Mental skill training to enhance sport motivation in adolescents

Adolescence is a period of strong changes for individuals; it can cause an important load of stressful stimuli with consequent anxious states with different intensity (Ferron et al., 1984). A large number of studies demonstrated that practicing sports and physical activity can lead to a large number of benefits for physical and mental health and can increase the vitality (Bouchard, Blair, & Haskell, 2007; Pelletier, Vallerand, & Sarrazin, 2007) and the improvement of some psychological and social factors in adolescents, such as self-esteem, mental well-being, academic performance and relationships with parents (Slutzky & Simpkins, 2009, Liu et al, 2014). Even if these benefits are known by the most part of people and the culture of an active lifestyle is broadening, there’s a large number of people that stop participation or start to have a sedentary lifstyle (Sarrazin, Boiché, & Pelletier, 2007). According to Self Determination Theory (Ryan & Deci, 2007), the engagement in sport can be determined by factors as rewards, evaluations, pressure or by opinions from others (Ryan & Deci, 2007), definided as external or/andpeople can be moved by interest, curiosity or the desire for improvement. It can be useful to act at different levels in order to maintain sport participation. According to Hodge, Sleivert and Mackenzie (1996), Mental Skill Training can be a valid method to foster motivation, throughout goal setting, self-talk, relaxation and imagery. Our study had the aim to investigate the relationship between a mental skill training program and the level of sport motivation of a group of teenage swimmer athletes