas Robin, Robbin Carien, Tom Bonnin, Loic Michineau, and Laurent Dominique
Intro
You’re working with athletes who have to execute a closed motor skill: serving in tennis, serving in volleyball, pitching in baseball/softball, or a penalty kick.
You want to know how to increase accuracy and get the ball in the right spot—but you also want to help your athletes improve their power output.
One of your athlete is torn between exhaling at contact and using motor imagery (visualization) before execution.
What to do?
Welcome to motor imagery and breathing.
What did the researchers do?
Robin et al. tested 20 skilled tennis players (participants had been playing between 9–18 years of competitive tennis; NTRP ratings of 4.0 to 5.5 in US terms).
Each player completed 4 counterbalanced serving sessions.
In other words, all players in the study went through the 4 different study conditions over 4 weeks:
Control: normal first serves. No mental or breathing instructions
Breathing only: inhale during the toss, forced exhale at ball contact
Imagery only: external, 3rd person point of view imagery used
Imagery + breathing: imagery before the serve plus breathing during execution
All serves were hit in “match-like” conditions toward defined targets
What instructions did participants receive?
In the motor imagery condition:
Players mentally rehearsed a successful first serve using external visual imagery. This is where the athlete sees themselves executing a skill from a 3rd-person perspective.
In the breathing condition:
Players were told to inhale during the ball toss and perform a “forced” exhalation at impact
Imagery + breathing condition:
Players combined both strategies as part of their pre-serve routine.
Important nugget: participants were not told why these techniques might work.
What did they find?
Interestingly, each tool helped. But they helped in different ways.
As you can see from the graphs above:
Motor imagery: best for serve accuracy, success rate, efficiency. With the trade-off being that it was a slightly slower ball speed compared to breathing
Breathing: best for overall speed. Trade-off: no gains in consistency or accuracy of serve
Imagery + breathing: does not outperform imagery alone on accuracy. Does not outperform breathing alone on speed. However, it does offer some sort of compromise and balances outcomes. Meaning, if both are used together, while you do get most of the accuracy benefits from imagery alone, you also get some power benefits
Control: least efficacious. Lowest scores on all variables measured
Limitations
A few things to keep in mind:
Small sample (n =20)
All male, “skilled” players tested
Even though authors say “match-like conditions,” from reading the study, they only simulated this by having an opponent stand on the opposite baseline… that’s not “match-like” conditions at all
Simulations may struggle to recreate cognitive and somatic anxiety that individuals experience in true “match-like” conditions
Players completed a prior imagery screen to ensure that no one was incompetent when it came to imagery skills
Your takeaway
Motor imagery and breathing solve difference performance problems.
Motor imagery primarily helps with accuracy and consistency
Breathing strategies primarily help with speed and force production
Combining motor imagery and breathing does not “double-up” the benefits… but it does offer an interesting trade-off. You get a little bit of benefit from each bucket: speed and accuracy.
And, going back to the title of this week, compared to the control group, it does significantly (in the scientific sense) improve serve performance.
These findings could reasonably generalize onto similar skills executed in similar environments: volleyball serve, baseball pitching, softball pitching, and football/soccer penalty kicks.
That’s all for this week.
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Reference
Robin, N., Carien, R., Bonnin, T., Michineau, L., & Dominique, L. (2026). The combination of motor imagery and breathing optimizes the performance of the serve in skilled tennis players. Sports Health, 18(1), 40–46. https://doi.org/10.1177/19417381251392932
