Stress Related Sports Injuries
Physical factors are one the primary cause of injuries in sports and exercise for instance, a poor tackle in football, an awkward landing in gymnastics or poor warm-ups in sprinting. However, psychological researchers are continuing to show that thoughts, perceptions and aspects of personality may be linked to the incidence of injury.
Stress and athletic injury
Past research has seen the relationship between athletic injuries and psychological factors as essentially stress-related (1). In this sense, stress is predicted to produce increased state anxiety and consequently alterations in attentional focus and muscular tension. It is important to note that stress does not exist outside the individual “ not all people respond negatively to potentially stressful situations; one person may view a championship match as exciting and exhilarating while another becomes anxious and chokes. This will usually depend on the individual 's personality traits (perceptual bias) and the coping response present.
The importance of coping mechanisms will be discussed further towards the end of this paper but at this point it is useful to point out that between stress and its consequences are positioned individual coping strategies. Learning to cope with stress can avoid such negative symptoms as attentional disruption and muscular tension.
In situations seen as stressful, athletes will often report attentional narrowing and excessive muscular tension, which are thought to increase the chances of sustaining an injury. Having a flexible attentional focus is an important attribute in many fast sporting activities that require both narrow (focusing on perhaps just one environmental cue) and broad focus (focusing on peripheral cues such as the positioning of other team members or opponents) at different times during play.
Stress can cause attentional narrowing which results in important peripheral cues being missed. For example, the football player that only attends to the ball may
Stress and athletic injury
Past research has seen the relationship between athletic injuries and psychological factors as essentially stress-related (1). In this sense, stress is predicted to produce increased state anxiety and consequently alterations in attentional focus and muscular tension. It is important to note that stress does not exist outside the individual “ not all people respond negatively to potentially stressful situations; one person may view a championship match as exciting and exhilarating while another becomes anxious and chokes. This will usually depend on the individual 's personality traits (perceptual bias) and the coping response present.
The importance of coping mechanisms will be discussed further towards the end of this paper but at this point it is useful to point out that between stress and its consequences are positioned individual coping strategies. Learning to cope with stress can avoid such negative symptoms as attentional disruption and muscular tension.
In situations seen as stressful, athletes will often report attentional narrowing and excessive muscular tension, which are thought to increase the chances of sustaining an injury. Having a flexible attentional focus is an important attribute in many fast sporting activities that require both narrow (focusing on perhaps just one environmental cue) and broad focus (focusing on peripheral cues such as the positioning of other team members or opponents) at different times during play.
Stress can cause attentional narrowing which results in important peripheral cues being missed. For example, the football player that only attends to the ball may
References: (1) Weinberg, RS, & Gould, D (2005). Foundations of Sport and Exercise Psychology. Champaign, Ill. Human Kinetics. (2) Andersen, MB, & Williams, JM (2006). 'A model of stress and athletic injury: Prediction and prevention '. Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 10, 294-306. (3) Smith, RE, Smoll, FL, & Ptacek, JT (2005). 'Conjunctive moderator variables in vulnerability and resilience research: Life stress, social support and coping skills and adolescent sport injuries '. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 58(2), 360-369. (4) Junge, A (2007). 'The influence of psychological factors on sports reviews: review of the literature '. American Journal of Sports Medicine, 28 (5 supp), S10-S15. (5) Yan, J (2005) 'Personality of injured college students majoring in gymnastics '. Journal of Shanghai Physical Education Institute, 21(1), 37-41. (6) Williams, JM, & Andersen, MB (2006). 'Psychological antecedents of sport injury: review and critique of the stress and injury model '. Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, 10 (1), 5-25. (7) Rotella, RJ, & Heyman, SR (2006). 'Stress, injury and the psyhologica education of athletes '. In JM Williams (Ed), Applied Sport Psychology: Personal growth to peak performance (pp. 343-364). Palo Alto, CA. Mayfield. (8) Gould, D, Finch, LM, & Jackson, A (2007). 'Coping strategies used by national champion figure skaters '. Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport, 64(4), 453-468.