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Applying Psychological Thinking To Sports
Applying Psychological Thinking To Sports Word Count: 1787 "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 brain. 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 excellence 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 o... This is ONLY a preview of the article. If you would like to view the entire document, you must subscribe to Academic Library. Please register below now!
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