Why Muhammad Ali, GSP, Khabib, and Tyson Believe in Visualization – And How To Start Today

The New Year is in full swing (faster than you thought, right?). This means new changes.

Now, if you’re ready to level up your fight game in 2019… you can. 100%. And you can do it through Visualization. I’ve got six specific techniques for you – and you can use them immediately.

But first, why would you? Who cares about visualization? Isn’t it something for hippies and ayahuasca junkies?

Isn’t it like that “Law of Attraction” crap?

Well – no. It’s not. Not at all, in fact. It’s really a deadly effective, extremely serious tool that the very best who ever lived used. Often. And often credit in their successes.

Really – the VERY best.

Muhammad Ali. Georges St Pierre. Jon Jones. Dan Gable. Khabib. Conor McGregor. Mike Tyson. Even the greatest Olympic Champion of of all time who wasn’t a fighter – Michael Phelps.

Every single one of them used high-level visualization routines in achieving total dominance. Tyson was even hypnotized up to three times a day before fighting (hypnosis the best place for deep, vivid visualizations).

Now, you don’t need to meditate in a Buddhist temple for 20 years to fight better with visualization.

You definitely don’t need to buy anything.

You just need to start doing it.

Just start. Start now, and you’ll instantly gain an upper hand in fighting.

I’m going to give you six extremely powerful methods to level up your visualization game.

Many of you already know me as the leading expert of high-level visualization systems for professional fighters. And I’m about to share with you some of the “needle-moving” methods that really make the difference.

Now, a winning visualization plan has structure, discipline, strategy and direction. And is extremely powerful. But..

If you’re like 99% of fighters, you’ve never learned such a thing.

Not from your coaches. Not from training. If you’re a pro fighter, you probably didn’t learn high-level visualization anywhere. My goal is to fix this for you right now. Read on.

Why you really want to improve your Visualization for fighting

There’s three big reasons you’ll want to ramp up your visualization skills:

3. Proper visualization helps kill pre-fight anxieties

Pre-fight nerves can murder performance. Whether you’re just nervous, second-guessing yourself, or having massive freak-outs and puking hours before your fight, visualization can help. The truth is that the brain cannot distinguish between an actual experience, and a vividly imagined one. And you can use this fact to your advantage. This means you can go over an event in your head, imagine a positive outcome, and your body and mind will feel more familiar with that positive outcome. This really means less freaking out and less anxiety. Visualization using the techniques I’m going to show you today can dramatically reduce such pre-fight anxiety.

2. Proper visualization improves your chances of winning.

Especially nailing and landing specific shots (think Muhammad Ali and Conor McGregor calling their rounds and shots). Strong visualization, since it is taken as “real” by the brain, builds a sense of familiarity and absolute certainty in moving through a series of movements and outcomes. This means not only greater success in overall performance, but an ability to increase the chances of hitting split-second strikes and precision movements. My fighters often comment that, once we engage in deep-level visualizations, that it “feels like the Matrix.” The techniques you learn today will help you push the boundaries of your own performance.

1. Because a DISCIPLINED visualization game will skyrocket your true potential and abilities.

Now, the fact that discipline is required is the single factor most fighters are clueless about when they think about visualization.

True legends in combat sports – Muhammad Ali, Mike Tyson, Khabib, Dan Gable, Jon Jones, Georges St. Pierre.. tend to have extremely intense and/or disciplined visualization routines.

This is very different from the fighters who just “dabble” in the idea of visualization. It’s goes light-years further than “imagine your opponent’s face!” It is a key skill that requires discipline and proper focus. And it’s worth developing this habit deeply.

Many fighters will quickly agree that fighting is 50%, 60%, even 90% mental. Yet almost every single fighter skips out on having a disciplined and regular mental training routine. Most don’t even know where to begin. It’s time we start focusing on some better mental training and visualization methods if fighting is more than 50% mental. Here’s a place for you to start.

