What Is Sports Psychology? Learn The Secrets Of A Growing Discipline
Sports psychology: an undiscovered and booming profession since more and more clubs and athletes take into account the psychological aspect when planning their training and goals.
Today we will explain what the discipline of sports psychology is based on, its methods and objectives, and other data of interest to understand this discipline that aims to improve the performance and experience of athletes and teams.
There is no country in the world where some type of sport is not practiced. Thousands of articles have been written about the benefits of practicing sports, whether amateur or professional, and how this regular practice is related to both physical health and mental health.
A sedentary life with some excesses (tobacco, alcohol), added to the lack of sports activity They usually lead to serious health problems, so it seems a good idea to seriously consider practicing sports as a guarantee of physical, mental and emotional health.
A bit of sports history
A sport is considered any activity that is regulated and associated with competition, involving the physical and mental part of the person.
The sport and its disciplines have been practiced for millennia. There is evidence that the first to practice regulated physical activity were the Greeks back in the 700s BC. The ancient Persians were not far behind and were the first to play Polo in the 6th century BC. Sports activity has always been closely linked to the development of the human being and their societies, which used physical activity for relaxing and beneficial purposes, or as a means for survival in certain social conditions, as occurred with slaves in ancient Rome.
Currently, with all the technology we have, it is almost impossible not to be aware of what is happening with the great sports stars of the moment in competitive sports that enjoy greater coverage in the mass media, such as football, tennis, basketball, gymnastics. Olympic, Formula 1, etc. This certain media presentation of sporting activity results in a great influence on the perception of the masses about sport in general, through the expectations that great athletes generate based on certain values and images.
The human being is characterized by an incessant search for knowledge and knowledge, and Sport has gone from being practiced as mere entertainment to being completely studied by sports science whose mission is to unravel all kinds of questions about the influence of exercise on the body and mind, when it is not the competitive sport itself that is analyzed in order to discover rules to improve performance.
It is for this reason that one of the many branches that exist in Psychology was created with the purpose of delving into sporting activity and its interaction with the psyche, founding the subdiscipline known as Sports psychology
Psychology applied to sports: a new and vital discipline of knowledge
Nachon and Nascimbene (2001), in their book Introduction to Sports Psychology, perfectly define the scope of study and the purposes of Sports Psychology:
“Sports psychology is the science dedicated to studying how, why and under what conditions athletes, coaches and spectators behave the way they do, as well as investigating the mutual influence between physical activity and participation. in sport and psychophysical well-being, health and personal development.”
The work of the sports psychologist
It is often thought, erroneously, that the main (if not the only) function of the sports psychologist is to motivate athletes and/or being in charge of containing and trying to channel those athletes with the worst temperament.
However, the work of a sports psychologist consists of knowing both the psychological phenomena that athletes experience, as well as the specificities of character and personality of each athlete and sporting context, in order to thus execute a series of structured techniques that allow you to optimize sports and psychological performance of the player or the team. The majority of professional squads enjoy the services of a sports psychology professional, occupying the aforementioned functions, thus collaborating with the coaching staff in the operation of the team.
Sports Psychology has come a long way in some European countries and in the US, with the North American state being the one that has contributed the most to developing theories related to sport and its influence on the psyche (and vice versa).
In Latin America , the story is very different when it comes to the development of the subdiscipline of Sports Psychology. This specialty is just beginning to take its first steps, and it will be necessary to continue researching in order to develop our own schools and theories that can found new paradigms and contribute to the construction of content and knowledge in this field.
The delay with respect to the old continent and the United States is motivated by the indifference and ignorance of the Latin American sports and political authorities, who until recently had kept these lines of scientific research in total darkness.
The way of working and intervening in this branch of Psychology has its particularities compared to other specialties, although many claim that The similarities with clinical psychology are numerous due to the themes that both try to influence (motivation, personality), although it would be daring to relate them too much since the fields of study and intervention are very different.
The importance of having a sports psychologist on the team
The functions and tasks of the sports psychologist can be extremely complex if they do not show training to take on ambitious challenges. Hence the need to also master the mental health facet of the professional in charge of competition groups in team sports. This is also an area that falls within sports psychology.
It has been demonstrated the importance of having a sports psychologist if you work with high-performance sports groups (Silva, J., 1984). In this sense, it has become almost indispensable in any sport or discipline. As far as the most important sport in the majority of Spanish-speaking countries is concerned, football, it is notorious how every year clubs and teams from all continents compete not only on the field of play, but in a series of intellectual fields, communication, group management and talent detection and development, with the sole objective of going beyond what could be achieved in sports the previous year.
As the writing of this article coincides with the World Cup soccer dispute in Brazil, I cannot miss the opportunity to point out that each of the national teams manages a certain policy, whose control is the federation of each country, which is in charge of following the championship minute by minute to be able to subsequently carry out the respective analyzes and thus obtain some conclusions on how to improve in the future from the different facets that influence the game of the national team l: strategy, direction, tactics, team dynamics, selected teams, motivation…
Knowing how to choose the right people for each specific role on the field of play in a team is a task as complex as it is decisive. Opinions and evaluations, criteria and decisions must be made, preferably, unanimously, both on the executive side and by the personnel in charge of the group. Among them, including the sports psychologist, who must provide insight into the players’ emotional state, their fears and their motivations at every moment of the competition.
In particular, I believe that behind optimal performance in an athlete’s performance on the playing field is a sports psychologist doing the job effectively and professionally, managing to strengthen confidence and touching the necessary keys for ideal mental health. We must continue to provide support to this specialty in order to obtain developments to achieve cohesive, self-fulfilling sports groups that in turn are a source of collective well-being, both in elite and amateur teams, and emphasizing the need for a Sports Psychology for the base categories
