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that cause some athletes to triumph and others to flounder, and even apply multiple analyses of variance to groups of athletes and estimate the percentage of influence each variable has, on average and in the long run, on outcomes. It is quite another to make specific predictions of which athletes will step up on the winner’s podium at the end of the day, and virtually impossible to turn Willy Whiff into Mark McGwire or Andy Airball into Michael Jordan. Here we enter the murky world of performance enhancement and sports counseling. As in the general field where experimental psychology is the science and clinical psychology the art, this is the art of sports psychology.

One of the most commonly practiced and effective sports psychology intervention techniques is called imagery training, or visualization, where you “see” (although you should also “feel”) yourself executing the physical sequence of your sport. We have all seen Olympic downhill skiers minutes before their run standing in place with their eyes closed and body gyrating through the imaginary course. Gymnasts and ice-skaters are also big on imagery, but even cyclists can benefit—witness Lance Armstrong’s remarkable 1999 Tour de France victory to which he attributed his success, in part, to the fact that he rode every mountain stage ahead of time so that during the race itself he could imagine what was coming and execute his preplanned attacks. And countless experiments on imagery show time and again that groups who receive physical and imagery training on a novel task do better than groups who receive physical training only. Imagery training fits well into cognitive-behavioral models of sports psychology.

Nevertheless, failures of imagery-trained athletes are legion in sports. We hear about the Lance Armstrong stories because we love winners and want to emulate what they did. We simply never hear about all those cyclists who also rode the Tour stages ahead of time but finished in the middle of the pack, or the visualizing downhill skiers who crashed, or the imagining gymnasts who flopped. Even the most enthusiastic supporters of imagery training for peak performance (or any other clinical method) caution that there are numerous mediating variables that can prevent an individual from benefiting from the technique.

For example, sports psychologists Daniel Gould and Nicole Damarjian caution that imagery takes time to develop as a skill and you must practice it on a regular basis, use all your senses in the imagery process, apply both internal and external perspectives, and utilize relaxation techniques in conjunction with imagery, as well as video- and audiotapes and logs to record the process and progress. They conclude that imagery is not for everyone and that “it is important to remember that imagery is like any physical skill in that it requires systematic practice to develop and refine. Individual athletes will differ in their ability to image and, therefore, must be encouraged to remain patient. Imagery is not a magical cure for performance woes. It is, however, an effective tool that—when combined with practice and commitment—can help athletes reach their personal and athletic potentials.” In other words, they seem to be saying that this stuff works when you work it. But what does that mean?

Flooded with Flapdoodle

To determine if a psychological technique works, we might evaluate it by two standards: criterion 1 (does it work for an individual?) and criterion 2 (does it work for all individuals?). For criterion 1, to the athlete who wins the big meet or the gold medal, whatever he or she did “worked.” Like the depressed person who leaves therapy happy, it does not matter what scientists think of the therapy, because the therapy worked in the sense of doing something that resulted in a positive outcome. Most practicing therapists accept criterion 1 as good enough.

But to the extent that psychology (including sports psychology) is a science that would like to be able to claim, at least provisionally, that a clinical technique is something more than