Psychological Factor That Affect Sports Performance

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

For this assignment I will explain the effect of personality and motivation on sports performance.

The aim of this research is to examine the correlation between mental rehearsal and physical practice and no practice at all, in a marble throwing exercise in different methods of improving performance. Studies have shown mental rehearsal and physical training will significantly improve motor skills in sport. However, mental rehearsal needs to be incorporated along with physical practice to gain specific benefits. The study saw thirty psychology students from Monash University and Federation University, both male and female, aged between eighteen and sixty three years of age, randomly allocated to one of three groups, these being physical rehearsal, mental rehearsal, and no rehearsal. The participants consisted of students from

A sport and exercise psychologist are those involved in the scientific study of any psychological factor involved with physical activity, exercise, or sport. According to the APA, sport psychologists are concerned with two main areas: (1) helping an athlete attain ideal health and assist in getting them to consistently perform at the upper range of their capabilities through psychological principles, and (2) understand how involvement in physical activity, exercise, or sport can affect psychological development, and overall health and well-being throughout life. Some professional roles that can be related to sport/exercise psychology include: athletic trainers, physical therapists, coaches, psychologists, and performance enhancement consultants.

My philosophy is based on providing the athletes with an opportunity to enhance their performance and develop their skills in a supportive and enjoyable environment.

There are different ways in which a coach can help their athlete manage and control their arousal levels to prevent negative anxiety. These coping strategies have proven to be successful for various athletes as they try to fix bad habits that are left on the field or court during their performance. The first strategy is imagery and mental rehearsal. This strategy allows an athlete to visualize, in their mind, a specific game event or a skill they feel they need to work on. By an athlete visioning themselves performing the skill, without the use of their body, it allows them to find kinks in their game that might be affecting their play during performance. This strategy can also include an athlete examining video or another athlete to see what

     In our society today it seems like sports rule the land. Everywhere we look, there is some kind of sporting event going on or being televised. Almost everyone could be considered a fan of at least one sport. Some people follow sports like a religion. With such an increased focus on sports, the athlete's performances are put under a microscope. This puts more pressure on athletes to give a winning performance. No longer do athletes play for fun, they play to win. This isn't happening just on the professional level; it is happening on all levels of sport. From little league to backyard football, the goal is to win at all cost. With this increase pressure, athletes are

Cognitive psychology is linked to sports, insofar, it allows an athlete to recognize subjective experiences that give rise to an optimal mindset, allowing one to perform mentally. Clinical sport psychologists who incorporate this theoretical framework, also believe athletes have the tendency to create maladaptive attitudes, resulting in distorted or exaggerated thoughts (Beck, Freeman, & Davis, 2004; Beck & Haigh, 2014; Keefe, Webb & DeRubeis, 2016), thus, debilitating one’s athletic achievement. For this reason, an athlete’s ability to think, rationalize or anticipate events (i.e., games or practice) affects the way they view their personal experiences. In the same way those experiences are interpreted, is likely how they can be misinterpreted,

The sports psychology concepts taught throughout this semester gave me a better understanding of why individuals act the way they do in certain situations. Now that I have been introduced to the realm of sports psychology, I understand the reasoning for personal sports behavior. During this semester, this class has analyzed peer reviewed studies, thus allowing individuals, including myself, to critically discuss major sport psychology concepts. Three concepts discussed throughout this semester reviewed the concepts of group and team dynamics, the self-confidence level in sports, and the response to injury. After reviewing the topics stated above, I can anticipate and assist future behaviors of others which will assist clinical care in my future

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

Sports Psychology has become more and more influential in understanding how to play the game. Serious athletes are now training their mind just as much as they train their body. They have found that to be a champion, it now takes more than just being fit and having talent. As the pressure to succeed continues to increase, athletes continually add both physical and emotional stress to their bodies. Mental toughness, or the ability to perform at one’s optimal level regardless of their circumstances, is a

Somatic anxiety is a second factor that affects an athlete’s performance. Somatic anxiety (SA) was defined by Liebert & Morris 1967; Martens et al., 1990; Vickers & Williams (2007) as an individual’s awareness to anxiety experienced and the physical symptoms in response to the anxiety. Few of many symptoms associated with somatic anxiety (SA) include increased blood pressure, shortness of breath, clammy hands, muscle tension, choking, sweating and having butterflies in the stomach (Morris, Davis & Hutchings, 1981 p. 541; Vickers & Williams 2007; Fullerton 2007). The Competitive State Anxiety Inventory-2 (Smith et al,; Humara, 1999) asses and measures the correlation between somatic anxiety and performance.

The activity- while studies have shown that your performance will increase until you have reached your optimal level of arousal, there are some sports that require you to have a low arousal level and example of a sport that requires a low arousal level is snooker, as the player has to be very calm and collected and take his/her time to choose the right ball to pot and they have to find the exact spot on the ball that they want to hit, if they had a high level of arousal they would very likely miss their shot.

The article, Predicting athletic performance using the five factor model of personality by Ralph L. Piedmont, David C. Hill, Susana Blanco seeks to address how the five factor model of personality when utilized, is a suitable predictor of athletic performance and how it is can assist in gaining an insight and understanding of the competitive nature within athletes, to show if there was a correlation between personality traits within different competitive sport. There have been many other studies used to evaluate personality within sport such as Cooper’s study (1969) that concluded that those that are more athletic in a competition sense are inclined to be socially confidence, aggressive and have an increased motivation to achieve. (Piedmont, R., Hill, D., & Blanco, S. 769-777, 1997). Therefore the authors aim was to utlise several testing method to gain a greater insight to there questions and compliment other studies findings or determine different things.

The importance of vision in sports is a subject that triggers everyone’s awareness for the past couple years .In fact, with the increasing of people playing sports as a recreational activity or at a professional level, it is becoming more relevant than ever to stress the type of eye injuries that can happen while practicing a sport and the best way to protect ourselves. Whether it’s basketball, football, baseball or any type of sports human in general, is more exposed than ever to eye injuries. According to the book sport vision care for the enhancement of sports performance “ sports - related ocular injuries account for 33000 to 100000 of the estimated 2.4 million eye injuries that occur in the US annually” (Brumitt & Erickson, p. 139). Furthermore, eye injuries are the number cause of blindness and ocular morbidity in children (Brumitt & Erickson, p. 139). Traumatic eye injury, according to the sports-medical organization sports eye injuries remain the second most common cause of visual impairment, behind only cataracts. Moreover, every year, nearly 15 percent of the 2.5 million eye injuries in the United States occur during sporting activities. Of these injuries, 42,000 are severe enough to warrant an emergency department visit, and approximately 13,500 result in legal blindness (R.A., D., & TS, 2012). All those facts reunite prove that sports related ocular injuries should be a concern for everybody. This paper will focus on the diverse type of injuries that can