Abstract:
For the past three decades performance development in sport has been steered by
traditional Psychological Skills Training (PST) programmes. However, in the last
decade, the Mindfulness-Acceptance-Commitment (MAC) approach to
performance development in sport has been introduced. To date, there is limited
research on the MAC approach and there are currently no published studies in
South Africa. The goal of this study was to explore the participant’s experiences of
the MAC programme with reference to what they learnt through the programme,
how they applied their learning to their swimming and how they transferred their
learning to their lives. This study is an Interpretive Phenomenological view of five
adolescent swimmers (two female and three male) at the High Performance Centre
(hpc), in South Africa (SA). The participants partook in a one-day swimmingspecific
MAC programme and thereafter, semi-structured interviews were
conducted with the participants. An interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA)
was used for analysing the data gained from the interviews. The findings indicate
that the participants had experiences which were consistent, inconsistent or unique
in relation to the literature review.
