Sport Psychology

Introduction

Sports psychology is the study and implementation of mental techniques to better an athlete's performance. "On top of the time spent honing skills and developing physical readiness, studies of top performers have shown that the elite from a variety of different sports complete many laps of the track, lengths of the pool or throws of the javelin in their mind before competitions". (White 52)In touch football, top players would spend hours practising moves on the field but would spend even longer rehearsing moves, considering options and strategising before they even step onto the field.

Discussion

This unit of work has allowed me, as a learning HPE student, to implement psychological strategies such as goal setting, arousal and performance relationship, mental rehearsal, and feedback and motivation.

"Goal setting is a means of keeping a practical achievement in sight and working towards it effectively to produce possible outcomes".(Perrine 32)When goals are set, they must be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-framed, that is SMART, or else they cannot be effective. This term, researcher set a number of goals and the main goal that researcher chose to focus upon was, (Nash 47)This goal of mine followed the SMART theory in that it was specific to touch, researcher could measure his progress, it was achievable for me physically and realistic that researcher could reach his goal, and researcher set myself a time frame for his goal to be achieved in.

To be able to achieve this goal though, researcher had to be able to set up a stair case to climb. This is referred to as the staircase model. My staircase consisted of a number of smaller, shorter goals: learning and understanding all moves and patterns, learning each position, and adapting to on field situations. In climbing his staircase researcher was able to reach his goal.

To better his overall performance, and work towards achieving his goal, researcher had to recognise and accept the relationship between arousal and performance and the factors that can help or hinder this relationship. "The optimum arousal level varies from athlete to athlete, and is also different for different sports," (Hanc 20). For me to heighten his level of arousal, that would create the best performance, researcher had to find where on the 'inverted-U-curve', touch football would sit for me. Researcher found that researcher required a reasonably high level of arousal for his performance to be maximised to his 'inverted-U-curve' (see following page) would take the following shape,

To achieve his level of arousal, researcher employed a number of psychological strategies such as concentration, centring, simulation, mental rehearsal. When in game play, and attacking to execute a move, researcher would concentrate by maintaining a continual and perpetual habit that allowed me to block any irrelevant information and concentrate on the task at hand. Researcher would mark off against his defender, that is adjust his position so as to be correctly positioned against his defender, take two steps on the spot and then begin to centre myself. (Fitts 65)To do this researcher would ...