ABSTRACT
Athletes in talent development programmes must improve their performance enormously to reach the top. Multidimensional personal characteristics such as anthropometric, physiological, technical, tactical, and psychological skills underlie their development; always in and with the environment. Although the value of training is acknowledged and the theory of deliberate practice (i.e., 10.000 hours or 10 years to reach elite level) well known (Ericsson, 1996) relatively little is known about which training behaviour is beneficial for performance development. This is also true for speed skating, a popular sport in the Netherlands. Recent studies on self-regulated learning in talented athletes have revealed that self-regulated learning skills play a distinguishing role at the highest levels of performance (Jonker et al., 2010; Toering et al., 2009). Moreover, studies examining self-regulated learning in sport training showed that experts have a higher degree of self-regulated learning skills than non-experts or novices (Cleary and Zimmerman, 2001; Kitsantas and Zimmerman, 2002). Especially, reflection is a very important self-regulatory skill in talented athletes (Jonker et al., 2012). Additionally, goal orientation is related to the level of performance. The research of Van Yperen and Duda (1999) among talented soccer players showed that an increase in skilled performance over the season corresponded to a stronger task orientation. However, the knowledge of theoretical processes underpinning behaviour will only be meaningful if it can be related to real-world, overt behavior (Toering et al., 2011). Specifically, for practical application and implementation of psychological constructs in talent development, it is important to know how these theoretical constructs are expressed in the actual behaviour of an athlete. Moreover, there is very little research with respect to behaviour in the sport context (Toering et al., 2011; Young and Starkes, 2006a; Young and Starkes, 2006b).
