Have you ever found yourself struggling to maintain your motivation, focus, or confidence during training or competition? If so, you’re not alone. Many runners, from beginners to elite, experience these challenges. However, the good news is that you can overcome them through sport psychology training. In this blog post, I’ll explain the benefits of sport psychology training for runners of all abilities and provide practical mental skills that you can use to improve your running.

What is Sport Psychology?

Sport psychology is the study of how psychological factors influence sports performance and

What is it?

Sport Psychology can be described as the study of how psychology influences sports performance. Our thoughts, feelings and behaviours can all have an impact upon the way we approach sport, but quite this area of sports performance can be left unchecked.

Traditionally, there is a focus on the technical, tactical and physical aspects of sport. For example, teams and individuals might spend hours improving fitness, technical ability and tactical aspect of performance. But…how much time do we allocate to improving our mental fitness to perform?

There’s an urban quote that suggests:

“Sport is 90% physical and 10%

The use of Sport Psychology support has been gaining momentum in recent years. More athletes, coaches and team managers understand the benefits of engaging with it, but there are still some myths flying around. So here’s a few that I’ve debunked:

It involves sitting on a couch and sharing my problems

No! Not usually! Sport Psychology support comes in a range of shapes and sizes depending on your needs. When I work with individual sportsmen and women, I often meet in a venue that the athlete is happy with. This could be

One thing we love about competitive sport is observing how different individuals and teams respond in different situations. How do they perform under pressure, how do they cope with adversity, how do they manage their own and other’s expectations? Also, how do they respond to being the favourite or the underdog?

WHAT IS AN UNDERDOG?

The weaker of two competitors, or anyone not expected to win a competition

As well as not being expected to win, we might also expect the underdog to be well beaten in their competition. On paper you’d pick the