What do you REALLY want?

Now, the results a fighter really wants can vary between fighters and specific fights.

Maybe you just want your hand raised in your next fight.

Or maybe you’ve got higher ambitions – like a UFC belt or “Champ Champ” status.

Or, maybe you want a very specific ending – like dropping a nuclear hellbow in a split-second window of opportunity.

In any case, you can apply these powerful techniques of visualizations to improve your outcomes.

We’ve already discussed how most professional fighters haven’t scratched the surface of truly powerful visualization techniques. And the most sought-after visualization expert for professional fighters, I can tell you the number of fighters who use visualization *effectively* is much lower than it could be.

And there’s two big reasons for this.

Two Reasons Professional Fighters Suck At Visualization

Now, the first reason pro fighters are usually terrible at visualization is because they never learned truly powerful techniques. Most fighters have learned things that wouldn’t even qualify as the basics. Would you take a UFC title fight, if your only training is two weeks of YMCA Aikido? Probably not the best way. So the techniques themselves are crucial to effective visualization.

The second reason fighters typically suck at visualization is that there’s a definite “discipline” gap. We know top performers across all sports use visualization. The difference is that truly elite performers often commit to intense, disciplined daily routines. Michael Phelps. Muhammad Ali. Pelé . Dan Gable. Tiger Woods. These athletes used visualization tactically and in very disciplined and consistent ways. It’s the difference between the New Year’s Resolution crowd who signs up to the gym on January 1st, versus BUD/S training with the SEAL Teams. The level of commitment to the task at the highest levels is -very- different. It’s not just that the techniques are better – it’s the level of commitment behind them.

The following athletes have gotten a tremendous amount of of their disciplined used of visualization.

Combat Athletes Who Harnessed the True Power of Visualization

Here’s a few accounts of dominant combat athletes who were extremely effective in their visualization:

Mike Tyson

“The goal of all this was to build confidence in the fighter. Confidence was everything. But in order to possess that confidence, you had to test yourself and put yourself on the line. It doesn’t come from osmosis, out of the air. It comes from consistently going over the visualization in your mind to help you develop the confidence that you want to possess.”

Source: How I became the heavyweight champion of the world, TheWeek.Com, By Mike Tyson

You’ll notice in this quote, Tyson emphasizes the disciplined importance of “consistently going over the visualization in your mind.” This repetition is one visualization element which I work on with all of my fighters (note: in hypnosis, repetition can be done through “suggestion”, and a large number of repetitions performed very quickly).

Dan Gable

“With success, I began to visualize myself competing in future Olympic Games. Throughout my wrestling and coaching, I have continued this use of imagery. Athletes and coaches must visualize greatness to achieve it. Well before competitions, wrestlers and wrestling coaches must see themselves performing positively in their upcoming events. Imagery is a great source of motivation, and it can be very helpful in learning and refining certain wrestling techniques and tactics. If done correctly, imagery is similar to ‘live’ drilling on the mat, where wrestlers feel, see, smell, and hear themselves performing perfectly.”

Source: Coaching Wrestling Successfully, By Dan Gable

In Gable’s account, you’ll notice there is a KEY distinction. I mean DJ Khaled Major Key level. He doesn’t say “imagery is similar to ‘live drilling on the mat..” – he says “IF DONE CORRECTLY, imagery is similar to ‘live’ drilling on the mat..” and that is a crucial difference. He then goes on to describe a multi-sensory approach that includes how things feel, look, smell, and sound (We take this a step further even in the LiS FoB technique below).

Muhammad Ali

Muhammad Ali was especially effective in “predicting the future” in his own fights. And he did this using very specific, disciplined techniques. He publicly predicted he’d beat Archie Moore in 1962 in a very specific way: ‘Archie Moore will fall in four.’ Sure enough, Ali beat Moore with a knockout in the fourth round.

And of course, Ali predicted how he’d beat his opponents often down to the exact round, and he believed his strong visualization practice was a major factor.

