Expert sport performance is developed by engaging in large volumes of high-quality training, particularly among endurance athletes, which must be supported by recovery. Despite the importance of recovery for sustaining and enhancing training, the concept has been largely absent from sport expertise research due in part to a lack of identified athlete-led recovery skills. Moreover, research on recovery has focused on a limited range of modalities, informed by practitioners' perspectives, at the expense of more complex, athlete-centered perspectives of what recovery may involve. The overarching purpose of this dissertation was to explore and describe the psychology of recovery in relation to sport expertise, and in doing so answer, "What might it mean for an endurance athlete to be skilled at recovery?". This purpose was addressed in four articles, organized in an exploratory, sequential, mixed-methods design.
Expert sport performance is developed by engaging in large volumes of high-quality training, particularly among endurance athletes, which must be supported by recovery. Despite the importance of recovery for sustaining and enhancing training, the concept has been largely absent from sport expertise research due in part to a lack of identified athlete-led recovery skills. Moreover, research on recovery has focused on a limited range of modalities, informed by practitioners' perspectives, at the expense of more complex, athlete-centered perspectives of what recovery may involve. The overarching purpose of this dissertation was to explore and describe the psychology of recovery in relation to sport expertise, and in doing so answer, "What might it mean for an endurance athlete to be skilled at recovery?". This purpose was addressed in four articles, organized in an exploratory, sequential, mixed-methods design.
Article 1 explored what recovery means to a sample of 13 elite endurance athletes with experience at multiple World Championships/Olympics. Each athlete participated in two semi- structured interviews, separated by an intervening week of keeping an activity journal of their recovery-related thoughts/actions. Using inductive reflexive thematic analysis, the findings portrayed recovery as encompassing a wide range of potential approaches that spanned multiple dimensions of feelings, levels of focus, and personal solutions. Further, the athletes assigned meaning to recovery in a particular time and context based on processes of 'defining short and long-term purposes', 'breaking and engaging', and 'negotiating and prioritizing'. These findings suggested that recovery is highly complex and individual, and that athletes define recovery according to personal and contextual conditions.
Article 2 described the process of implementing recovery from the perspective of elite endurance athletes, using data from the same interviews as Article 1. Through inductive reflexive thematic analysis, I found that these athletes felt recovery was athlete-led: it involved processes of self-knowledge and planning (captured in the theme of 'Knowing my body'), self-awareness and interpretation ('Listening to my body'), and self-control and adjustment ('Respecting my body'), all connected in on-going development ('Learning my body'). During reflexive analysis, I further found that recovery self-regulation was integrated with people and places in the athletes' environments in ways that supplemented, facilitated, and provided for aspects of recovery. I integrated the athlete-led themes and environment-influenced themes in the Athlete Recovery Regulation Model, a heuristic model outlining how athletes shape their recovery using a set of athlete-led skills of recovery self-regulation.
Article 3 aimed to describe how 22 elite cyclists and triathletes implemented certain recovery self-regulation skills between two key workouts, placed 2-3 days apart in their planned training. Using experience sampling methods, participants reported their momentary use of certain self-regulatory processes, as well as states of recovery and stress, up to eight times per day, leading up to and between the workouts. These processes were strongly correlated but differed in frequency, intensity, consistency, and predictors of use, which suggested that the processes represent synergistic yet unique competencies. Greater use of recovery self-regulation processes was associated with higher perceived stress and, to a lesser extent, lower perceived recovery, but there was no association with the time remaining to or elapsed after the key workouts. These findings indicated that elite endurance athletes self-regulate their recovery frequently and dynamically, largely in response to multidimensional feelings of stress.
Article 4 refined the methods of Article 3 into a more controlled, representative task to assess and describe recovery between two key workouts. Using that task, planned analyses aimed to (a) describe the patterns of recovery self-regulation employed by 16 non-elite endurance athletes, and (b) assess those patterns in relation to the recovery of performance between successive workouts. Sixteen recreationally competitive cyclists participated remotely in two prescribed workouts, 48 hrs apart, on the Zwift virtual cycling platform. Between workouts, they participated in the same experience sampling design as Article 3. Findings showed that the non- elite cyclists also self-regulated their recovery frequently and dynamically. In contrast to the elite athletes in Article 3, this sample made greater use of self-regulatory processes specifically when experiencing physical stress, following the first workout, and use declined with time between the workouts. The recovery of performance in workout 2 relative to workout 1 was associated with more frequent use of certain self-regulatory processes, although overall, various characteristics of recovery self-regulation were not associated with performance recovery. These findings indicated that non-elite athletes engage in recovery self-regulation, albeit in potentially simpler and more reactive patterns compared to elite athletes.
This dissertation makes several contributions. It proposes that an athlete's role in recovery may be conceptualized through athlete-led skills, as described in the Athlete Recovery Regulation Model. Further, it suggests that recovery may be understood in relation to various processes and perspectives of self-regulated learning. Methodologically, this dissertation advances a proof of concept that recovery can be examined in a traditional expertise paradigm, using experience sampling methods employed around a representative task in the context of inter-workout recovery. Finally, this dissertation advances an athlete-centered and skills-based understanding of recovery, which provides an alternative avenue for applied practitioners and sport organizations to address recovery with endurance athletes. Overall, this dissertation centers recovery on the athletes who engage in it by describing skills they can own and hone to shape their recovery.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uottawa.ca/oai:ruor.uottawa.ca:10393/45840 |
| Date | 15 January 2024 |
| Creators | Wilson, Stuart |
| Contributors | Young, Bradley W. |
| Publisher | Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa |
| Source Sets | Université d’Ottawa |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ |
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