In the age of social networks, what high-level athlete has never been approached by a professional presenting themselves as a mental trainer or coach to sell their method? Such an approach boasting of having “already unlocked hundreds of athletes”, acting “directly on the identity to boost performance, effortlessly”, such another advocating a “energetic mental coaching”, yet another promising to “go beyond classic mental preparation and make it more concrete, faster and therefore more effective”.
What do each of these methods have in common? Define yourself as “unique”, “innovative”even ” revolutionary ” in supporting athletes, with the assurance of making them exceed their limits by offering “the” solution to achieve this. Often, as a pseudo-guarantee of credibility, the abstruse concepts put forward have a vague scientific coloring. Some show an advanced sense of marketing: their method is the subject of a registered trademark or a book to develop it, sometimes appearing prominently on the shelves of bookstores.
There literature on mental preparation is now as abundant as the tools that have broadened the field of possibilities, to the point that, for athletes, it is difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. “Some methods are very widespread, but without any scientific validity,” notes Marjorie Bernier, lecturer at the University of Brest and author of a doctoral thesis in sports sciences. “Pretending to base your method on neuroscience is also a great classic,” continues the researcher, who cites “neurolinguistic programming or methods based on motor preferences”, which establish personality profiles based on motor tests.
“Attentional processes”
“Depending on how you walk, we know how you think,” caricature Jean Fournier, lecturer at Paris Nanterre University and researcher in performance psychology. Several psychological assessment tools on which these techniques are based have been called into question by the scientific community, in particular by the American Psychological Association.
Others strictly speaking relate to coaching, like clean language (clean language) – a question-and-answer technique to help athletes better understand their behavior – developed in the 1980s by New Zealand psychologist David Grove.
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