How Does Sports Psychology Help in Injury Prevention?

An injury is not only physical pain, but also disrupts daily life: usual routines are limited, such as attending work or school, independence is reduced by not being able to perform essential tasks such as cooking or dressing, changes are generated in personal and family life, and we could continue. In the case of athletes (whether professional or not), the injury takes on a different tone, since it interrupts an extremely significant activity for the person who suffers it.

Their experiences indicate that many of them go through this period with irritability, appear hostile, sad, or frequently have negative thoughts. Although it is a fact inherent to sport – some authors compare an injury with a work accident, in the case of professionals—this phenomenon can be experienced as a catastrophe. And, in some cases, even as an escape from constant exposure to high-stress situations.

Sports psychology has been in charge of studying these psychological variables that emerge after an injury, and has subsequently developed interventions to accompany athletes during this process. However, different researchers in this discipline have reached findings that suggest that psychological factors not only appear after the injury, but, surprisingly, can be the cause of it. Let’s see why this is due and what are the injury prevention strategies that research in sports psychology has developed

Why can psychological factors facilitate the appearance of injuries?

To answer this question, it is necessary to start from the following idea. In scientific research, before being able to develop a prevention plan for a certain problem, it is necessary to have theoretical knowledge to support it. For this reason, injury prevention is only one side of the coin when it comes to the work of sports psychology. The other is to determine at a theoretical level why psychological factors can influence an injury.

That said, sports psychology tends to think that the origin of an injury is multifactorial. Although some injuries have a unicausal origin, related to an undeniable physical substrate (for example, caused in a situation of tackle playing rugby), generally have multiple causes converging at a specific time. The weight of each factor will be greater or less depending on the context in which the accident occurs.

One of these factors is linked to the psychological, and two of the main phenomena that have been studied by researchers as causing injuries are stress and motivation

Stress as a cause of injuries

From a psychosocial point of view, both high-performance athletes and those who practice physical exercise as an amateur or for their well-being are exposed to stressful situations linked to exercise. In the case of professionals, they must face continuous demands for improvement, to the discipline of the team or club to which they belong, and to a demand (both from others and from themselves) for results. For their part, those who do physical exercise for health also face stressful situations, linked to the difficulties they encounter in achieving adherence to their own activity, in feeling good, and in coordinating sport with other areas of life, such as family or work.

To determine how these forms that stress takes can be factors causing an injury—or, at least, how both variables are related—there are two major theoretical models. One of them argues that stress causes a reduction in the subject’s attentional focus, making them prone to injury; while the other maintains that stress causes an excessive increase in muscle tension, inducing the athlete to make less precise movements. Whatever the explanatory theory from which it is investigated, in both cases the influence of stress as a psychological factor is on the table.

Injury and motivation: a paradoxical relationship

The role of motivation in sports practices is a topic widely studied by science. In general terms, motivation has been linked to the need to achieve, a concept that has two aspects: achieving success and avoiding failure.

It is considered that athletes who tend to avoid failure will be focused on the associated feeling of shame, so their performance will be worse in situations of social evaluation such as sport. Therefore, they will evaluate sports activities as stressful, tending to experience them as such, and, consequently, be more susceptible to injury.

However, some of the researchers who have investigated the possible relationship between the motivation of athletes and the risk of suffering injuries have arrived at curious results. In a study carried out with professional handball players, it was found that Athletes with higher levels of motivation also had a higher risk of suffering moderate injuries Paradoxical, right? The interpretation that was developed for these results was that some of the attitudes that both athletes and coaches have and that are linked to motivation – for example, the idea of ​​giving one’s best without thinking about the pain or consequences that it may cause — is related to the emission of risky behaviors. Therefore, this can lead to overtraining and thus the possibility of injury increases.

How can a sports psychologist prevent an injury?

Taking these theoretical elaborations into account, researchers have proposed psychological intervention programs for injury prevention. These focus mostly on the psychological training of general skills (for example, linked to stress management) with the purpose of these having an impact on the incidence of sports injuries.

Some of the contents included in a psychological prevention program for injuries in this area are training in activation control techniques (such as progressive relaxation) and control of the athlete’s attention, images or thoughts. It is also proposed carry out an adjustment of objectives, so that these are realistic while becoming progressively more demanding; Likewise, video analysis and spaces where competition conditions are simulated are also promoted.

Based on this, we could say that the help of sports psychology in injury prevention is two-sided, since it not only generates knowledge about how psychological variables affect the possibility of injuries, but also develops interventions to prevent them.