Panhellenic Sports: The Benefits Of Athletes

Sports have been a part of human history since our very existence. Although, the earliest recorded sporting event was around 776 BC during the ancient Greek era. The literature explains that "The Archaic Age (c. 750–500 BC) laid the foundation for modern athletics when athletic festivals complemented earlier funeral games, and by the mid 6th century Olympia (see OLYMPIC GAMES, ANCIENT) was the greatest of the four Panhellenic crown, or stephanitic, games (non-war games of crown festivals), the others being Delphi's Pythian Games, Corinth's Isthmian Games, and Nemea's Nemean Games" ( Oxford dictionary of sports ) and sporting events like "The Athenian games had an expanded gymnastic programme and prizes (initially sacred olive oil …show more content…
Many studies have demonstrated the benefits that athletes can receive from MI (Jones and Stuth, 1997). Furthermore, it has been shown that the higher the level of competition the more that athletes use MI to their advantage(Hall et al., 1990). Moreover, MI has not only been used in sports such as soccer or hockey, but in movements such as weight lifting(Ridderinkhof 2015). In most cases MI is meant to help compliment physical training, however studies have shown that MI on its own can provide benefits for the athletes that use it (Grouios, 1992 and Isaac, 1992). Imagery can be done in several different ways however, usually the athlete using imagery will imagine with a third person point of view where they imagine seeing themselves perform the movement or a first person point of view where they imagine themselves performing the movement from their own eyes (Ridderinkhof 2015). Most often with closed motor skills, a skill without any changing environmental factors, athletes use first person or kinetic motor imagery because there are no environmental factors affecting the movement(Ridderinkhof 2015). An example of a closed motor being free throw shooting in