Effects of Mental Energy and Flow on Sport and Exercise Performance: Why Adding Cognitive Tasks to Physical Warmups Enhance Athletic Performance

About the Project

Background: This project will evaluate the effects of adding brief mental drills to standard physical warmup drills on subsequent sport and/or exercise performance. The performance tasks have yet to be decided (e.g., they could be endurance or resistance exercise tasks or they could be relevant to a team sport such as football, hockey or rugby or they could be relevant to an individual sport such as swimming, tennis or golf). The rationale for the project is our latest research showing that adding very brief cognitive tasks to standard physical warmup activities can improve subsequent sport and exercise performance more than standard warmup alone. The project will extend our understanding of the performance enhancing priming effect associated with combined warmups.

What you will learn: How to assess sport and/or exercise performance. How to use an app to train and assess cognition and psychobiological state (e.g., heart rate variability). How to program cognitive priming tasks designed to improve subsequent sport and/or exercise performance. How to assess the psychobiological state induced by warmup (priming) activities. How to understand their role in sport and/or exercise performance.

Academic Background: You must have an undergraduate degree in sport and exercise science or psychology with an upper second or first class degree classification or equivalent. Ideally, you will have a masters degree too (merit or distinction). Experience/interest in sport and exercise performance and/or coaching would be expected.

Funding: You must self-fund your studies. The university has no funding.