The Evolution of Psychological Response to Athlete Injury Models for Professional Sport

Abstract

Elite competitive sport is linked with a unique collection of stressors distinct from the general population. While there have been advancements in understanding the role that stressors play within the elite sporting environment, uncertainty still exists around a clear process for measuring stressors, and their specific relationship to injury. A number of models have been proposed as useful frameworks for investigating and describing the role of stress and its interaction with the psychological response to athletic injury. While these models provide evolving points of view drawing on different theoretical backgrounds regarding their interpretation of athletic stress and injury, they offer little application to the applied elite sporting environment, and no detail of how they these models support athletes, and high performance staff in the applied setting. This narrative review will present two popular theoretical psychological models of sports injury rehabilitation. We argue that these models could be better applied in the current sporting environment if they utilized biological markers such as cortisol measures of personality. Extending from the Biopsychosocial model of injury, we present an updated model of injury quantifying the psychophysiological response for athletes [1]. This model is aligned with the current applied sporting landscape, incorporating the implementation of measurement practice guidelines, and offering high-performance staff an example that can be applied to their unique setting by assessing individuals' distinct measures of cortisol and personality in response to stress and injury.