He would visualize the entire fight, and he would do so with a particular level of belief and conviction that almost all fighters fail to add in their visualization. I work with my clients specifically to ensure they are creating this superhuman level of belief and conviction, as it is so important. Ali would all the way through his hands being raised, and hearing himself announced as the Champion. This is another area where I take my clients a step further, to truly build an unstoppable level of conviction. A fighter can then, just as Ali would do, redirect all their energy to just making it happen. Once you’ve seen it, once you’ve believed it is the right outcome, with conviction, you can shift 100% of your energy into getting the job done.

Conor McGregor

Conor, like Muhammad Ali, also has successfully predicted his wins with startling accuracy a number of times. And he credits visualization and belief to much of his success.

He successfully predicted knocking out Jose Aldo in round one at UFC 194, with startling accuracy. Conor’s prediction: “I will KO him in one round. Every single movement I make will get an overreaction from him because he’s too emotionally invested in it. I see him overeating, overextending and then being KO’d unconscious.” This is exactly how the fight unfolded, and Conor knocked out Aldo 13 seconds into round one.

Conor also predicted a first-round KO of Dustin Poirier at UFC 178. Conor said ‘I’m going to crack him with a jab, he’s going to wobble and I’m going to put him away early” and “It’s going to be a first round KO mark my words.” Again – this is exactly how the fight went down.

Conor had more predictions that were accurate, and one especially interesting one was against Chad Mendes. Conor attempted to place a $3 million dollar bet that he would finish Mendes in round 2. He defeated Mendes by TKO at exactly 4:57 in round two.

Conor is another example of the benefits of putting extreme belief and total conviction into your visualizations. He also stresses the importance of a multi-sensory approach and an incredibly detailed experience (which we will implement and expand upon in the “LiS FoB” method below).

Jon Jones

“I used to meditate a lot. Now I’m more into visualization. Right around 2010, 2011, I went through this huge spiritual thing, where I became obsessed with the power of the mind. I got into it deep, like really deep. Just meditation, and visualization, and realizing just how powerful our minds actually are, like how we really do paint our worlds with our thoughts and our level of self-belief. … I took myself to a different place mentally, and a lot of it came from mental practice, and meditation, and visualization, and seeking knowledge from people who are strong believers..”

Source: Joe Rogan Experience Podcast #880

What’s especially interesting here is that Jon openly speaks of becoming obsessed with visualization. This indicates the amount of effort and discipline he’s putting into his visualizations, and of course, he first won the UFC Championship in March of 2011.

Georges St. Pierre

“The key to effective visualization is to create the most detailed, clear and vivid a picture to focus on as possible. The more vivid the visualization, the more likely, and quickly, you are to begin attracting the things that help you achieve what you want to get done.”

GSP’s language here also clues us in to the importance of discipline in visualization. While the most effective processes may differ from one fighter to another based on individual characteristics, creating a detailed, clear, and vivid picture can be powerful. There are a number of other elements and discipline that we can put similar focus on to improve fight outcomes.

The Importance Of Starting Immediately

Visualization can go much further than most people can even begin to imagine – and that’s all fine and well. The most important factor is to simply start immediately.

It’s so important to start immediately because you will improve every time you do it. You will learn specifics and distinctions that help you go further each time. And you’ll learn what really works for you. In addition to all of this, if you have a fight on the schedule, mentally rehearsing your desired outcome over and over again will only benefit you. Of course, you’re going to want to start well before your fight, and as early as possible. Start with the techniques below, and you can start right now.

Six Techniques Powerful Fight Visualization Techniques You Can Use Right Now

And that brings us to the use of these six specialized techniques. Spend time with them – incorporate them into your training. Where and when you can, do them daily. And treat them every bit as seriously as you do your physical training.

Technique #1: “Lis Fob” Method

This is a technique that simply brings into consciousness multiple elements which make a visualization effective, using a mnemonic device. The elements are the three primary senses, and also breathing.

