Soccer players inescapably live under stress during the sportive career, and many real-life aspects of soccer situations operate in the ongoing performance. This study’s main objective was to elaborate the List of Stressors in Professional Indoor and Field Soccer, a self-report instrument designed to measure the impact of 77 soccer situations upon the sport performance. Participants were 138 indoor and field soccer players from the Brazilian Premier League. Each situation was evaluated on a 7-point scale, ranging from the most negative (−3) to the most positive (+3). Data were analyzed according to the players’ perception of the items: distress or eustress and its intensity, and after that, situations perceived as plus −1 and +1 were compared by time in which they were experienced and distributed among five categories established by the literature: Expectations about the Performance, Personal Factors, Competition Aspects, Training Demands, and Relationship with Significant People. Narratives of athletes’ experiences were also used to discuss the results. An Exploratory Structural Equation Modeling using Bi-factorial (BI-ESEM) was employed to assess the factor structure. For the total participants, 49 situations were perceived as distress and 28 as eustress. Using the criteria established a priori, the distribution was among the five categories in the remaining 32 situations. Differences in perception between less and more experienced players were found in 11 situations. The results revealed that Brazilian professional soccer players experience various stressful situations. These events are important representations of environmental demands and could predict the performance as they are perceived as eustress or distress. Some of these stressful situations are inherent in sport and others adjacent to the sports system or environment. Coach pressure to win and conflicts with teammates are examples of stressors in-sport, family problems and disputes with press or fans are examples of stressors external to the team, also called peripheral opponents, and showed the relative social influence of significant others in soccer performance. We can conclude that the knowledge of the direction of a given stress situation has important practical implications in preparing athletes and helping them face the performance stressors that are part of soccer daily life.

Recently, the skill to play games has led to the professionalization of the activity in the form of “eSports” (electronic sports). Despite the popularity of eSports, little is known about its professional players from a psychological perspective. Given the importance of the coach-created environment in the athletes’ motivational processes, this study aimed to investigate the key psychological dimensions of the coach-created climate in 75 Brazilian professional players of League of Legends (LoL) considering the Self-Determination Theory (SDT) and Achievement Goal Theory (AGT). Fourteen hypotheses were tested, of which seven were confirmed. The empowering climate was a predictor of basic psychological-needs satisfaction and indirectly influenced autonomous motivation. The need satisfaction had a significant impact on both autonomous motivation and on lack of motivation, which, in turn, explained 56% of the variance in well-being and the intention to keep playing eSports. The disempowering climate was a predictor of psychological-needs thwarting but had no significant impact on autonomous motivation or lack of motivation. The results obtained support SDT and AGT in the context of eSports and were similar to those conducted with athletes from traditional sports, indicating that the empowering-and-disempowering-coaching-climates conceptualization applies not only to traditional sports athletes but also to professional eSports players.

The People's Republic of China obtained at the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games its best historical performance in the triple jump, thereby winning the silver medal. The objective of this case study was to present how evidence-based knowledge was applied to improve selected factors that may have contributed to this result. The factors included running speed, strength, muscle power, jumping technique, body composition, mental preparation, training organization, and recovery. Short training blocks, monitoring of training sessions and athlete's status, individualized tapering, use of activation sessions the day before competition, and postactivation performance enhancement strategies used in training and at the event were concepts followed during the preparation to the Games. Improved performance in field tests and power training was accompanied by positive changes in approach speed, run-up accuracy, and jumping technique, which, together with mental preparation, enabled two personal records to be set in the Olympic final. The results in the field tests were among the best ever reported and could constitute a benchmark for world-class triple jumpers.

Artigo original: Daniel I. G. Cubero, Renata Rego Lins Fumis; Thiago Hérick de Sá; Aldo Dettino; Felipe Osório Costa; Brigitte M. R. H.; Adam Van Eyll; Carlos Beato; Fernanda Maris Peria; Augusto Mota; José Altino; Sérgio Jobim Azevedo; Duílio Reis da Rocha Filho; Melba Moura; Álvaro Edson Ramos Lessa; Auro del Giglio. Burnout in Medical Oncology Fellows: a Prospective Multicenter Cohort Study in Brazilian Institutions. J Canc Educ.Published online 09 May 2015.

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