Mental training and high performance sport

Abstract EN

Several motivational registers can be involved in sport (Durand, 1987, Thill, 1989).

If the commitment of an athlete can respond to a direct search for the hedonic sensation provided by his activity or even to a need for affiliation, his accession and his maintenance at the highest level of the competition are more motivated.

Accomplishment.

For his early theoreticians (Atkinson, 1957, McClelland, Atkinson, Clark, and Lowell, 1953, Murray, 1938), the motivation for achievement is characterized by the behaviors that people exhibit when they task, to seek standards of requirement or performance, to set high goals.

This definition seems to perfectly match the characteristics of elite sport practice.

In the same logic, high-level sport can be likened to a context of achievement such as that described by Heckhausen (1974).

For this author, several conditions must indeed be met in order to evoke a context of accomplishment.