Integrated mindfulness-based intervention: Effects on mindfulness skills, cognitive interference and performance satisfaction of young elite badminton players

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychsport.2019.101638Get rights and content

Highlights

  • The 8-week Mindfulness Badminton Integrated (MBI) programme is presented.

  • This study evaluated the MBI’s impact through a mixed methods approach.

  • The MBI did not lead to clear improvement when compared to an active control group.

  • Social validation provided additional insights into overall perceptions of the MBI.

  • The findings have implications for researchers and practitioners.

Abstract

Objectives

Mindfulness- and acceptance-based interventions (MABI) in sport settings need further development and validation to fulfil the desired outcomes related to sport performance. The current study aimed to design and implement a MABI integrated into the badminton training of young elite players (MBI programme), and to investigate its impact on sport performance-related outcomes.

Design

Two stages: (a) design and implementation of the MBI programme, and (b) evaluation using a mixed methods approach.

Method

Participants were young elite badminton players, assigned either to the 8-week MBI programme (n = 18; Mage = 16.22), or the 8-week placebo programme (n = 11; Mage = 16.64). Participants completed pre- and post-intervention measures of mindfulness skills, cognitive interference, and performance satisfaction. Social validation interviews were conducted with MBI participants to collect their overall perceptions of the programme.

Results

MANCOVA indicated a large intervention effect on the main outcome variables (partial η2 = 0.58). The results of univariate ANCOVAs showed that post-intervention awareness, performance worries and task-irrelevant thoughts differed significantly across the groups. In addition, follow-up t-tests provided additional information regarding changes from pre- to post-intervention among the MBI and control groups separately. Social validation data gave further insights into what athletes had retained and applied from the MBI programme.

Conclusions

Contrasting results highlighted the need to better explore mindfulness mechanisms in MABI and the way they are inter-related, in order to strengthen changes in sport performance-related outcomes.

Section snippets

Development of the Mindfulness Badminton Integrated programme

The MBI programme was designed by our research team, which has solid experience in sport psychology counselling and especially in the implementation of MABI for athletes (8 years on average). The MBI programme was developed as an adaptation of the MAC (Gardner & Moore, 2007) and other previous mindfulness interventions conducted with elite athletes (Bernier et al., 2009, 2014). Following the MAC’s principles (i.e., psychoeducation, mindfulness, cognitive defusion, goal-driven behaviour,

Questionnaire results

Table 2 shows the means and standard deviations of the main variables for the badminton players in the MBI group and control group at pre- and post-intervention.

Pre-intervention comparisons. Firstly, the groups’ characteristic comparisons showed that there was no significant difference between the groups of badminton players in age (F(1, 27) = 0.99, p = 0.33), badminton playing experience (F(1, 27) = 0.97, p = 0.33), or number of hours’ training per week (F(1, 27) = 0.80, p = 0.38). In

Discussion

The current study aimed to design and implement an integrated MABI (i.e., the MBI programme) for badminton training and performance settings, and to investigate its impact through a mixed methods approach (Huynh et al., 2019). Firstly, its effects on the mindfulness skills (i.e., awareness, acceptance, refocusing), cognitive interference (i.e., disruptive thoughts), and performance satisfaction of young elite badminton players were assessed from a quantitative approach and compared to an active

Conclusion

The design, implementation and evaluation of the MBI programme led to contrasting results when compared to an active group control. While the MBI programme appeared to improve awareness skill and decrease task-irrelevant thoughts, the results also suggested the need to take into account the concurrent development of mindfulness skills to prevent potential counterproductive effects, such as on performance worries (Farias & Wikholm, 2016; Gardner & Moore, 2012; Lindsay & Creswell, 2017). As such,

Funding

This research was supported by a grant (no.15r16) from the Ministère chargé des Sports (i.e., the French Ministry of Sports) and INSEP (i.e., the French Institute of Sport).

Declaration of competing interest

Julie Doron and Marc Jubeau have received research grants from French Ministry of Sports. Quentin Rouault and Marjorie Bernier have collaborated to this research project. All the authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the athletes and coaches who took part in the study, the French Federation of Badminton for organization support, Anthony Mette who conducted placebo intervention based on relaxation sessions, Maël Goisbault for qualitative data transcription and Jean-Philippe Lachaux for his expert advice on the protocol.

Julie DORON was, at the time of the first submission, a researcher at the French Institute of Sport (INSEP), Research Department, Laboratory of Sport, Expertise and Performance (EA 7370), Paris, France. She is now an associate professor at the University of Nantes, Laboratory Movement - Interactions - Performance (EA 4334), Faculty of Sport Sciences, Nantes, France. At the time of this research,

References (48)

  • D. Birrer et al.

    Psychological skills training as a way to enhance an athlete's performance in high-intensity sports

    Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports

    (2010)
  • D. Birrer et al.

    Riding the Third Wave: CBT and Mindfulness-Based Interventions in Sport Psychology

    In Zizzi, S. J. & Andersen, M. B. (Eds.), Being Mindful in Sport and Exercise Psychology

    (2017)
  • D. Birrer et al.

