Sports Psychology Techniques

At present, more than 20 U.S. runners break that same barrier every year (Stulberg & Magness, 2017). Performance gains have been found in both physical and mental training.

Whether competing with elite athletes or as an amateur, hanging in and being calm under pressure, remaining focused, and maintaining self-belief are all vital aspects needed to push personal limits (Sheard, 2013).

This article explores sports psychologists’ techniques and tips that can help improve athletes’ games, overcome the obstacles they face, and deliver consistently high performances.

Types of Sports Psychologists

Just as there are different types of psychologists—such as clinical psychologists, developmental psychologists, and forensic psychologists—there are also different types of sports psychologists.

Educational Sports Psychologists

An educational sports psychologist uses psychological methods to help athletes improve sports performance.4 This includes teaching them how to use certain techniques such as imagery, goal setting, or self-talk to perform better on the court or field.

Clinical Sports Psychologists

Clinical sports psychologists work with athletes who have mental health conditions such as depression or anxiety. This work involves using strategies from both sports psychology and psychotherapy.5 A clinical sports psychologist helps athletes improve their mental health and sports performance at the same time.

Exercise Psychologists

An exercise psychologist works with non-athlete clients or everyday exercisers to help them learn how to make working out a habit. This work can include some of the same techniques used by other sports psychologists, such as goal setting, practicing mindfulness, and the use of motivational techniques.

14 Skills of Effective Sports Psychologists & Coaches

Typically, sports psychologists’ activities fall into three major categories, each with its specific skills (Moran, 2012):

1. Applied consultancy work, such as coaching, in which the sports psychologist engages with professional and amateur athletes (and coaches and parents) to help them:
   • Enhance sporting performance
   • Cope with the pressure of competition
   • Recover from injuries
   • Maintain exercise programs

2. Education – involves teaching athletes, coaches, students, and even businesspeople about the principles and methods behind sports psychology.
3. Research – finding evidence-led answers to the obstacles and challenges found within sporting success.

The following coaching skills are crucial to be effective in an applied role, coaching individuals or teams of athletes:

1. Counseling skills, such as active listening
2. Ability to be non-judgmental
3. Detailed knowledge of psychology theory and techniques
4. Ability to understand people’s responses
5. Understanding and sensitivity
6. Excellent verbal communication and interpersonal skills
7. Patience, understanding, and the ability to motivate others
8. Ability to work under pressure and cope with stressful situations
9. Active interest in sports
10. Flexibility to work with different clients across multiple settings
11. Problem-solving and decision-making skills
12. Commitment to ongoing professional development
13. Methodological approach to work
14. Good IT skills

Sports Psychology Techniques to Apply

When supported by sports psychologists, athletes, coaches, and even parents will benefit most when the underlying theory informs their practice (Kremer, Moran, & Kearney, 2019).

While there is still much within the field of sports psychology to explore, there are many established practices that sports psychologists can adopt with confidence that will benefit their clients, including (Kremer et al., 2019; Strycharczyk & Clough, 2015):

Reflection

Honesty is crucial to reflection. The sportsperson needs to identify and capture strengths and weaknesses to control their performance (Kremer et al., 2019).

By creating a list and scoring (out of 10) where an athlete is now (see ‘Now’ in the table below) and where they want to get to (See ‘Future’ in the table below), it is possible to focus mental energy and direct training, development, and growth.

For example, a marathon runner may have identified the following areas for improvement:

Area	Now	Future	Action needed
Nutrition	3	8	Work with a nutritionist to create a dietary plan
Endurance	7	9	Include more long-distance running
Ability to cope with pressure	2	9	Begin visualizing the race
Ability to fit training in around family	3	8	Create a plan with the coach and involve key family members

Understanding what has to be improved makes it possible to increase the perception of control and start creating motivating, action-focused goals.

Relaxation techniques

If an athlete is nervous about competition, it is not necessarily a negative. It shows that the competition or event matters to them (Kremer et al., 2019).

