James Barraclough
I currently work as a lecturer in sport at the Manchester College. I am also under 14s coach at a Championship football club's academy. My third role is as a sport performance (psychology) consultant specialising in football and mixed martial arts.
@sportpsychjimbo
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There is a theory (K Anders Ericsson) that it requires 10,000 hours of 'deliberate practice' or 10 years (1,000 hours per year, 2.75 hours per day!) to become an expert in a given field. Although there are big holes in this theory (namely individual differences in acquiring skill and the...
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Imagery has many uses not just in sport, but pretty much any occupation where motor (learnt) skills need to be performed to a high standard (such as surgery), as well as something as mundane as trying to remember a shopping list. Within sport it can be used for many different tasks from mental...
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Everyone has an inner voice which can be either helpful or unhelpful – the angel on one shoulder (helpful) and the devil on the other (unhelpful). It is vital to remember that the devil is only your brain playing tricks on you and to pay more attention to the angel! As Ralph Charrell...
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The above question has been posed countless times and explored in many ways since the advent of talent identification in professional sport (and other domains for that matter e.g. music). Many early theorists believed that talent was innate, you either have an inborn ‘gift’ or you don’t. This, on its...
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I was originally going to write a post just about the power of the placebo effect in sport after watching the film Senna. This led me to watch another documentary about him on YouTube titled “Ayrton Senna: the Right to Win” – full subtitled version at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShPc3nY5m5w After watching this,...
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This may seem like a strange question. Surely, mankind would not have got where we are today without the focused and intense ‘brainstorming’ of our finest intellectuals forcing ideas out of their minds by hard concentration (what author Guy Claxton refers to as d-mode for ‘default’). D-mode is what we...
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Sportspeople often talk about being ‘in the zone’, but I’m sure many are unaware of what this actually means. The zone in question to give it it’s full title is the ‘zone of optimal functioning’ or when an athlete performs to their absolute maximum – has the perfect game. That...