Today sport takes a special place in our fast-paced and eventful life.
Sport not only ensures the physical development of a person but also contributes to the education of his moral and volitional qualities. The health-improving effect of exercise on the human body has been known since ancient times. Many generations of Greek doctors and philosophers in their writings emphasized the importance of physical activity for overcoming disease states and prolonging life.
Even Aristotle said: "Life requires movement", "Nothing drains and destroys a person like prolonged physical inactivity."
Avicenna in his work "Canon of Medicine" wrote that if you exercise and follow a normal hygienic regime, there will be no need to use drugs ...
Despite the enormous social significance of sports, one cannot fail to notice that the motivating basis for doing sports of the highest achievements is in the field of egocentrism. A strong desire to realize one's egocentric nature finds a most favorable basis in sports. And sport, as a rule, obeys people with a pronounced desire for self-affirmation, for glory, for superiority. On this path, they often demonstrate unparalleled feats, overcoming their weaknesses, fatigue, pain, danger, side obstacles, etc. In my opinion, it is appropriate to compare elite sport with a kind of cult: athletes have their own rules, rituals, clothes, symbols, hymns; they renounce in the name of their goal - the podium - a symbol of highlighting their own "I" - from the many joys of a common man in the street ...
It is quite obvious that the specificity of sport lies in the tireless development of sensorimotor skills, in the highest requirements for the volitional qualities of athletes, in the abundance of stressful situations, and finally, in entertainment. Today there are a huge number of sports, but they are all united by such requirements for participants in this type of activity as systematic training and participation in sports competitions. On the one hand, the development of effective methods of sports training is impossible without studying the characteristic features and patterns of sports activity, and on the other hand, without thorough attention to the personality of an athlete as a subject of this type of activity.
So, sports psychology is one of the areas of psychology that study the specifics of specific types of human activity, such as, for example, labor psychology, game psychology, educational psychology. What is the difference between sports activity and all other human activities? The specificity of sport is in the highest motivation, which allows you to subject yourself to many years of daily physical and mental state to achieve victory in competitions. It is through this motivation that sport has become an excellent natural platform for demonstrating human capabilities.
The eternal "foundation" of this motivation is the constant comparison of one's results with the achievements of other athletes, the involvement of the athlete and the team in the centuries-old achievements of physical culture, daily comprehension of the essence of the human body, nature, and technology, the possibility of realizing one's abilities, self-realization, self-affirmation. We can say that in the "coordinate system" of other branches of psychology, sports psychology occupies a middle position among the natural, philosophical, and social scientific disciplines.