ABSTRACT

This chapter provides coaches with information on choking under pressure in sport so that they can help their athletes to prevent this from occurring in pressurised situations. Choking is ‘an acute and considerable decrease in skill execution and performance when self-expected standards are normally achievable, which is the result of increased anxiety under perceived pressure’. An athlete’s desire to perform at his or her best, or very close to his or her best, in a competition or match that is deemed to be very important creates performance pressure. As the pressure to perform increases, the athlete tries even harder to control the sequence of movements that make up an entire skill in the hope that the performance of the skill will be more accurate through being more controlled. A pre-performance routine may be more suitable in sports that are self-paced, such as golf, tennis, or for regular free-kick takers in soccer.