However, when nerves take over and damage performance, it can be a problem for the competitor. The challenge is to maintain calm and remain relaxed, enjoy the challenge, and perform at their best.

First, it is important to distinguish between two approaches to coping:

• Problem-focused
  Used when preparing to face pressure within the athlete’s control, such as a race or a match. It is possible to form a plan of action to reduce the impact.
• Emotion-focused
  When the athlete changes how they interpret or react to a high-pressure situation.

Both problem-focused and emotion-focused approaches can be valuable in reducing stress and promoting relaxation. Here are two examples:

Meditation and mindfulness

Meditation and mindfulness are highly effective emotion-focused techniques that help the athlete restructure the pressure in their mind.

The Body Scan Meditation or entering a mindful state by exploring the Five Senses can be incredibly valuable and convenient forms of self-directed relaxation that can integrate into training and competition.

Pre-performance routines

Pre-performance routines are highly effective problem-focused techniques for reducing stress and promoting a calm state, ready for competition.

The athlete should create a script of actions they need to perform when getting ready for a game or a match.

“Routines are valuable because they take you from thinking about doing something to doing it” (Kremer et al., 2019).

Focusing

While telling yourself (or receiving a shout from a coach) to concentrate may encourage you to try even harder, it doesn’t inform how to do it or what to focus on (Kremer et al., 2019).

Focusing must be specific to what you are doing and where you are and involves ignoring distractions. It helps to have a clear goal that you can break down into a set of actionable steps.

You can think of attention as a spotlight; its focus can attend to one of the following (Strycharczyk & Clough, 2015):

• Narrow (one aspect of the gameplay) versus broad (the entire game)
• Internal (attending to your performance) versus external (considering the environment)

Because the human capacity for focus is limited, we are almost always in one of the following combined states at any given time:

Narrow/Internal focus	Broad/Internal focus
Narrow/External focus	Broad/External focus

Each type of focus has its time. For example:

• A broad/external focus is required to read play late in a team game.
• A narrow/internal focus is necessary when digging in during the ultimate stages of a marathon.

Consider your particular sport. What focus applies and when? Imagine the situation and consider how you will direct and maintain that focus.

Progressive Relaxation

Relaxation techniques offer athletes many benefits. Among them are an increase in self-confidence, better concentration, and lower levels of anxiety and stress—all of which work together to improve performance.13

One of the relaxation strategies sports psychologists use with their clients is progressive muscle relaxation. This technique involves having them tense a group of muscles, hold them tense for a few seconds, then allow them to relax.

Hypnosis

Some health professionals use hypnosis to help their patients quit smoking. A sports psychologist might use this same technique to help their clients perform better in their sport of choice.

Research indicates that hypnosis (which involves putting someone in a state of focused attention with increased suggestibility) can be used to improve performance for athletes participating in a variety of sports, from basketball to golf to soccer.14

Biofeedback

Biofeedback involves using the feedback provided by the body to notice how it feels physiologically in times of stress (elevated heart rate, tense muscles, etc.). This information can then be used to help control these effects, providing a more positive biological response.

One systematic review noted that using heart rate variability biofeedback improved sports performance in more than 85% of the studies. Other research supports using biofeedback to reduce an athlete’s stress and anxiety.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is used to help all kinds of people identify and change destructive thoughts and behaviors. Therefore, it would only stand to reason that athletes would also benefit from its effects.

One case study involving a 17-year-old female cross country skier noted that CBT helped reduce performance anxiety while improving sport-specific behaviors.17 Another piece of research involved 16 NCAA Division I athletes with severe injuries and found that CBT enhanced their emotional well-being during recovery.

Flow

Flow as the word defines, is a nonstoppable and easy output. In this case, it can be more related to a natural execution of the strategies and game with a balanced mind. The feeling from within of being energetic, focused, sharp, and prepared to deal with an unplanned event during the sport is what defines flow. Here the athlete does not require to make effort to attain focus and concentration. Flow is possible when the athlete is completely drenched in the game and this can be possible with attaining relaxation, imagery, and focus.

