What is Sports Psychology? A booming discipline

Sports psychology: a profession to be discovered and on the rise, as more and more clubs and athletes take the psychological aspect into account when planning their training and goals.

Today we will explain what the discipline of sports psychology is based on, its methods and objectives, and other data from interest to understand this discipline that aims to improve the performance and experience of athletes and teams.

Sports psychology: what does it consist of?

There is no country in the world where some kind of sport is not practiced. Thousands of articles have been written about the benefits of practicing sport, be it amateur or professional, and how this regular practice is related to both physical health and health mental.

A sedentary life with some excesses (tobacco, alcohol), added to the lack of sports activityoften lead to serious health problems, which makes it a good idea to seriously consider practice sports as a guarantee of physical, mental and emotional health.

A bit of sports history

Sport is considered any activity that is regulated and associated with competition, involving the physical and mental part of the person.

The sport and its disciplines have been practiced for millennia. There is evidence that the first to practice regulated physical activity were the Greeks back in the 700s. C. The ancient Persians were not far behind and were the first to play Polo in the 6th century BC. C. Sports activity was always closely linked to the development of the human being and their societies, who used physical activity for relaxing and beneficial purposes, or as a for survival in certain social conditions, as happened with slaves in the old Rome.

Currently, with all the technology we have, it is almost impossible not to be aware of what is happening with the great sports stars of the world. moment of competitive sports that enjoy greater coverage in the mass media, such as soccer, tennis, basketball, Olympic gymnastics, Formula 1, etc. This particular media presentation of the sporting activity has a great influence on the perception of the masses about sport in general, through expectations great athletes generate based on certain values ​​and images.

The human need to play sports

The human being is characterized by an incessant search for knowledge and knowledge, and sport has gone from being practiced as mere entertainment to being fully studied by sports science, whose mission is to unravel all kinds of questions about the influence of exercise on the body and mind, when it is not the competitive sport itself that is analyzed in order to discover rules to improve the performance.

It is for this reason that one branch of the many that exist in Psychology was created with the purpose of delve into sports activity and its interaction with the psyche, founding the well-known subdiscipline What Sports psychology.

Psychology applied to sport: a new and vital discipline of knowledge

Nachon and Nascimbene (2001), in their book Introduction to Sports Psychology, perfectly define the scope of study and the purposes of Sports Psychology:

"Sports Psychology is the science dedicated to studying the how, why and under what conditions athletes, coaches and spectators behave in the way in who do, as well as investigating the mutual influence between physical activity and participation in sport and psychophysical well-being, health and development personal".

The work of the sports psychologist

It is often mistakenly thought that the main (if not the only) role of the sports psychologist is to motivate athletes, and / or be in charge of containing and trying to channel those athletes with the worst temperament.

However, the job of a sports psychologist is to know both the psychological phenomena they experience athletes, in addition to the specificities of character and personality of each athlete and sports context, for this mode execute a series of structured techniques that allow to optimize sports and psychological performance of the player or the team. Most professional squads have the services of a professional psychologist sports, occupying the mentioned functions, thus collaborating with the coaching staff in the operation of the team.

Sports Psychology has a long way to go in some European countries and in the USA, the state being American who has contributed the most to developing theories regarding sport and its influence on the psyche (and vice versa).

On Latin America, the story is very different as far as the development of the subdiscipline of sports psychology is concerned. This specialty is just beginning to take its first steps, and it will be necessary to continue researching to be able to develop schools and own theories that can found new paradigms and contribute to the construction of content and knowledge in this countryside.

The delay with respect to the old continent and the United States is motivated by the indifference and ignorance of the authorities Latin American sports and politics, who until recently had maintained these lines of scientific research in a total darkness.

The way of working and intervening in this branch of Psychology has its peculiarities with respect to other specialties, although many affirm that the similarities with clinical psychology are numerous, due to the themes on which both try to influence (motivation, personality), although it would be daring to relate them too much and the fields of study and intervention are very different.

• To better understand what a sports psychologist does, we invite you to read: "10 reasons to put a sports psychologist in your life"

The importance of having a sports psychologist on the team

The functions and tasks of the sports psychologist can be extremely complex if he does not show a training to take on ambitious challenges. Hence the need to also master the mental health facet of the professional in charge of competition groups in team sports. This is also an area that pertains to sports psychology.

It has been demonstrated the importance of having a sports psychologist if working with high-performance sports groups (Silva, J., 1984). In this sense, it has become almost indispensable in any sport or discipline. With regard to the king of sports in most Spanish-speaking countries, football, it is notorious as every year the clubs and national teams. all the continents compete not only on the playing field, but in a series of intellectual, communication and group management fields and talent detection and development, with the sole objective of reaching beyond what the previous year could be achieved in sport.

As the writing of this article coincides with the World Cup dispute in Brazil, I cannot miss the opportunity to point out that each of the national teams manages a certain policy, whose command is the federation of each country, who are in charge of following the championship minute by minute in order to subsequently carry out the respective analysis and thus obtain some conclusions on how to improve in the future from the different facets that influence the game of the national teaml: strategy, direction, tactics, team dynamics, selected, motivation ...

Knowing how to choose the right people for each specific role on the field of play in a team is a task as complex as it is decisive. Opinions and evaluations, criteria and decisions should be taken, preferably, unanimously both by the executive side and the personnel in charge of the group. Among them, including the sports psychologist, who must provide the nuance on the mood of the players, their fears and their motivations at every moment of the competition.

In particular, I think that behind an optimal performance in the performance of an athlete on the field of play is a psychologist of the sport doing work efficiently and professionally, strengthening confidence and playing the keys necessary for optimal health mental. We must continue to support this specialty in order to obtain developments to achieve sports groups cohesive, self-actualizing and that in turn are a source of collective well-being, both in elite teams and in amateur, and emphasizing the need for a Sports Psychology for the base categories.

Bibliographic references:

• Fabre, F. (2006), Interview by the Ibero-American Association of Sports Psychology
• Nachon, C. and Nascimbene, F. (2001), Introduction to Sports Psychology
• Silva, J. (1984) Personality and sport performance: controversy and challenge. In J. Silva & R. Weinberg