Abstract
Objectives: Athlete burnout is a crucial concern affecting the development and athletic performance of young weightlifters. To reduce or relieve the prevalence of athlete burnout, this study examined the relationship across social support, sports motivation, mental toughness, and athlete burnout in weightlifters.Methods: A total of 315 weightlifters aged 17–28 years old (151 males, 164 females; Mage = 18.89 years, SD = 3.66) from Sichuan, Chongqing, and Shanxi in China participated in this survey. The Perceived Available Support in Sport Questionnaire (PASS-Q), Sports Motivation Questionnaire (SMQ), Sports Mental Toughness Questionnaire (SMTQ), and Athlete Burnout Questionnaire (ABQ) were used in this study. SPSS Statistics 19.0, AMOS 21.0, and PROCESS 3.0 macro were used to analyze the collected data.Results: The results indicated that weightlifters’ social support could negatively significantly affect athlete burnout [beta = −0.398; 95% confidence interval (CI): −0.3699, −0.2184; P < 0.05) via mental toughness and sports motivation. The mediation analysis revealed that they had partial mediating effect, including three paths: First, social support had a direct effect on athlete burnout (beta = −0.150; 95% CI: −0.1824, −0.0397; P < 0.05); second, sport mental toughness had a mediating effect on athlete burnout (beta = −0.113; 95% CI: −0.1703, −0.0631; P < 0.05); and finally, sports motivation had a mediating effect on athlete burnout (beta = −0.124; 95% CI: −0.1751, −0.0793; P < 0.05).Conclusion: The findings revealed that social support could inhibit or prevent athlete burnout via mental toughness and sports motivation; thus, to decrease or relieve the prevalence of burnout in weightlifters, it is an important solution to enhance their social support.
Highlights
Weightlifting needs performers’ skilled techniques, strong physical performance, and excellent psychological characteristics to exert their maximum efforts to lift optimal weights (Dvorkin, 2005)
The present study proposed the following four hypotheses to examine the impact of weightlifters’ social support on athlete burnout and the role of mental toughness and sports motivation, clarify the value of social support, enrich the path of social support affecting athlete burnout, to provide theoretical bases for further explaining the mechanism of social support on athlete burnout, and provide ideas for the prevention and intervention of athlete burnout
All dimensions of the sports motivation scale were negatively associated with each dimension of athlete burnout (R = 0.24 ∼ 0.44)
Summary
Weightlifting needs performers’ skilled techniques, strong physical performance, and excellent psychological characteristics to exert their maximum efforts to lift optimal weights (Dvorkin, 2005). The role of psychological quality, which can be measured by scales on emotion, confidence, willpower, resilience, and so on, is becoming more and more critical. A variety of studies have shown that when competing with opponents with equal ability, the athletes’ psychological differences, such as toughness, cognition, or personality, can affect the competition outcomes by more than 50% (Weinberg and Gould, 2003). Excellent psychological quality has become an essential factor in athletes’ evaluation (Chang et al, 2012; Lou et al, 2014). Monitoring the psychological state of athletes has an important practical significance
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