Introduction
This free course, Developing resilience in sport, explores how the concept of resilience can support athletes on their athletic development journey. Resilience can act as a buffer to protect against the challenges that might be faced by athletes.
The course is divided into two sessions:
- In Session 1 you’ll investigate the concept of resilience, identify the characteristics of resilience and explore resilience in differing social contexts. Throughout, you will consider why resilience is an important psychological skill for athletic development.
- In Session 2 you’ll examine how we might build resilience, looking at the role of the environment, reviewing several interventions and considering how best to support both athletes and coaches to develop resilience.
Within both sessions you’ll be directed to a number of fascinating resources, including research articles to support your learning. While you will see that the majority of the research into resilience in sport has been completed in elite sport, you will reflect that it is a concept that impacts across all levels of sport, in different athletic contexts.
By the end of this course, you should be able to:
- describe the features of resilience in both individual and team contexts and understand why it is important for athletic development
- critically discuss the role of the environment in the development of resilience
- examine how to build resilience in a range of sport settings and apply this knowledge to real world scenarios.
Moving around the course
In the ‘Summary’ at the end of each session, you will find a link to the next one. If at any time you want to return to the start of the course, click on ‘Full course description’. From here you can navigate to any part of the course.
It’s also good practice, if you access a link from within a course page, to open it in a new window or tab. That way you can easily return to where you’ve come from without having to use the back button on your browser.
This OpenLearn course is an adapted extract from the Open University course E312 Athletic development: a psychological perspective [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] .
You can now go to Session 1.