Investigation of Body Awareness Level and Performance Emotional Status of Athletes in Different Branches.

Abstract

The level of body awareness, performance emotional status and demographic characteristics in different sports branches are subjects to be investigated. It is important to examine the concepts of performance emotional state and body awareness to better understand the body-mind relationship in different sports branches.The aim of this study was to investigate the level of body awareness and performance emotional status (PES) of athletes.In this cross-sectional study, independent variables are groups (4 sports branches) and dependent variables are body awareness and performance emotional status.The study was conducted on 188 licensed athletes (85 footballers, 36 basketball players, 34 handball players and 33 swimmers). The mean age of participants was 14.64±1.89 years, height was 172.44±11.03cm and body weight was 62.35±13.12 kg.Four sports clubs and 2 high schools were the intervention facilities.Body Awareness Questionnaire (BAQ) and Continuous Optimal Performance Emotional Status Scale-2(COPESS-2) were used for data collection. Sociodemographic information was recorded.One-way ANOVA was used for analysis of normal distribution data in four different groups, and the Kruskal Wallis test was used for the analysis of data that did not show normal distribution.There was no difference in body awareness among the branches (p=0.171). The performance emotional state (PES) of the footballers was better than that of other athletes (p=0.01). The correlation between body awareness and PES was medium (r=0.47, p<0.01) and the corelations between body awareness and age, licensed year and number of weekly training sessions were weak (r=0.22, p<0.01; r=0.19, p<0.01; r=0.15, p=0.03).The body awareness of athletes may not differ among the sports branches, but PES is related to many factors such as mood, age, license years and number of training sessions. In rehabilitation and training, body awareness and PES should be evaluated together.