What is Sport Psychology? Free Essay Example

Introduction

Sport psychology is a study of how psychology affects an athlete and their performance as an individual or a team. in sports psychology there 5 key concepts, motivation, confidence, arousal, attention and concentration and team dynamics and cohesion. Each of these concepts are very important when playing a sport. Motivation is a drive to achieve a goal in your sporting life, while one way might be getting an award or winning the season another could be the sound of a crowd as you are running out on the field or about to score or even to be like an athlete/player that is a role model.

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Confidence is having faith and believing in yourself or another person that they can perform a task or performance without confidence your performance in game will start getting affected and will have poor performance.

Arousal level affect your performance the most, if you are under aroused or over aroused your performance will be affectected and you will play poorly.

Attention and concentration is important by being able to stay focusing on the game or activity you are doing and not getting distracted and being able to listen to whistle or gun to start and stop. Team dynamic and cohesion are the most important in sports that involve two or more people that have to work together by being able to successfully work together and support each other both physically and emotionally, if the team doesn’t have a good relationship communication and performance will be poor.

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Paragraph 1 – strategy

The concept I am focusing on will be confidence, for a lot of people confidence play a big part in why their performance isn’t good and its proven once their confidence improved so did their performance. Confidence is mainly talked about in self-confidence but can also be confidence in your team that they are able to successfully use their skills to perform in the game or activity. Self-confidence is a general term to describe the able and trust you have in yourself for your performance but it falls into two components, self-belief and self-efficacy. Self-belief is the trust an athlete has in their ability to succeed no matter how their last performance was, while self-efficacy is more of a specific term that refers to an athlete’s perception of their ability in their performance rather than their actual ability. >

Paragraph 2 – how to improve

My confidence in the start was very poor I was scared to hit or even go for the ball I would rather watch but as I applied my strategy to improve, I slowly ended up gaining more confidence and participating more. My strategy was to work with different people during warmups to build up my confidence in going for the ball and experiencing different serves by how people do it different instead of getting use to the same old person every time, as I started hitting and doing better sets I got more confident and believed in myself, at the start I just had self-belief by believing I could hit set and dig. As I practised a lot more with different people during warmup it was definitely a big change by how people play but it helped build up my skill set and not just using the same person constantly.

Before and after games >as shown in the top before playing my confidence level was very low which also caused my motivation and arousal levels to drop but as I used my method of improving my confidence level you see my confidence is getting high which causes my arousal level and motivation to improve which means my performance will be improved >video >As you can see I choose to focus on digging, my low confidence levels affected this by not wanting to go for the ball, not participating in games or standing to the side hoping someone else would go for the ball I was not confident in participating for many reasons.

Certain people in the class feedback to when I would miss or mess up my dig affected me and made me not want to play, but as I improved my confidence my performance with digging improved dramatically. I was able to play full games have confidence in myself and work with my teammates. Having the same team made is easier to work together and keep my confidence right.

Conclusion

My strategy of practising with different people made me more confident and improved my skills, not only was I playing the game to the best of my ability I was enjoying playing and had fun.