Title: Evaluation of the Mental Skills of the High Level Athletes: Example of the Athletes of Martial Arts
Abstract: The domain of sport competition is developing every day so the athletes nearly have the same physical abilities and have different mental skills.Therefore, it is not possible to ignore the role of mental skills to achieve maximum performance, Heever (2007).Most sport psychologists believed that in recent years the coaches and athletes have concluded that they need psychological skills more than physical skills in order to achieve their goals, Behboudi (2007).The purpose of the present study was to compare some psychological skills of the martial arts high level athletes (judokas, boxers, wrestlers and karate as) in Tunisia.152 volunteer athletes of martial sports (95 Judokas, 15 Wrestlers, 12 Boxers and 30 karate as) including 89 men and 63 women answered the Ottawa Mental Skills Assessment Tools (version 4).This questionnaire assessed three categories of mental skills: fundamental skills, psycho-somatic skills and cognitive skills.The results revealed mean differences for all the mental skills between the different activities in the benefit of judokas but this differences was not significant.Despite this difference in averages, the analysis of the 12 mental skills by gender is significant only for the control of fear (significant atp <0.05.