A mental state of Flow is the base from which the mental training program starts: a path towards self confidence and consciousness.
Our mental training (program) must keep these four factors into account:
- structural: oriented towards analysis and consideration of the athlete’s psychological conformation;
- functional: for an optimization of the elaboration processes of the cognitive system’s information;
- psychophysiological: oriented towards the modulation of psycho-physical reactivity;
- systemic: for a situated athlete’s conceptualization in the referring social contexts
At the same time, the mental preparation program must be shared with the athlete, and includes three specific moments:
- Education, aimed at developing the knowledge of how mental abilities influence performance and acknowledge their trainability;
- Learning, moment of acquisition of techniques and strategies necessary to the development of different mental abilities;
- Training, stage aimed at automatizing mental abilities and their transfer to the challenge / competition.
