How does Sports Psychology help in injury prevention?

An injury is not only physical pain, but also interrupts daily life: normal routines are limited, such as going to work or the health center. studies, independence is reduced by not being able to perform essential tasks such as cooking or dressing, changes are also generated in personal and family life, and we could continue In the case of athletes (whether they are professionals or not), the injury takes on a different color, 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, are hostile, sad, or frequently have negative thoughts. Despite the fact that this is an inherent fact of 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 route from constant exposure to high-stress situations.

Sports psychology has been in charge of studying these psychological variables that emerge after a 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 her.

Let's see why this is due and what are the injury prevention strategies that research in sports psychology has developed.

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Why psychological factors can 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 given problem, it is necessary to have theoretical knowledge to support it. For this reason, injury prevention is only one side of the coin as far as the work of sports psychology is concerned. The other is to determine at a theoretical level for what reasons psychological factors can influence an injury.

That said, from sports psychology there is a tendency to think that the origin of an injury is multifactorial. Although some injuries have a single-causal origin, related to an undeniable physical substrate (for example, caused in a situation of tackle playing rugby), generally have multiple converging causes 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.

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Stress as a cause of injuries

From a psychosocial point of view, both high-performance athletes and those who practice amateur physical exercise or for their well-being are exposed to stressful situations related to exercise. In the case of professionals, they must face the 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 to achieve adherence to one's own activity, to feel good, and to coordinate sport with other areas of life, such as the family or the job.

To determine how these forms that stress takes can be factors that cause 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 attentional focus of the subject, making him prone to injury; while the other maintains that stress causes an excessive increase in muscle tension, inducing the athlete to perform less precise movements. Whatever the explanatory theory from which it is investigated, in both cases the influence of stress as a psychological factor is put on the table.

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Injury and motivation: a paradoxical relationship

The role of motivation in sports practices is a subject widely studied by science. In general terms, motivation has been linked to the need to achieve achievement, 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 feeling of associated shame, so their performance will be worse in situations of social evaluation such as sport. Therefore, they will value 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 the athletes and the risk of suffering injuries arrived at results at least curious. 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 moderate injuries. Paradoxical, right? The interpretation that was elaborated for these results was that some of the attitudes that both athletes and coaches have and that are linked to what Motivational -for example, the idea of ​​giving one's best without thinking about the pain or the consequences that it may cause- is related to the emission of behaviors of risk. Therefore, this can lead to overtraining, thereby increasing the chance of injury.

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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 that they have 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 arousal control techniques (such as progressive relaxation) and control of the mind's attention, images, or thoughts sportsman. It is also proposed carry out goal setting, so that these are realistic while becoming progressively more demanding; as well as video analysis and spaces where competition conditions are simulated are promoted.

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