Posted: 07 February 2008
Psychologists explain how to release your true sporting potential
“To play your chosen sport to the best of your ability, it is vital to have identified, harnessed and trained your mental skills to ensure that you are not limited by any excess psychological baggage,” says Professor Aidan Moran from the UCD School of Psychology who has co-authored a new book on practical sports psychology: Pure Sport.
In Pure Sport, Professor Moran and his co-author Dr John Kremer, Reader in Applied Psychology, Queens University Belfast, explain in everyday language the whys and wherefores of contemporary sport psychology.
Drawing on their combined experience as academics and applied sport psychologists, the authors pinpoint what works, and what doesn’t, when it comes to performance enhancement. They present an array of techniques for channelling and harnessing mental skills with the ultimate goal of improving sporting performance.
Blending sound theory with good practice, Pure Sport will help coaches, teams and sports people to develop their mental edge, and release their true sporting potential.
“Our approach is purely to allow the reader to engage with sport itself, pure sport – unadulterated by hype or hysteria,” says Professor Moran. “At the end of the day, consistently playing your sport to the best of your ability is what matters most. No one dimension should ever be afforded pre-eminence. Instead it is the synergy operating between them all that can help to maximise potential.”
Pure Sport: Practical Sport Psychology is published by Routledge.
Aidan P Moran is a Professor of Cognitive Psychology and Director of the Psychology Research Laboratory at the UCD School of Psychology, University College Dublin. He has gained an international reputation for his research on concentration, mental imagery and expertise in athletes. He is a psychology consultant to may of Ireland’s leading athletes and teams and is a former Official Psychologist to the Irish Olympic squad.
John Kremer is a Reader in Applied Psychology at Queen’s University Belfast, where he has lectured since 1980. A graduate of Loughborough University, he has been actively involved in sport and exercise psychology since the mid-1980s as a practitioner, researcher and teacher. He continues to work with a range of individuals and teams at both club and international level.
