Apply sport psychology - Essay Example

Applying Sport Psychology Affiliation: Injury occurrences are experienced in sports from time to time. In the context of an athlete, an injury is a critical setback to deal with. Sports psychology can actually be applied in such a scenario in helping the athlete through the recovery period. Knowledge, skills and techniques that comes with sports psychology are relevant in this case because an injured athlete suffers anger and sadness, denial, stress or even depression (Taylor &Wilson, 2005). Athletes are keen to maintain physical fitness and general good health.

An injury therefore implies the opposite of this. Sports psychology is essential at such instances in helping the athlete remain positive and resilient. In helping an injured athlete, sports psychology knowledge, skills and techniques can be used in a number of ways. The first strategy to employ is the helping the athlete to learn about the injury. This is essential in providing vast information about the injury to the athlete. Learning about the injury relates to identifying the cause, listing all possible alternative treatments to the injury and learning on how the injury can be prevented.

It is important that the athlete understands all the information about the injury to minimize anxiety and fear that is caused by inadequacy of information. The second strategy that can be derived from sports psychology is convincing the athlete to accept responsibility for the injury (Taylor &Wilson, 2005). This does not imply that the athlete deems the injury as his or her fault, but rather accepting the state at which the athlete is currently at due to the injury. This way, it is easier for the athlete to quicken the recovery process and expect a high outcome during and after the recovery.

The underlying interest is to alleviate the blame factor from the thoughts of the athlete and place the athlete at the current period rather than living his or her past. Finally, sports psychology can be employed to foster and maintain positivity in both attitude and life aspect of the athlete. The idea here is to help the athlete see opportunity out of his or her sorrow. In other words, it is important that the athlete overcomes the injury and sees a whole new life by maintaining positive thoughts and attitude.

In this regard, sports psychology can take any or all of the following forms of help: using the mind to heal the body, getting support from different key caregivers, setting goals that are appropriate and applicable to the injury scenario and maintaining fitness while still injured (Taylor &Wilson, 2005).ReferenceTaylor, J. &Wilson, G. (2005). Applying Sport Psychology: Four Perspectives. New York: Human Kinetics.