The three senses that generally comprise our visualized experiences are Visual, Auditory, and Kinesthetic.

Visual is what we see in our visualizations. Auditory is what we hear, or the sounds. Kinesthetic is what we feel. There are distinctions that go much deeper, however for our purposes in this article, we’ll operate with these three senses.

Now, what many people lack in their visualization, is an element that ties things all together: Breathing. If you visualize your breathing at the rate and depth that you want for your performance, you can add an entirely new element to your visualization.

So we can describe the elements as:

-Looks (Visual)
-Sounds (Auditory)
-Feels (Kinesthetic), and
-Breathing

So, (L)ooks, (S)ounds, (F)eels, and (B)reathing are the elements you’ll want to focus on.

Written by the first letter only: LSFB. Which gives us the mnemonic device “LiS FoB” becomes super easy to remember within your visualization.

Now, all you need to do when you’ve reached an extremely relaxed state in the float tank, is simply go through your fight visualization, remembering “Lis Fob” during all key events. Perhaps you’re shooting the perfect single leg. Going through LiS FoB, you’ll imagine:

What does this (L)ook like?
What are the (S)ounds involved?
What does this physically (F)eel like?
And how are you (B)reathing during this takedown?

All of these things will serve to deepen the visualization experience, since putting such focus on individual elements brings in more information sometimes than the actual experience, because we tend to filter a out a lot, and focus on one sense more than the other in waking consciousness. All this can serve, once the opportunity arises, to help you feel as though you’ve already been there, you know what to do, and now it’s just a matter of letting it happen or “doing it again, in real life.”

The elements become extremely easy to focus on, and cycle through, in real-time in a visualization when you simply remember “LiS FoB.”

Technique #2: Freezing Time & “Micro-Moments”

“Micro-Moments” are a term I coined to describe split-second windows of opportunity, that can almost seem to expand when you’ve rehearsed the outcome over and over again. Think of, in your visualization of the fight, a specific strike, sequence, or combo that you want to execute. Let’s say you’re going to feign a jab near your opponent’s head to get him to draw out his hand, then you’re going to follow up with a hard cross when there’s an opening.

What you’re do here is very simple, and extremely powerful. As you are throwing your jab, watch him draw his hand out to defend it. Now, imagine that you “freeze time.” Make time and movement come to a complete halt, except for you. Your opponent is frozen in time. The fans are frozen still. The ref, completely frozen. All sound is frozen. It’s often good to attach a physical symbol to this, to differentiate it psychologically. So you may step out of the ring to pull batteries out of a clock. Just as the opponent’s hand may be drawn forward to defend against the jab, you can imagine a clock on the wall shattering. Now your opponent “freezes” as “time” freeze. He’s stuck in that position, and you have free reign to drop your thunderous cross on his chin. Here’s where it becomes really powerful: All time is processed in the mind as a function of relativity. So you can imagine dropping that powerful cross ten times fast as you see his hand frozen there, leaving an opening. You can imagine your breath being perfect to take advantage of this opportunity. You can imagine zooming in on exactly where on the chin, down to the very millimeter, that you’re going to strike. You can mentally reposition yourself for comfort and power, and ease of delivery. You can feel yourself hitting him as he’s frozen, and make any corrections that you need to within the visualization, so it feels better and feels “just right.” And if you’ve followed Technique #1 (highly recommended), you can go through the full “LiS FoB” sequence here, in “frozen” time.

By the time the actual fight unfolds, and that opportunity to feign the jab comes, and draw his hand out to defend… you might just find you’ll suddenly feel like you’ve been there many times before.

(In hypnosis, there’s a concept referred to in “time distortion” that can take people much further down this rabbit hole. I’ll have a book out in 2019 that will delve a little deeper into these topics).

