The effect of PETTLEP and traditional mental imagery on handball triple shooting in novice and professional adolescent handball players

Mental imagery is one of the psychological skills that sports psychologists recommend athletes to focus on.

This study aimed to investigate the effects of PETTLEP and traditional mental imagery on handball triple shooting in novice and professional adolescent handball players.

A semi-experimental study was conducted on all novice and professional adolescent handball players in Maragheh, East Azerbaijan Province, Iran, in 2018-2019. By using the revised Movement Imagery Questionnaire (MIQ-R) (Hall and Martin, 1997), 60 people from the statistical population were purposively selected as the sample. The participants were randomly assigned to 5 groups of 12:  two groups of traditional mental imagery at the novice and professional levels, two groups of PETTLEP imagery at the novice and professional levels, and a control group. After the 9-meter line test as the pretest, 3 sessions of group training for 7 weeks and then the posttest were performed. The data were statistically analyzed by using the repeated measures ANOVA and the Tukeychr('39')s test in SPSS-23.

The results showed that professional participants in the PETTLEP imagery group significantly outperformed their peers in the traditional imagery group in handball triple shooting (P=0.001). By contrast, such a significant difference was not observed between the two groups of novice handball players (P>0.05). The results also indicated that the highest increase in mean score from pretest to posttest was observed among professional handball players in the PETTLEP imagery group.

Mental imagery can effectively improve the performance of athletes. Therefore, it is recommended to be used in combination with physical exercises.