Resilience in sport: a dynamic and multidisciplinary perspective

Resilience is a key construct across disciplines, including psychology, medicine, physiology, and sports science (e.g. Bryan et al., ۲۰۱۹; Gijzel et al., ۲۰۲۰; Pincus & Metten, ۲۰۱۰; Scheffer et al., ۲۰۱۸). In this paper, we proceed from the cross-disciplinary conceptualization of human resilience as ‘the capacity to bounce back to normal functioning after a perturbation’ (Scheffer۲۰۱۸b). Such stressors are omnipresent in the environment of an athlete, and may be of a psychosocial nature (e.g. losing a match, maladaptive interactions with the coach, see Sarkar & Fletcher, ۲۰۱۴), physiological nature (e.g. high training loads, Halson, ۲۰۱۴; Kellmann et al., ۲۰۱۸), or non-typical, such as adversity experiences related to the current COVID-۱۹ pandemic (e.g. Gupta & McCarthy, ۲۰۲۱). The way in which people respond to stressors has gained widespread multidisciplinary interest, particularly in the domains of psychology, physiology, and sports science. In these domains, researchers examined these processes under the terms psychological or physical resilience and load (or stress) and recovery (e.g. Brink et al., ۲۰۱۰; Bryan et al., ۲۰۱۹; Fletcher & Sarkar, ۲۰۱۳; Galli & Gonzalez, ۲۰۱۵; Gijzel et al., ۲۰۱۹; Hill et al., ۲۰۱۸a; Kenttä & Hassmén, ۱۹۹۸; Kuipers & Keizer, ۱۹۸۸; Reilly & Ekblom, ۲۰۰۵; Varadhan et al., ۲۰۱۸; Whitson et al., ۲۰۱۶).Despite the apparent similarities and common aims (i.e. understanding and improving how athletes bounce back from stressors), the literature in psychology, physiology, and sports science can be considered as segmented rather than integrated. In this review, we aim to merge insights from these fields to develop a coherent perspective on resilience as a dynamic process (cf. Hill et al., ۲۰۱۸a, ۲۰۱۸b; Kalisch et al., ۲۰۱۹; Kuranova et al., ۲۰۲۰; Rector et al., ۲۰۲۱; Scheffer et al., ۲۰۱۸). Accordingly, an important methodological step is to study resilience processes across time (e.g. Bryan et al., ۲۰۱۹; Galli & Gonzalez, ۲۰۱۵; Galli & Pagano, ۲۰۱۸; Gupta & McCarthy, ۲۰۲۱; Hill et al., ۲۰۱۸a). That is, examining if and how the state of an athlete returns to the normal level following a stressor requires studying temporal processes of psychological, physiological, and/or performance measures (cf., Gijzel et al.,۲۰۱۷; Heidari et al., ۲۰۱۹; Hill et al., ۲۰۱۸b; Hill, Den Hartigh et al., ۲۰۲۰; Kalisch et al., ۲۰۱۹; Pincus & Metten, ۲۰۱۰; Scheffer et al., ۲۰۱۸; Seeman & Robbins, ۱۹۹۴; Van de Leemput et al., ۲۰۱۴). Relying on this approach, we specifically focus on ‘warning signals’ that indicate possible losses of psychological or physical resilience (e.g. Hill et al., ۲۰۱۸a; Rector et al., ۲۰۲۱; Scheffer et al., ۲۰۱۸; Van de Leemput et al., ۲۰۱۴). Detecting such warning signals requires new technologies, multimodal data collection, and the analysis of temporal processes. Data science applications are therefore needed, which may also deliver the tools for online dashboards to provide timely resilience feedback to coaches and athletesIn the next sections, we present a multidisciplinary, dynamic, and personalized perspective based on knowledge from psychological and physical resilience. Next, we illustrate how recent developments in the field of data science can contribute to the analysis of dynamic, personalized resilience processes, thereby identifying warning signals (i.e. indicators of resilience losses) based on patterns in the data. Finally, we illustrate how our proposed perspective can be feasibly implemented in the field of sports, based on close collaborations between psychologists, sport scientists, data scientists, and practitioners in the sports field

کلیدواژه ها:

psychology ، medicine ، physiology ، and sports science