Technique #3: Shifting into Multiple Angles and Perspective

Have you ever used Google Maps to find a destination before? Most of us have – and many of us are familiar with a particular phenomenon.

Let’s say I’m looking up Jim’s Bar and Grill, and it’s on the corner of Main Street and 10th Ave.

The directions, on street view, show me exactly what Jim’s Bar and Grill looks like from Main Street. I get a very particular view of it, that was snapped by the Google robo-car thing. But the interesting thing is, if I come from 10th street, a totally different angle, I’ll still almost immediately recognize the place I’m looking for. The mind knows you saw the view from Main Street, but you’re still very familiar with it and can just “tell” that it’s the right place if you come in from 10th street. Or if you walk to the place. Simply seeing a vivid, lifelike, “street view” picture from a different angle gives your mind all the info it needs to instantly recognize the destination, and it just feels right.

Now, here’s the really cool thing. Using the same technique in visualizing your fight, can make a particular outcome “just feel right” in any given moment in a fight. And sometimes this helps create a level of belief and expectancy in your outcome, that the body can respond just a split second fast – which can mean the winning edge at times.

So you’ll simply do this: Pick 5-10 different angles of the outcome you would like. Visualize in detail what this outcome looks like from each of the angles, and use LiS FoB from all of the angles.

Examples of angles and perspectives you can use, on a perfect KO Hellbow:
-Visualize your elbow landing from your corner/coaches perspective.
-Visualize your elbow KO’ing your opponent from above the cage, looking straight down.
-Visualize your knockout elbow hitting your opponent from “beneath” the cage looking up, as if the canvas were plexiglas.
-Visualize your elbow landing from your opponent’s corner.
-Visualize how it looks when you KO your opponent from the stands.
-Visualize how your KO elbow looks from the referee’s position.

If you systematically work through all of these angles, you’ll quickly find that you have an enhanced level of familiarity with the position when it arrives in the fight.

(Also, the rabbit hole does go quite a bit deeper on this one as well, in NLP and hypnosis. If you’d like to take it to a next level, and you are a Top 5 ranked UFC pro who is not competing in one of my current client divisions, feel free to submit an inquiry through the form on the bottom of this page).

Technique #4: “Breakthrough” States

This is an extremely powerful technique. Once you grasp why it is so effective, it makes perfect sense.

What the technique requires is that you simply get to a point where you need a “breakthrough.” A place of extreme exertion, or exhaustion, or a difficult place in a fight that you need to power through.

Let’s say for instance, you’re standing and banging with your opponent, and it’s the end of the 5th round in a championship fight. Both of you are struggling, have caught a number of heavy leg kicks, your arms are both shot, and you both are having a hell of time even keeping your hands up still.

There’s a thought process that’s popular in the Navy SEAL community – “When you think you’re finished, you’re about 40% finished.” Meaning, you’ve got a long way to go after you simply think or feel like you’re exhausted. You’re really nowhere close to finished.

What happens now, when you’re at the end of the fifth round? Let me ask this: What are your chances of hitting a perfect liver shot, within 10 seconds exact moment? Got your answer? Good. Now let me change just one element: The person you love most in this world will be shot in the back of the head at point-blank range, if you don’t successfully land a liver shot in the next 10 seconds.

Does that change the likelihood that you’ll land it? For most people – such intense emotional leverage has the capacity to draw more out of them. Even when they believe they were “exhausted” or nearly finished.

So knowing that we do, in fact, have deeper emotional reserves that allow us to do the “impossible” at times – this technique is simply a matter of apply a thought process, or intense frame of mind, to what you need to get done.

Powerful “Breakthrough” states can include:
“I have 10 seconds to blast out my second wind – Or I’ll regret it forever.”
“My fatigue is only feedback – I can choose to listen to it, or not.”
“Now is the moment I decide my legacy.”
“I can go all out for the next ten seconds.” (You can keep repeating every ten seconds until round is done – Similar to Terry Fox’s idea when he ran 3,339 across Canada with a prosthetic leg to raise money for cancer research and hopefully a cure one day – He kept telling himself ‘I just need to make it to the next telephone pole.’)

