How Do Psychological and Physiological Performance Determinants Interact Within Individual Athletes? An Analytical Network Approach

Previous research on sports performance has mostly been conducted: (a) at a single point, or at most, a few points in time, (b) on the group level, and (c) as a causal chain of monodisciplinary predictor and outcome variables. In the present research, we argue and demonstrate that the next important step should be to monitor, analyze, and visualize the dynamic and individual-specific interactions of multidisciplinary determinants of sports performance. Hence, we apply a recently developed analytical approach, that is, (Time-Varying) Vector-AutoRegressive ((TV)-VAR) modeling, which captures the intra-individual interactions and changes of multidisciplinary determinants. We first measured critical psychological (e.g., self-efficacy) and physiological (e.g., heart rate) factors among youth male football (soccer) players at a professional club, on a daily basis across one season. Next, we assessed the temporal dynamics of the factors with (TV-)VAR models, and visualized the findings in network graphs. We highlight the results of two players, showing how multidisciplinary key determinants of sports performance dynamically evolve across a sports season, that is, interact and change in individual-specific ways over time. For instance, the results of player 1 revealed a stable network across the season in which self-efficacy was the strongest predictor of other determinants, whereas this was not the case for player 2. These new insights improve our understanding of how key determinants of sports performance are dynamically related in individual athletes and may allow practitioners to develop and implement person-specific interventions at the right time.