Imagery and Visualization

Visualizing or imagining positive sportsmanship is a way to let your confidence get a boost. Imagery is to create a live scene in the mind and conscience, about exclusive strategies, fair play, and maximum positive energy. Once this gets created in the mind, while on the field in the real game, the mind can interpret them easily as similar, improving your mental performance. This is like a mental recall of the physical strengths, skills and capacities of the athlete. Clearly visualizing the goal and target is a boost to make sure the athlete uses his energy to the optimum.

Motivation in Sports Psychology: 4 Interventions & Techniques

Life is not orderly, and neither is our motivation (Kremer et al., 2019). We prioritize different motives depending on the time, situation, and our personal life choices.

However, countless studies have confirmed that intrinsic motivation (doing something for the sake of accomplishing a task) is more powerful at sustaining commitment than extrinsic motivation (for the sake of the ego or the rewards gained; Ryan & Deci, 2018).

Several approaches can help motivate athletes.

Goal setting

Goals focus attention, mobilize effort, enhance persistence, and encourage strategy development (Kremer et al., 2019).

Self-talk

Motivational self-talk improves endurance performance, increasing both power output and time to exhaustion (Meijen, 2019).

Athletes talking (out loud or internally) to themselves, saying things like “I can keep going” and “There is more in the tank,” boosts motivation.

Such verbal persuasion appears to influence the evaluation of a stressful situation, the experience of emotions, and the degree of self-belief.

Change the environment

Listening to great music in training and competition can be a quick way to boost your mood.

Create a list of tracks of varying intensities that will suit your mood at different points. For example, you may want something high energy before a game or a little slower after spending two hours on a long run (Afremow, 2014).

Growing intrinsic motivation

Intrinsic motivation is not a given. The coach and athlete must find new (or change existing) environments to align with basic psychological needs. Fostering a sense of autonomy, competence, and relatedness can maintain and sustain motivation and allow the sportsperson to flourish (Ryan & Deci, 2018).

Top 6 Worksheets & Exercises

The following exercises provide support for increasing mental toughness, fostering intrinsic motivation, and handling anxiety in training and competition.

Goal setting

“Goal setting is widely recognized as an effective means to motivate individuals to achieve some valuable or important purpose,” say mental toughness experts Doug Strycharczyk and Peter Clough (2015).

Not only does goal setting provide meaning and direction, but it also fuels and energizes working toward objectives.

At times, the enormity of goals can be overwhelming. Instead, break them down into specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound (SMART) goals.

Use the SMART goal-setting template to help athletes set and navigate goals that enable them to focus on the right thing at the right time.

Fostering mental toughness

Mental toughness is a valuable concept in determining wellbeing, behavior, and individual and team performance (Strycharczyk & Clough, 2015).

While there may be a degree of innateness, mental toughness can be developed for those wishing to do so.

Three factors that can help enhance mental toughness (Crust & Clough, 2011):

• Providing a supportive yet challenging environment
• Having an appropriate support network
• Encouraging reflection and experiential learning

While there are several mental toughness interventions, including positive thinking, visualization, and goal setting, mental toughness is often more effectively learned rather than taught. Therefore, learning mental toughness is particularly suited to coaching.

According to Strycharczyk and Clough (2015), a coach can facilitate the growth of mental toughness by helping an athlete to:

• Recognize what needs to be improved to develop performance
• Overcome barriers that impede performance improvement
• Sustain long-term positive changes
• Develop strategies to maintain potential

The GROW Coaching Model (Goal, Reality, Options, Way forward) offers a useful and structured approach to implementing process improvements.

Improving performance

Focus on what you want to happen

“Focus on what you want to happen, not what you are afraid might happen,” says Jim Afremow (2014). If you take a shot and focus on what you are trying to avoid, you are not likely to hit your target.

