The research, led by PhD candidate Jamie Wilson at Flinders University, focuses on what the authors describe as a vulnerable transition window in an athlete’s development: the years between 17 and 24, when teenagers and young adults move from junior competition toward elite senior levels. During this period, athletes face a convergence of pressures that few other young people experience. The study found that 84.6 percent of the young athletes surveyed held outside employment while pursuing their sporting careers, and 61.5 percent were simultaneously studying. These figures illustrate the reality of the dual-career lifestyle, in which intense training schedules must be fitted around exams, shifts at work and the ordinary developmental tasks of early adulthood.

At the heart of the study is a concept drawn from occupational therapy known as occupational balance, which refers to how individuals distribute their time and energy across the full range of activities that make up a life, including sport, education, paid work, leisure and rest. The researchers argue that this balance is not a peripheral concern but a powerful force shaping mental health outcomes. When a young athlete’s daily routine becomes dominated almost entirely by training and competition, the structure that once made sport enjoyable can become a source of strain. As Wilson explains, when a passion once pursued for fun begins to consume every waking hour, young athletes face heightened risks for poor mental health and wellbeing, both in the present and later in life.

The study identifies several key factors that contribute to poor mental health among young athletes on the elite pathway. The first is the sheer volume of time that sport and training demand, which can leave little room for recovery, social connection or the exploration of other interests. The second is the frequent need to relocate, often at a young age, which uproots athletes from stable relationships with family, friends and community support networks at precisely the stage of life when those connections matter most. The third is a more insidious dynamic: many athletes report feeling objectified, treated as a commodity whose value depends entirely on performance, with support systems that are contingent on results rather than on the person behind them.

A fourth factor compounds the others. The culture of elite sport often imposes what the researchers describe as superhuman expectations, an implicit demand that athletes be endlessly resilient, tireless and immune to doubt. This framing creates profound obstacles to seeking help. A young athlete who believes they must appear invulnerable is far less likely to disclose anxiety, burnout or depression to coaches, medical staff or even family members. The result is a silent accumulation of distress during a developmental window in which mental health trajectories for adulthood are being established.

The research also highlights that risk is not distributed evenly across the sporting population. Female athletes and those who compete in individual sports tend to face greater threats to their mental health, the researchers report. Individual athletes, who train and compete without the shared burden and camaraderie of a team, may carry the full weight of results and expectations alone, while the specific pressures experienced by women in high-performance environments add further layers of vulnerability. These findings suggest that support programs built around a generic image of the athlete may miss the groups who need help most.

Co-author Professor Ivanka Prichard of Flinders University frames the practical implication of the work in striking terms. Supporting young athletes beyond sport, she argues, is not a distraction from victory but the vital foundation for developing healthier, stronger and more resilient competitors. The study adds an intriguing nuance to this argument: young athletes who pursue their sport for personal enjoyment and love of the game, rather than in response to external pressure from coaches, parents or institutions, appear more likely to persist through setbacks and to be psychologically healthier. Their commitment and enthusiasm, in other words, function as protective factors, but only when the surrounding life structure allows those motivations to survive the grind of elite training.

The urgency of the findings is sharpened by the status that the International Olympic Committee has assigned to this age group. The IOC has designated young adults and teenagers in elite sport as a neglected population, a label that reflects a gap between the scale of investment in junior performance pathways and the attention paid to the wellbeing of the young people moving through them. The Flinders study argues that this gap needs to be closed with deliberate support to maintain and build long-term wellbeing and resilience, rather than leaving athletes to navigate the transition window on their own or relying on support that evaporates the moment performance dips.

From a methodological standpoint, the study contributes an occupational lens to a literature that has often approached athlete mental health through clinical or performance frameworks. Survey research of this kind allows researchers to map how young athletes actually spend their days and how those patterns relate to measures of mental health and wellbeing, rather than treating the athlete purely as a performer whose non-sporting life is incidental. The occupational therapy perspective reframes everyday activities such as studying, working a part-time job, resting or socialising as meaningful occupations that sustain identity and psychological resources. Seen this way, the dual-career demands documented in the study are not obstacles to athletic achievement but potential scaffolding for it, providing alternative sources of self-worth, social contact and future security that buffer the inevitable highs and lows of competitive sport.

