By recruiting nationally ranked athletes, we aimed to ensure that our sample consisted of individuals with high levels of physical fitness, mental resilience, and competitive experience. This is important because elite athletes may exhibit different physiological and psychological responses to mental fatigue compared to recreational or sub-elite athletes.
This is important as this sample they are using might be more resistant to mental burnout than the average joe endurance athlete.
Mental fatigue further influences the autonomic nervous system functions and hence heart rate variability and cardiovascular responses to exercise (Matuz et al., [18]). The autonomic changes can affect oxygen and blood transport and redistribution to working muscles and thereby affect exercise performance overall
This is definitely important to my research.
Harmoniously passionate athletes feel free and autonomous in their choice to engage in their activity, and can maintain a healthy balance between their sport and other important life domains
This kind of passion defined here seems like a really hard balance to find especially as the stakes continue rising for an athletes performance (such as going pro etc.).
Autonomous reasons, such as the inherent pleasure an activity brings, are known to lead to intrinsic motivation (Ryan and Deci, 2000). If the given activity becomes part of athlete's identity, a harmonious passion can result (Mageau and Vallerand, 2007). When athletes feel obliged to practice, or if the activity serves important compensatory or external functions, this will lead to a more extrinsic form of motivation, and, in time, can result in an obsessive passion (Mageau and Vallerand, 2007).
I think this passage here will be important to my research as a whole because with my research question "How does mental burnout compare to physical overtraining in predicting performance readiness in endurance athletes?" it will be important to look at which types of motivation more often lead to which kind of burnout. Already I could speculate that extrinsic motivation will more often lead to mental burnout and intrinsic motivation may lead to overtraining?
In sports, motivation is used to describe the initiation, direction, intensity, and persistence of behavior (Vallerand, 2012), in short; the “drive” to exercise. Passion is defined as a “particularly strong motivation toward a self-defining activity,” and thus might be a useful construct to understand athletes' “drive” to exercise
Good to start by defining terms. Now for the rest of the article I will know what they mean exactly when using the terms "motivation" and "passion." It will be important to understand that motivation is often an item that is born out of passion, but they are two different things entirely.