Review – Mental Strength Tips For Peak Athletic Performance
During the past year on Thursday I’ve discussed a variety of mental strength skills and concepts to help enhance your athletic performance.
The intention of these posts is give you an awareness and understanding of the importance of mental strength skills and how they can impact your athletic performance.
In addition to this knowledge and learning’s, the posts have also attempted to give the specific “how to’s.” Specifically, the posts have addressed ‘how to’ learn and develop specific mental strength skills, i.e confidence, imagery, motivation, goal-setting, effective concentration, and then how to use these the mental strength skills during practice and competition to achieve athletic peak performance.
There have been two main goals for these posts:
- To get you thinking about the importance of the mental aspect of peak performance and creating awareness about how important mental strength affects your athletic practice and performance.
- To provide you with the resources to manage and control the mental aspect of your athletic performance.
Given that we are already well into the New Year it seemed fitting to take a look at some of the highlights from the posts….kind of a mental strength in sport year in review.
I hope this will be a reminder as to the importance of developing your mental strength right along with your physical strength and your athletic skills.
So here at the top 8 mental strength tips for peak athletic performance for 2011.
- Know Yourself: A point that has been infused throughout discussions has been the importance of knowing yourself—what helps performance (and what hurts) from a psychological perspective? What are your mental strengths and weaknesses? Be aware.
- There Is No One Best Way: But there is a best way for you: I’ve been unable to provide a specific “recipe” on how to approach practice, how to think effectively prior to and during competition, or how to focus, because everyone is different and what works for one athlete may not be best for another. Instead, these posts have provided mental strength skills and strategies that you can learn and blend into training as is best for you to help your athletic performance.
- Be An Athlete: That is, during training, commit mentally and physically to the task at hand and leave everything else off the playing field (or out of the pool, weight room, etc). Make practice more than a physical attempt by mentally engaging in what you are doing.
- Set Goals: Goal-setting works. Effective goal-setting can enhance athletic performance. Think about how you can incorporate goals into your daily training—goals that focus on what you need to do to improve.
- Be Aware Of Your Thinking: Work on thinking effectively: Too often, athletes let their thinking and self-talk “run wild” during practice but expect to have disciplined thinking during competition. Use practice to figure out how to think effectively (that is, what to say to yourself and focus on to facilitate peak performance) – and practice it during practice sessions.
- Recognize Success: In a quest to improve, athletes often focus solely on weaknesses, areas that need improvement and what went wrong. Equally important is to recognize strengths, what went well and all of the little successes. These little successes, that occur on a daily basis, can serve as the foundation for confidence but only if they are recognized.
- Create a Mental Strength Plan For Competition: Being mentally prepared for competition has been identified as a primary factor influencing performance with elite athletes. Work to figure out how you tend to think, feel, focus when you perform your best and develop a plan and routine that gets you thinking, feeling and focused in this way to optimize your athletic performance.
While this is certainly not an all-inclusive list of reminders, it does serve to highlight some of the key points discussed this past year.
Take some time and reflect on these key mental strength skills, as well as others you can identify. Then begin thinking about which ones you need to work on most and how you can better develop them to incorporate into your training in the upcoming year.
If have more to add to this list please share them in the comments below.