Similarly, don’t try to perform without (or avoiding) fear; instead, try to perform with confidence, telling yourself “Stay on target” rather than “Don’t blow it” (Afremow, 2014).

Reframing

The legendary tennis player Billie Jean King saw pressure as a privilege rather than a sign something was wrong. It is vital to reframe events as opportunities to do well, rather than catastrophes.

Training under pressure and practicing visualization provide useful opportunities to try out reframing by simulating the stress response and providing assurance of coping ability (Afremow, 2014).

Trust your talent

Overthinking can be dangerous, leading to the perils of perfectionism and paralysis-by-analysis syndrome. When there is a risk of this happening, change internal focus to external focus (Afremow, 2014).

Trust your talent and accept that you are well prepared. Follow the train it–trust it process (Rotella & Cullen, 2004):

Step one – Train your talent in practice.
Step two – Trust your talent in competition.
Step three – Keep repeating steps one and two.

While there is a degree of tongue-in-cheek in step three, it is an essential point: trust is vital for peak performance.

Dealing with anxiety

Gaining control of breathing can be a highly effective way to manage and reduce both general anxiety and anxiety specific to a forthcoming competition.

Controlled breathing can help you “relieve anxiety, improve circulation, concentration, and digestion and increase energy” (Strycharczyk & Clough, 2015).

Try the following controlled breathing exercise or our detailed 3 Steps to Deep Breathing worksheet.

1. Take a deep, slow breath.
2. Gently exhale fully.
3. Inhale again, this time counting 1 to 4.
4. Hold your breath, counting 1 to 4.
5. Exhale fully while counting from 1 to 8.
6. Repeat step 3 to 5 four times.

Using Imagery and Visualization: 6 Tips

Visualization is closely linked to other positive thinking techniques and a surprisingly intuitive activity (Strycharczyk & Clough, 2015).

However, the challenge most of us face is that we typically imagine the negatives. For example, when we think of an exam or a presentation, we may begin by picturing what could go wrong.

Visualization is widely used and highly successful in sporting environments. The 100-meter sprinter imagines the race from gun to tape, and the tennis play pictures the perfect serve (Strycharczyk & Clough, 2015).

After all, inside our heads is one of the best (and safest) places to play through a difficult task or situation. The sportsperson can rehearse a tough set of movements to improve skills or a stressful situation to increase confidence all the way up to the podium.

Try it out:

• See the environment: the pitch, track, and competitors.
• Imagine yourself confident, relaxed, and in control.
• See yourself prepared and ready.
• Picture what it is like to make each movement successfully.
• Imagine winning the race, match, or game.
• Visualize how you look to your competitors: calm, confident, and committed.

3 Questionnaires & 128 Questions to Ask Clients

Several questionnaires help sports psychologists form a more complete understanding of the sportsperson and their needs.

The following are three of the most popular. The answers to the coaching questions highlight an athlete’s needs based on their mental toughness, personality, and motivation.

Measurement of mental toughness

The MTQ48 scores individuals on their mental toughness according to the four Cs: control, commitment, challenge, and confidence (Crust & Clough, 2005).

While there are other measures of mental toughness, the MTQ48 offers valuable insights into the mindset of the individual through a series of 48 self-rating statements such as (Sutton, 2019):

• I generally feel in control.
• I often wish my life was more predictable.
• I don’t usually give up under pressure.

The MTQ48 is available for purchase.

Personality

Personality affects performance and the ability to handle pressure in sports (Sutton, 2019).

The Big Five Personality Inventory is a practical approach to scoring an athlete’s personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism (John & Srivastava, 1999).

Individuals rates themselves on whether they agree with a series of 44 statements such as:

I am someone who…

… is talkative.
… is reserved.
… is full of energy.

