Feeder 2.1

Feeder 2.1
http://bmo.sagepub.com/content/34/5/386.full.pdf+html

The population of sports psychology has increased significantly as an academic regulation and an applied practice over the past two decades. Chris J. Gee wrote an article in Behavior Modification titled “How Does Sports Psychology Actually Improve Athletic Performance? A Framework to Facilitate Athletes’ and Coaches’ Understanding” that explains this increasing psychological study.

As any athlete would tell you, mental preparation before a sporting event as well as the in-game mental preparedness is vital in chances for success. Nevertheless, recent research has shown that given the need for this particular mindset, many athletes, coaches, and sports administrators are still reluctant to seek out the help of sports psychologists. One of the main reasons for this reluctance is the lack of understanding of just how important mental skills are in determining performance. “The purpose of this article is to provide the reader with a simple framework depicting how mental skills training translates into improved within-competition performance. This framework is intended to help bridge the general “understanding gap” that is currently being reported by a large number of athletes and coaches, while also helping sport psychology practitioners sell their valuable services to individual athletes and teams.”

Gee then talks about terminology such as Absolute Performance, “an individual’s theoretical optimal performance (i.e., 100% perfect performance) in a given athletic endeavor” and Relative Performance, “what a person’s 100% performance potential would be in a perfect world or ‘on paper.’” Gee uses figures and tables of athletes performances to explain these terms.

The article then transfers over to the mental side of sports performance. The idea that mind and body are inherently intertwined has been around for centuries. Our emotions and attitudes can directly affect our actions and instincts. These principals also govern sports performance. The main psychological issue facing competitive athletes is precompetitive anxiety. All athletes have experiences pre-game gitters or butterflies before big competitions at some point in their career. Elevated anxiety levels cause many changes in psychological mindset that have the ability to impede athletic performance greatly. High anxiety impairs fine motor functioning, disrupts blood flow patterns, impairs decision making abilities, and causes muscle to become more tense. The primary difference between these psychological factors and impending environmental factors is that the psychological factors are in the athletes control, unlike headwind or perhaps rain, thus explaining the importance of mental skill training.

Gee then talks about strategies to reduce precompetitive anxiety. Anxiety is both cognitive and somatic and both aspects negatively affect an athlete’s performance. Strategies addressed for fixing cognitive anxiety should appraise how athletes view the competitive habitat before competition. The main outcome desired with somatic anxiety is to minimize the psychological performance inhibitors and to help the athlete perform the relative skills to the best of his or her abilities.

Before concluding, Gee talks about sport psychology skills and relative performance. He states how it is clear that sports psychology cannot make someone a better athlete in the absolute sense, but what I can do is help someone performance at a level closer to their absolute potential. Psychological impediments differ greatly from competitor to competitor. Since these are very individualized, the relative impact on performance varies greatly between athletes. Gee uses an example of two athletes with headwinds and psychological impediments to show how different athletes are affected by the same inhibitors.

There are a number of psychological factors that have the potential to negatively affect the outcome for athlete’s ability to perform optimally. The role of sports psychology is to provide athletes with the necessary tools and strategies to address these psychological factors as they arise and thus minimize their negative impact over performance. The framework that Gee presented should be treated as preliminary at this point. However, he says that it should serve as a starting point for addressing the common concerns facing sports consultants in the field. Gee states that framework is an oversimplified explanation of sports psychology that he hopes will be expanded in the future.