**7.2 Exercise mental imagery**

If actual physical exercise testing is not possible, there is still one other avenue to determine cerebral activation during an exercise task: mental imagery. For example, a sport psychology study investigated motor imagery of the golf swing to determine brain region activation. Using the sensori-motor homunculus map as a guide, Ross et al. (2003) compared the amount of fMRI BOLD response in brain regions related to the golf swing between novice versus expert golfers. It was determined that the greater the golf handicap, the greater the region of activation (greater than 2%) in specific somatatropic regions of interest relevant to golf. The powerpoint presentation can be downloaded from the internet with a search engine. A very recent BOLD fMRI study (Cremers et al., 2011) investigated mental imagery consisting of subjects envisioning themselves either walking, standing, or lying down (block design). Their imagined walking (speed = 2.3 ± 0.4 m/s) was associated with activation in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, posterior parietal lobule, and the left cerebellar hemisphere. Therefore, it might be interesting to conduct an imagery intervention study to determine the acute response to an imagined exercise stress test as well as an imagined chronic response to a long-term exercise intervention. Studies of this nature have not yet been reported.
