Relationship between perfectionism with stress and athletic burnout

 Retirement in sports has always caused many psychological problems for athletes and has had detrimental effects on their health. Given the importance of subject and role of psychological components, the aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between perfectionism with stress and athletic burnout.

The statistical population of this descriptive-correlational study included all young national footballers. The sample size was 378 ones, selected using a quota sampling method. Data were collected through questionnaires of coping strategies for stress, perfectionism and athletic burnout. Kolmogorov-Smirnov tests, Pearson correlation coefficient and linear regression were applied to test the hypotheses. All data were analyzed using SPSS 24.

The findings showed that there was a significant correlation between athletic burnout with positive perfectionism (- 0.622), negative perfectionism (0.555), problem-oriented strategy (-0.358) and emotion-oriented strategy (0.401). Totally, 56% of the variance in athletic burnout could be predicted via positive perfectionism (beta: 0.412), problem-oriented strategy (beta: 0.306), negative perfectionism (beta: 0.267) and emotion-oriented strategy (beta: 0.114).

Based on the findings of this study, planning to develop coaches’ awareness of coaching behaviors and to increase optimal, psychological and better performance of athletes, it seems necessary to use psychological variables such as perfectionism, stress and athletic burnout.