Sports Psychology:
Breaking Down What Athletes, Coaches, and Parents Need to Know
Whether you are an athlete trying to get to the next level, an elite sports coach trying to help your team succeed, or a parent of an aspiring elite athlete, this page is designed to break down nearly everything that you need to know about sports psychology, mental performance, mental toughness, mental skills, and how to train the mind to crush your goals.
More than ever before, mental health has become an accepted part of our society. From the highest levels of tennis to football superstars, we have seen athletes from all different sports talking about their journeys in working with their minds.
With that, there has been a rise in professionals who work with these athletes to get their minds right. Sports psychologists, certified mental performance consultants, mental performance coaches, meditation teachers, your coach who read that book AJ Brown was reading on the sidelines last year, and so many more.
This creates a rather confusing landscape for athletes, coaches, program directors, and parents who are seeking to gain an edge through mental training and cultivate a robust sense of mental well-being.
What is sports psychology and mental performance?
With all the buzzwords out there, when it comes to mental health, sports psychology, and mental toughness, let's start off by breaking down some of the terminology you may see when seeking out these services:
Sport(s) Psychology is the overarching field that studies and researches how your mind affects how you play and feel in sports to address optimal performance and well-being. Many professions outside of sports, like corporate business, performing artists, military personnel, and first responders, utilize the knowledge and training this field offers.
Mental Skills are a set of cognitive, emotional, and behavioral abilities that enable individuals to manage their thoughts, emotions, and actions effectively. These skills play a crucial role in enhancing performance, well-being, and resilience during sports, work, and personal life.
Mental Performance Training is the systematic packaging of mental skills to elicit a specific type of performance or well-being benefit. We often relate mental training to strength & conditioning. The same way you may do squats or bench press, during mental performance training, we do things like goal setting, breathwork, or meditation. This type of training is most often done with athletes, teams, coaches, business professionals, performing artists, military, police, and first responders, and delivered through indvidual, team, or group sessions.
Mental Toughness is the buzzword of the bunch; it is often used in context as the ability to withstand or endure through difficult situations. To us, mental toughness is the ability to act in line with your values when standing face to face with adversity.
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Breaking Down Mental Skills
As was defined before, Mental Skills are a set of cognitive, emotional, and behavioral abilities that enable individuals to manage their thoughts, emotions, and actions effectively. These skills come and go; we always have them to some extent, and they can be systematically enhanced through mental training.
We break down mental skills into personal foundation skills, performance skills, and personal development skills:
Foundation Skills
Mental capabilities that provide a strong basis for success in sport
Motivation
Self-Awareness
Productive Thinking
Self-Confidence
Mindfulness
Acceptance
Self-Compassion
Performance Skills
Mental abilities critical to the execution of skills during sports performance
Perceptual cognitive skills
Attentional focus
Energy management
Development Skills
Mental skills that represent significant markers of maturation, self-development, and autonomy.
Identity achievement
Interpersonal Competence
Lifestyle Management
Leadership
Mental skills play a crucial role in enhancing performance, well-being, and resilience during sports, work, and personal life.
Strength & Conditioning for the Mind: Mental Performance Training
Mental Performance Training is simply strength and conditioning for the mind. When athletes (or anyone) work out in the gym, they do exercises like squats, lunges, bench press, or rows. After completing these exercises, there is some kind of effect on the body's physical skills, like strength, endurance, power, speed, and agility.
When working on your mind to increase performance, you will need to do exercises like:
Meditation
Breathwork
Relaxation
Imagery
Perceptual cognitive, think, reaction time
Reflection
Goal setting
After action reviews
Competition planning
Routine building
Self-talk
These exercises have an effect on the mind by increasing all or some of the mental skills we talked about above. In the same way that a strength and conditioning coach manipulates sets and reps during physical exercise, mental performance coaches or sports psychologists do the same thing to help their athletes.
Whether it’s the body or the mind. The ultimate outcome of training is for athletic performance, resilience, and well-being to be enhanced.
What About Mental Toughness?
If you watch or have been around sports, I can almost guarantee that you have heard the term mental toughness before. It is thrown around as the gold standard for measuring the mind.
If you start to dig into what mental toughness really is, you start to see that it is an ability just like being able to broaden or narrow one's focus during crucial moments.
People don't just have mental toughness or not. No one is born mentally tough, it needs to be developed the same way any other skill or ability is developed.
To start developing mental toughness, we need to get clear on what mental toughness really is.
Mental toughness is the ability to act in line with your values when standing face to face with adversity.
If we can all get clear on that definition, this allows us now to systematically train mental toughness through a mental performance training program. If leaders expect their athletes to just be mentally tough without doing anything to foster it, then we are doing them a disservice.
Interested in learning more about training the mind to be great at sports?
Check out the resources below for more information on sports psychology, mental performance training, mental skills, and more!
What is Mental Performance Training?
Mental Performance Training is the practice of mental skills that improve the performance of athletes, teams, coaches, business professionals, performing artists, and so many more people who care about the outcome of the work that they do and experience stress or pressure while doing it.