How does a sportsman feel after his great success?
Answers
Answer:happy/joy
As the sportsman gets the achievement which he/she was practising since years and struggling from the pain of failure
Sports visualisation: how to imagine your way to success
Why do Wayne Rooney, Jonny Wilkinson and Andy Murray use visualisation before competition? And could it help you too? Mark Bailey explores the powers of the imagination

The visualisers: Jonny Wilkinson, Andy Murray, Jessica Ennis-Hill, and Wayne Rooney

By Mark Bailey
8:37AM GMT 22 Jan 2014
On the evening before a Premier League football match, Manchester United striker Wayne Rooney habitually asks the club’s kit man what colour shirts, shorts and socks the team will wear the next day. It’s not that Rooney is a closet fashionista eager to match the colour of his boots, underpants or hair transplants to the shades of his team’s battle garb. Rooney’s mind craves forensic details before a game for one special purpose: to enhance the accuracy of his psychological preparation.
“I lie in bed the night before the game and visualise myself scoring goals or doing well,” he once revealed. “You're trying to put yourself in that moment and trying to prepare yourself, to have a 'memory' before the game.” Knowing exactly which kit he will be wearing helps him conjure up a richer, more detailed and authentic vision. “I don't know if you'd call it visualising or dreaming, but I've always done it, my whole life.”
For Rooney, this use of imagery – the act of creating and ‘rehearsing’ a positive mental experience in order to enhance your ability to achieve a successful outcome in real life – is an instinctive method honed since childhood, and one shared by great athletes from Muhammad Ali and Michael Phelps to Jessica Ennis-Hill and Jonny Wilkinson. Prior to London 2012, Ennis-Hill revealed: “I use visualisation to think about the perfect technique. If I can get that perfect image in my head, then hopefully it’ll affect my physical performance.”
Wilkinson regularly performs visualisation sessions before games. “You are creating the sights and sounds and smells, the atmosphere, the sensation, and the nerves, right down to the early morning wake-up call and that feeling in your stomach. It helps your body to get used to performing under pressure.”
Once the game begins and Wilkinson is required to kick for goal, he uses a visualisation routine to help him put the ball between the posts: “I visualise the ball travelling along that path and imagine the sensation of how the ball is going to feel when it hits my foot for the perfect strike.”
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It’s clear that visualisation is no longer just an abstract concept associated with hippies, dreamers and people who own crystal skulls, but a quantifiable component of modern sports psychology. We can be fairly certain that Wayne Rooney isn’t burning joss-sticks and meditating on a yoga mat with his ankles wrapped around his neck, but it is intriguing to know that his quest for precise detail could be what makes him so special.
“The most important thing with imagery is using multiple senses, like sound, sight and smell,” explains sports psychologist Dr Steve Bull, author of The Game Plan. “What makes (a player like) Rooney unique is his imagination. When he visualises scoring a goal, he can feel his foot hitting the ball, the smell of the grass under his foot and the sound of the crowd. This incredibly vivid imagery helps an athlete to prepare mentally, by improving their confidence, focus, clarity and speed of thought. It helps them prepare for any scenario: how will I react to the crowd? What if we go 1-0 down? What shot will I take in a certain situation? But it also fires impulses to the muscles, therefore priming them for action. The more vivid the mental image, the more effectively your brain primes your muscles to complete the same physical and technical action in a real game.”