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buybuydandavis comments on Attention control is critical for changing/increasing/altering motivation - Less Wrong
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The general answer is yes. See, for instance, Pearson et al. Curr Biol. 2008 18(13):982-6; Sherwood and Pearson PLoS One. 2010 5(12):e15217; and Byrne et al. Psychol Rev. 2007 114(2):340-75.
Synaptic strength (if I understand your question correctly), especially in relation to deliberate practice...that is more difficult to figure out. I'm not aware of any particular research on that topic (and it would be hellishly difficult to do). Whether (and if so, how much) visualization-gained improvements are transferable to real-world skills is also controversial.
I'll indulge in one paragraph of guesswork here. Extrapyramidal centers (such as spine, basal ganglia, cerebellum) appear excluded during visualization exercises. Say you are visualizing a martial arts kata, and say that visualization does produce potentiation. Even in this case, all of the changes would be limited to the premotor area and the primary motor cortex - areas that are critical for actual movement execution (especially cerebellum, balance centers in the brainstem and spinal centers) would be unaffected. Worse, the changes in the high-level centers would be made without corrective input. When kata is then attempted in real life, these idealized neural plans might slam nose-first into unexpected feedback responses - therefore making things worse, not better. For this reason, I would personally eschew visualization as a training modality in any actual physical skill.
Do we know which parts of our nervous system gets altered by physical training?
My understanding is that stretching is largely a retraining of the nervous system. But I've wondered, which parts of the nervous system are being trained? Do the basal ganglia adjust their connections, or is it only centers higher up in the nervous system?
We do know, and it's pretty much everything. From premotor area, over the motor cortex, through brainstem nuclei, cerebellar nuclei, cerebellar cortex, all the way down to spinal motor centers - everything can and does get retrained.
Not to mention associative connections with all other parts of the brain. Do an hour of any physical activity, and you'll be changing at least a few synapses in pretty much every area of the brain. (Ok, fine, maybe there will be a few exceptions - say, hypothalamus - but they will be exceptions.)
Thanks. I've wondered what got retrained for a while, because in some way I can't recall, I thought the locus of change in the system had practical implications for training, but couldn't remember what they were.
As for your aversion to visualiztion, I think it flies in the face of a lot of data showing the benefit of visualization exercises. The theory goes that the brain is always simulating the feedback it expects to get, so that simulation system still runs while you visualize, so that you do get feedback, and therefore can train. The key is to train up that simulation so it is reliable when you do visualizations. The advantage is being able to train more, and train with a fresh simulated body, instead of a tiring real one.
The somatic work literature like Feldenkrais Hannah, Mabel Todd, and Lulu Sweigert have exercise for training that somatic sense. One thing in particular I remember are exercises where you close your eyes and move, trying to sense your final position, then open your eyes and get visual feedback about where you are. You can do that focusing on either the visual simulation, the proprioceptive feel, or both at once. Mabel Todd was big on knowing anatomy, so that your visualization could also draw on an accurate model of your bones and muscles when trying to make predictions. Visualize the bones moving. Visualize the the muscles lengthening and shortening. Do whatever you can to get accurate models in your head.
The belief is that the visualization itself works by simulating the feedback, and one of the keys is to train that