Perfectionism Profiles Reveal Which Strength and Conditioning Coaches Face the Highest Mental Health Risk

Strength and conditioning coaches spend their careers building resilience in others, designing training programs that push athletes to their physical limits while carefully managing fatigue, recovery, and injury risk. Yet a new study suggests that the people responsible for everyone else’s physical wellbeing may be quietly carrying a substantial psychological burden of their own, and that this burden is not distributed evenly across the profession. Instead, mental health risk appears to cluster around specific combinations of perfectionism and coping style, a finding that could reshape how sporting organizations think about supporting the staff behind the athletes.

The research, published in BMC Psychology by Tomasz Kowalski of Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University and the Institute of Sport in Warsaw, and Joanna Gorgol-Waleriańczyk of VIZJA University, took a person-centered approach to a question that has long been studied in athletes but rarely in the coaches who support them. Rather than averaging out how perfectionism or coping strategies relate to wellbeing across a whole sample, the researchers asked how these traits naturally co-occur within individuals. That distinction matters, because the psychological profile of a coach who sets impossibly high standards for himself while also believing that everyone around him demands perfection is likely very different from that of a coach who simply holds himself to exacting standards.

A total of 303 strength and conditioning coaches completed validated questionnaires measuring perfectionism, coping strategies, depressive and anxiety symptoms, and life satisfaction. The team then applied k-means cluster analysis, a statistical technique that groups individuals based on how similar their response patterns are across multiple dimensions simultaneously. The method searches for natural groupings in the data, allowing profiles to emerge from the responses themselves rather than being imposed by the researchers in advance. This approach has become increasingly popular in psychology precisely because it captures the way real people combine traits, rather than treating each characteristic as an independent variable with its own separate effect.

Three distinct profiles emerged from the analysis. The first group, labeled High-Strain Coaches, scored high on both self-oriented perfectionism, the tendency to demand flawlessness from oneself, and socially prescribed perfectionism, the belief that significant others expect perfection from them. The second group, the Internal Critics, combined high self-oriented perfectionism with a strong tendency toward self-blame when things go wrong. The third group, the Sustainable Professionals, showed lower levels of perfectionism overall and low self-blame, a combination that on its face suggests a healthier relationship with a demanding job.

When the researchers compared mental health outcomes across the three clusters, the differences were statistically significant across every measure examined. Both the High-Strain Coaches and the Internal Critics reported substantially higher levels of depressive and anxiety symptoms than the Sustainable Professionals. But the Internal Critics stood out in one additional and troubling way: they also reported the lowest life satisfaction of any group. In other words, the combination of perfectionism directed inward and a coping style built on self-criticism appears to be the most corrosive profile of all, eroding not just mood and anxiety levels but the broader sense that one’s life is going well.

The findings align with a well-established body of theory on perfectionism. Psychologists have long distinguished between perfectionistic strivings, the drive toward high personal standards, and perfectionistic concerns, the fear of failure and the sense that others demand the impossible. Self-oriented perfectionism can coexist with genuine achievement and even satisfaction when paired with flexible coping, but socially prescribed perfectionism, in which pressure is perceived as coming from outside, is consistently associated with poorer mental health. The present study adds a coaching-specific dimension to this picture, suggesting that the culture of strength and conditioning, with its emphasis on precision, accountability, and visible results, may amplify the perceived external pressure that makes socially prescribed perfectionism so damaging.

The coping dimension is equally important. Self-blame as a coping strategy, sometimes called self-criticism in the coping literature, involves attributing failure to one’s own character rather than to circumstances, strategy, or chance. Decades of research have linked this style to depression and anxiety across many populations, and the current findings suggest that when it combines with high personal standards, the result is a profile in which coaches are simultaneously demanding more of themselves and punishing themselves more harshly when they fall short. The Sustainable Professionals, by contrast, appear to hold high standards without the punitive internal response, a combination that seems to protect both mood and life satisfaction.

What makes this study particularly timely is the growing recognition that mental health in sport cannot be understood by looking at athletes alone. Strength and conditioning coaches occupy a peculiar position in the sporting hierarchy: they are authority figures to the athletes they train, subordinates to head coaches and performance directors, and often the first to be blamed when results disappoint. They work long and irregular hours, travel extensively, and frequently absorb the emotional labor of managing athletes’ frustrations while having few outlets of their own. If a substantial proportion of this workforce carries psychological profiles associated with elevated depressive and anxiety symptoms, the implications extend beyond individual suffering to the quality of support that athletes receive.

The authors argue that their results point toward targeted rather than generic interventions. Because the risk is concentrated in specific profiles, support programs should address both organizational contributors to perceived external pressure, such as unrealistic workload expectations and cultures of blame, and the internally driven patterns of perfectionism and self-critical coping that turn external demands into internal suffering. Cognitive approaches that help coaches reframe failure, distinguish between high standards and perfectionistic concerns, and develop more adaptive coping strategies could be particularly valuable for the Internal Critics, whose combination of self-imposed pressure and self-punishment places them at the greatest risk.

For the sporting world at large, the study serves as a reminder that the people who build the bodies of elite athletes are themselves human, and that the same psychological forces that drive excellence can, in the wrong combination, quietly undermine the very professionals the industry depends on. As mental health becomes an increasingly central concern across sport, the coaches who stand behind the athletes may finally be getting the attention their own wellbeing deserves, and this research offers a concrete map of where that attention is most urgently needed.

Subject of Research: Mental health profiles linked to perfectionism and coping strategies in strength and conditioning coaches

Article Title: Who is at risk? Mental health and perfectionism-coping profiles in strength and conditioning coaches

Article References: Kowalski, T., & Gorgol-Waleriańczyk, J. (2026). Who is at risk? Mental health and perfectionism-coping profiles in strength and conditioning coaches. BMC Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-026-05602-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40359-026-05602-2

Keywords: strength and conditioning coaches, perfectionism, coping strategies, depressive symptoms, anxiety symptoms, life satisfaction, mental health, sport coaching, cluster analysis, self-blame, coach wellbeing, BMC Psychology