Professor, M.Sc.Psych. B.P. Yakovlev
Associate professor, Ph.D. L.A. Kovalenko
Postgraduate student N.R. Usaeva
Surgut State University, Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Region Yugra, Surgut
G.D. Babushkin, professor, Dr.Hab.
Siberian State University of Physical Culture and Sport, Omsk

Keywords: intelligence, thinking, activity, elite athletes, effectiveness.

Introduction. Different requirements for mental qualities of an athlete are defined by specificity of training and competitive activities in each sport. In recent years, it has been of great interest to define the structure and manifestations of general and special mental properties of athletes.

It is typical for many outstanding athletes of our time to focus on harmonious development and improvement of physical, intellectual and mental potential in their training.

For example, famous Olympic champion, D.Sc. in engineering and writer Yuri Vlasov writes: “Despite my deep love of physical activity and exercise, I have always believed the development of mental and spiritual aspects in man to be most important… The destiny of man is to improve and expand his mind and knowledge. Everything else must be subordinated to it. And sport should strengthen man, help achieve this dominant objective, and not grow into something independent and self-sufficient…”   [3, p. 128].

The process of sports training is characterized by intense intellectual and mental activity and manifestation of creative abilities contributing to effectiveness and reliability of training and competitive activities of athletes. Within potential growth of his sports mastery an athlete is increasingly focused on the development of visual and concept thinking promoting a deep and clear understanding of each specific action and activity without their immediate execution, relying only on the experience of sensory perception. The more adequate and meaningful the process of actions and activities is in thinking, the higher the quality is and the fewer errors are during their execution.

An athlete should be able to repel physical properties of actions and activities quickly and accurately; precisely design and predict their actual combinations in a complex action; accurately, quickly, flexibly implement the plan while addressing a motor task [11, 12].

High level of mental activity determines the speed of acquiring knowledge, skills and experience and the speed of receiving and processing various information. With the development of intellectual abilities an athlete starts to conceive movement separately from a practical action in a more integral and harmonious way, to see them as if from the outside “mentally”. After performing any actions he mentally analyzes them, forming and creating better ways of solving motor tasks and problematic situations.

If having high mental activity an athlete reaches the ability to solve certain, standardized motor tasks well, with significant automatic precision and speed, then an athlete with developed intellectual abilities solves motor tasks for the most part by means of optimization and harmony, expanding the concept of the possibility of harmony between “strength and intellect”. 

However, due to the current level of proficiency of physical culture and sports specialists the issues of comprehensive determination, development and improvement of mental abilities, stimulation of mental activity of those engaged in sports cannot be fully solved.

The purpose of the research was to determine and substantiate the directions of mental activity of elite athletes within a competitive training.

Analysis of scientific research on the subject has shown that sports activity is determined by a number of both general and specific requirements to the level of intellectual and thinking capabilities. As pointed out by B.J. Kretti [8], apparently, there must be a certain minimum rate of intellectual development (IQ=110-120) below which it becomes difficult to improve sports skills. However, it would be an oversimplification in terms of an athlete’s capacity of self-perfection with regards to sports training to say in general that an athlete has a high, medium or low intelligence levels. At first it is necessary to correlate a certain combination of various intelligence characteristics with specific requirements imposed on an athlete in life and in his sport, and only then to conduct a comparative analysis of the dependence of effectiveness of training and competitive activities on special intellectual training. 

However, now it is yet impossible to say with certainty that any program that improves intelligence and thinking will form abilities necessary for a particular sport or provide objective information on the connection of intellectual and creative abilities with regard to requirements of specific sports.

Figure 1. Structure of intellect according to J.P. Guilford

General mental abilities of a person present an extremely complex personality component. J.P. Guilford proposed a model of the “structure of intellect (SOI), systematizing results of his research in the field of general abilities [4]. According to J.P. Guilford, there are one hundred and twenty factors (5 х 4 х 6) of the human intellect (Figure 1). Over a hundred factors are currently identified, i.e. appropriate diagnostic tests for them are selected [4].

J.P. Guilford’s concept is widely used abroad, especially by educators working with gifted children and teenagers. Educational programs are created on its basis allowing rational planning and directing intelligence at the development of both general and special abilities. However, the separation of thinking into divergent and convergent is considered to be the main achievement of J.P. Guilford. The first relates to production of multiple solutions on the basis of clear evidence and is the basis of creativity (creative work). The second – convergent thinking – is aimed at finding the only true result and can be diagnosed by conventional intelligence tests [4].

