Showing titles in Sports Psychology

The Athlete’s Ascent shows how you can harness the wisdom of martial and Zen arts to develop the profound connection between mind, body and breathing that leads to the coveted flow state. Drawing on a lifetime of deep practice, Jayne Storey has streamlined centuries-old disciplines – including Tai Chi and Zazen meditation – into a simple, proven and trusted Performance Practice that helps both amateur and professional athletes ascend to higher levels of enjoyment and performance.

Are you looking for unique ways to "get into the game"? To enhance your training and find focus? You aren't alone. Increasingly, athletes and coaches are incorporating mindfulness practices into their training. That's because mindfulness can help you lower your stress levels, connect with the moment, and mentally bounce back after setbacks. So whether you're a sports enthusiast or a professional athlete, mindfulness can also help you deal with physical aspects of training, such as fatigue, aches, pains, injury, burnout, and exhaustion.

Mike Brearley is one of the most successful cricket captains of all time, and in 1981 he captained the England team to the momentous Ashes series victory against Australia. In The Art of Captaincy, his treatise on leadership and motivation, he draws directly on his experience of man-managing a team, which included a pugnacious Ian Botham and Geoffrey Boycott, to explain what it takes to be a leader on and off the field.

The Choice Point merges mindfulness, cognitive behavioural therapy and the new practice of FIT (Functional Image Therapy) into a user-friendly model for blasting through negative thoughts, adjusting your behaviour to make better choices, and for making decisions that are always in support of achieving your goals.

As the sports reporter for BBC Radio 1 for the best part of a decade, Simon Mundie was pitch-side at many of the most high-profile sporting events in history. It was often thrilling, but when he took to the airwaves to report on what he had seen, it increasingly felt like something was missing. The emphasis always seemed to be on results, tactics and the score. But as the saying goes, sport is a metaphor for life – so Simon set out to explore that.

Elizabeth Clor wanted nothing more than to qualify for the prestigious Boston Marathon. Dead-set on achieving this goal, she found herself bound up in a vicious cycle of perfectionism and anxiety that thwarted her at every turn, despite making significant gains in her physical abilities over seven years. Boston Bound is the story of how Elizabeth discovered that her own brain was the culprit, and explains the steps she took to completely overhaul her mindset about her running and her life.

Did you know that anyone can learn to achieve flow? This book shows you how. Discover the secret weapon of champions: Flow. Unlike a rare talent, anyone can learn to cultivate this state and access peak performance in their sport. Create the optimal conditions for cultivating flow in your own athletic career. Cultivating the flow state in sport can be a powerful way to improve your performance and achieve a greater sense of satisfaction and enjoyment in your athletic pursuits.

This is a manual designed to get white belts to competent blue belts in as fast a time as possible. Zen Jiu Jitsu is more a rendition of concepts than techniques. This is the simplest and easiest way to break down and simplify the many and varied ideas, philosophies, and combinations in the Brazilian Jiu Jitsu arsenal. For both competition Jiu Jitsu and self-defense Jiu Jitsu, most white belts need to fully understand the concepts, but they can be VERY confusing!

Positive thinking leads to positive outcomes. Study after study proves this. Researchers have found that optimistic people live longer, live healthier, have more energy, have more successful careers, make better decisions, are more productive, are less stressed, have healthier relationships, and (not surprisingly) are much happier than pessimists. However, a lot has been misunderstood about what it means to be a positive thinker and what it takes to maintain an optimistic mindset.

The mental game of golf remains, to many players, a mystery. Its importance cannot be overstated, with PGA Tour professionals agreeing that golf is 80% mental and 20% mechanical at the highest level. Silent Mind Golf is unique in that it not only explains how the mind can work against you in detail. It also gives you the tools to improve your mental game through explanations and exercises.

All cricketers long to know the answer to these questions and many more. Only 15 years ago, it would have been difficult to answer them - cricket was guided only by decades-old tradition. Data has changed everything. Today we can track every ball to within millimetres; its release point, speed and bounce point are measured as are how much the ball swings, how much it deviates off the pitch, the exact height and line that it passes the stumps and multiple other variables. Hitting Against the Spin is the story of that data, and what it can tell us about how cricket really works. 

What's the secret of a great comeback? And how do we boost our mental fitness to succeed in sport and life? The Comeback Quotient provides inspiration and practical advice on building mental endurance and physical stamina. When bestselling sportswriter Matt Fitzgerald went through a coronavirus-George Floyd double whammy, he realized that nobody can escape setbacks in life so we all need to be able to pull off a comeback. In training for his first triathlon since 2009 and overcoming chronic injury, Matt Fitzgerald puts his ultrarealist mental fitness training to the test.

Remember the freedom you felt playing golf as a kid? No fear, no worries, no overthinking. You stepped up on the first tee with confidence and excitement, rather than fear and anxiety. You saw every shot as an opportunity to learn or enjoy, rather than a challenge to be overcome. Now imagine playing with that mindset today, but with all the skills, technique, and experience you have gained since. What’s stopping you?

Mental training is a must for high performance both on the field and off. But simply hoping for mental toughness isn't going to build any mind muscles. You need a proven routine of daily exercises to get you where you want to go. 10-Minute Toughness is your personal coach for boosting brainpower and achieving a competitive edge in whatever game you play.

The Sports Parents Solution gives you the strategies and methods you need to transform the parent culture in your team, allowing you to better support each athlete’s growth, improve your team’s performance, create an extraordinary experience for all involved—and take your program to a whole new level.

In this inspirational fable, Jack McKee is a professional golfer who has just suffered through the most humiliating meltdown of his career. After years of struggle, he is ready to quit on his dream. He has convinced himself he doesn't have what it takes to make it on the PGA Tour. In an attempt to figure out why his career has ended up the way it has, Jack reaches out to one of the game's greatest former players for advice. This legendary golfer teaches Jack that the problem is not in his swing, but in his mind.

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Play On by Jeff Bercovici, read by Adam Sims. Sports are about challenging our physical limits. But the greatest limit of all remains undefeated: age. We're taught to believe that ageing thwarts effort and grace, talent and grit, outstanding teamwork and individual brilliance. But a new breed of top professionals - the likes of Roger Federer, Jo Pavey and Tom Brady - are overturning long-held assumptions about the duration of primetime in a sporting career. It's not that aging causes a decline in fitness; rather, a decline in fitness causes aging.

Never have the best sportspeople seemed so far removed from the rest of us. So how are these extraordinary athletes made and what do their achievements tell us about success? The Best reveals how the most incredible sportspeople in the world got that way. It is a unique look at the path to sporting greatness. This is a story of origins, training, luck and serendipity, as well as of sports science and cutting-edge technology.

When Jenny Valentish wrote a memoir about addiction in 2017, she noticed that people who treated drug-taking like an Olympic sport would often hurl themselves into a pursuit such as marathon running upon giving up. What stayed constant was the need to push their boundaries. Everything Harder Than Everything Else follows people doing the things that most couldn’t, wouldn’t or shouldn’t. Their insights lead Jenny on a compulsive, sometimes reckless journey through psychology, endurance and the power of obsession, revealing what we can learn about the human condition.

While most mental-skills guides for golf adopt a narrow focus on teaching skills that target performance, this audiobook uses a holistic approach and provides tools to organize your thinking. You will learn to direct your mind with focused purpose to help you achieve your goals.