Sports Psychology

How the mind functions in sport and competition.

Skill Acquisition

Skill acquisition is the area of sports psychology concerned with how athletes learn and retain new skills. Having a good understanding of how the mind works and people learn can help improve your own sports performance. This is especially true when learning new techniques as well as coaching and teaching others.

Individual Aspects

Individual aspects of performance relate to things personal to each athlete such as motivation, personality, behaviour, and attitudes. For example, some people can ‘psych’ themselves up easily, some are more laid back.

Mental Preparation

A motor program is a series of subroutines organized into the correct sequence to perform a movement. It is stored in the long-term memory and retrieved when we need to perform the skill. Areas of study cover Adam’s loop theory and Schmidt’s Schema theory.

Group Dynamics

Group dynamics and teamwork is about how teams work together and the influence of others as well as leadership.

Quizzes

Resources to help teach and learn sports psychology.

Sports psychology is concerned with the mind and how it functions in a sporting and competition situation. Specific areas of sports psychology include mental preparation, skill acquisition, individual differences between sportspeople as well as group dynamics, leadership, and teamwork.

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