Psychological skills training, as an essential component of competitive sports training, is currently a popular method widely applied to enhance athletes’ performance. Particularly for adolescent athletes, psychological training not only helps them perform at their best in competitive settings but also promotes the comprehensive development of their psychological qualities. However, current research primarily focuses on adult populations, and studies targeting adolescents still have certain limitations. This article aims to review the impact of psychological skills training on the sports performance of adolescent athletes by analyzing the content, methods, and findings of existing research. It summarizes the shortcomings of current studies and provides suggestions for future research. Method: Using keywords such as “Psychological Skills Training”, “ports performance”, and “adolescent athletes”, we searched multiple databases such as China National Knowledge Infrastructure, Wanfang Database Full Text in November 2024. Different psychological skills training methods play a significant and positive role in enhancing the competitive performance of adolescent athletes, strengthening their psychological resilience, improving their team collaboration abilities, and reducing competition-related anxiety and tension. Currently, most research on psychological interventions in competitive sports suffers from issues of selection bias. Additionally, psychological intervention experiments often struggle to achieve complete blinding, as participants may be aware that they are receiving interventions. Due to the limited number of specific athletes, study sample sizes are typically small. If larger-scale samples could be used, more compelling conclusions might be drawn. On the other hand, there is still a scarcity of research on the specific mechanisms through which these interventions work. Therefore, it is necessary to strengthen the measurement and exploration of psychological variables to gain a deeper understanding of the psychological processes underlying intervention effects. This would further distinguish the effects of different interventions, enabling more targeted implementation of relevant interventions. Moreover, most studies focus on measuring short-term effects post-intervention, lacking systematic research on the long-term impacts on adolescent athletes. Additionally, individual differences are often not fully considered. Factors such as personality, psychological developmental stage, and cultural background of adolescent athletes may influence the effectiveness of psychological training, yet current research rarely delves into these aspects.
Lingzhi He (Thu,) studied this question.