Martial Arts

"...there is a sufficient research base to conclude that sports psychology can assist martial artists with achieving peak performance in both katas and sparring. In particular, skills training can aid with regulating intensity in the martial arts as well as improving the physical skills required to be competitive."

Although sports psychology is still in its infancy, a tremendous amount of interest has been generated by the potential of psychological principles to enhance athletic performance. In particular, the dedication to empirical examination of the tenets of cognitive-behavioral theory has led to more effective clinical techniques which have been intuitively appealing to sport psychology consultants. As a result, psychological methods were implemented to enhance performance prior to solid research support. However, recent reviews of studies conducted in the last approximately fifteen years have shown the psychological methods to be useful in the area of sports performance enhancement (Greenspan & Feltz, 1989; Weinberg and Comar, 1994). READ MORE...

Although martial arts derive from the eastern philosophical thinking which focuses on the importance of the combined interaction of the mind and body, many western martial artists tend to ignore the mental aspects of the art and only focus on the physical aspects.

Interestingly, other sports that were not so grounded in the metaphysical traditions seem to have more easily accepted the precepts of sport psychology and embraced the development of mental skills. It seems that more and more frequently, whenever a sporting event is on television, references are made to sport psychologists assisting the athletes. Top athletes in most sports are turning to sport psychologists to enhance their performance because the development of the mental skills has been shown to give an edge to those athletes. READ MORE...

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Training “smart” is more important than the amount of daily practice. Too often an athlete believes that the more he or she practices, the more proficient he/she will become. However, this plan is not only ineffective, but it can also be detrimental to achieving the desired outcome. An athlete who practices frequently and hard without an overall plan will be more likely to suffer the effects of overtraining such as burn-out, exhaustion, and increased injuries rather than actually improving performance. By developing a set of specific goals and a plan for reaching those goals, athletes can more effectively use their practice time and even reduce the time required in practice to attain their goals. Obviously, this does not mean that the martial artist can achieve rank or win tournaments with little practice; it means that the athlete does not need to waste time through ineffective practice and through the harmful effects of overtraining. READ MORE...

Assessing performance and correcting errors are important internal skills for the martial arts student to develop. But how does one develop this skill? To do so, the martial arts instructor needs to consciously teach skill just as he or she teaches proper execution of a side kick or using faking techniques during sparring. However, teaching the development of using internal sources of information for feedback may be something many martial arts instructors were not taught themselves. So often when we teach skills, our response to the student’s performance involves correcting errors or giving general praise, neither of which are conducive to teaching the student how to self-correct errors. In fact, these responses tend to create excessive dependence upon the instructor’s feedback and presence. READ MORE...

Giving Women Feedback to Increase Self-Efficacy

The manner in which instructors provide feedback to athletes can have significant impact upon an athlete's self-efficacy which in turn affects the ability to learn a skill and the overall performance. Self-efficacy is the athlete's personal belief that he or she has the capability to learn and perform a specific skill or activity. The results of an interesting study by Amparo Escarti and Jose Guzman in 1999 indicated that performance feedback which focuses on providing feedback regarding technique rather than evaluating outcome was related to increased self-efficacy, a higher level of performance, and the tendency to choose more difficult tasks. Other research has shown that a higher level of self-efficacy improves performance. Thus, research shows us that how a coach provides feedback to athletes is critical in the development of the athlete.

To make this issue all the more complicated, there is research evidence that women respond differently than men to feedback from coaches. This is most likely a crucial point in the martial arts today because the majority of instructors in the martial arts are men and there are more and more women choosing to participate and compete in the martial arts. Therefore, a martial arts instructor needs to be more attuned to the methods of providing feedback to women in order to elicit their best performance as well as to keep them interested in continuing their training READ MORE...