Sports Performance: Exploring Sport Psychology

On this four-week course, you’ll discover how sport psychology is applied to coaching, individual athletes, and competition to help you to guide others or better understand your own sporting experiences.

You’ll change how you view sports psychology and gain new skills and confidence to identify valuable next steps to develop yourself and others in sport.

Designed for anyone with an interest in the psychology of sports performance, you’ll learn from Open University experts, sports psychologists, and practising athletes about what it’s really like to use sport psychology to inform training and welfare. You’ll challenge some common cliches along the way, for example, what psychological skills do people use when they talk of ‘rebounding from setbacks’?

You’ll gain skills to help you understand how athletes respond to pressure, with tools and techniques to create psychologically informed sporting environments to motivate athletes and enhance their mental health.

You’ll draw on examples to understand the link between psychology and injury in sport. Using inspiring case studies, including excerpts from The Open University and BBC co-production Freeze, you’ll examine where confidence in sport comes from and how you can enhance the resilience of others.

The way athletes respond to the pressures and challenges that face them can impact on their performance. You’ll discover how emotions can help or hinder, drawing on examples from nail-biting ‘penalty shoot-out’ moments. You’ll also understand the purpose of pre-performance routines and how they can influence athletes.

• What modern sport psychology is and how it is evolving
• Examples of how sport psychologists can enhance athlete performance
• Athlete welfare and enhancing mental health
• How psychologically informed training environments impact on athletes and their motivation
• Applying insights into athlete resilience, confidence and coping with pressure to your own sporting or personal context