Motivation

Based on Deci and Ryan’s (1985) Self-Determination Theory, the General Causality Orientation Scale (GCOS) provides a well-validated tool for measuring intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation (Sutton, 2019).

Athletes rate themselves on a series of 36 statements based on a scene or situation, such as:

You have just received the results of a test you took, and you discovered that you did very poorly. Your initial reaction is likely to be:

• “I can’t do anything right,” and I feel sad.
• “I wonder how it is that I did so poorly,” and I feel disappointed.
• “That stupid test doesn’t show anything,” and I feel angry.

The SDT GCOS is available for download.

Top 4 Videos on the Topic

Here are four of our favorite videos about sports psychology:

Sport psychology – inside the mind of champion athletes

Martin Hagger’s TEDx talk provides fantastic insights into the crucial role of sports psychology in helping athletes prepare for competition.

How to Keep Your Head in the Game: Sports Psychology Tips & More

How to Keep Your Head in the Game is a short but helpful introduction to the importance of focus and mental preparation to sporting performance.

The Psychology of a Winner: Documentary on peak performance and sports psychology

The Psychology of a Winner is an inspiring documentary on peak performance and sports psychology.

Win the Game of Life with Sports Psychology

Win the Game of Life is another hugely entertaining TEDx video that introduces in a fun way some techniques that have proven successful in sports psychology.

Want to know how you can use sports psychology and mental training to reach your health, fitness and sports goals faster, easier, and get the results you want? Here are my top 10 mindset tips to help you build new motivation, confidence and major breakthroughs in your fitness, your training and in your life.

1. Positive Images: When you are exercising, use your positive mental images throughout your workout to create feelings of speed and power. (e.g., If you’re walking or running and you come to an unexpected hill visualize a magnet pulling you effortlessly to the top). Use visualization before, during, and after your training to build confidence and new motivation.
2. Power Words: Make positive self-statements continually. Negative thinking is common; everyone has an inner critic. Become aware of these thoughts early on. Don’t fight with them; simply acknowledge their presence, and then substitute positive power words. (e.g., When you’re thinking: “This hurts too much, I want to lay down and die”; say to yourself: “This feeling is connected with getting healthier and doing my absolute best.”)
3. Present Focus: Practice being in the present moment. Remind yourself to stay in the here and now. Instead of replaying past mistakes, or worrying about the future, let past and future events fade into the background. Be right on, right here, right now.
4. Advantage: Use everything in your workout to your advantage. For example, if another person passes you, tuck in behind and go with his or her energy for as long as possible. You may catch a “second wind” and be carried on to a personal record.
5. Chunking Goals: Focus on your immediate target. Break your training goals down into small, manageable pieces and begin to focus only on the first portion, not the entire workout (e.g., Say to yourself: “I’m just relaxing and getting my rhythm during the first part, or the first workout session”).
6. Body Scan: Pay close attention to your tension level and training form. Do a body scan while working out and relax your tight muscles frequently. Ask yourself: “Are my shoulders and neck relaxed; how does this pace feel; how much energy is left in my legs?”
7. Pain as Effort: If you have “good pain,” the pain of effort, that is not seriously damaging your body, just shift attention to your breathing or cadence of movement, and let the discomfort fade into the background. You can also use the pain as feedback. Register it not as pain but as effort level. Say: “Now I know exactly how hard I’m working. I know how this pace feels. My body is doing what it should be doing.”
8. Detach From Outcome: Look only at what you need to do right now (e.g., your pace, your breathing, your concentration); your final time, place, or score will take care of itself
9. Focused Attention: Be aware of distractions. Breathe out unwanted thoughts with your next exhale and re-focus your attention instantly on what is important right now, at this moment.
10. Celebration: Enjoy and appreciate your fitness and strength. When you exercise, relax and let your body do what you’ve trained it to do. Remember that your goals are realistic. All you need to do is perform up to your capabilities.

