Top 3 Sport Psychology Books
About the Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns Author
Ben Foodman is a licensed psychotherapist & performance specialist. He owns his private practice located in Charlotte North Carolina where he specializes in working with athletes to help them overcome mental blocks (the yips), PTSD, ADD / ADHD and achieve flow states through the techniques of Brainspotting & Neurofeedback. If you are interested in services, use the link here! Enjoy the article below!
Introduction: Top 3 Sport Psychology Books
Athletes and coaches are always looking for resources to help achieve peak performance. One area where athletes look to gain the edge over their competition is through mental skills training. Fortunately there are many excellent resources to help them accomplish these goals. For instance, there are a plethora of mental performance books written by sport psychologists that provide guidance on how athletes can achieve their goals. Based on my experience in the sport psychology field, I wanted to provide my list of the top 3 sport psychology books that athletes and coaches can use to leverage mental skills training to their advantage. Let’s dive in!
Part I. This Is Your Brain On Sports
THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON SPORTS: Beating Blocks, Slumps and Performance Anxiety for Good! is the ground-breaking book that will change the face of sports performance forever. This book introduces the breakthrough concept of STSD (Sport Traumatic Stress Disorder). Grand and Goldberg have discovered that STSDs are the cause of most significant performance problems. Performance blocks and anxiety, including the yips, stem from accumulated sports traumas including sports injuries, failures and humiliations.
The authors also introduce the Brainspotting Sports Performance System (BSPS) which quickly finds, releases and resolves the sports traumas held in your brain and body. An easy read, THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON SPORTS is filled with engaging, informative, inspiring stories. These case examples illustrate how professional, elite, collegiate and junior athletes have been freed for good from this silent "epidemic" of performance blocks and anxiety including: the yips, "Steve Blass disease," "Mackey Sasser syndrome," protracted slumps, balking, choking and freezing.
Part II. The Body Keeps The Score
Trauma is a fact of life. Veterans and their families deal with the painful aftermath of combat: one in five Americans has been molested; one in four grew up with alcoholics; one in three couples have engaged in physical violence. Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk, one of the world’s foremost experts on trauma, has spent over three decades working with survivors. In The Body Keeps The Score, he uses recent scientific advances to show how trauma literally reshapes both body and brain, compromising sufferers’ capacities for pleasure, engagement, self-control, and trust.
He explores innovative treatments-from neurofeedback and meditation to sports, drama, and yoga-that offer new paths to recovery by activating the brain’s natural neuroplasticity. Based on Dr. Van Der Kolk’s own research and that of other leading specialists, The Body Keeps the Score exposes the tremendous power of our relationships both to hurt and to heal-and offers new hope for reclaiming lives. This book has incredible application to individuals suffering from the after-effects of trauma, and when one considers the amount of traumatic experiences that athletes experience in sports, it becomes easy to see why athletes and coaches need to get this book!
Part III. Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns
Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns is a narrative non-fiction about my journey towards discovering what causes the Yips and how to fix the problem. However, unlike other sport psychology books, Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns goes a step further by trying to explain the neuroscience behind the Yips, but through engaging story-telling. Many athletes are familiar with what the Yips is, but most people who are not active in sports are unfamiliar with this term. For those that are just learning about what the Yips is, quite simply it is a psychological phenomenon when an athlete can no longer perform even simple sports movements despite no current presence of a sports injury. So how does one know if they have the Yips versus if they are just making simple mistakes?
In my work with athletes, most performers describe the Yips as an ‘unnatural’ and ‘unexpected’ sensation in the body. Athletes have reported that symptoms include but are not limited to the following: muscle tension in certain areas of the body, rapid breathing, hyper-focusing on unimportant areas in one’s visual field, temperature change in different areas of the body, anxiety-like symptoms, feeling ‘out of place’ or ‘off balance’, experiencing random spasms in different areas of the body, etc. Breakthroughs Need Breakdowns provides the answers and solutions to these problems while also exploring strategies to stay ‘Yips-free’ and unlock an athlete’s peak mental performance potential!
