Trait mindfulness and competitive-race flow in swimmers: the mediating role of attentional control

Background and purpose Mindfulness training benefits athletes’ psychological states and performance, but how mindfulness translates into competitive experience remains unclear. This study examines whether attentional control is the psychological pathway from trait mindfulness to race flow in competitive swimmers, and whether this pathway extends to objective pacing accuracy.

Methods: A prospective, multi-wave observational design measured trait mindfulness (T1), attentional control (T1/T2), and race flow (post-race) at separate time points. The main analysis included 280 adult swimmers who had trained for over 3 years and whose main event included the 400 m freestyle. Near-race attentional control served as the mediator and baseline attentional control as a covariate; competitive anxiety and level were controlled. A mediation model with cluster-robust standard errors (clustered by team) was applied, and the indirect effect was estimated with 5,000 bias-corrected bootstrap samples. Pacing accuracy was an exploratory downstream outcome.

Results: Attentional control accounted for the association between trait mindfulness and race flow (indirect effect 0.127, 95% CI [0.071, 0.192]; mediated proportion 43.4%), with a significant direct effect, indicating partial mediation; the attentional control–flow path was the strongest link. At the between-person level, race flow did not predict late-race pacing deviation, and no flow dimension was significant after correction. The reverse mediation test was also significant, limiting interpretation to temporal-order inference.

Conclusion: The findings characterise attentional control as a psychological pathway linking trait mindfulness to race flow, but this study did not find sufficient evidence that the pathway extends to objective pacing. The study was not preregistered and is not a clinical trial.