Introduction: Mental imagery is one of the practical techniques to increase the performance of athletes and is defined as performing a specific movement task mentally and actively, to recreate or create an experience, without physically performing the task. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the effect of mental imagery practice on the darts performance of physical education students in Shohada Safeh Conservatory, Isfahan.
Methodology: In terms of practical purpose and in terms of implementation method, the present research was a semi-experimental type of research, of pre-test and post-test type, and in terms of time, it was cross-sectional, which was carried out by the field method. The participants included 30 available statistical samples of female physical education students of Shahada Sefa Physical Education Academy, who were randomly divided into two equal groups of 15 people. The first group practiced darts along with mental imagery and the second group only followed darts exercises. The data collection tool was collected through dart performance and score test. The mental imagery training protocol included 12 45-minute sessions (3 sessions per week) and darts training for both groups and 12 45-minute sessions (3 sessions per week). To analyze the data, repeated measures analysis of variance test, Kolmogorov-Smirnov test for normality was used with the help of SPSS 24 software, and a significance level of less than 0.05 was considered.
Results: The results of the research showed that there was a significant difference between the darts practice group and the experimental group, that is, the average performance of the subjects in the experimental group was higher and better than the darts only practice group (P≤0.05).
Conclusion: Therefore, mental imagery had a positive and meaningful effect on the performance of female art students' darts, based on this, it can be said that mental imagery training can be considered as a useful approach in increasing the level of darts performance of teenage students.