It's not just the 10,000 hours that makes an Olympic medallist. As Swedish psychologist Anders Ericsson has shown, just brute, mindless practice gets you nowhere fast. It is the quality of practice that matters. And that means elite performers have to be, above everything else, elite-level learners. They have to be able to suck every last drop of learning juice out of every last drop of learning juice out of every last drop of learning juice out of every two hours in the pool or on the track. And sports psycholoy has developed a valuable database for helping athletes and sportsmen and women to learn how to learn. They know when and how to amplify direct practice with mental rehearsal, and when to use a first-person perspective - being imaginatively inside your own body, feeling your own feelings and looking out through your own feelings and looking out through your own eyes - and when to stand back, in your mind's eye,and watch your performance from the outside. They know how to cultivate the kind of mental toughness that enables you to maintain you peak performance under the most intense pressure, and to bounce back from a bad sessin and regain your poise. They know how to orchestrate their own training sessions, when to do what and when to allow yourself breaks, so that the most learning happens in the least time. They know how to control their own attention, like a master meditator, so they can watch in minute detail what happens in their right shoulder as they do their tumble turns, or how their mindset regularly collapses during the third lap out of four in training (see Mellalieu & Hanton, 2009, for a good overview).
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