title: Mentales Training - Für und Wider bei ästhetisch-kompositorischen Sportarten
Creators: name: Samstag, Sabine
Publisher: name: :none
Year: 2008

description: Mentales Training hat sich im Sport als Ergänzung zu herkömmlichen Methoden für das Erlernen und Stabilisieren von Bewegungsfertigkeiten etabliert. Da es sich vorwiegend bei kognitiven Aufgaben günstig auf die Leistung auswirkt, ist davon auszugehen, dass sportliche Disziplinen mit hohem technischen Anforderungsniveau besonders davon profitieren. Dies würde für die ästhetisch-kompositorischen Sportarten Kunstturnen und Eiskunstlauf zutreffen. Da jedoch der Großteil der motorischen Fertigkeiten in beiden Sportarten zwischen dem sechsten Lebensjahr und der Pubertät erlernt wird, stellt sich die Frage nach der Anwendbarkeit Mentalen Trainings im Kindes- und Jugendalter.
description: Mental training has developed to become a complement to traditional methods for learning and stabilising movement skills in sports. Having positive effects on performance principally on cognitive tasks, it is expected that mental training will be particularly beneficial in sports disciplines with high technical requirements. This would apply to the aesthetic-compositional disciplines of artistic gymnastics and figure skating. However, most of the movement skills in both disciplines are acquired between the 6th year of age and puberty, which gives rise to the question for the applicability of mental training during infancy and adolescence. Subsequently on a presentation on the subject matter of the used terms (mental training, visualization, imagery, mental imagery, mental rehearsal …), especially theories explaining the effectiveness of mental training are addressed in detail, presenting some basic concepts of the most various aspects of mental training. This summary of the current state of research is followed by a descriptive individual case study of a 15 years old figure skater (mental training of the double Axel) and a 7 years old artistic gymnast (mental training of the forward bow). This study examines the applicability of mental training for learning movements through the five-steps Eberspächer concept. The aim is to ensure the applicability of mental training during infancy with focussed propaedeutic visualization, an increased practical imagery as well as a more intensive co-operation between the coach and the athlete during all coaching sessions. The presentation shows, which problems occurred during coaching, how they were reacted to and which differences appear in dealing with this training method as compared to adolescent athletes. The study is based on the assumption that a different approach towards mental training results from the latter rather than from cognitive gestation, due to the short coaching period. The pros and cons of mental training during infancy are highlighted by means of practical coaching and the implementation of the findings in scripts of movements already mastered and are compared with the results of adolescent athletes in order to see if a suitable approach to mental training can be found for children. In spite of improved movements by both athletes, significant variations appear between the athletes during infancy and adolescence, showing that mental training can only be used to a very limited extent for learning movements during infancy.