Achieving Excellence

Your Pre-Competition Routine

Bringing it all together: The Training and Performance Diary

You can help yourself to routinely apply sports psychology techniques by getting into the habit of using a Training and Performance diary before and after every training session and performance.

The Training and Performance diary is an extremely effective tool that brings together and helps to apply almost everything that this Mind Tools Sports Psychology section has covered.

Take a diary that has a full page for every day. Block each page into sections for:

• Entries before the session:
  • Goals - enter the main goals to be achieved in the training session or performance here. Enter goals before the session or performance. Base the setting of goals on notes from previous pages of the diary.

• Entries after the session:
  • Achievements - Write down the goals achieved here after the session.
  • Errors - note mistakes here, and suggestions for future improvements or possible future goals
  • Quality of Session - Write down your assessment of the quality of the session. Include here any times or scores you achieved.
  • Mindset - make entries here recording your mood, susceptibility to distraction, feeling of stress, and feeling of focus/flow. Score these from 1(poor) to 10 (v. good). Note why you think you felt the way you did.

Keeping this diary has the following advantages:

• It focuses your attention before a session on what you need to achieve. This helps to ensure that training sessions and performances are always useful for improvement of skills.
• It helps you to track the achievement of goals, and feed information back into the setting of new goals. This helps to build your confidence as you can see easily what you have achieved.
• It helps you to isolate areas needing improvement and plan to work on them.
• It gives you the raw data you need to track improvement over time so that you can see how you are improving.
• It helps you to see and analyse how mood, distraction, and stress relate to performance and flow. This will help you to develop management programs for these, and apply them appropriately.