    Mindfulness to enhance athletic performance: Theoretical considerations and possible impact mechanisms

    Mindfulness

    (2012)
  • R.M. Briegel-Jones et al.

    A preliminary investigation into the effect of yoga practice on mindfulness and flow in elite youth swimmers

    The Sport Psychologist

    (2013)
  • L. Bühlmayer et al.

    Effects of mindfulness practice on performance-relevant parameters and performance outcomes in sports: A meta-analytical review

    Sports Medicine

    (2017)
  • S. Carletto et al.

    The effectiveness of a body-affective mindfulness intervention for multiple sclerosis patients with depressive symptoms: A randomized controlled clinical trial

    Frontiers in Psychology

    (2017)
  • B.A. Cayoun

    Mindfulness-integrated CBT: Principles and practice

    (2011)
  • M. Farias et al.

    Has the science of mindfulness lost its mind?

    BJPsych Bulletin

    (2016)
  • F.L. Gardner et al.

    The psychology of human performance: The mindfulness-acceptance-commitment approach

    (2007)
  • F.L. Gardner et al.

    Mindfulness and acceptance models in sport psychology: A decade of basic and applied scientific advancements

    Canadian Psychology/Psychologie Canadienne

    (2012)
  • F.R. Goodman et al.

    A brief mindfulness and yoga intervention with an entire NCAA Division I athletic team: An initial investigation

    Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice

    (2014)
  • L. Haase et al.

    A pilot study investigating changes in neural processing after mindfulness training in elite athletes

    Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience

    (2015)
  • A. Hatzigeorgiadis et al.

    Assessing cognitive interference in sport: Development of the thought occurrence questionnaire for sport

    Anxiety, Stress & Coping

    (2000)
  • S.C. Hayes et al.

    Acceptance and commitment therapy: An experiential approach to behavior change

    (1999)
  • Cited by (17)

    • Examining the roles of experiential avoidance and cognitive fusion on the effects from mindfulness to athlete burnout: A longitudinal study

      2023, Psychology of Sport and Exercise
      Citation Excerpt :

      According to the psychological flexibility/inflexibility theoretical framework of ACT (Hayes, 2004), increases in mindfulness levels can contribute to the reduction of psychopathology via the reduction of mindlessness, experiential avoidance, cognitive fusion, and psychological inflexibility (Levin et al., 2012). Indeed, preliminary evidence has been established that the mindfulness-based interventions are effective on reducing the experiential avoidance (Goodman et al., 2014; Zhang Si et al., 2016), cognitive interference of disruptive thoughts (Doron et al., 2020), and athlete burnout (Li et al., 2019). From the perspective of reducing athlete burnout in applied contexts, we expect the effects of ACT-based intervention to produce reliable findings after a relatively long-term mindfulness training (Verhaeghen, 2021).

    • An integrated mindfulness and acceptance-based program for young elite female basketball players: Exploratory study of how it works and for whom it works best

      2022, Psychology of Sport and Exercise
      Citation Excerpt :

      They showed that the athletes perceived an improvement in monitoring their attention to deal with present-moment experiences and focus on the contextual and performance-relevant cues rather than being overwhelmed or distracted by disruptive stimuli (Bernier, Thienot, Pelosse, & Fournier, 2014; Doron et al., 2020; Goodman, Kashdan, Mallard, & Schumann, 2014; Josefsson et al., 2019; Scott-Hamilton et al., 2016; Vidic, Martin, & Oxhandler, 2017). The gap between the quantitative and qualitative results echoes a question previously raised in the literature about the difficulty of measuring mindfulness skills accurately with the use of self-report questionnaires (Doron et al., 2020; Longshore & Sachs, 2015; Shankland, Kotsou, Cuny, Strub, & Brown, 2017). Shankland et al. (2017) pointed out that participants generally tend to rate their awareness higher prior to a MABI precisely because they are less conscious or unconscious of the fact that their awareness is not as high as they think (Shankland et al., 2017).

    View all citing articles on Scopus

    Julie DORON was, at the time of the first submission, a researcher at the French Institute of Sport (INSEP), Research Department, Laboratory of Sport, Expertise and Performance (EA 7370), Paris, France. She is now an associate professor at the University of Nantes, Laboratory Movement - Interactions - Performance (EA 4334), Faculty of Sport Sciences, Nantes, France. At the time of this research,

    Quentin ROUAULT was a Master student at the University of Nantes, Laboratory Movement - Interactions - Performance (EA 4334), Faculty of Sport Sciences, Nantes, France. He is now a consultant in sport psychology.

    Marc JUBEAU is an associate professor at the University of Nantes, Laboratory Movement - Interactions - Performance (EA 4334), Faculty of Sport Sciences, Nantes, France.

    Marjorie BERNIER is an associate professor at the University of Brest, CREAD (EA 3875), Faculty of Sport Sciences and Education, Brest, France.

    View full text