ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that the holistic approach is the single way to understand the psychophysiology of sports, exercise, and fitness. This holistic concept of human behavior as a self-organizing system in a changing environment includes the assumption that it is based on and uses many subordinated self-organizing subsystems of different complexity. Within the social network, internal drive is consciously organized as sports and exercise with the declared aim to acquire and retain fitness. To understand the importance of psychophysiology for sports, exercise, and fitness, one must elucidate how psychophysiological mechanisms develop and how they work. Sports and exercise are societal phenomena organized by individuals within their social environment. However, at the same time these people must train their body functions to become competitive. Most people working in sports education and training are only looking for the fitness of the body functions and do not acknowledge that the athlete also has a brain.
