Bored of sports? Investigating the interactive role of engagement and value as predictors of boredom in athletic training

Abstract

Recent research has brought up boredom as guiding signal in goal-directed behavior. Boredom activates a search for more valuable activities, consequently, boredom can challenge goal-directed behavior, also in the sporting context. Here, we examined experienced boredom in athletic training for a competition in 153 athletes with a cross-sectional questionnaire. We developed the questionnaire based on theoretical approaches of boredom. Specifically, we considered two core triggers of boredom, i.e., the ability to remain engaged with the training and the value that athletes ascribe to the training. We found that the positive relationship between difficulty of engagement in athletic training and the experience of boredom is moderated by the value ascribed to the training. In other words, the value ascribed to the training plays a protecting role in that high levels of value nullify the positive relationship between difficulty of engagement and experienced boredom in sports. Future research is needed to better understand antecedents and consequences of boredom experiences in specific sporting contexts, for example differentiating individual vs. collective activities, or competition vs. training situations.

Boredom in Sports and Exercise

“…If the act of exercising itself were to be perceived as intrinsically valuable, then boredom should be much less of a barrier. Indeed, research shows that ascribing high value to one's training is associated with less boredom in athletes 66 .…”

“…Consistent with this, it has been shown that ancillary training (i.e., running as a soccer player) is perceived as more boring than training that resembles one's primary sport (i.e., playing soccer as a soccer player; 2 ). Digging deeper into the mechanism by which boredom occurs during athletic training, a recent study investigated whether boredom depended on an athlete's difficulty to devote themselves to the training, and the value an athlete ascribed to the training session 66 . Consistent with theoretical expectations, athletes reported more boredom if they found it hard to fully engage with their training.…”

Methodological approaches to boredom and its measurement

“…It is reasonable to assume that there are differences between domains and, at the same time, that boredom-prone individuals might report having experienced boredom more intensely and more frequently across domains (see also the notion of a "holistic perception of life being boring," described by . Several studies show associations between boredom proneness (e.g., measured with the BPS) and the assessment of boredom in the academic context (Farmer & Sundberg, 1986), the sporting context (Martarelli et al, 2023), or the work context (Baratta & Spence, 2018). To our knowledge, no study has compared the answers to different domain-specific scales and domain-general scales to give a precise estimation of the variance explained by a domain-general factor and that which is domain-specific.…”