Session 4: Psychological interventions to prevent sport injury

Introduction

As you saw in the previous session, psychological factors such as stress can increase an individual’s risk of developing a sport injury. In this session you will consider whether interventions that address these psychological factors can reduce the risk of sport injury. In this course we are using the term ‘psychological interventions’ to describe the psychological techniques and strategies that an individual can use.

Figure 1 Interventions for injury

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A photograph of the lower half of a man standing on a racetrack. He has injured his knee, which he is clasping and which is glowing red.

Figure 1 Interventions for injury

You will be looking at psychological interventions again in Sessions 7 and 8 when we explore their use in the treatment of injury, but this session is focused purely on their use in the prevention of injury.

By the end of this session, you should be able to:

• explore some of the psychological interventions that may help to reduce the risk of sport injury
• consider the effectiveness of psychological interventions to reduce injury risk.