Sports Psychology: Maintaining emotional control in competitions

Competition & Emotional Control

Competition can bring out the best or the worst in athletes, and the psychological demands are especially high when individuals or teams are striving to achieve the same goals.

When physical skills are evenly matched, it is often the competitor with the stronger mental approach, who can control his or her mind before and during events, who wins. However, many athletes wrongly assume that mental aspects of performance are innate and unchangeable when, in reality, systematic mental training can have a similar impact on performance as physical workouts.

Getting into the correct mind-set prior to competition is one of the most crucial aspects of top performance. In fact, a study of Olympic athletes by Orlick and Partington¹ showed that the combination of mental and physical readiness was a key factor that distinguished more successful athletes from their less successful counterparts in the Olympic Games.

Perhaps even more impressive is the finding that, of the three states of readiness assessed (mental, physical and technical), only mental factors were statistically linked with final Olympic rankings.

If you have ever observed performers during the lead-up to competition, you can’t have failed to notice that behaviour starts to change. As the anticipation builds, athletes and coaches cope with the demands of the situation in various ways, some becoming withdrawn and quiet and some more aggressive than usual, while others disappear frequently to the toilet. Emotional reactions to stressful situations can drain an athlete’s resources and impact negatively on performance if poorly-managed. That is why it is important to have in place a strategy to deal with pre-performance stress.