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This study examined the coping strategies used by Korean national athletes. One hundred-eighty Korean athletes from 41 different sports were interviewed about the coping strategies they used as national athletes, both presently and in the past. Qualitative methodology was utilized in this investigation and the interview transcripts were analyzed inductively. The interviews were tape recorded and transcribed verbatim. Themes were identified from the analysis of the interview data. Combining these themes, seven general dimensions of coping strategies were identified: psychological training, training and strategies, somatic relaxation, hobby activities, social support, prayer, and substance use. The most cited coping strategies by national athletes in Korea are similar to the coping strategies of the previous elite figure skaters in the study by Gould, Finch, & Jackson (1993).

Jetting across several time zones can attenuate the performance of athletes as well as markedly reduce comfort. Circadian disorganization occurs because, while some adaptation is controlled by external factors such as light and social activity, other adaptations must wait for internal clocks to slowly synchronize. To advise athletes how best to adapt to jeg lag, the sport psychologist must consider many variables such as distance traveled and direction of flight, and choose among options such as education of the athlete and strategies for improving reentrainment.

The ability to prepare effectively to execute complex skills under pressure is crucial in a number of performance-focused professions. While there is emerging evidence of best practice little research has sought to compare preparation strategies across professions. As a result, the aim of this research was to explore the approaches employed within a number of professions and whether there are similarities in the techniques and strategies adopted. Participants were 18 “performers,” purposefully selected from sporting, musical, performing arts, and medical domains. Participants were interviewed individually to gain an understanding of each participant’s preparation strategies and the functions these strategies fulfilled. The data were thematically analyzed using interpretative phenomenological analysis. Results suggest that there are similarities in both behavioral and mental strategies adopted across professions. Future research should seek to explore the transferability of developmental approaches.

This study examined the use of four advanced psychological strategies (i.e., simulation training, cognitive restructuring, preperformance routines, and overlearning of skills) and subsequent competitive anxiety responses. Semistructured interviews were employed with eight highly elite athletes from a number of team and individual sports. Participants reported using each strategy to enable them to interpret their anxiety-response as facilitative to performance. Only cognitive restructuring and overlearning of skills were perceived by the participants to exert an influence over the intensity of cognitive symptoms experienced. The perceived causal mechanisms responsible for these effects included heightened attentional focus, increased effort and motivation, and perceived control over anxiety-related symptoms. These findings have implications for the practice of sport psychology with athletes debilitated by competitive anxiety in stressful situations.

This action research study employed a multi-modal intervention with three athletes rehabilitating from injury. The efficacy of a number of intervention strategies emerged, including social support, goal setting, imagery, simulation training, and verbal persuasion. Emotional support was perceived by athletes as important when rehabilitation progress was slow, setbacks were experienced, or other life demands placed additional pressures on participants. Task support mainly took the form of goal setting. There was support for the use of long-term and short-term goals, and both process and performance goals. The effect of outcome expectancy, rehabilitation setbacks, financial concerns, isolation, social comparison, and the need for goal flexibility emerged as salient to athletes’ responses to, and rehabilitation from, injury. In the reentry phase of rehabilitation, confidence in the injured body part, and the ability to meet game demands was perceived by participants as important to successful return to competition.

The purpose of the present experiment was to examine whether the use of selfhandicapping strategies influences participants’ anxiety levels before athletic performance. Seventy-one competitive basketball players participated in the study. A repeated measures design was used, such that state cognitive and somatic anxiety intensity and direction were measured before and after participants were given the opportunity to self-handicap. Overall, participants reported their cognitive anxiety to be more facilitating after they had the opportunity to self-handicap. Thus, participants who were given the opportunity to self-handicap (i.e., use claimed and behavioral self-handicaps), reported greater increases in perceptions of cognitive anxiety as facilitating their performance. This study shows the importance of looking at anxiety direction, and not just anxiety intensity, when examining self-handicapping’s effects on anxiety. Implications for sport psychologists are proposed.

This article explores techniques that individuals can use during learning and performance to influence thoughts, feelings, and subsequent achievement. Of concern is knowing how to learn—how to perform. Learning strategies can be isolated and task-specific, or combinatorial and more generally applied to related tasks. Researchers have primarily labored in the first area, frequently demonstrating the effectiveness of a particular learning strategy in improving the learning of a certain activity. In more recent years the second area, typically defined as metastrategies, is attracting the interest of scholars. Since the notion of metastrategies is vague, they are difficult to define and pose a challenge to investigate as to their influence in learning/performing situations. This article begins with a general discussion about information processing processes involved in attaining movement skill, and the use of strategies and metastrategies. A proposed global strategy, the Five-Step Strategy, is presented that should be useful in the learning/performing of all types of closed (self-paced) athletic acts. The strategies include readying, imaging, focusing, executing, and evaluating. The learning of task-pertinent strategies appears to be particularly influential in a number of ways, ultimately leading to a higher probability of learning efficiency and performance excellence.

This study outlined the implementation and evaluation of one associative and two dissociative coping strategies on rowing ergometer performance. Participants were 9 novice varsity rowers who performed a 40-min ergometer workout in 10 separate experimental sessions. At each workout participants were requested to row as far as possible in 40 min. A multiple-baseline design was utilized, which after varying amounts of baseline permitted implementing an associative or dissociative strategy for each participant. These strategies included associative, dissociative-video, and dissociative-music. Results indicated that performance improved under all conditions for all participants but that the greatest gains were found in the associative condition.

Athlete burnout is an important psychological health concern that may be influenced by coach behaviors. Participants were 933 collegiate soccer coaches who described their utilization of burnout prevention strategies. Deductive content analysis was used to categorize and interpret responses. The most frequently endorsed prevention strategies involved managing/limiting physical stressors. Reducing nonsport stressors and promoting autonomy and relatedness were also endorsed. Motivational climate changes and secondary prevention strategies were infrequently reported. These findings can help inform the design of educational programming to ensure that all coaches are aware of the range of ways in which they can help prevent athlete burnout.

The purpose of the present investigation was to compare Australian tennis coaches’ frequency of use, and perceived effectiveness, of 13 self-efficacy building strategies to those of American tennis coaches. Subjects were 60 Australian tennis coaches coaching at the club or state level. Results indicated that Australian coaches used all 13 strategies designed to enhance selfefficacy to a moderate degree and found these techniques to be at least moderately effective. The most often-used strategies to enhance self-efficacy, as well as those strategies found most effective, included encouraging positive self-talk, modeling confidence oneself, using instruction drills, using rewarding statements liberally, and using verbal persuasion. When comparing the results of the Australian and American coaches, few differences were found. However, the American coaches used more of the following self-efficacy strategies: conditioning drills, the modeling of other successful players, the emphasis that feelings of anxiety are not fear but are a sign of readiness, and the emphasis that failure results from lack of effort or experience and not from a lack of innate ability. Results are discussed in terms of Bandura’s self-efficacy theory and Weinberg and Jackson’s (1990) efficacy-building strategies used by American tennis coaches. Future directions for research are offered.