Abstract
Mental training has been used on a large scale during the latest decades, as a complementary method particularly valuable for the athletes' technical and tactical training. In tennis, this happened when some great athletes, such as Arthur Ashe, Billie-Jean King, Martina Navratilova, Tim and Tom Gullickson, shared to the others their opinions about the mental training. Because the training process has to be accomplished right on time, the specialists use many teaching strategies, including biofeedback, to improve the efficiency of mental training. In this paper we try to put in evidence that the visualization, as a mental training method assisted by neurofeedback, as a method of augmentation of internal feedback, reduce the time request by the correctness process of shots. The ameliorative experiment used as an independent variable the computer-assisted visualization exercises. The dependent variable was represented by the technical procedure aimed by the coach in order to be corrected. In this research we included 12 junior tennis players that participated in 10 psychological assistance lessons. The mental training exercises were assisted by the Peak Achivement Training (produced by NeuroTechnology, Inc., USA). We recorded as mental practice parameters the amplitude of cerebral waves, the duration of mental practice, the number of concentration - relaxation cycles, to establish the athletes progress on mental exercises. We also recorded the official games, in order to evaluate the efficiency of our method at the level of techniques, during the competition. The results permitted us to formulate some methodological recommendations concerning the mental training in tennis and to contribute in this way to the improvement of training methodology in this area. |