Final Essay

How to win a competition when the athletes are afraid of playing the game? This is a serious question which all the coaches and athletes are facing. The purpose of their training is to win the game. However, many coaches are frustrated about how to give their athletes an effective training. A good training includes many aspects, not only sports skills, but also their psychological skills. A successful psychological skill will directly help athletes increase their confidence in competition and finally influence their performance. In the following of the paragraphs, I will discuss how the psychological skills training (PST) increases the performance and how to do the psychological skills training. First of all, many athletes are able to focus

The method of PST including self-talk, imagery, goal setting and arousal regulation. Firstly, for self-talk, it can be instructional and motivational. An athlete can talk to himself like “focus on the play” (instructional) or “ I can play until the end with the energy I have” (motivational). The reason of the self-talk will help athletes to win is that according to Philipp, Daniel, Stephan&Martin (2016), “it could help athletes to remind themselves of key skills and strategies and to direct their attention and behavior accordingly” (p.1) When the athletes focus on the competition, they will have more chance to win. On the other hand, imagery shows that the person will experience or re-experience the newly generated images. For instance, a skier can image he is at a skiing course to reduce stress and anxiety. For the advantage of the imagery, according to Philipp, Daniel, Stephan&Martin (2016), “Imagery may help athletes to behave functionally because it could facilitate the recollection of corresponding psychological states and movements.” (p.1) The imagery will help athletes to form an image when they are training which helps the athletes to eliminate the anxiety. So they will have a better performance. The third PST training is setting goals, there are three types of goals: outcome goals (e.g.win or lose), performance goals (e.g. increasing the shooting accuracy) and process goals