Aim. The article deals with studying the injury rate factors in athletes with different peculia­rities of mental self-regulation. Materials and methods. Male athletes aged 18–32 involved in cross-country motorcycle and bicycle races, snowboarding, and skateboarding participated in the study (n = 167). The following injury factors were taken into account: the number and severity of injuries, length of the recovery period, limitations on doing sport after recovery. The intensity of the following self-organization characteristics was assessed: determination, self-discipline, flexibility, perseverance, commitment to the current aim, and the general level of self-organization. The frequency of using the following mental self-regulation techniques during training and competitions was assessed: autosuggestion, self-persuasion, physical exercises, breathwork, auto-training, psycho-muscular training, motor imagery practice, visualization, and meditation. Results. Athletes with better-developed self-discipline and those practicing psycho-muscular training have fewer injuries while doing extreme sports. The injuries of athletes practicing psycho-muscular training are not so severe. Athletes with better determination and self-discipline recover faster after injuries. This can also be applied to those athletes who often use the techniques of autosuggestion, self-persuasion, psycho-muscular training, meditation, and visualization. Athletes with greater perseverance have fewer limitations on doing sport after recovery. This is also true for athletes practicing autosuggestion, self-persuasion, and meditation. No differences in the injury rate of cross-country motorcyclists, snow- and skateboarders were revealed. Conclusion. It is appropriate to treat the peculiarities of mental self-regulation as a factor affecting the injury rate of athletes practicing extreme sports.

Background and aims. In the last thirty years, the continuously increasing number of studies investigating Exercise Addiction (EA) stimulated interest in developing instruments assessing the risk of exercise addiction (REA). One widely used tool is the Exercise Addiction Inventory (EAI) because it is a brief, easy-to-use, time-saving, and psychometrically validated tool. However, its items based on the Components Model of Addiction still lack some reoccurring symptoms associated with exercise addiction. This protocol report outlines the methods of developing and validating an expanded version of the EAI (EAI-3) in a large international sample.Methods. The EAI-3 will be administered to over 5000 regular exercisers in 15 languages through an online survey. The survey will also include questions from the Exercise Dependence Scale-Revised, the Obsessive-Compulsive Inventory-Revised, the SCOFF questionnaire, and the Ten Item Personality Inventory. We will investigate the factorial structure of the EAI-3 through confirmatory factor analysis. Moreover, we will test EAI-3’s measurement invariance across languages and gender. Finally, we aim to find a standard cutoff point for at-risk exercisers. Expected results. We expect to obtain a good fit of the EAI-3 structure and general measurement invariance. In addition, we expect associations with another EA measure and the other measures of mental health assessed in the study.Discussion and conclusions. We expect that the results will support an assessment tool useful in measuring the REA with greater accuracy and exhibiting reliability across gender and language (culture).

The article presents the results of psychological research and psychologist’s work with young hockey players at two stages of pre-competition training camps for sports training for the 1st Winter Children of Asia International Sports Games (hereinafter – the 1st Winter ISG “Children of Asia”). The research involved studying the young athletes’ psychological fitness by three indicators: the status of pre-competition mental states (motivation and anxiety), autonomic balance and psychomotor control, as factors of psychological selection to a sports team and solving key problems in the content of integrated sports training. The research presents the annual cycle of young athletes’ sports training, which is timely at the stages of basic training and sports excellence.