Loading field map
Should an athlete about to take a game-winning free throw try to calm their racing heart and block out distracting thoughts? Or should they accept the adrenaline and the noise, let the thoughts pass, and act on their training? This tension—between controlling internal states and accepting them—has driven the development of mental skills training (MST) in sport psychology for over half a century. MST is the applied subfield that designs and delivers psychological techniques to help athletes perform at their best. Its history is not a simple story of progress but a series of competing answers to a single question: what is the right relationship between an athlete's mind and their performance?
From the 1960s through the end of the twentieth century, the dominant answer was clear: athletes should learn to control their thoughts, emotions, and arousal levels. This approach, called Psychological Skills Training (PST), emerged when sport psychologists began adapting techniques from clinical and cognitive-behavioral psychology for the athletic context. Pioneers such as Richard Suinn and Rainer Martens developed structured, multi-phase programs that treated mental skills as trainable competencies, much like physical skills.
A typical PST program unfolds in three phases. The first, education, helps athletes understand how psychological factors—anxiety, confidence, focus—affect performance. The second, acquisition, teaches specific techniques: arousal regulation (breathing, progressive relaxation, or activation strategies), imagery (mentally rehearsing movements and outcomes), self-talk (replacing negative or distracting internal dialogue with task-relevant cues), and goal-setting for confidence and motivation. The third, practice, integrates these skills into simulated and real competition settings until they become automatic.
PST's philosophical commitment is to control. The assumption is that unwanted internal experiences—nervousness, doubt, intrusive thoughts—interfere with performance and should therefore be managed, reduced, or replaced. This cognitive-behavioral logic worked well for many athletes, and PST became the standard of practice. Yet by the 1990s, practitioners noticed a paradox: athletes who tried hardest to suppress anxiety sometimes became more anxious, and the effort to control every thought could itself disrupt focus. This observation opened the door to alternative frameworks.
Even while PST dominated applied work, a different model of optimal performance was taking shape. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Flow Theory, introduced in the mid-1970s and still influential today, describes a state of complete absorption in an activity where self-consciousness disappears, time distorts, and action feels effortless. Flow is characterized by a balance between challenge and skill, clear goals, immediate feedback, and intense concentration on the present moment.
Flow Theory did not emerge as a direct competitor to PST, but it posed a quiet challenge. In flow, athletes do not deliberately control their internal states; they are too immersed in the activity itself. The paradox for mental training is that the very effort to control one's mind can block the conditions that make flow possible. A basketball player who constantly monitors her arousal level and checks her self-talk may never lose herself in the game. Flow Theory thus introduced a different vision of peak performance—one that does not require the athlete to be a manager of internal experience but rather to create the environmental and psychological conditions under which absorption can occur naturally.
For MST practitioners, Flow Theory offered a valuable lens for understanding what athletes were actually experiencing during their best performances. It did not replace PST—many athletes still benefit from arousal regulation and imagery—but it broadened the conversation. If peak states are characterized by effortless attention rather than deliberate control, then mental training might need to include strategies for letting go, not just strategies for taking charge.
The most direct challenge to PST's control orientation arrived around the turn of the millennium with the Mindfulness-Acceptance-Commitment (MAC) approach, developed by Frank Gardner and Zella Moore. MAC draws on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), a third-wave cognitive-behavioral therapy that rejects the premise that unwanted thoughts and emotions must be changed or eliminated. Instead, MAC teaches athletes to notice internal experiences without judging or struggling against them, to accept discomfort as a natural part of performance, and to commit to actions aligned with their values.
This is not a minor adjustment to PST; it is a philosophical disagreement about the nature of mental interference. PST assumes that thoughts like "I'm going to choke" cause choking and must be replaced. MAC assumes that such thoughts are just thoughts—they become problematic only when the athlete fights them, gets entangled in them, or lets them dictate behavior. The goal is not to control the mind but to change one's relationship to it.
In practice, MAC involves mindfulness exercises (breath awareness, body scans, open monitoring of thoughts), acceptance training (learning to allow discomfort without reacting), and values clarification (identifying what matters in sport and life, then committing to actions that serve those values). Empirical studies have shown that MAC can reduce anxiety, improve focus, and enhance performance, often with effects comparable to or exceeding traditional PST. The approach has been particularly influential in sports where pressure is high and thoughts are hard to control, such as golf, shooting, and gymnastics.
Today, PST, Flow Theory, and MAC coexist as active frameworks within mental skills training, each with a distinct role. PST remains the most widely taught and practiced approach, especially for athletes who respond well to structured skill-building and who find that arousal regulation and self-talk genuinely help. Flow Theory continues to inform how coaches and psychologists design practice environments—setting clear goals, balancing challenge and skill, providing immediate feedback—to increase the likelihood of peak experiences. MAC has gained a strong foothold in both research and applied settings, particularly for athletes who struggle with the paradoxical effects of trying to control their thoughts.
Practitioners often choose between PST and MAC based on the athlete's personality and the nature of the performance challenge. An athlete who is already prone to overthinking may benefit more from acceptance-based strategies than from additional cognitive techniques. An athlete who lacks basic self-regulation skills may need PST's concrete tools before they can benefit from mindfulness. Many practitioners now integrate elements of both, teaching athletes when to control and when to accept.
What the leading frameworks agree on is that mental skills are learnable and that psychological preparation matters for performance. They disagree on the fundamental mechanism: PST sees internal control as the path to consistency; MAC sees acceptance and values-driven action as the path; Flow Theory suggests that the best performances happen when the athlete stops trying to manage the mind altogether. This disagreement is not a weakness of the subfield but a sign of its maturity. Different athletes, different sports, and different moments within a single competition may call for different relationships between the athlete and their inner experience. The task of mental skills training is no longer to find the one right method but to understand when each framework applies.
The evolution from PST to Flow to MAC has also expanded the goals of mental skills training beyond performance. MAC, in particular, has brought attention to athlete well-being, mental health, and the sustainability of a sporting career. The subfield now asks not only "Does this technique improve performance?" but also "Does it help the athlete thrive?" This broader concern reflects a growing recognition that the mind is not a machine to be optimized but a dynamic system to be understood, accepted, and sometimes simply allowed to be.