“Sports is by far one of the fastest growing pass times in the United States” (Rainer 1987). Even if people don’t take it to the professional level, sporting events are happening in our backyards, and at all of our local schools around the country. With the growing popularity and the increasing competitiveness of the sports, it will take more than just a physical advantage to compete at the highest level. This is where the psychology of sports comes into play. In my research I will cover different areas in which you can psychologically strengthen you mental and physical skills to become a more skilled and competitive athlete.
Goal setting is a hugely powerful technique that can yield strong returns in all areas of you life. At its simplest level the process of setting goals and targets allows you to choose where you want to go in life. By knowing what you want to achieve, you know what you have to concentrate on and improve, and what is merely a distraction. Goal setting gives you long-term vision, and short-term motivation. By setting goals you can achieve more, improve performance, improve the quality of you training, increase your motivation to achieve, increase your pride and satisfaction in your performance, and improve your self-confidence (Bull, 1983).
Research (Bull, 1983) has shown that people who use goal-setting effectively suffer less from stress and anxiety, concentrate better, show more self-confidence, perform better, and are happier with their performance. The way in which you set your goals strongly affects their effectiveness. Before you start to set goals, you should have set the background of goal setting by understanding your commitment to sports, understanding the level you want to reach within the sport, knowing the skills that will have to be acquired and the levels of performance that will be needed, and know where this will fit into your overall life goals.
The following broad guidelines apply to setting effective goals. Positive statements, be precise, set priorities, write goals down to avoid confusion and give them more force, and keep operational goals small (Rainer, 1987). “Your body is a beautifully evolved sporting machine, comprising, among other things, muscles that can be trained to a peak of fitness and nerves that control the muscles” (Morris 1992). The nerves are massively linked in your brain: vast numbers of nerve cells are linked with a hugely greater number of interconnections. Many of the pathways, however, lie within the rain.
These pathways can be effectively trained by the use of mental techniques such as imagery and simulation. Imagery is the process by which you can create, modify or strengthen pathways important to the co-ordination of your muscles, by training purely within your mind. Imagery rests on the important principle that you can exercise these parts of you brain with imputes from our imagination rather than from your sences: the parts of the brain that you train with imagery experience imagined and real inputs similarly, with the real inputs being merely more vividly experienced (Rainer 1987).
Simulation is similar to imagery in that it seeks to improve the quality of training by teaching your brain to cope with circumstances that would not be otherwise met until an important competition was reached. Simulation, however, is carried out by making your physical training circumstances as similar as possible to the “real thing”-for example by bringing in crowds of spectators, by having performances judged, or by inviting press to a training session (Rainer 1987). Deciding your Commitment to your sport is possibly the most important “Sports Psychology” decision you will make.
It is important to realize that xcellence demands complete dedication: if you want to be the top athlete, then training to be the top athlete must be the most important thing in you life (Orlick 1994). Self-Confidence is arguably one of the most important things you can have. Self-confidence reflects your assessment of you own self-worth. It will play a large part in determining your happiness through life. Sports can be both enormously effective in improving self-worth, and highly destructive in damaging it (Orlick 1994). Imigery, positive thinking, and goal setting can dramatically help in ones own self-confidence.
You can help yourself to routinely apply sports psychology techniques by getting into the habit of using a Training and Performance Diary before and after every training session and performance. Take a diary that has a full page for every day. Block each page into sections for Entries before the Session: goals, and Entries after the Session: achievements, errors, quality of session, and mindset. Keeping this diary has the following advantages: it focuses your attention before a session on what you need to achieve. It helps you to track the achievement of goals.
It helps you to isolate areas needing improvement. It give you the raw data you need to track improvement over. It helps you to see and analyze how mood, distraction, and stress relate to performance (Orlick 1994). Part of Mental Preparation for competition is ensuring that you start your performance in a state of flow. Many high level athletes do this by developing routines that help them to focus their minds and block out distractions. These may involve complex and detailed rituals that involve preparation, detailed dressing rules, or precisely executed warm-ups.
You can perform best in competition if you remember the following pointers. Enjoy the performance. Execute, analyze, and improve skills in practice, and if you make a mistake during performance, forget about it and focus on executing (Morris 1992). One thing to watch out for as you get better at a sport is loss of Focus. This can happen for two main reasons. As your reaction becomes automatic, they hold your attention less. And the other reason is because as you get better, you may find that you are not as challenged by other competitors.
You may find that these focus problems have their root in goal setting: if you are setting outcome goals such as “coming first”, then this will not be challenging if you win easily (Orlick 1994). Bad Moods damage your motivation to succeed in training or competition. They make you more prone to negative thinking, and cause distraction, often as you trigger bad moods in other people. Bad moods emerge as bad temper, unhappiness, lethargy and sluggishness. If you are in a good mood, then even dull training can be enjoyable.
Your mood is completely under your control. You can improve you mood in the following ways: through positive thinking and suggestion, by treating each element of a performance individually, by using imagery, by reviewing your goals to remotivate yourself, and by smiling (Orlick 1994). Distraction is damaging to you performance because it interferes with your ability to focus and disrupts flow. It interferes with the attention that you need to apply to maintain good technique.
This causes stress and consumes mental energy that is better applied somewhere else. Distraction can come from a number of sources, both internal and external” (Rainer 1987), such as: the presence of loved ones you want to impress, family or relationship problems, media, teammates and other competitors, coaches who do not know when to keep quiet, frustration at mistakes, unjust criticism, poor refereeing decisions, or changes in familiar patterns. What is worth remembering is that when you are distracted, lose concentration, and make a mistake, you have not lost your skills. You have just lost your focus. The following points help to deal with distractions.
Your reaction to distractions is controllable, think positive, prepare for distractions, expect distractions, learn how to change bad moods to good moods, sleep and rest more before big events (Bull 1983). Too much Stress and Anxiety can seriously affect your ability to focus on your skills and low in a performance. It is important that you recognize you are responsible for your own stress levels. Very often they are a product of he way you think. Always be aware that others may be out to manipulate your stress levels. A certain level of Stress is needed for optimal performance.
If you are under too little stress then you will find it difficult to motivate yourself to give a good performance. Too little stress expresses itself in feelings of boredom and not being stretched. At an optimum level of stress you will get the benefits of alertness and activation that a good level of stress brings. Excessive levels of stress damage performance and damage your enjoyment of the sport. When you are in a competitive environment or are in an environment in which ou are being evaluated, Adrenaline may enter your bloodstream.
This has the following positive and negative effects on you body. Those positive include: adrenaline causes psychological arousal, it causes alertness, it prepares the body for explosive activity. Those negative effects include: it inhibits judgement, and it interferes with fine motor control (Morris 1992). Anxiety is different from stress. Anxiety comes from a concern over lack of control over circumstances. In some cases being anxious and worrying over a problem may generate a solution, normally, however, it will just result in egative thinking (Bull 1983).
You need mental energy to be able to concentrate your attention and maintain good mental attitudes. If you are concentrating effectively then you can conserve physical energy by maintaining good technique when your muscles are tired. You can waste mental energy on worry, stress, fretting over distractions, and negative thinking. Over a long competition, these not only damage enjoyment, but also drain energy so that performance suffers. It is therefor important to avoid these by good use of sports psychology, and by resting effectively between events and by ensuring that you sleep properly.
