Sport psychology is a specialization within psychology that seeks to understand psychological/mental factors that affect performance in sports, physical activity and exercise and apply these to enhance individual and team performance. It deals with increasing performance by managing emotions and minimizing the psychological effects of injury and poor performance. Some of the most important skills taught are goal setting, relaxation, visualization, self-talk awareness and control, concentration, using rituals, attribution training, and periodization.
The principles and theories may be applied to any human movement or performance tasks (e.g., playing a musical instrument, acting in a play, public speaking, motor skills).
There are over 100 graduate programs in sport psychology available world-wide. Usually, experts recommend that students be trained in both kinesiology (i.e., sport & exercise sciences, physical education) and psychology/counselling.
Your body is a mass of muscles and nerves linked together into the central processing unit that is your brain. This series of articles on sports psychology seeks to show you how to use that central processing unit to its greatest effect in controlling your body to give optimum sporting performance.

The section takes two separate approaches:
A tools based approach explaining the three fundamental sports psychology tools:
Goal Setting
Imagery and Simulation
Flow and Flow Control
An application based approach explaining how to use the tools to their maximum effect.
Enjoy the Mind Tools Sports Psychology section - lessons you can learn here apply to high performance living both inside and outside sport.

Deciding Your Commitment
Deciding your commitment to your sport is possibly the most important 'Sports Psychology' decision you will make.
If all you want out of sport is a bit of relaxed fun, then your approach should be entirely different from someone who wants to reach the top. It is important to realise that excellence demands complete dedication: if you want to be a top athlete, then training to be a top athlete must be the most important thing in your life. If your career or family are more important than your sport, then you will find it difficult to devote the time and dedication you need to achieve excellence to the sport, unless you have a very sympathetic boss or family.

Once you have decided how committed you are, adjust your training and expectations appropriately. Read the section on deciding your goals.

One way of deciding the relative importance of sport in the context of your whole life is to download and use Mind Tools goal setting shareware, 'LifePlan'. Click here for information of LifePlan.

Building Self-Confidence
Develop the self-confidence you deserve!
From the quietly confident doctor whose advice we rely on, to the star-quality confidence of an inspiring speaker, self-confident people have qualities that everyone admires. Jack Welch once said: “Confidence gives you courage and extends your reach. It lets you take greater risks and achieve far more than you ever thought possible” (Capitalism Magazine, 2002). This powerfully conveys the enormous role self-confidence plays in achieving greater success in whatever you do.
Self-confidence is extremely important in almost every aspect of our lives, yet so many people struggle to find it. Sadly, this can be a vicious circle: People who lack self-confidence can find it difficult to become successful. After all, would you instinctively want to back a project that was being pitched by someone who was nervous, fumbling and overly apologetic?
With Mind Tools' "Design Your Life" goal setting system, you decide how you'll focus your life, and then set the clear, vibrant, compelling goals that power you to achievement and a new self-confidence.
On the other hand, you might be persuaded by someone who spoke clearly, who held their head high, who answered questions assuredly, and who readily admitted when he/she did not know something.
Self-confident people inspire confidence in others: Their audience, their peers, their bosses, their customers, and their friends. Gaining the confidence of others is one of the key ways in which a self-confident person finds success.
The good news is that self-confidence really can be learned and built on. And, whether you’re working on your own self-confidence or building the confidence of people around you, it’s well-worth the effort! All other things being equal, self-confidence is often the single ingredient that distinguishes a successful person from someone less successful.

Sporting Excellence
The following pointers should lead you to maximise your sporting abilities:
Training Excellence
Set specific achievement goals before each training session
Prepare your mind before training to get the most out of each period
In training practice your skills with the maximum attention and effort
Use imagery and simulation to mimic actual performance as far as possible
Practice distraction, mood and stress control so that they can be applied effectively in competition
Performance Excellence
Rest effectively before a performance: over-training exhausts your body and tires your mind when you need your maximum mental resources
Use pre-performance ritualsand on-site psych plans so that you start competing in the best frame of mind
Keep focus. If you lose focus, apply a refocusing plan to regain concentration
Learn as much as possible out of your performance, but only analyse after your performance is complete
Keep a training/performance diary to set goals and record performance and mental results.

