Tag Archive for 'mental training'

30 years ago I published my first book of sports psychology. Mental Training illustrates a psychological preparation program organized at 8 weeks. As John Salmela wrote in 1992 in The World Sport Psychology Sourcebook: “Mental Training is an original initiative that resembles many of the North American applied sport psychology” how-to “books”. The book, in fact, is designed for athletes with the intention of providing tests for evaluation of some basic psychological skills and their competitive behavior and mental skills to teach about goal setting, relaxation, ideomotor training and concentration. This book is practical and useful to psychologists who want to approach the world of competitive sports, providing a system allowing to program the intervention through tasks and abilities to develop weekly. It’s a book that is based on my professional experiences carried out in previous years with club and national volleyball teams. In those years, it was already available a relatively broad scientific literature, showing the effectiveness of mental training for elite athletes. At this regards, Psychological Foundations of Sport edited by John Silva and Robert Weinberg (1984) can be considered the best psychology book of that period, a part of the book (5 chapters) was centered on issues related to stress management. So it was not difficult to find a scientific basis to the program that I had developed. In relation to the duration of 8 weeks, I decided to make this choice because Richard Suinn, who first introduced in 1971 in North American alpine skiing a program of competitive anxiety management through integration of relaxation with ideomotor training (which he called: visual-motor behavior rehearsal) based on 10 sessions, like a brief psychotherapy. I thought it was necessary for a longer period and I turned over a two-month. period