Learning from sport burnout and overtraining
Introduction and guidance
This free badged course Learning from sport burnout and overtraining lasts 24 hours with eight ‘sessions’. You can work through the course at your own pace, so if you have more time one week there is no problem with pushing on to complete a further study session. The eight sessions are linked to ensure a logical flow through the course. They are:
- What is burnout?
- Perspectives of burnout
- Exploring identity and overtraining
- Insights into overtraining
- What role does motivation and perfectionism play?
- Coaches and burnout
- Managing those on a burnout path
- Reducing burnout using psychological strategies.
The course will give you a deeper understanding of physical and mental aspects of dedicated training such as athletic identity, overtraining, motivational climate and perfectionism. You’ll also explore a number of factors affecting burnout which will lead you to understanding what contributes to sporting environments that are more likely to prevent burnout. Through being introduced to a number of sport psychology ideas you will have a better understanding of your own work or training situation and the balance between physical and emotional stress and recovery.
After completing this course, you should be able to:
- understand what burnout and overtraining are, the relationship between them and how it can affect athletes and coaches slightly differently
- describe the main factors influencing burnout and some of the key theories and models used to explain it in sport psychology
- evaluate coach and parents contribution to the motivational climate in sport and how they can help prevent burnout and overtraining
- identify strategies to help prevent and manage sport burnout and overtraining.
Moving around the course
In the ‘Summary’ at the end of each session, you will find a link to the next session. 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 (including links to the quizzes), 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.
The Open University would really appreciate a few minutes of your time to tell us about yourself and your expectations for the course before you begin, in our optional start-of-course survey [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] . Participation will be completely confidential and we will not pass on your details to others.