ABSTRACT
How to help athletes enhance their performance is a never-ending mission for all stakeholders involved in sport contexts, including athletes, coaches, and sport psychology practitioners. Even the highest-level athletes face various challenges in high-level sport competitions. The key for athletes to become successful is being able to cope with such challenges and keep improving their sport performance, no matter what adversity they encounter. This chapter introduces the theoretical origin of the mindfulness-based contextual approach for performance enhancement, defines mindfulness, discusses how mindfulness can help enhance athletic sport performance, and considers the application of mindfulness training in sport. Recognizing the limitations of traditional psychological skills training, mindfulness training has been applied to athletic performance enhancement for the past 15 years. Empirical support for the effectiveness of the mindfulness training programmes has been preliminarily established with a series of studies on athletes from a variety of individual and team sports.