How To Sports Psychology Performance Enhancement

Sports Psychology is about improving your attitude and mental game skills to help you perform your best by identifying limiting beliefs and embracing a healthier philosophy about your sport. Below is a list of the top ten ways that you can benefit from sports psychology:

1. Improve focus and deal with distractions. Many athletes have the ability to concentrate, but often their focus is displaced on the wrong areas such as when a batter thinks “I need to get a hit” while in the batter’s box, which is a result-oriented focus. Much of my instruction on focus deals with helping athlete to stay focused on the present moment and let go of results.
2. Grow confidence in athletes who have doubts. Doubt is the opposite of confidence. If you maintain many doubts prior to or during your performance, this indicates low self-confidence, or at least you are sabotaging what confidence you had at the start of the competition. Confidence is what I call a core mental game skill because of its importance and relationship to other mental skills.
3. Develop coping skills to deal with setbacks and errors. Emotional control is a prerequisite to getting into the zone. Athletes with very high and strict expectations have trouble dealing with minor errors that are a natural part of sports. It’s important to address these expectations and also help athletes stay composed under pressure and when they commit errors or become frustrated.
4. Find the right zone of intensity for your sport. I use intensity in a broad sense to identify the level of arousal or mental activation that is necessary for each person to perform his or her best. This will vary from person to person and from sport to sport. Feeling “up” and positively charged is critical, but not getting overly excited is also important. You have to tread a fine line between being excited to complete, but not getting over-excited.
5. Help teams develop communication skills and cohesion. A major part of sports psychology and mental training is helping teams improve cohesion and communication. The more a team works as a unit, the better the results for all involved.
6. To instill a healthy belief system and identify irrational thoughts. One of the areas I pride myself on is helping athletes identify ineffective beliefs and attitudes such as comfort zones and negative self-labels that hold them back from performing well. These core unhealthy beliefs must be identified and replaced with a new way of thinking. Unhealthy or irrational beliefs will keep you stuck no matter how much you practice or hard you try.
7. Improve or balance motivation for optimal performance. It’s important to look at your level of motivation and just why you are motivated to play your sport. Some motivators are better in the long-term than others. Athletes who are extrinsically motivated often play for the wrong reasons, such as the athlete who only participates in sports because of a parent. I work with athletes to help them adopt a healthy level of motivation and be motivated for the right reasons.
8. Develop confidence post-injury. Some athletes find themselves fully prepared physically to get back into competition and practice, but mentally some scars remain. Injury can hurt confidence, generate doubt during competition, and cause a lack of focus. I help athletes mentally heal from injuries and deal with the fear of re-injury.
9. To develop game-specific strategies and game plans. All great coaches employ game plans, race strategies, and course management skills to help athletes mentally prepare for competition. This is an area beyond developing basic mental skills in which a mental coach helps athletes and teams. This is very important in sports such as golf, racing, and many team sports.
10. To identify and enter the “zone” more often. This incorporates everything I do in the mental side of sports. The overall aim is to help athletes enter the zone by developing foundational mental skills that can help athletes enter the zone more frequently. It’s impossible to play in the zone every day, but you can set the conditions for it to happen more often.

A Take-Home Message

Once you get to a certain level of competency in sports, “the mental skills become as important as the physical skills,” writes Gary Mack, sports psychology consultant to Olympic athletes (Mack & Casstevens, 2001).

Activity is more likely when humans feel intrinsically motivated and have a sense of control over their behavior (Ryan & Deci, 2018). Mentally tough athletes have an advantage over their opponents; they can cope with the demands of training, competition, relationships, and lifestyle (Connaughton & Hanton, 2010).

Sports psychologists can support competitors at all levels in handling the pressures of sports. They can use coaching techniques such as visualization, goal setting, focus, and self-talk to help athletes regain a sense of control and perform at their best under pressure.

Importantly, these techniques are useful within the context of sports as well as outside it. Try out some techniques mentioned above; the lessons are valuable for anyone pushing their performance limits.