Sports

Sports are competitive activities that involve formal rules and procedures and require tactics and strategies as well as specialized neuromuscular skills that are applied to varying degrees of difficulty and effort. To prepare for such activities, many individuals will engage in practice (training); practice patterns for recreational sportspersons may be intermittent or nonexistent, whereas serious-minded sportspersons are characterized by regular patterns of specialized training. Sport is a domain-specific form of physical activity, related [Page 2131]to, but also distinguishable from, other forms of exercise and fitness. Sport is commonly viewed as an outlet for personal leisure time. This entry briefly considers continuity between participation in sports during childhood and adulthood and then focuses on sports during adulthood in terms of motivation, social influences, and psychosocial outcomes.

Psychosocial ...