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Psychological Training in Sport Psychology: Our Technique Bundles Explained

Writer's picture: Esa AaltoEsa Aalto

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Psychological Training in Sport Psychology: Psychological Techniques

Psychological techniques are in the center of developing psychological skills. They are the exercises and actions we do to become stronger and fitter with our mind. Well-known techniques include goal setting, self-talk, and one that has gained a lot of momentum in recent years in sport psychology, mindfulness.


With technique, we refer to the way we do the actions, so in sport psychology, psychological techniques are the evidence-based way to train your mind.

Psychological skills on the other hand refer to our ability to execute those techniques when needed. So, by doing exercises with the correct technique, we acquire skills that help us perform well when needed. Pretty useful for high-performance sports and possible to do with the psychological aspect of performance as well.


However, as with everything, the correct technique will ensure that we will develop skills and abilities effectively. That is why we need to practice doing the psychological techniques, instead of just expecting to have (effective) psychological skills when needed. While we all have our own personalities and experiences that shape the way we react to events, if we want to develop our skills, there is no substitute for a quality practice.


To illustrate, learning a functional way to use self-talk (the technique), enables us to use self-talk (the skill) effectively when needed (e.g., during adversity). This is especially visible when we make a mistake (which we all do) but we are expected to keep performing in pressurized situation. Having the ability to put that mistake out of our mind and focus on our performance as we had not made that mistake is crucial for sustained high-performance.


Why bundles?

Good quality psychological work takes the client's situation under consideration when designing what kind of exercises to do, therefore the work is usually client-lead. However, we believe that most people can benefit from training the mind, especially young athletes who desire to become elite athletes.


This is why we have chosen to offer fundamental psychological techniques as a pre-defined service. We believe that learning and beginning to practice these techniques will build a robust base for the future and facilitate the long-term development.

Additionally, this kind of pre-defined service can be an easier way to begin the psychological training than starting with nothing. So, we see these bundles as an introductory way into sport psychology, which will create a better, more nuanced understanding of it.


Furthermore, the content of these techniques will be molded to the client's situation and needs where possible. Such as that self-talk exercises are going to be client-specific, but relaxation exercises are going to be standard as they have less room for specificity, especially in the beginning.


Therefore, we have bundled psychological techniques together to give an overview of the fundamentals to the people new to this area of training.

We have three different bundles: base-, background-, and core-levels that contain the fundamental psychological techniques that can help you to begin training the mind for sustained, elite performance.

You can complete all of them, just one bundle, or you can book an appointment and request that we focus only in one technique that interest you.


Next, we will introduce the bundles and their content.


Base-Level: Build the base for your psychological training

In the Base-level we cover the "base" techniques for sport psychology work. We call these "base" techniques because these form the foundation of utilizing sport psychology in your career. These techniques aim to teach you about the base processes that guide our behavior and how you can set them up effectively.


The first technique is performance profile, aimed to increase your self-awareness and determine your current situation, psychological skill level, and strengths.

Before the meeting, we also ask you to fill out the a psychological questionnaire to complement the profile. During the meeting, we discuss about you and your situation and together fill out the performance profile to create an overall picture of the current state.


The second technique is goal setting, aimed to teach you a functional goal setting method, which is a good way to create sustained, goal-driven behavior needed to reach the elite level.

Setting a goal is to identify what we want to achieve and why (both short- and long-term), what we need to do to achieve those goals, and finally how we will achieve the goals.

Goal setting is a good way to focus our behavior at the base level and is crucial for achieving something that is difficult and demanding, such as high-level sporting performance or career.


The third technique is performance routines, aimed to teach you how to set performance routines that are facilitative for consistent high-performance. A performance routine is a systematic sequence of physical and psychological behaviors that are demonstrated before, during, and/or after the execution of a task. 

High-level, consistent performance is made easier by consistent behavior, which can be aided by consciously creating a set of behaviors that are aimed to facilitate that purpose.


