A Multidisciplinary, Personalized Approach to Resilience in Sports

Athletes encounter various physiological and psychosocial stressors, such as heavy training sessions, lost games, and life events. In order to stay healthy and perform optimally, they must be resilient. Indeed, when athletes do not “bounce back” from the stressors, they can get injured or experience a mental dip. Our ZonMw project aims to improve our understanding of resilience in sports and beyond. Because resilience can pertain to physiological and psychosocial processes, and is typically dynamic and individual-specific, these properties should be accounted for (Den Hartigh et al., 2022). We closely collaborate with professional sports organizations, such as PSV, Vitesse, and FC Groningen, where we developed a well-functioning infrastructure. We collect physiological data through sensors that players wear on the field, and psychosocial data through a tailor-made application on a daily basis. In a collaboration between psychologists, movement scientists, and data scientists, we apply analyses to detect resilience losses in the physiological and psychosocial processes of the players. Current and predicted states of the players, including resilience losses, are communicated to the staff of the soccer clubs via the dashboard of our tailor-made app. Through this multidisciplinary, dynamic, and personalized approach we aim to advance theoretical and practical insights into resilience.