Bored of sports? Investigating the interactive role of engagement and value as predictors of boredom in athletic training.

Abstract

Recent research has identified boredom as a guiding signal in goal-directed behavior.As boredom activates a search for more valuable activities, it can consequently challenge goal-directed behavior; this is also expected to be the case in the sporting context.Here, we examined the experience of boredom in athletic training for a competition among 153 athletes with a cross-sectional questionnaire.We developed the questionnaire based on theoretical approaches to boredom.Specifically, we considered two core triggers of boredom (i.e., the ability to remain engaged with the training and the value that athletes ascribe to the training).We found that the positive relationship between the difficulty of engagement in athletic training and the experience of boredom was moderated by the value ascribed to the training.In other words, it seems that the value ascribed to the training can play a protective role, in that high levels of value nullify the positive relationship between difficulty of engagement and boredom experienced in sports.Future research is needed to better understand the antecedents and consequences of boredom experiences in specific sporting contexts, which could be achieved, for example, by differentiating between individual and collective activities or competitions and training situations.Highlights o Processes that might lead to the experience of boredom in sports o Lack of engagement and value as antecedents of boredom in sports o Significant interaction between lack of engagement and value in sport-specific boredom o Value ascribed to athletic training can act as a protective factor Bored of sports?Investigating the interactive role of engagement and value as predictors of boredom in athletic training Being properly prepared for a sporting competition requires countless hours of training.Athletes must exert intense mental and physical effort to stick with their training regimens and remain engaged in their goal pursuit.Thus, training for a competition requires the continued and effective regulation of goal-directed behavior.Of the many challenges athletes (and non-athletes, for that matter) can face while they train for a major goal (McCormick et al., 2019), one challenge has only very recently started to attract research interest (despite it being a topic of immense interest in sports-related media).This challenge is boredom (Wolff et al., 2021).Simply put, exercising for many hoursby repeatedly reiterating similar movements-in preparation for a competition might sometimes be boring.Crucially, boredom should not be taken lightly or seen as an irrelevant nuisance.It has recently been highlighted that being bored during an activity can make continuing with it more demanding of one's self-control.Specifically, boredom is understood to place an additional demand on self-control by signaling that one should do something else, thereby making it more demanding to continue with one's current activity (Wolff & Martarelli, 2020).Research shows that boring activities can lead to sensations of exertion (Bieleke et al., 2021), fatigue (Milyavskaya et al., 2019), and frustration (Westgate & Wilson, 2018).This is critical in the sports setting, as athletic training already relies on athletes' effectiveness in regulating physical effort (i.e., on athletes' self-control; Englert & Taylor, 2021), and the regulatory demands might be even higher if athletes must also deal with exercise-induced boredom (Wolff et al., 2021).Given boredom's likely relevance to the sporting context and the relative scarcity of research on the topic, we investigated the correlates of boredom in sports -particularly the ability to remain engaged with the training and the value that athletes ascribe to the training -in the present study.Theoretical foundations of boredom.Outside the sporting context, there has been increasing empirical and theoretical work about boredom ascribing functional relevance to this rather neglected emotion (e.g., Elpidorou, 2022).Indeed, boredom has emerged as a powerful motivator for human (and even non-human) behavior.For example, boredom has been linked to engaging in sadistic behavior (Pfattheicher et al., 2021), infringing on guidelines during a pandemic (Wolff et al., 2020), self-administering electric shocks (Wilson et al., 2014), and participating in maladaptive academic behavior (Audrin & Hascoët, 2021).Current models explain when and why boredom might occur and integrate the important distinction between boredom as a transient cognitive-affective experience and boredom proneness as a relatively stable individual disposition.To illustrate this contrast, the latter idea refers to high boredom-

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