With these three techniques, we have built a base for you to improve your psychological training and performance.


Background-Level: Understand the processes behind your performance

In the Background-level we cover the "background" techniques for sport psychology work. We call these "background" techniques because these techniques function in the background continuously, influencing us throughout our careers and lives. Understanding these three processes help us to be in control of ourselves, even during demanding times.


The first technique is breathwork, aimed to make you conscious of your breath and how you can use it to your advantage. There is a saying that, "breathing is an often-practiced, but seldom-mastered art", which refers to its potential that most people are unaware of.

When we are anxious or highly alert, our breathing often becomes rapid and shallow, which will create unwanted physical and psychological consequences, such as tension.

We teach you to become aware of your breathing and taking control of it with some of the most fundamental exercises.


The second technique is a thought regulation method, aimed to teach you about your thought-process and how to manage it.

We teach you a practical way to capture and examine our thoughts and feelings about a situation, and what evidence we have for them.

Doing this can help us to understand how linked our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors can be, and how they influence each other. Thus, this is an excellent technique to learn early in your sport psychology training as our thoughts are always working in the background.


The third technique is an emotional regulation method aimed to teach you about your emotional process and how to manage that.

Sports is full of emotions, some desirable, some undesirable. We can experience emotions all the time, including before, during, or after performance, which means the better we are in control of them, the better we can prepare, perform, and recover.

We teach you a fundamental technique for emotional regulation, which is a good place to start practicing dealing with emotions in a way which you are in control of them and not vice versa.


With these three techniques, we have the background techniques working for us and we are in a better position to increase our training and performance.


Core-Level: Arm yourself with the core techniques

In the Core-level we cover the "core" techniques for sport psychology work. We call these "core" techniques because these are in the center of sport psychology and you might use these weekly, if not daily in your training.


The first technique is self-talk, aimed to teach you to use self-talk effectively and facilitative manner

Self-talk is the dialogue with ourselves, whether it is giving instructions or reinforcement. It can be either automatic where the talk is not prepared or it can be strategic, where the self-talk is planned and used strategically to improve performance. From the thought regulation base, we explore the ways you can take control of self-talk in various ways.


The second technique is relaxation/activation, where we cover techniques around relaxation and activation of our body.

Relaxation refers to a set of strategies to relax the body and mind when overly anxious or stressed. Some techniques first utilize relaxing the body, from which then a relaxed mind follows. Others first relax the mind, from which then a relaxed body follows. 

In this meeting, we focus and teach you to use one main body-mind relaxation technique plus give some other strategies for both relaxation and activation of your body’s physiological state.


The third technique is imagery, aimed to teach you to take control of your mind's eye.

Imagery in sport psychology is about creating a controlled experience in one’s mind using the senses to improve performance. Here we teach you the basics for beginning to master this technique and the applications for your sporting performance.


The fourth technique is mindfulness as a technique for performance enhancement.

Being mindful simply means paying attention to the present moment with purpose. Our minds wander naturally, so it is likely that it will happen during performance as well, at least during more idle moments or when distractions happen that takes precedence in our mind.


Practicing mindfulness teaches us to be aware of our attention, thus allowing us to bring it back to what currently matters the most, quicker (our performance). Practicing mindfulness also teaches us techniques to do this and develops the skill of sustained attention.

While this is only a part of mindfulness, from the sport psychology perspective it is the essential one, making it a good starting point.


With these four core techniques, you can go for a long way to set up your psychological training and they will remain with you always.


Bonus

If you have travelled the whole road, that is you have completed all three bundles, we offer a complementary, extra meeting for you as a reward for your commitment.

During this last meeting, we review what was learned in the bundles, reflect, prepare for self-training, and answer any questions.

This is a great way to round up everything we have gone through and make sure that you have a clear idea on how to utilize and develop your psychological skills on your own.


infographic for fundamental psychological techniques

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