ABSTRACT
Mindfulness For Performance is a programme that has been developed over 15 years. It aims to help athletes maintain effective attentional focus regardless of the disruptive sensations and thoughts induced by the performance situation. It is inspired by Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction and Acceptance Commitment Therapy programmes and has been adapted to the specificities of sport. It is composed of three steps: (a) psychoeducation and identification of the focus of attention, (b) mindfulness and acceptance training, and (c) integrating skills acquired into training and competition. This article reports the effects of MFP in two studies in national basketball players and in young table tennis players. The first study showed that mindfulness skills and free-throw accuracy during basketball games increased more in the experimental group than in the control group. Table tennis results revealed that participants who showed the highest percentage of adherence to the programme benefited more from MFP training in terms of performance outcome (i.e., accumulated points collected from published results compared with the baseline phase) than participants who showed weaker percentages of adherence to the programme. Both studies provided some evidence on the effects of MFP on specific performance indicators (i.e., free-throw accuracy in basketball and ranking points in table tennis), but this needs to be confirmed by further research measuring other relevant performance indicators. The impact and conditions of adherence also deserve more consideration.
Subject(s)
Basketball , Mindfulness , Tennis , Athletes , HumansABSTRACT
Our goal for this study was to adapt the Mindfulness Inventory for Sport (MIS) into written Arabic that would be easily understood in North African countries (Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco or TAM). Assessment tools in Arabic, such as this MIS-TAM version, are rare but essential for evaluating the effectiveness of sport psychology interventions. We adopted a committee approach to obtain a first Arabic version of the MIS. We asked a team of translators to adapt the items to the level of understanding of 13-year-old athletes by selecting words common to the culture of the three countries. The validation process underwent three phases. In Study 1, we tested MIS-TAM for clarity and deemed it acceptable. In Study 2 we tested the construct validity of two different models with confirmatory factorial analyses. These analyses confirmed that the structure of the 15-item MIS-TAM was psychometrically similar to the original version; it had a first order model encompassing three dimensions: Awareness, Non-Judgement and Refocusing. Analyses also found the internal consistency of the MIS-TAM acceptable. We assessed convergent validity in Study 3 with the Mindfulness Attention Awareness Scale, but no correlations between the two instruments were significant. In conclusion, the MIS-TAM has acceptable psychometric properties, though further work is needed regarding convergent validity. The rigorous work of translation and adaptation focused on shared linguistics in three target countries, and this questionnaire will also prove useful in other countries where Arabic is the main language.
