Sports injuries and psychological aspects of pain perception of athletes

Objective: As there is not much research on the psychological aspects of pain perception of athletes, the main purpose of this study was to investigate differences in pain coping styles according to gender and type of sport.

Methods: The sample consisted of 147 athletes (101 men, 46 women) who reported a previous sports-related injury, with an average age of 20.82 ± 1.61 years, involved in individual (n = 59) and team (n = 88) sports. The pain perception was evaluated by Sports Inventory for Pain (SIP15) comprised of three subscales: coping by direct action, catastrophizing, and somatic awareness.

Results: We found that men perceive pain in sport more intensely and sensitively than women (p = .01, r = .21). Nevertheless, men consider pain to be more bearable and give up less than women (p = .05, r = .16). In individual and team sports, we did not find significant differences in response to painful stimuli, but in terms of giving up due to the perceived pain, the athletes of individual sports scored higher values than athletes of team sports (p = .04, r = .17). In coping by direct action, we also did not find significant differences between gender or types of sports.

Conclusions: The results of our research suggest that pain perception is one of the factors influencing giving up in the sport. Therefore, we recommend that this aspect be considered in psychological preparation and that the efforts of sports psychologists should focus on eliminating escape reactions, especially for women, which would contribute to higher mental resilience and effective management of painful obstacles. We also recommend implementing psychological preparation aimed at overcoming pain more in individual sports, because it seems that individual athletes can handle pain much more difficultly than collective athletes.