Chin-Up Mentality

Evidence base & methodology

How the Mental Performance Profile is grounded in the sport psychology literature, and what that grounding does and doesn't mean.

What "grounded in the research" means here

Each of the six domains in the profile — Confidence, Composure, Motivation, Focus, Resilience, and Team Chemistry — maps onto a construct with a substantial, peer-reviewed research base in sport and exercise psychology, cited below. The check-in items were written specifically for this platform to reflect those constructs.

They are not reproductions of any published instrument's actual items. Validated instruments like the SMTQ, TOPS-2, CSAI-2R, and the Group Environment Questionnaire are the copyrighted work of their original authors and publishers, and using their exact items commercially requires their permission. If a program specifically wants results from one of those exact, validated instruments — for research purposes, for example — that requires licensing it directly from the copyright holder, not something this platform does on your behalf.

What this profile is — and isn't

This is a self-report mental performance snapshot, intended to give athletes and coaching staff a shared, coachable picture of the mental side of performance — not a clinical or diagnostic psychological assessment. It measures how an athlete currently sees their own mental skills, not a health status.

It also hasn't yet been through its own independent reliability and validity testing as a standalone instrument — that's a natural next step (see below), and something to be transparent about with any program using it.

Where the score bands come from

The Strength / Developing / Priority focus bands currently use provisional cutoffs (70 and 45, on a 0-100 scale) rather than cutoffs derived from normative data. As more athletes use the platform, those cutoffs can be recalibrated against your own population's actual score distribution, which is the standard path toward a properly normed instrument.

Sources