A SOCCER PLAYER´S MENTAL PREPARATION
MENTAL PREPARATION
Sports Psychology is the science that studies thoughts, emotions, and behaviors during sports activity (shown on drawing below). This includes not only training or competition, but also what the athlete thinks, feels and does on a day-to-day basis in relation to their sport.
Source: own elaboration
There are many coaches and athletes who refer to mental factors when judging a performance as “good“ or “bad“. Every day, there are more athletes, coaches, clubs and sports institutions that understand the importance of working on mental preparation and invest in it.
If you had to grade your soccer performance from 0 to 100, on the importance of technical skills, tactical preparation, physical preparation, and your mental preparation; what score would you give yourself for each aspect? Then, think about how much time you spend to train each aspect and score them as well. Does your game vs. training scores match?
Source: own elaboration
There is no one correct answer. It depends on each sport. Even in the same sport, people can give you different answers. The important thing is whether you are consistent with that answer. For example, let’s imagine that for soccer a possible answer is:
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- 🏃🏼♂️The importance of the technical part = 25%
- 🤔The importance of the tactical part = 25%
- 💪🏻The importance of the physical part = 25%
- 🧠The importance of the mental part = 25%
As mentioned earlier, the important thing is if we are giving the same relevance to each part. Considering that the physical, technical and tactical parts are trained 3 to 4 days a week; it is also necessary to invest time in weekly preparation every week if you want to be performing at your peak.
Just as you plan and invest time during the week in your technical-tactical training (on and off the field) and in working on your fitness, you must also do it with your mental preparation!
They are the 4 fundamental parts of sports training and in all 4, the more you train, the better you will get .