A Mental Warm-Up for Athletes

Abstract

The purpose of this research was to develop and evaluate a 5-min structured mental warm-up involving aspects of goal setting, imagery, arousal regulation, and positive self-talk. Results of a study that featured a pretest–posttest design with 101 male youth soccer players (Study 1) and a study that featured a repeated-measures experimental design with 29 female intercollegiate soccer players (Study 2) indicated that executing the mental warm-up was associated with significantly greater readiness to perform and to use mental skills to enhance performance. In Study 3, 30 male high school soccer players used the mental warm-up daily over a competitive season and rated it as acceptable (albeit less so than their physical warm-up) at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end of the season. The findings suggest that a mental warm-up is both acceptable to athletes and potentially useful in helping them prepare for training and competition.

Effects of a Mental Warmup on the Workout Readiness and Stress of College Student Exercisers

“…The Wellness Center Research Questionnaire consists of demographic items and questions pertinent to exercise experience and plans. The Workout Readiness Questionnaire is adapted from previous research [ 17 ] such that the workout readiness items relate to exercise rather than sport and include an item pertaining to stress. The Workout Readiness Questionnaire includes 18 items that assess the state of psychological readiness to perform physical activity and use psychological skills including: (a) the 7-item Psychological Readiness to Perform scale that addresses respondents’ readiness to perform exercise (i.e., the extent to which they are prepared, energized, calm, motivated, focused, thinking, and confident) with responses given on a Likert-type scale ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 ( strongly agree) and high scores indicating greater readiness; (b) the 6-item Readiness to Use Psychological Skills scale that address respondents’ readiness to use imagery, focusing skills, motivation skills, thoughts, calming skills, and energizing skills, scored on a scale from 1 (not at all ready) to 7 (very ready); (c) the 3-item Mental Readiness Form [ 24 ] that assesses thoughts, how the body feels, and emotions/feelings on 11-point scales from calm to worried, relaxed to tense, and confident to scared, respectively (all items on this scale were reverse scored and averaged so that a high score reflected high mental readiness to perform); (d) a stress item to rate overall level of stress from 1 (very low) to 11 (very high); and (e) an overall mental warmup item that states, “I am mentally warmed up to perform my best,” rated on a scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree).…”

“…The Workout Readiness Questionnaire includes 18 items that assess the state of psychological readiness to perform physical activity and use psychological skills including: (a) the 7-item Psychological Readiness to Perform scale that addresses respondents’ readiness to perform exercise (i.e., the extent to which they are prepared, energized, calm, motivated, focused, thinking, and confident) with responses given on a Likert-type scale ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 ( strongly agree) and high scores indicating greater readiness; (b) the 6-item Readiness to Use Psychological Skills scale that address respondents’ readiness to use imagery, focusing skills, motivation skills, thoughts, calming skills, and energizing skills, scored on a scale from 1 (not at all ready) to 7 (very ready); (c) the 3-item Mental Readiness Form [ 24 ] that assesses thoughts, how the body feels, and emotions/feelings on 11-point scales from calm to worried, relaxed to tense, and confident to scared, respectively (all items on this scale were reverse scored and averaged so that a high score reflected high mental readiness to perform); (d) a stress item to rate overall level of stress from 1 (very low) to 11 (very high); and (e) an overall mental warmup item that states, “I am mentally warmed up to perform my best,” rated on a scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree). Adequate internal consistency has been demonstrated for Psychological Readiness to Perform (Cronbach’s alpha values ranging from 0.86–0.91), Psychological Readiness to use Mental Skills (Cronbach’s alpha values ranging from 0.92–0.93) and the Mental Readiness Form (Cronbach’s alpha ranging from 0.74 to 0.87) [ 17 ]. The two single-item scales were developed in accord with the suggestion of Tenenbaum, Kamata, and Hayashi [ 25 ] for ease of administration in field settings and timely completion of data collection.…”

“…Next, participants stood up, listened to and simultaneously participated in a 5-min prerecorded mental warmup. The 5-min mental warmup audio script was slightly modified from the mental warmup developed by Brewer et al [ 17 ]. That is, the exercise mental warmup omitted information pertaining to having just completed a physical warmup.…”

“…The purpose of this research was to replicate the work of Brewer et al [ 17 ] by examining the effects of a mental warmup on exercisers and extend the work of Brewer et al [ 17 ] by exploring the effects of a mental warmup on exercisers’ psychological stress. Based on previous research with competitive athletes and musicians, it was hypothesized that exercisers who use a mental warmup would become more psychologically ready to exercise after completing the mental warmup [ 12 , 13 , 17 , 18 ]. Because psychological skills use has been found to be associated with reduced/manageable stress, it was hypothesized that the mental warmup would also reduce exercisers’ levels of stress [ 8 , 18 , 21 ].…”

“…Based on these findings, specific recommendations related to mentally warming up for sport competition have been developed that include the use of goal setting, imagery, confidence building, arousal regulation (calming down or energizing), and attentional focus [ 16 ]. The purpose of mental warmups is to increase athletes’ readiness to use mental skills, including the skills that are part of their usual mental skills training [ 17 ]. Similar recommendations have been made for musicians, whose development of mental warmup skills such as self-talk have been found to be related to enhanced self-efficacy and a greater sense of control over some of the debilitating aspects of stress and anxiety [ 18 ].…”