Sometimes a student athlete has turned to drugs to cope with the pressures of sport. Without really considering what a powerful influence the positive mind can be in successful performance, were these individuals unknowingly depriving themselves of an opportunity to reach much higher levels of ability?

Many young collegiate athletes have gained tremendous advantage from learning mental techniques appropriate for their sport. The two stories below are true accounts of two very talented student athletes who turned disappointment into success by training themselves to think differently.

Sports Psychology: Student Examples

MILT
Milt, an outstandingly gifted NCAA College basketball player learned from personal experience how mind training could affect his performance. Milt was a great jumper, and a very talented three-point shooter. At one point in his college basketball career he was having difficulty finding the basket; a time when his team was preparing for the NCAA area finals. He consulted a professor at his university who was a sport psychologist and received advice on how to train mentally to effectively make perfect three points shots. Milt developed an audio tape of himself describing perfectly in his own words what it felt like to hear the "swoosh" of the net as the ball went down. He played this tape before going to sleep and when he woke in the mornings.

It was not long before Milt went out and broke a college record for scoring three point baskets in one game. His team went on to win the NCAA basketball championship that year.

CHRIS
Chris was a young wrestler who knew that he was talented and able to beat many of the opponents who beat him. He thought: "if only I could find a way to focus and maintain concentration during the later part of the bouts." Chris learned about "focusing his mind" in one of his university classes and started to practice "mental focusing and positive self-talk." Later that year he placed third in the NCAA wrestling championships.

These two short stories are true accounts of student athletes who experienced athletic success during their four years of eligibility from training themselves mentally. They learned from experience and self-discipline, that the power of the mind and careful mental conditioning can help an athlete to succeed in sport.

Sports Psychology and Athletic Performance

For more information on sport psychology and sport performance visit:
Getting Players to take Psychological Responsibility.

How can sport psychologists help a student athlete to succeed?
The main role of the sport psychologist is to provide information and help student athletes cope with the effects of sport by offering techniques and strategies to increase concentration, confidence, consistency, control and motivation. Sport psychologists can help student athletes to cope with the pressures of sport by helping individual athletes to learn different coping skills and stress management skills. Cook (1990) also commented on the important roll that sports psychologists have in helping athletes to overcome mood swings and assist recovery from injury.

What factors most often influence athletic performance?
An athlete's performance can be negatively affected when they are overcome by nervousness during competition or lack discipline during training sessions and competition. Some student athletes experience pre-competition anxiety. This may negatively affect their ability to performance well; consequently, they experience depression and disappointment that they have the team down. The following issues generally originate when a student athlete miss-manages inner thoughts and feelings:

What mental training techniques can help an athlete to succeed?

Positive self-talk:
Positive self-talk can be the most convincing message that we ever receive. Unfortunately, the abilities of some individuals are clouded by negative self-input.

As strange as it may seem, many of the most important messages we receive come from our inner conversations with ourselves, not from others. When negative self-talk is the result of our perceptions of what we feel that the outside world is telling us it is not surprising when athletic performance deteriorates.

Negative self-talk leads to negative personal feelings, low self-esteem leading to poor performance. Self-confidence is the key to success in sport. This is developed through positive self-communication. Unfortunately, student athlete who use performance enhancing drugs lose valuable opportunities to develop self-confidence from achieving results without chemical assistance. When an individual relies more and more on the drug he/she may tend to rely less on the self. Positive self-talk is an effective method to help individuals to avoid drugs.

One technique for dealing with negative self-talk is called "thought-stoppage." This technique allows a student athlete to screen out negative, unwanted thought patterns. This technique can promote greater mental toughness and increase the ability of an individual to respond positively to adversity during difficult times. The key is to develop the habit of using positive self-talk. Thought-stoppage can be an effective deterrent to the thoughts that influence using drugs in sport. The mind begins to establish positive rationale for not using drugs. Self-talk promotes mental toughness that can be a life-long legacy.

Imagery:
Imagery is a technique that can help a student athlete to have an ideal picture of a desired performance. According to Davies and West (1991), it can be used as a powerful tool to enhance performance, and often acts as a corrective technique, energizer, practical aid, problem solver and controller of physiological responses.

Imagery works best in a relaxed mental state. A comfortable, relaxed state of mind allows visualization of detailed images of different performance situations; for example, a soccer player visualizes the perfect action of kicking the ball, the leg following through, and see the ball beating the goalkeeper and hitting the back of the net.

Imagery can also be useful in dealing with fear, anxiety, and over-arousal. The key elements for imagery to become a positive mental training tool are the following:

Holly Flankers, Olympic skier and three-time World Cup Winner; Willie Davenport five time Olympian; Jeff Blatnick a gold medal wrestler; Ross Hellickson a two time Olympic silver medallist are elite athletes who have successfully used imagery. (Ungerleider, 1995; Cook, 1991).

Visuomotor Behavior Rehearsal (VMBR):
VMBR is a technique that involves the components of relaxation and imagery rehearsal. There are three phases included in this technique:

For example, the soccer player achieves a state of relaxation, followed by imagery practice and finally imagines specific shooting skills to facilitate a transfer of learning.

The transfer phase indicates that a skill initially practiced in one situation will more likely to transfer to another if the two situations are similar (Suinn, 1976). According to Ungerleider (1996) VMBR involves a process of creating a mental video tape before an event and then using it to analyze and correct errors that may have occurred in both real and imagined events. The goal of VMBR is to remove unwanted and undesirable movements that affect athletic performance. VMBR has four goals:

This technique has been used widely among Olympic and professional athletes such as Kristi Yamaguchi former Olympic figure skater, Steffi Grafs, Zina Garrison, Martina Navratilova and Gabriela Sabatini (Ungerleider, 1996).

Relaxation training:
The main goal of relaxation technique is to reduce anxiety under conditions of high emotional arousal. Student athletes can learn to remain calm during stressful situations and deal with stray thoughts and negative feelings that interfere with a clear mental image of a successful movement or encounter during competition. For greatest effect, relaxation should be combined with imagery and visualization training in a regular training schedule. Relaxation techniques to enhance imagery and visualization strategies emerge from two different concepts: First, the muscle to mind relationship allows student athletes to train their muscles to become sensitive to any level of tension and arousal; muscles are trained to diagnose the situation. Second the mind-muscle relationship that is usually present in meditation techniques. Allows the athlete to become aware of arousal and tension in the mind and then follow with appropriate quieting messages to the muscles. Olympic gold and silver medallists in gymnastics, Julianna McNamara and Kathy Johnson have successfully used relaxation techniques.

Goal-Setting:
Goal setting involves a student athlete developing a general plan for success in sport and academics. Objectives provide the opportunity to be more specific and allow the student athlete to measure their progress. According to cook (1991) a daily, weekly and monthly objective enables a student athlete to understand and appreciate the relationship between effort and accomplishment. Specific short term and long term objectives provide important structure in an individual's daily life, and when goals and objectives are written and shared with others there is a high probability that they will be achieved.

Many student athletes have experienced the benefits of mental training and many stories can be told about the successes of those that have taken the time and put in the effort to learn sport psychology skills. If you are interested in learning more about these skills visit the following web sites.

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