A theoretical model of stress and athletic injury is presented. The purpose of this paper is to propose a framework for the prediction and prevention of stress-related injuries that includes cognitive, physiological, attentional, behavioral, intrapersonal, social, and stress history variables. Development of the model grew from a synthesis of the stress-illness, stress-accident, and stress-injury literatures. The model and its resulting hypotheses offer a framework for many avenues of research into the nature of injury and reduction of injury risk. Other advantages of the model are that it addresses possible mechanisms behind the stress-injury relationship and suggests several specific interventions that may help diminish the likelihood of injury. The model also has the potential of being applied to the investigation of injury and accident occurrence in general.
The results support the model's suggestion that psychosocial variables, as well as psychologically, based interventions, can influence injury risk among athletes.
Although the parent discipline of sport psychology is psychology, the delivery of sport psychology services has its main roots in physical education and sports science (motor learning and control, skill acquisition). Thus, sport psychologists may look more like coaches than they look like clinicians or counselors. In this article, the authors trace the evolution of sport psychology services and contrast the temporal, spatial, and delivery issues of applied sport psychology with more mainstream counseling and clinical psychology. The looser boundaries of sport psychologist practice have both benefits and dangers, and the authors offer some examples to professional psychologists who are thinking of expanding their delivery of service to athletes and coaches.
This study examined the effectiveness of a prevention intervention program to lower the incidence of injury for soccer players with at-risk psychosocial profiles. The Sport Anxiety Scale, the Life Event Scale for Collegiate Athletes, and the Athletic Coping Skills Inventory-28 were used to screen for psychosocial risk factors outlined in the stress and injury model (Williams & Andersen, 1998). Thirty-two high injury-risk players were identified and randomly assigned to treatment and control groups. Injuries of participants were reported by their coaches. The intervention program consisted of training in 6 mental skills distributed in 6 to 8 sessions during 19 weeks of the competitive season. The results showed that the brief intervention prevention program significantly lowered the number of injuries in the treatment group compared with the control group.
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