ABSTRACT
One of the biggest trends in sport science is load monitoring. This involves recording how much training and other demands that athletes are subjected to over a period of time. Research has shown that load is associated with injury risk, and the race is on to figure out how to quantify everything athletes are exposed to in the hopes of predicting who will be injured, and when. One of the factors that's only starting to gain attention is “life load” or, in other words, the psychological stressors that we’re all familiar with (e.g., family tensions, major events, and so on). Yet, the relationship between life stress and injury has been on the sport psychology radar for decades. This chapter will discuss this evidence around stress, coping skills, and social support, and re-conceptualize it in the new context of load monitoring. It will also address the inherent role of individual perceptions in the way athletes report their experience of training load and the resulting implications for measurement validity and intervention development.
