Why Coming Home Can Be the Hardest Part of the Olympics — with Dr Karen Howells

🏋️‍♀️ Extended version of this interview: https://www.patreon.com/evidencestrong/posts/post-competition-166449364 🏋️‍♀️

After representing their country on the biggest stages of the world, athletes face the hard comeback to a normal life, called post-Olympics blues. It is a known but hardly researched phenomenon. Dr Karen Howells is working to change this situation, with the ultimate goal of developing interventions to help athletes recover successfully.

Dr Karen Howells is a Senior Lecturer in Sport and Exercise Psychology at Cardiff Metropolitan University in Wales, UK. She is a Chartered Psychologist of the British Psychological Society (BPS), a registered Practitioner Psychologist with the Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC) and regularly provides sport and performance psychology support to athletes from a wide range of individual and team sports competing at a variety of levels. Her research interests are in elite sport and mental health, specifically looking at adversity and growth, and the post-Olympic Blues. She has published her research in a number of academic journals and co-edited a book on Adversity and Growth in Sport.

Enjoy!

Original research paper:

Holly Bradshaw, Karen Howells & Mathijs Lucassen (2022) Abandoned to manage the post-Olympic blues: Olympians reflect on their experiences and the need for a change, Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health, 14:5, 706-723, DOI:10.1080/2159676X.2021.1993974

https://doi.org/10.1080/2159676X.2021.1993974

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