PSYCHOLOGICAL TRAINING PLAN FOR THE SPORT OF PETANQUE: IN SEARCH OF OPTIMUM GROUP PERFORMANCE

This article describes a study conducted on the Valencian Petanque Federation's regional team during the 2008 National League. Each Autonomous Region in Spain sends a team to compete in the "all against all" category in this league, which takes place over an entire weekend in May 2008. This methodology requires applied and systematic work, not only inside, but also outside the context of sports. At the same time, we achieved goals during this intervention such as: taking advantage of support and boosting confidence to improve self-perception; increasing self-confidence; and even stimulating curiosity to focus attention, motivation and the orientation of thoughts on very specific objectives appropriately. The intervention achieved all this through a detailed cognitive-conductual study that is described in this paper. This psychological training plan may be considered a quick procedure. Furthermore, it can also be applied in concrete interventions, close to the time of main competitions or even shorts competitions; however, the most common application is after a period of learning and adaptation to psychological work in high performance sports.