Athletes having divergent thinking are less restricted by regulatory requirements, given factors and conditions of the task, they are capable of fast variation of ways of solving a problem moving in different directions and producing a lot of different options for solutions that lead to original findings and results.

Ts. Zhelezkov, professor, Dr.Ed., writes that intellectualization of sports training is the central and dominant factor of sports achievement in the modern system of sports training [5]. According to the Bulgarian scholar, high effectiveness of this factor is accounted for by a number of its specific components:

• increasing interaction and interpenetration of different branches of science, such as physiology, psychology, biomechanics, biochemistry, etc.;
• intensive introduction of modern fitness, telemetric and computer technologies;
• universalization of scientific techniques (primarily mathematization of the research and development process) and other components. 

Professor Ts. Zhelezkov characterizes the differences of the phenomenon of intellectualization of sports activity from other types of human activities, he writes: “In contrast to the sphere of material production where intellectualization facilitates or completely eliminates physical work, in sports it leads to its intensification” [5, p. 42]. Therefore, with the increase of sports mastery the number of factors that determine sports achievements increases, as well as extreme psychological requirements for intellectual manifestations of athletes. So we should support the author in terms of the fact that the issue of permissible boundaries of influence of training and competitive loads on athletes’ intelligence as well as related issues of psychological health characteristics will increasingly occur.  

In general psychological preparedness is closely linked to intellectual and creative activity of an athlete in sports activity. Currently, elite athletes have a fairly high level of intelligence enabling them to be aware of the social tasks of sports activity, social importance of sports achievements and their place in sport. 

In some sports, such as combats, sport games, etc., integration of different professionally important qualities (perceptual, intellectual, emotional, volitional, intuitive) into a specific system that promotes optimal psychic manifestations in constantly changing conditions of activity in a compressed time frame for situation assessment and analysis comes to the fore. Thus, in these sports athletes face the need to prepare for continually arising extreme situations and overcome them. The effectiveness of athlete’s actions in these circumstances can be ensured only when the focus is not only on the situation as a whole, but also on the accuracy of perception of objects, reaction speed and performance of motor actions, mental activity efficiency that helps analyze situation, choose and implement an optimal or original solution from a number of alternatives.

Level of sports achievements depends on a number of factors: abilities relevant for this kind of sports activities; athlete’s motivation; relevant individual psychological characteristics of a person; the availability of appropriate sports facilities; a qualified trainer and many other factors [6, 9-11, et al.]. However, such a factor as the essence of precompetitive mental activity of an athlete, which in our opinion is important, is not given attention in the theory and methodology of sports training and sports psychology. The issues of characteristics of athletes’ mental activity during training for a competition, its impact on the effectiveness of the competitive activity of an athlete, its focus and factors contributing to the formation of its content remain unsolved in the sports psychology of today. 

What characterizes mental activity of an athlete before a competition? What is the ratio of positive and negative thinking of an athlete in connection with his participation in an upcoming competition? Does an athlete know about the influence of the nature of mental activity on the formation of precompetition state and results of his competitive activity? Even their trainers do not always have such information. Most probably, thoughts of each athlete have a certain content and orientation (positive, vague, negative). The major task of a trainer is to find out the thoughts of an athlete and turn them into the desired (positive) direction. For an athlete is and will be what he thinks of himself [1, 2, 7, and 8]. Self-perception of a person makes him the way he is today.

Formation of positive thinking of athletes should be one of the objectives of psychological preparation. However, psychological preparation of an athlete in its current form is mostly technologized and is mainly aimed at the formation of psychical functions, moral and volitional qualities and self-control skills. At the same time such complex mental formations as worldview, self-concept, consciousness, thinking and self-esteem, reflecting the attitude of an athlete to himself, are kept out. This aspect of psychological preparation of an athlete should be an integral part of the training process.  

Today it becomes clear that athletes need to master skills of independent psycho-correction of their state and behavior at competitions that would help them form a rich and effective internal image of themselves – a self-concept – of a person who can defeat opponents and himself and be the subject of his activity [2]. However, they are not taught this. Outstanding athletes build their own mental image by themselves over the years of sports career and take it to their start, to their fight.   

