Excellence in athletic performance is the result of sound skill and physical training, supported by optimal rest, recovery, and nutrition. At any particular stage of biological maturity, the athlete’s current physical potential represents a relatively stable ceiling for performance. However, the expression of that performance can vary considerably from contest to contest and even from moment to moment.
The role of sport psychology is to help athletes achieve their physical potential by carefully managing their physical resources through appropriate psychological strategies and techniques. By understanding these strategies and techniques, strength and conditioning professionals can design sport-specific and even position-specific training programs that have the ultimate goal of maximizing performance.
After introducing foundational concepts, we address how one’s mind, through cognitions, can influence physical performance, and then we describe the ideal performance state—the ultimate goal of every athlete. This state is marked by psychological and physiological efficiency, meaning that the athlete employs only the amount of mental and physical energy required to perform the task.
We then examine the primary psychological influences on skill acquisition and performance: motivation, attention, and arousal. Several theories explain how these factors shape psychomotor learning and athletic outcomes. Finally, we review performance-enhancement techniques such as goal setting, energy management and relaxation, imagery, and confidence development, which can be applied to strength and conditioning environments as well as other performance settings.
It is important to note that strength and conditioning professionals are responsible for applying these techniques within their scope of practice. Clinical concerns such as mental illness or significant psychological distress should be referred to a licensed mental health professional.
An athlete is someone who engages in a social comparison (i.e., competition) involving psychomotor skill or physical prowess (or both) in an institutionalized setting, typically under public scrutiny or evaluation. The essence of athletic competition involves comparing oneself to others and putting ego and self-esteem on the line in a setting bound by rules and regulations.
The psychologically well-prepared athlete is characterized by efficiency of thought and behavior. Efficiency is typically associated with skilled performance, where actions are fluid and graceful. The concept can also be extended to psychological activity: an efficient athlete adopts a task-relevant focus, not wasting attention on irrelevant processing such as worrying, catastrophizing, or thinking about a critical audience or coach.
Core psychological skills training (PST) tools can be integrated into sessions to support this efficiency. These include goal setting, imagery, self-talk, relaxation and arousal regulation, and pre-performance routines.
The ideal performance state has been studied from a number of perspectives. Williams and Krane identified the following characteristics that athletes typically report about this state:
In a sense, this ideal performance state seems to represent everything that applied sport psychology programs attempt to promote. There is an absence of negative self-talk, a strong feeling of efficacy, and an adaptive focus on task-relevant cues.
Kobe Bryant, one of the premier players in the National Basketball Association, describes being in this state, saying:
“When you get in that zone, it’s just a supreme confidence that you know it’s going in. It’s not a matter of if this [or that] is going in. Things just slow down. Everything slows down and you just have supreme confidence. When that happens, you really do not try to focus on what’s going on because … you could lose it in a second. Everything becomes one noise—you don’t hear this or that; everything’s just one noise—you’re not paying attention to one or the other … You just really try to stay in the present and not let anything break that rhythm. Again, as long as you just kind of stay there, you become oblivious to everything that’s going on. You don’t think about your surroundings or what’s going on with the crowd or the team. You’re kind of locked in … You have to really try to stay in the present and not let anything break that rhythm.”
Bryant’s comments reinforce many of the concepts discussed in this chapter. It is important to remember that this mental state rests largely on a sound physical training program and a history of performance success. Bryant exhibits phenomenal physical prowess, outstanding running sprints, training on the court, and lifting weights in the off-season. Combined with superior performance on the basketball court, such preparatory physical effort contributes greatly to his focused, confident psychological state.
To perform effectively, athletes must learn how to manage their mental and physical energy levels. Athletes who deplete energy through worry, anger, frustration, or anxiety are more likely to experience fatigue, reduced self-confidence, and diminished physical energy at critical moments of performance.
Mental energy is generated, maintained, depleted, and refreshed through emotions. Emotions are temporary feeling states that occur in response to events and have both physiological and psychological components. These emotions affect both mental and physical energy and can be either beneficial or detrimental to performance, depending on how they are interpreted.
Training athletes to channel their emotions to elevate or regulate energy, while maintaining control over those emotions, is essential for achieving the ideal performance state. This aligns with the concept of flow and the individual zones of optimal functioning (IZOF), which emphasize that the optimal level of arousal is specific to each athlete and each task, rather than universally “high” or “low.”
The training environment provides a host of new and unfamiliar experiences that create multiple opportunities to test oneself and be evaluated for effectiveness. Because of this, athletic performance is frequently affected by arousal, anxiety, and stress.
Arousal is simply a blend of physiological and psychological activation in an individual and refers to the intensity of motivation at any given moment. For example, a “psyched-up” athlete may experience tremendous mental activation characterized by positive thoughts and a strong sense of control, whereas a “flat” athlete could experience minimal activation characterized by wandering thoughts and slow reaction.
Arousal is always present in an individual to some degree, on a continuum ranging from deeply asleep or comatose to highly excited; but in and of itself, it is not automatically associated with pleasant or unpleasant events. It is simply a measurement of activation and can be indexed through tests such as heart rate, blood pressure, electroencephalography (EEG), electromyography (EMG), and catecholamine levels.
Anxiety is a subcategory of arousal that involves negative emotions such as nervousness, worry, or apprehension. It can be categorized into state anxiety (momentary nervousness in response to competition) and trait anxiety (a general disposition to perceive competitive situations as threatening). High levels of cognitive anxiety (excessive worry) and somatic anxiety (physical symptoms like increased heart rate) can impair performance.
Stress is a response to a substantial imbalance between demand and capability, where failure to meet the demand has important consequences. Stress can be positive (eustress), enhancing performance, or negative (distress), impairing focus and execution.
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