USOC Sport Psychology's “TOP TEN” Guiding Principles for Mental Training

By Sean McCann, Ph.D., CC-AASP, USOC Sports Psychologist

1. Mental training can’t replace physical training and talent.
2. Physical training and physical ability isn’t enough to succeed consistently.
3. A strong mind may not win you an Olympic medal, but a weak mind will lose you one.
4. Coaches frequently don’t know what their athletes are thinking.
5. Thoughts impact behavior. Consistency of thinking = consistency of behavior.
6. Coaches often have a different view of changing technical mistakes vs. mental mistakes.
7. Coaches must be involved in the mental training process.
8. Sometimes it is ok to force athletes to take the time to do mental training.
9. Like any other skill, mental skills need to be measured in order to maximize performance of those skills.
10. Coaches need to think about their own mental skills.

Here’s a link to a more in-depth discussion of this top 10.

Tags: coaching, consistency, mental-mistakes, mental-skills, mental-training, mistakes, olympic-sports, performance, success, technical-mistakes, training

This entry was posted on February 6, 2008 at 10:58 pm and is filed under Full Podium Archive, What's Out There. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.