Mental control: promotion of mental-tactical competence
If an athlete wants to perform at their best, they must be able to maximise their personal performance potential. This requires optimal control processes (skills), which are summarised under the term mental-tactical competence and are closely interlinked.
Focus
When performing a movement, the athlete is dependent on the perception and processing of relevant information. Attention processes are responsible for this. The conscious directing of attention is known as concentration, which is why it is an essential performance-determining skill in every sport. Athletes can focus their attention on themselves (internal) or their attention can be directed away from themselves (external). The direction of attention can also be narrow (perceiving a few details accurately) or broad (perceiving a lot of information with little accuracy). The location and direction of attention can be combined into four dimensions: external narrow, internal wide, external wide, internal narrow. As people constantly change their focus when regulating the various directions of attention, the term focus is also used instead of concentrate.
It makes sense to carry out concentration training in which the athlete has to switch quickly between the four directions of attention. In this way, the athlete learns what and how to focus on in a meaningful way.
Perceiving and processing
The process of taking in and recognising information via the senses is known as perception. This information can come either from the environment or from the person themselves. A large part of perception takes place quickly and unconsciously, i.e. implicitly. What is consciously perceived is referred to as explicit perception. An athlete can specifically influence their perception by focussing their attention on certain things.
Perception can be trained in different ways. In principle, as many senses as possible should always be included in the training. However, the leader can instruct the athletes to consciously direct their attention to individual sensations.
Regulate the psyche
Optimal mental and physical arousal or tension is required for sporting performance. Although the optimal level of arousal varies from athlete to athlete and from sport to sport, performance also increases with increasing tension. However, if the optimal level of arousal is exceeded, performance falls again as the level of tension continues to rise.
In order for the athlete to change a state of arousal that is not conducive to performance, they must first recognise it and realise that it does not correspond to the optimal level. In a second step, the athlete learns to change their mental state through fast-acting activation or calming techniques.
Controlling willpower
Motivation is an important prerequisite for achieving top sporting performance. An athlete is often motivated and wants to achieve something, but obstacles get in the way (e.g. race/game not going as planned). In competition or when working to the point of exhaustion, there is a great deal of psychological and physical, internal and external resistance to overcome. The athlete must have specific mental skills to overcome the obstacles: He needs willpower.
The use of volitional processes can be learnt and practised. Conscious and targeted intervention is central to this. It is important that the athlete prepares for a possible situation before a sporting crisis (if-then relationship).
Anticipate
The mental anticipation of future (movement) sequences and situations is referred to as anticipation. Anticipation is based on experience. The basis for successful anticipation is the perception of relevant information and its rapid processing. If you anticipate in good time, you can choose the best (tactical) variant from a range of options (e.g. the defender anticipates the direction of the attacker's pass and moves into the corresponding position).
As efficient anticipation is dependent on perception and processing, exercises to improve perception, decision-making and concentration are helpful for training the anticipation of opponent actions. However, if anticipation is to be improved specifically, decision training exercises are required, where the athlete tries to anticipate the opponent's actions.
Communicating
Communication is central to almost all areas of human life. In this process of social interaction, a sender transmits information to a receiver. This information is conveyed via a channel, such as speech, writing, body language or images. The difficulty lies in the fact that major discrepancies can arise between what the sender transmits and what the receiver decodes.
What people express in spoken or written language is called verbal communication. Everything that is not communicated verbally but is nevertheless communicated is called non-verbal communication (facial expressions, body language, tone of voice, volume). People communicate constantly even without language ("you can't not communicate"). Leaders and athletes cannot talk to each other in the immediate competition situation, for example, but communication between the two via other signals can be crucial. The leader often underestimates the importance of sending non-verbal information and is unaware of the effect he or she has on the athlete, even without speaking. Communication is an important topic when it comes to optimising athletic performance.
The first prerequisite for understanding a message correctly is "speaking the same language". If a beginner diver wants to signal that everything is OK by giving a thumbs up, he will be surprised to realise that the instructor is surfacing with him. Clarifying the meaning of words and signs is therefore crucial. Clear, unambiguous communication can be trained (high-performing teams are characterised by clear forms of communication among themselves, among other things).
Tactics and strategy
Tactical skills enable the skilful (exploitation) of a given situation in order to gain an advantage over the opponent (team or individual) (e.g. playing mainly on the opponent's backhand in tennis, many high cross balls in football or constantly playing to the same player in beach volleyball). With the help of experience and training, an athlete can expand the tactical possibilities and apply them correctly. In sports games, a distinction is made between team and individual tactics.
It is important that tactics training is geared towards sufficient (linguistic and exercise-related) repetition. On the other hand, it is important to ensure that the athlete thinks about the meaning and purpose of the tactic variants they are trying to realise.
The words tactics and strategy are often used interchangeably, but there is a difference. A strategy is a plan of action for a season or series of competitions. The aim of the strategy is to achieve the best possible chance of success. The strategy is therefore the big plan, and the tactic contains the guidelines that are implemented during a game in order to generate advantages or execute the strategy.