AL Gondi
The goals of a psychological support programme are to contribute to rehabilitation and ultimately lead to recovery and successfully return to sport performance by facilitating emotional equilibrium.
Ensuring there is psychological intervention to return to play is complimented by physical readiness.
There are important elements in psychology-based interventions with high performing athletes that they can successfully implement and build on skills already known.
High performance athletes usually have experience with psychological skills applied to sporting performance such as positive talk and goal setting.
The other mental skills are training and relaxation, which concern water floatation, music, massage and education.
Some elite athletes use water flotation tanks as part of their active recovery programme.
Salted water
The floatation tank is a bathtub half-filled with water heavily salted so that the individual floats comfortably on the surface.
The benefits of floatation include, an increase in favourable mood states, increased capacity for sleep, and the capacity to lower blood pressure and decreased cholesterol levels.
The float tank can be used for relaxation therapy, mental imagery and watching tapes of selected performances.
Music is widely used by the athletes as part of their routine culture in preparation for sporting competitions. Music can improve simple visual tasks and improve muscle contraction in the short term.
One of the potential problems for athletes not familiar with psychological training is that they may be listening to music that has inappropriate effect in their arousal levels. Nevertheless, it is unwise to change a well-established formula.
Massage can be used to not only reduce tension, but also to provide feedback to the athlete about muscle tension.
Muscle tone
This helps the athlete to learn to monitor muscle tone. The positive aspects of massage include removing abnormally tight tissues and facilitating deep relaxation.
It is advantageous to complement progressive relaxation techniques with deep therapeutic massage as two techniques to reinforce each other.
The primary aim of education is to help the athletes gain a clear accurate state of the problem, the rehabilitation mechanisms and the recovery processes.
This will result in optimising adherence by engaging the athlete as an active motivated collaborator. This will reduce worries, fears and related mood disturbances, which in some instances, have been found to correlate negatively with adherence.
Finally, no matter what psychological strategies are applied, the practitioners must be able to apply basic counselling skills to deliver the programme.
