Psychological Skills and “the Paras”: The Indirect Effects of Psychological Skills on Endurance

We examined the indirect effects of basic psychological skills (PS) on military endurance through enhanced advanced PS while controlling for fitness. British Army recruits (n = 159) participated in three endurance events for Parachute Regiment selection and completed an adapted Test of Performance Strategies questionnaire (Hardy et al., 2010 Hardy, L., Roberts, R., Thomas, P. R., & Murphy, S. M. (2010). Test of performance strategies (TOPS): Instrument refinement using confirmatory factor analysis. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 11, 27–35. doi:10.1016/j.psychsport.2009.04.007[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). Following confirmatory factor analyses, the multiple mediation regression analyses using PROCESS (Hayes, 2013 Hayes, A.F. (2013). Introduction to mediation, moderation and conditional process analysis: A regression-based approach. New York, NY: Guilford Press. [Google Scholar]) suggested that goal setting, imagery and relaxation all had positive indirect effects on endurance via activation, with goal setting also impacting on endurance via negative thinking. These data provide some support for basic PS influencing endurance via advanced PS.