MINDSET, MENTAL SKILLS, MENTAL TRAINING, MENTAL HEALTH
Sep 15, 2022Mindset is the established set of attitudes held by someone. Your mindset can help or diminish your performance during competitions.
Mental Skills is the set of learned skills that help athletes regulate thoughts, feelings, and actions during practices and competitions.
Mental Training is a section of Sport Psychology that focuses exclusively on teaching mental skills to enhance athletic performance. Athletes will learn skills to help them cope with performance anxiety, change thoughts and beliefs, train the physical and emotional reactions to stressors, manage anger, manage time, improve concentration and focus, and other skills to help athletes deal with obstacles during their career. Athletes who train their minds can perform the best of their abilities more consistently.
Mental health is a term used to define cognitive, behavioral, and emotional wellbeing. Mental illness can affect relationships, physical health, and daily living. For years, some professionals believed that athletes who score high in anxiety trait, depression, neuroticism, or other signs of psychopathology would be unsuccessful in sport. Today, we know it is not true. If an athlete is dealing with mental issues, correcting pathology and dysfunction can improve the athlete’s wellbeing, and the performance level can be restored to previous levels if it was affected at all.
Biofeedback equipment is used to help athletes understand and manage the physiological reactions elicited by thoughts and emotions associated with competition, so they can control the activation levels to perform to the best of their abilities. By becoming aware of the physiological processes (biological feedback), athletes can choose the responses that were previously automatic.
Mental training professionals who have specialization in sport psychophysiology will integrate training tools that challenge athletes’ perception of the situation, help athletes choose different actions to deal with challenges and help athletes become aware of automatic physiological responses to stressors. So, athletes can respond optimally leading to enhanced athletic performance and wellbeing.
Maximizing performance requires mastering a combination of physical and mental strength. To reach the top, athletes need to develop robust psychological strategies for success - but who can provide reliable guidance? The answer lies in identifying an expert source that specializes in the mental preparation of athletes. The minimum education needed to help you improve your mental game is a master’s degree in sport psychology. So, make sure you are seeking out help from qualified professionals because it could mean the difference between victory and defeat.
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