In the Lent Term 2024, BrainFeed ran a competition where students in year 10, 11, and 12 completed a 500 word essay on one of 3 given essay titles. Here is our winning entry, written by Evie L, year 12.

Sports psychology can be described as the study of how psychological factors influence sport, athletic performance, exercise and physical activity. It is often used in teaching athletes to apply various psychological techniques in preparation for high performance in a chosen sport. Furthermore, sports psychologists often investigate how participating in sports and exercise can affect mental health, as well as improve physical health and well-being.

 

There are different types of sport psychologists, including educational, clinical and exercise psychologists. Educational psychologists often focus on visualisation, goal setting and self talk methods. Clinical psychologists focus on strategies from educational psychology and psychotherapy to help improve an athlete’s mental health and personal performance. Exercise psychologists work with people to help them to learn how to make exercise a habit, and to practice motivational techniques and mindfulness.

 

While sports psychology has been around for almost 200 years (Ref. PMC PubMed Central) research on sports psychology interventions is relatively new with most data coming from the past four decades. Over the years, there has been a lot of meta-analytical data gathered that links sports psychology techniques and sports performance, but it has often been gathered in piecemeal fashion, rather than in its totality, leaving a need for current studies to focus more on improving the understanding of the link between improvement of sports performance through psychological interventions, with solid evidence to prove efficacy.

 

Sport performance is the manner in which sport participation is measured and is a complex mixture of biomechanical, emotional factors and training techniques. In 1954, Sir Roger Bannister broke the four minute mile which at the time was considered to be at the limit of human performance. At present day, there are many elite athletes who break that barrier every year, with performance gains achieved through both physical and mental training. Mental techniques include learning how to stay calm under pressure, remaining focused and maintaining self-belief to push personal limits. Conversely, there are many occasions where athletes operating as part of a team focus too much on themselves, rather than the team, leading to a dysfunctional team environment and where they struggle to deliver desired high performance. Examples of this include Tour de France teams, where individual riders can seek individual glory rather than team success, and the All-Blacks rugby team who have been world leading in their sports, by applying psychological interventions to put team culture and team success, over individual success (ref. Legacy – James Kerr).

 

Mental toughness is a valuable concept in determining wellbeing, behaviour, individual and team performance (Strycharczyk & Clough) and typical psychological interventions for educational sports psychologists include visualisation, goal setting and self-help techniques. Visualisation is highly successful in sports and is linked to positive thinking techniques and an athlete or team imagining the perfect race, serve or phase of play, to get through a difficult task or situation. Visualisation needs to be practiced repeatedly to improve skills and to increase confidence in application. Goal setting provides meaning and direction with the discipline to use SMART (Specific, Measurable, Accurate, Realistic, Time Bound), allowing athletes to focus on what they want to happen in the short term rather than fear what might happen in not achieving their ultimate ambition.

 

For athletes and non-athletes alike, self-talk practices are instrumental in achieving performance and well-being gains. At the core of this personality and motivation are a key factor in how individuals embrace sport to improve their performance and wellbeing. The Big Five Personality Inventory (John and Srivastava 1999) is a practical approach to scoring an athlete’s personality traits of openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. Assessing these traits as a psychological intervention provides for establishing a clear understanding of an athlete’s character, and a frame for directing attention towards the actions required to improve the quality of their performance.

 

There are unfortunate circumstances where specialist clinical psychological support is required when an athlete has been through some kind of trauma, whether an injury, illness or a personal life matter. An approach that clinical psychologists use is the Cognitive Behavioural Approach. Psychologists using this perspective will look at how an individual’s feelings, behaviours and thoughts interact with each other. There are four approaches to clinical psychology: psychodynamic, humanistic, cognitive behavioural therapy or family therapy. Getting these matters balanced is a critical baseline to allow an athlete to focus on their sporting performance.

 

Overall, sport psychology interventions have been proven to enhance performance and wellbeing. Team cohesion, clear visualisation, goal-setting, confidence and mindfulness interventions have been shown to have a beneficial effect, whereas variables detrimental to performance include anxiety, depression and negative self-talk.