Research methods and organization. We hypothesized that precompetitive direction of thinking of athletes affects the effectiveness of competitive activity. In order to verify the hypothesis the direction of mental activity before training for a competition was identified. To this end, a test “Mental activity of an athlete” was used; the test was developed by us [1]. Three levels were identified with regards to the nature of mental activity (its positive direction): high – 55-60 points, medium – 35-54 points and low – 20-34 points. Before the competition athletes were interviewed about the planned results. The effectiveness of the competitive activity of the athletes was determined by proximity to the planned figures.

 The research involved elite athletes: 29 speed skaters – Masters of Sport and Masters of Sport of International Class – including 9 members of the national team of Russia – participants of the Olympic Games (Sochi, 2014) and 20 members of the All-Russian Universiade (Kolomna, 2014); 20 Masters of Sport and Candidate Masters of Sport in pistol shooting; 3 Masters of Sport in swimming – participants of the V. Sal’nikov Cup (St. Petersburg, 2013).

Research results and discussion. The direction of mental activity of athletes before the competition determined revealed a fairly high level of 54 points on average. Depending on the achievement of the planned result in the competition all the involved athletes were divided into two groups. The first group of athletes achieved the planned result. Their mental activity direction was 54.7 points. The second group did not achieve the planned result. Direction of mental activity of athletes of this group was lower than that of the first group – 52.1 points. Based on the comparison of the effectiveness of competitive activity and the level of orientation of mental activity of these two groups we can talk about the impact of the content of mental activity on the effectiveness of competitive activity of athletes which was confirmed by one-way analysis of variance with the calculation of Fisher’s correlation coefficient (Table 1).

Table 1. Impact of content of mental activity of athletes on competition results (Fischer’s coefficient)

Analysis of test results of athletes’ mental activity revealed the following. All the surveyed athletes plan their objectives prior to performance based on a realistic assessment of their fitness and know how to reach the goals they set. This is one of the keys to successful performance in the competition. However, not all athletes always perform successfully in competitions: only 21% of the surveyed athletes do so. The others perform successfully in most cases.    

Positive self-hypnosis plays a significant role in self-improvement in sport. All athletes use it in their sports activity, it helps them achieve high results. However, not all athletes use positive statements in training for the competition, 71% do. Probably, they do not know about their impact on the increase of sports results and successful performance. This is accounted for by the fact that athletes do not refer to special sports literature on a regular basis, they do it situationally – on the advice of others. 

Mental activity of all athletes before the competition and prior to the start is focused on successful performance, which is a positive thing. In the overall structure of mental activity of athletes the share of positive thinking is 81 %. This is indicative of misjudgments of trainers during years of training that affect the results of athletes’ performance in important competitions.

The reader (especially an athlete and a trainer) will be interested to know how to get rid of negative thinking and develop one’s positive thinking. Below are the recommendations for creating a positive mindset of an athlete based on the principles of the brain function described by J. Kehoe, a Canadian physiologist [7]. (The technique is described in more detail in monograph [1, 3].)

Phase one – development of faith in success. To develop such confidence it is necessary to form the following beliefs: 

First – the world of sports is full of riches.

Second – sports activities bring joy and satisfaction.

Third – I have unlimited abilities.

Fourth belief – my sports achievements depend only on me.

Phase two – programming oneself for success. An athlete should feel that he is capable, confident and lucky right now, at the stage he has reached in sport.

Phase three – a vision of success. An athlete should learn to see success everywhere, while performing every task given by the trainer, during every workout, every competition.  

Phase four – intellectual self-improvement.

Phase five – association of oneself with famous great athletes.

We use this technique in training elite sprint swimmers for competitions. There are positive results of its implementation.

Conclusion. The results of the study of elite athletes have confirmed our hypothesis about the effect of the directed thinking on the effectiveness of competitive activity. According to the analysis of directions of mental activity of elite athletes suggests that positive thinking, influencing the effectiveness of competitive activity prevails in the overall structure of mental activity of athletes. However, there are also negative and uncertain thoughts about the upcoming performance at a competition, which leads to non-fulfillment of planned results by an athlete. Increase in the share of positive thinking in the structure of mental activity of athletes is an additional resource for improvement of results in competitions. When an athlete does not fulfill planned results at competitions means that the trainer miscalculated about the psychological preparation of athletes in the long-term training, which affects the results of competitive performance. The presented in the paper materials supplement the theory and methodology of sports training and sports psychology with new data about the importance of mental activity of athletes, their sports improvement and the need for its formation.

References

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Corresponding author: sportscience@mail.ru