Bringing it all together: The Training and Performance Diary
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.

The Training and Performance diary is an extremely effective tool that brings together and helps to apply almost everything that this Mind Tools Sports Psychology section has covered.

Take a diary that has a full page for every day. Block each page into sections for:

Entries before the session:
Goals - enter the main goals to be achieved in the training session or performance here. Enter goals before the session or performance. Base the setting of goals on notes from previous pages of the diary.

Entries after the session:
Achievements - Write down the goals achieved here after the session.
Errors - note mistakes here, and suggestions for future improvements or possible future goals
Quality of Session - Write down your assessment of the quality of the session. Include here any times or scores you achieved.
Mindset - make entries here recording your mood, susceptibility to distraction, feeling of stress, and feeling of focus/flow. Score these from 1(poor) to 10 (v. good). Note why you think you felt the way you did.
Keeping this diary has the following advantages:

It focuses your attention before a session on what you need to achieve. This helps to ensure that training sessions and performances are always useful for improvement of skills.
It helps you to track the achievement of goals, and feed information back into the setting of new goals. This helps to build your confidence as you can see easily what you have achieved.
It helps you to isolate areas needing improvement and plan to work on them.
It gives you the raw data you need to track improvement over time so that you can see how you are improving.
It helps you to see and analyse how mood, distraction, and stress relate to performance and flow. This will help you to develop management programs for these, and apply them appropriately.

Your Pre-Competition Routine
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. Part of this practised routine might involve specific sports psychology skills such as imagery, positive thinking, mood control and distraction and stress management, perhaps using a Training & Performance Diary.
All of this ensures that you enter a competitive situation in the ideal state of mind to give an excellent performance.
Experiment with developing a ritual that covers all points of preparation that you consider to be important. By practicing this ritual and keeping it standard in training, it will be automatic and complete when you face a potentially stressful competition.

Performing at Your Best in Competition
You can perform best in competition if you remember the following pointer:
Enjoy the performance - if you find it dull, then you may need to psych yourself up or focus on performance rather than outcome goals. If you are so stressed that you do not enjoy the performance, implement stress management techniques.
Execute, analyse and improve skills in practice. In competition perform thought-free - trust all that hard training. Only analyse your performance after the event.
If you make a mistake during performance, forget about it and focus on executing the next skill properly. Dwelling on past mistakes will distract you from good performance of present skills.
Use Pre-Competition Rituals, On- Site Psych Plans and Refocusing Plans to block distractions, prepare for all eventualities, and keep your performance flowing.


The On-Site Psych Plan
The On-Site Psych Plan works in conjunction with pre-competition routines to prepare fully for competition.

The idea of the On-Site Psych Plan is to prepare you for any reasonable eventuality, so that you can deal with the inevitable distractions that will occur as rapidly and effectively as possible. This helps to ensure that you are in a positive and focused frame of mind for the start of your event.

To prepare the plan, list all the physical and mental steps that occur between arriving on site and the start of the performance. List every distraction that might reasonably occur during this time. Next to the listed items, list what to do if these occur or go wrong and why you will do it. Next to that list what you will do if that goes wrong.
This will ensure that you have thought about and prepared for every reasonable eventuality that might occur up to the start of the performance. This will significantly reduce any anxiety you may feel, as not only do you know how you will deal with any problems that come along, you will know how to react if your first solutions do not work.
You can practise your on-site psych plan using imagery and simulation.
After using the plan in a competition, re-examine and refine it for the next competition.

Your Refocussing Plan
A refocussing plan is very similar to an on-site psych plan, in that it aims to prepare to return you to a state of focus and flow during a performance where something goes wrong. This might be because you are distracted, become stressed, make a mistake or suffer an unjust refereeing decision.

Since you will need to apply the refocussing plan rapidly, it needs to be short and simple.

An effective way of preparing the plan is to list what might go wrong with the performance, and then write down how you will let go of the distraction and refocus on your performance. This might be by rapid application of a relaxation technique, by using a cue-word that has been linked to a feeling of focus, or by effective use of imagery.

Practice applying the effective refocussing technique using imagery or simulation. This will make it easier to use and apply the technique during competition.