Athletes Mental Toughness

Before exploring the health of an athlete its important to understand what mental health is. Mental health is characterised by emotional wellbeing and resilience to stress (ClearingHouseForSport Australian Government Ralph Richards 9th June 2016). Mentally healthy individuals are able to cope with daily stresses and fully participate in family, work and in this case sport activities. A mental disorder is a diagnosable illness that affects a persons thinking, emotional state and behaviour and disrupts his/her ability to carry out normal daily activities and maintain personal relationships. Exercise has many benefits, not only for physical health but also your mental health as well. In the brain, exercise stimulates chemicals that improve an

Something that has always been in my life and repeatedly been said to me, or mentioned is that during a sporting event everything is mental. Now what I have always wondered was that everything in the mental game is based on one’s own preferences, the way one thinks and processes information and how he reacts to a situation. There are various components of an athlete’s mental game such as motivation, agility, confidence; all of which contribute in actual competitions, games or even at practice. More importantly, confidence is more complex because it is what is affected most of the mental game, that’s what makes or breaks an athlete, and that can be affected by a coach, parent, or negative teammate, it’s not just personal thoughts reflecting

Mental strength and agility is just as important as physical prowess in sports. In the debate over the importance of physical prowess and mental agility in sports, Sanneh and Heinrich have similar views, with Sanneh supporting the idea that the ability to think while playing football is just as important as running in “What Could Be Better Than A Touchdown”, and Heinrich suggests that the ability to think while or before running a “race” is just as important as their physical strength and endurance.

Statistics shows that 90 percent of physical strength vs. mental strength is mental. I think the statistics came out this way because Your mind is the control center of your body and makes everything function. Without mental strength, sports are pointless! An example from “Confessions of a Doper” is, “ At 5:30 every morning, I popped out of bed with excitement and purpose. Into the freezing Colorado morning I rode. For the next 30 miles I pushed my heart rate and the pedals.” When the author had excitement and purpose, that came from his mind in mental strength to ride every morning and push himself. Another example from “Confessions of a Doper” is, “These early rides make up many of my memories from my teenage years during the 1980’s: the crashes, the adrenaline, and the discipline of training of every day.” This shows mental strength because for the author to carry on working hard he had to be mentally strong and mentally prepared. Sometimes it is better to work out your brain than your physical talents of the

Today in sports athletes endure many mental and physical obstacles from there competitive environment. Many of today's best athletes work with sports psychologists to help them handle the pressures found in this competitive atmosphere. One question that athletes ask is, why cant they play in big games as well as they anticipate themselves doing? Sports psychologists feel that spending all their time on body conditioning and athletic skills will not ensure that athletes reach their peak performance.

For High Performance athletes, there can be a lot riding on their results and performance in competition. If athletes develop an over-reliance on sporting success as a source of self-worth and identity, it can lead to serious emotional issues if things do not go as desired. Athletes often identify their self-worth with their ability to perform, and performance failure has been significantly associated with depression (Taylor, 2015 pg.11; Troijan, 2016, pg. 137) Athletes face many struggles and when something goes wrong it can leave them not knowing where to turn for help. They can be left with they feelings that they are nothing, undeserving, and alone. This may also exacerbate their feelings of seclusion, depression, or grief. Most athletes

According to James Loehr, a famous sport psychologist, mental toughness is defined as the ability to constantly maintain a perfect performance state during the heat of competition (Loehr, 1986). Since then, Goldberg (1998) has well-defined mental toughness as the ability to stand high in the face of difficulty, and being able to rebound from repetitive setbacks and failures. Fletcher and Fletcher (2005) defined mental toughness as the ability to manage with various

It has been identified that through sports psychology one can improve their physical ability and performance. Sports psychology is the study of how the mind, mental states and behaviour effect sporting performance. There are several sport psychology techniques, which have helped me become a better volleyball player. These techniques include planning for performance, controlling arousal levels, mental rehearsal and concentration.

The connection of the mental game and the athletes for any rank of sports has been extremely underestimated. While some believe that all athletes are “all brawn and no brain,” this disregards how much mental activity is brought into any sport. It connects to the fear and separation of mental health for athletes. If an athletes is showing signs of any type of mental issue or disorders, their spot on the team has been threatened. The coaches and staff sometime cannot simply understand the importance of treatment for an athlete. Depression, anxiety, burnout and other disorders causes athletes to do poorly with their mental game, making them appear that these athletes would not be

In earlier days sports psychology was mostly concerned with developing assessment methods that would identify those people with the potential to become serious superior athletes. Today the focus is on psychological training, exercises that strengthen the mental skills that will help athletic performances on the path to excellence. These skills include mental imagery and focus training. If an athlete is serious about becoming the best he or she can possibly be, the most essential ingredient is commitment to practice the right things. It takes incredible commitment to reach the top: a commitment to rest and train the body so it can perform under the most demanding conditions and a commitment to train the mind to

To truly witness the full effects anxiety has on an athlete’s performance, research requires the focus on cognitive anxiety (CA) and self-confidence, but SA assists when assessing the true effects (Brustad & Wiggins, 1996). Brustad and Wiggins (1996) tested

What makes champions in sport? At the end of the day, it is the moment when one stands at the top of the podium, holding up their well-deserved medals and trophies that all elite athletes strive for. Thus, experts have studied this question extensively to see which programs, or by what means, are elite athletes developed to achieve this goal. One of the many aspects to athlete development is the controversial topic of deliberate practice versus deliberate play. Deliberate practice can be defined as “any training activity (a) undertaken with the specific purpose of increasing performance, (b) requiring cognitive and/or physical effort, and (c) relevant to promoting positive skill development” (Cote et al., 2007, p. 185) On the

Mental toughness is not a new concept in sport, but is generally misunderstood. Coaches design programmes to develop mentally tough athletes, predominately in professional sport, to separate elite performers from good performers (Gould, Jackson, & Finch, 1993) as physical talent itself is not the only component that can lead an athlete to success (Gucciardi, Gordon, & Dimmock, 2008).

Athletes all around the world have trouble with performance, whether it be because they lack motivation, or because they are distracted, or even because they don’t know their body as well as they should. Athletes go through too much to perform better, they stress themselves out trying to be that one “perfect athlete”. Athletes should know the importance of bettering themselves during performance and how it can affect others around them. In the book, Psychology of Sports, written by Dorcas Susan Butt mentions techniques to help an athlete do well in a sport. The best training techniques for an athlete to do well in a sport are positive thinking, relaxation, and visual motor behavioral rehearsal.

According to Manescu (2013), psychological preparation of sportsmen is a set of training and education strategies which aim to increase mental capacity and develop sportsmen’s personality, requirement of specific sport and high result in training. The importance of psychological preparation means that it is the total training of an athlete. With complete development not just the athlete but also the team. The full potential of a sportsmen can’t be attain without the full personality of the sportsmen.