Psychological Factors and Sport Injuries: What a Sport and Performance Professional Can Do? Part 2
In Part 1 of this post, there was a big information dump. This post picks up with an example. Hopefully, there has been enough time between the two posts to allow for different thought processes to occur to help with integrating the material. Let’s remind ourselves where we are headed. The example that we will discuss today is of a female-identifying athlete with an anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury to help demonstrate the nuance required of a sport and performance professional (SPP) to help an injured athlete.
Psychological Factors and Sport Injuries: What Can a Sport and Performance Professional Do? Part 1
When looking at the topic of injuries and injury prevention and rehabilitation, much must be attended to to provide the best care to an athlete. Sport injury risk is multifactorial, and any prevention program must account for this nature (Gledhill et al., 2018).
Designing a Rehabilitation Program: Things to Think About
There are many different factors associated with injury and the rehabilitation process. It is not a linear and straight forward journey. Many of us could agree that we wish it was! Referral, adherence, and modeling are essential concepts to consider in the process when building a rehabilitation training program. However, there are other considerations that need to be included to support adherence, for example.
Returning to the Sport You Love
Returning to the sport you love from a serious injury can be challenging, as there are many physical and psychological factors to consider. This post focuses on three psychological factors pulled from self-determination theory (SDT) that a sport and performance professional (SPP) and an athlete may want to address.
Mental Preparation for Adolescents Before the Big Game, Meet, or Race
It’s the week before a big game, meet, or race. What can you do mentally prepare? This post focuses on adolescents, but many of the ideas are applicable to adult athletes as well. Additionally, there are so many more to consider. This post just has three to get you started.
Team Cohesion - Task and Social Cohesion
Team cohesion is a common topic in many fields. Chances are that many of us are familiar with team cohesion in the work place, for example. Team cohesion in sports is another great example and a place to explore. Thus, this post aims to look at task cohesion and social cohesion to discuss the interplay between both types of cohesion as it relates to building effective team performances.
Barriers for Sport and Performance Consultants
Sport and performance consults exist within the world of psychology. They also exist within the world of sports. Both of these worlds introduce challenges for how a sport and performance consult can be introduced into the picture to help athletes. What is identified in this post about barriers for sport and performance consults hopes to illuminate some of these barriers and suggests ways that these barriers can potentially be overcome.
Introducing Self-Compassion Within a Team
It is no secret that I believe in the power of self-compassion with it comes to sport and performance psychology. Many times the question that is asked is if self-compassion hampers the competitive edge. The answer is no. Self-compassion does not mean that you can't push yourself and acknowledge your mistakes. Rather, it means that you do not tear yourself down when you are pushing yourself. It is counterproductive to tear yourself down when you need to build self-efficacy and self-confidence.
Injury Prevention Using Stress Management, Goal Setting, and Self-Confidence
Stress management, goal setting, and self-confidence all have a role in helping to reduce injuries. Though it needs to be kept in mind that sport injury risk is multifactorial, and that any injury prevention program needs to account for this nature (Gledhill et al., 2018).
Imagery for Rehabilitation From a Severe Injury
Using imagery during rehabilitation for an athlete with a severe injury can be helpful if executed well, adequately utilized by the athlete, and as many variables that can be accounted for are taken into account.
Motorsport Demands and Effective Practices Part 2: The Effective Practices
Motorsports are unique because there is the material factor, the car. The car is thus a factor that an athlete can engage in DP with, as discussed above. However, there are aspects of the material factor the athlete cannot utilize DP to help address physical, physiological, psychological, and competitive demands.
Motorsport Demands and Effective Practices Part 1: The Demands
Athletes flourish and grow in their chosen sport as they come to learn, understand, and master the unique demands of the sport. The first step, however, is identifying those unique demands. This blog post explores motor sports athletes' physical, physiological, psychological, and competitive demands as an example.
Confronting Fear When Injured Part 2: Working with Fear?
We will briefly explored some techniques and ideas that have helped athletes address fear during injury recovery. This is meant to be information only, not a form of treatment or a recommendation for a treatment approach. It is essential that these approaches are done with the support of a professional, like a sport and performance consultant.
Confronting Fear When Injured Part 1: What is Fear?
Injury does happen as much as many of us would prefer that it not happen.Who wants to be sidelined with any injury or even worse taken out of your favorite sport all together? What about the journey back from injury? It can be filled with many different emotions, thoughts, and experiences. This post is going to focus on fear. Yes, fear when it comes to coming back from injury. While we may not want to talk about it, we are going to go there because it is essential. It is best to start at the beginning, which means we need to understand fear and what some common fears are for injured athletes. Chances are while reading, you may recognize some of your own experiences. This is only part one of a two part series. The second part will look at techniques and concepts for helping to address fear.
The Mental Skill of Self-Awareness to Benefit Us and Athlete Memory Part 2: Action and Practices
In the first part of this series, the foundation was laid, discussing what self-awareness is and some other factors to consider. Now it is time to see self-awareness in action. This post does get a little long. Just a heads up!
The Mental Skill of Self-Awareness to Benefit Us and Athlete Memory Part 1: Foundation
It is said that expert athletes have a good memory. If that is the case, can self-awareness be helpful in building an expert athlete’s memory? Let’s explore and see what we find.
Expertise and Deliberate Practice
Deliberate practice (DP) is a fairly popular topic when it comes to discussing expertise in sports and other professions. So what is DP?
Ericsson (2008) originally constructed the definition of DP to have the following components:
Individual active engagement
Training crafted by a coach, teacher, or similar
Dedicated to the improvement of a particular action
Integration of immediate feedback
Space for problem-solving and evaluation
Repetition of the action to cultivate the action
Definition of Expertise with Age
Expertise in sports is a complex process and, when talked about, can elicit many different thoughts, comments, and feelings. So what happens when we bring age into the picture? What happens to the definition of expertise? What happens when we consider physiological constraints, psychological processes, and the experience of aging?
Training, Memory, and Recall
Let neuroscience come forth! Not everyone is a neuroscience fan like myself, and that is completely okay. Neuroscience is not for everyone. In the case of this post, neuroscience does have to be brought up because it sets the stage for discussing memory and recall.
Self-Modeling in Sports
What is self-modeling? I am sure that you could guess the answer to this question if you do not already know the answer. Self-modeling is a technique that encourages athlete development of new and current skills to improve performance by observing themselves in action. This type of technique is grounded in social cognitive theory, which aims to explain how people learn and develop different behaviors via interactions with other people and their environment, emphasizing interactions between personal factors, environmental influences, and behavior.