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Sport provides opportunities for adolescents to develop psychological skills. To realize this potential, sport facilitators must actively create a culture that develops adolescent athletes. Psychological skills training and biofeedback training have been effective at developing psychological skills in adult athletes. However, little research has focused on the effects of psychological skills training and biofeedback training in adolescent athletes. This study tests the efficacy of a pilot community outreach program to promote psychological skills development in adolescent soccer players from a travel soccer team (n = 21). During the 2-week intervention, researchers taught participants psychophysiological content related to self-awareness, emotional intelligence, and decision making. The psychological skills training sessions included active learning activities, group discussions, and reflection. Throughout the sessions, researchers used biofeedback to demonstrate and train participants in psychophysiological concepts. The 2-week intervention gave participants opportunities each day to monitor and reflect on their psychological performance state. Program evaluation data showed descriptive improvements in the ability to focus, control arousal, reduce stress, and control emotions. Wilcoxon signed-rank tests revealed significant positive changes occurred for decision-making self-efficacy. The intervention and efficacy of this study support applied practitioners’ integration of biofeedback and psychological skills training to improve adolescents’ self-awareness, emotional intelligence, and decision making.

Although exercise is generally considered a healthy lifestyle habit, it may be problematic for some people. This has led to growing research on compulsive exercise—an uncontrollable urge for physical activity despite its deleterious effects. A maintenance model of compulsive exercise has been developed for adults exhibiting weight and shape concerns, weight control behaviors, and specific psychological states (including depression and anxiety) as predictive factors. We identified predicting factors for compulsive exercise in adolescent athletes using the same model framework. These athletes completed the compulsive exercise test and several well-validated psychometric measures. Gender-specific multiple regression models identified stronger drive for thinness, perfectionism, and body image investment in sport as significant predictors of compulsive exercise in boys and girls. Among girls, asceticism and bulimia symptoms were also significantly associated with compulsive exercise. These findings support the relevance of the model for clinical intervention and research on compulsive exercise in adolescent athletes.

Based on the lessons learned from history and articulation of paradigm change in science, this article clarifies the concept of curriculum alignment and describes the risk of curriculum disalignment between school physical education and kinesiology. Through contextualizing kinesiology as an integrated science, it explains the difference between a discipline and a field (subdiscipline) and argues that K–12 physical education is an integral and indispensable component of kinesiology. The article provides detailed discussions about the historical reasons/events that might have led to the curriculum disalignment and the ways the disalignment can be understood and addressed. Based on the analysis, a four-pillar framework (science, health, culture, and education) is proposed as a platform for “doing kinesiology” and a way to address the curriculum disalignment crisis.