The key here is to visualize the exact thought process and shift that happens physiologically as you “break through” to the empowered state, and do it with LiS FoB. The “B” in LiS FoB, “Breathing”, will be especially key here as you break through into another state/mindset.

When you do this “Breakthrough” visualization in a deeply relaxed state in the float tank, your mind will remember that “switch” or transition to the breakthrough. This means it will feel that much more natural to instantly and powerfully dig much deeper at a “breakthrough” point in your fight.

Technique #5: Creating and Leveraging Identity

A universally powerful practice is to visualize yourself with the very identity that you desire. Spending 5-10 minutes a day seeing yourself as a Champion. Seeing yourself wake, eat, train, sleep, go about all of your daily activities as a champion.

This particular technique uses identity in an especially powerful way. This technique leverages desired/chosen identity to overcome challenges, plateaus, and inspire second winds.

The implementation is extremely simple: Get to the point of challenge in your fight, where you need to draw “a little something extra.”

Then, simply ask yourself a question similar to the following, and have the answer you desire in mind:

“Who am I becoming by pushing through this?” (A champion!) Or any question/statement that brings your desired/chosen identity into play.
“Who am I becoming by pushing an extra 20% for the rest of this hour?”
“Who am I becoming by getting here early, and staying later than everyone?”
“What kind of outstanding father am I being by always, always, always moving forward, no matter what happens?”
“What kind of coach am I becoming by doing my very best?”
“What kind of trainer am I becoming by training with purpose and intention?”

If I am operating from the frame that I am setting an example for my nephew that one can ALWAYS intensify their focus and effort to get the job done, you can bet that I’ll look different three rounds in on the pads, than if I was just “hitting the pads.” I could ask myself the identity level “What kind of role model am I becoming for my nephew” while I visualize pulling more out of myself on the pads, and that elevated drive and desire for excellence can translate into the physical realm very quickly.

This technique is especially well-suited to enhancing your training, not just performing on fight night. After all, if one can improve intensity, output, and technique routinely in training, by default one will almost always fight better.

Technique #6: Visualize The Celebration, “Remembering Back”

This technique is designed to do two things. First, bring you into the celebration after you’ve won, and notice all the good feelings involved. And secondly, give you an opportunity to “remember” back to winning the fight.

It works like this: Use LiS FoB to vividly imagine the experience, all the way through winning, then move forward in time to the “after party.” Whatever “after party” means to you. Let’s say two hours after your win, you are celebrating with a few drinks, your family, and corners are with you. Go through and imagine what the scene looks like. Imagine the compliments you’re hearing. Imagine the physical feelings, the feelings of accomplishment and pride.

Now imagine, while you’re celebrating, “thinking back and remembering” getting your hand raised. “Remember” how good it felt to hear the applause, all the congratulations, the crowd roaring. Imagine back to how it looked to have your hand raised.

This seems a bit trippy at first, but it will become an incredibly powerful tool in your arsenal. I take my clients through multiple points after the fight – sometimes 15 minutes to an hour, to two hours, sometimes months after winning a title. As long as you “remember back” to winning, you can deepen your level of belief prior to stepping into battle.

So these are the six techniques you can use immediately to start visualizing, or to improve your current visualizations.

You can also see some of my client results in the video below, and you can hear some of the experiences fighters enjoy when using visualization correctly. I truly hope you put these techniques into use to further your development and achieve your fight goals. If you are a Top 5 ranked UFC fighter in a division where none of my current clients are competing, and you’re interested in taking your visualization game further – you can reach out through the form at the bottom of the page, and we can discuss what you’re looking to accomplish.

—”The Fight Hypnotist™” Joshua Manuel, CHt, MPNLP

“The Fight Hypnotist™” Joshua Manuel’s Client Testimonials