Exploring the psychological aspects of sport injury
Introduction and guidance
This free badged course, Exploring the psychological aspects of sport injury, lasts 24 hours, with 8 ‘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:
- Sport injury and psychology – what’s the link?
- A holistic approach to sport injury
- Can psychological factors increase the risk of injury?
- Psychological interventions to prevent sport injury
- Psychological responses to sport injury
- What impact does psychology have on recovery?
- How can imagery, self-talk and relaxation help injury rehabilitation?
- How can goal-setting and social support help?
This course will develop your confidence and skills for online study, whether this is to explore sport and exercise topics or part of your preparation for other study.
You’ll begin in the first two sessions with a general overview of the psychological aspects of sport injury, drawing on your own experiences and those from case study examples, before moving onto a more detailed analysis of the two keys areas of the topic:
- Pre-injury factors: psychological factors that may increase the risk of sport injury (Sessions 3 and 4)
- Post-injury factors: psychological responses to sport injury and their potential impact (Sessions 5-8)
As part of this you will explore psychological techniques that can be used to help minimise the risk of developing a sport injury and help an individual to cope with sport injury once it has occurred.
Case studies and audio-visual examples are used to help explain concepts and you’ll get plenty of opportunities to demonstrate your new understanding and practise your study skills.
Part of this practice will be the interactive quizzes, of which Sessions 4 and 8 will provide you with an opportunity to earn a badge to demonstrate your new skills. You can read more on how to study the course and about badges in the next sections.
After completing this course, you should be able to:
- identify the psychological factors that may lead to a sport injury
- recognise the role sport and exercise psychology intervention can play in the prevention of injury
- evaluate psychological responses to sport injury
- identify psychological interventions that can aid rehabilitation from injury.
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.