MENTAL FEATURES OF TOP LEVEL ATHLETES.

In the last 50 years, various researchers have investigated the characteristics of the champions, wanting to highlight their personality traits, mental and physical states, the feelings experienced by athletes in the moment when they achieve tremendous performance. The aim of our paper is to identify the level at which physical and mental states are experienced by top athletes when they have achieved remarkable performance. Such information is very important in the self-monitoring process - in competition, self-monitoring enables selfregulation, representing a way of psychological support of top-level athletes. Top-level Romanian athletes from different sports, who won medals at the Olympic Games and World Championships, were investigated. Our research is intended to provide support for athletes who, being aware of the differences between their state at the time t0 (top athletes become aware after the self-monitoring process) and the optimal psychophysical state (specific to the moments when they achieve extraordinary performance), can intervene in order to activate or to relax, being more confident, detaching themselves from external factors or controlling their effort. In competition, self-monitoring makes self-adjustment possible (athletes can manage their own states in order to get closer to the psychological and physical condition for success). The constellation of mental and physical states that facilitates the achievement of superior results in competitions inevitably depends on the gender and age of the athletes and on the practiced sports branch (besides the interindividual differences related to each person's unique and original personality). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]