It is imperative to learn from experience

It is quite common to meet young athletes who have difficulty explaining their performance or understanding the reasons for their mistakes.

This is because they have not effectively developed the ability to use their sports experience to improve. The reason for including this skill among the relevant psychological competencies stems from the realization that learning and subsequent improvement are based on the continuous correction of mistakes made until optimal execution is achieved, a stage at which the athlete should be able to deliver excellent performance even in the presence of problematic psychological, relational, physical, and environmental conditions. Furthermore, since training is based on repetitive drills and at least 1,000 hours of activity per year, reflecting on this experience that is so important to the athlete is absolutely necessary to avoid training on autopilot and without taking full responsibility for how one trains.

Knowing how to use one’s past and daily sports experiences as an essential tool for one’s own improvement requires that the athlete develop a clear awareness related to one’s performance in training and competition. In fact, self-awareness is the key that opens the door to understanding one’s experiences and is the way to come to exert positive control over competitive pressure. We often hear “at some point I didn’t understand anything anymore, I don’t know what happened to me, I lost my mind.” Kenneth Ravizza, one of the most established psychologists in Major League Baseball argued that “athletes must learn the difference between the mechanical execution of a skill and the experience of the skill itself.”

Mindfulness involves the athlete being totally focused on performance, that is, on what he or she is doing at any given moment. In this way he cannot be focused on the outcome of his performance, which, on the contrary, would put even more pressure on him than he is feeling, probably reducing its quality.

Therefore, training sessions as well as the pre-competition warm-up must aim to keep the attention centered on the present; in those moments, athletes will have to perform technical actions in a condition of concentration that allows for optimal execution for them. Moreover, training, and especially its most significant phases, must never be merely an execution of an athlete’s or team’s physical and technical/tactical skills but must constitute a demonstration of their cognitive and emotional abilities. For example, in skeet shooting, athletes before beginning training do warm-up exercises that determine a general and sport-specific level of physical activation, then perform “focused shooting” exercises to ensure equally adequate activation of the mental component of performance.
The latter exercises include actions of slinging the rifle, paying attention to ensure that this movement is precise and accurate, and concentration tests to recognize that the gaze is directed toward the point from which the skeet will come out. This sequence of drills is replayed for several minutes until the shooter feels mentally and physically ready to begin. Since the start of competitions is obviously predetermined, each shooter must possess his own pre-competition routine that leads him to be ready a few minutes before the start. It thus becomes apparent that the development of awareness concerns the timing of the preparation to be carried out before the competition, the activities to be performed, as well as the mental attitude with which to carry them out in order to feel ready to compete both physically and mentally.