It is suitable for any type of athlete whether they be amateur or professional; PST helps an athlete to reach their potential. Success comes with not just having physical abilities alone but with a combination of physical and psychological abilities combined, certain sports such as figure skating and golf use 80-90% mental ability although the biggest users in sport of PST are tennis and formula one.
"A process by which sensory experiences are (re)created in memory and internally recalled and performed in the absence of external stimuli" (Murphy,1994). This is an excellent description of how imagery works in the mind. Taking a penalty kick in the world cup final as an example as mentioned above, we can apply imagery to this situation. The player taking the kick would recall an experience/s where they have taken successful penalty kicks before and scored a goal, this could be from another match or from their training sessions. The player would then play this image in their mind-of them taking and scoring a successful penalty kick. These movie like images in the mind would be rehearsed and played back in the mind many times so that the player becomes so familiar with that successful penalty kick that when they actually take it in reality they are fully confident of scoring. This allows the confidence level to rise in the athlete, allowing them to focus on the penalty kick, it also helps to ignore distractions surrounding them such as the crowd and environment, and it enables them to be blocked out. The player taking the penalty kick should now be able to take the penalty successfully, for the player to use this application successfully in this manner will be highly dependable on their practicing of PST skills. If they however have not practiced PST well and effective enough then their use of imagery may not be as effective as the player in the above example.
Imagery itself is split into two types of imagery, internal imagery and external imagery.