The broader message of the research is one that resonates well beyond the locker room. As major sporting events turn the world’s attention toward extraordinary feats of performance, the study reminds audiences that the athletes delivering those feats are young people in the midst of forming adult identities, and that true athletic excellence and long-term wellbeing require a balanced life. The elite pathway, as Wilson describes it, is packed with soaring highs and brutal lows, and the real secret to sustainable success may lie in the life an athlete builds outside of sport. For sporting bodies, coaches and families, the implication is clear: protecting time for education, work, friendship and rest is not a concession to softness but an investment in both the person and the performance. The study, titled Balancing act: An occupational lens on the process of becoming an elite athlete, was conducted by Jamie Wilson, Ivanka Prichard, Jasmine Petersen of Flinders and Adelaide University, and Brad Stenner of Adelaide University, and was published in the Scandinavian Journal of Occupational Therapy.

Subject of Research: Occupational balance and mental health in young elite athletes during the dual-career transition window

Article Title: Sporting glory starts with life outside sport, new study finds

Article References: Sporting glory starts with life outside sport, new study finds. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: young athletes, mental health, occupational balance, dual career, elite sport, occupational therapy, wellbeing, Flinders University, International Olympic Committee, transition window, athlete burnout, sport psychology

The study arrives at a moment of mounting concern in international sport. In 2023, the International Olympic Committee formally identified youth elite athletes as a ‘neglected population’ and issued a call for further research into their wellbeing. Despite the enormous investment that sporting systems pour into identifying and developing young talent, relatively little is known about how the process of becoming an elite athlete shapes the day-to-day occupational lives of adolescents and young adults. Previous work has leaned heavily on psychological frameworks, focusing on traits such as motivation, resilience and burnout, while paying less attention to how training regimes, relocation, institutional demands and social pressures restructure a young athlete’s entire pattern of living.

Methodologically, the research combined quantitative and qualitative evidence in a convergent mixed-methods design. A cross-sectional questionnaire captured data from 39 athletes, measuring dimensions of mental health alongside constructs such as enthusiastic commitment and grit. In parallel, the team conducted semi-structured individual interviews with eight athletes, gathering both the current experiences of young athletes on the talent pathway and retrospective accounts from more experienced athletes who had already lived through the transition. By analysing the two data streams side by side, the researchers could test statistical patterns in the sample while also building a richer narrative picture of what occupational balance, or the lack of it, actually looks like in the lives of developing athletes.

The quantitative results pointed to stark differences in mental health outcomes across the sample. Gender and sport type were both associated with psychological wellbeing: female athletes and athletes competing in individual sports reported poorer mental health than their male peers and those in team environments. This pattern is significant because it suggests that the structural and social conditions of different sporting contexts, rather than elite status alone, may shape psychological risk. Team sports may offer built-in social connection and shared identity, whereas individual sports can place the full weight of performance, travel and self-directed training on a single young person, with fewer companions to share the load.

One of the most technically interesting quantitative findings concerned the relationship between commitment quality and mental health. The researchers distinguished enthusiastic commitment, a form of engagement characterised by genuine enjoyment and willing dedication, from more constrained forms of commitment driven by obligation or entrapment. Enthusiastic commitment was positively correlated with grit, the persevering passion for long-term goals that psychologists have linked to achievement, and negatively correlated with depression. In other words, young athletes who pursued their sport out of love rather than pressure tended to be both more persistent and psychologically healthier. This distinction carries practical weight, because talent systems that rely on coercive or highly controlling selection pressures may inadvertently convert healthy dedication into a risk factor for depression.

The qualitative analysis, meanwhile, identified six key factors that influence occupational balance during the process of becoming an elite athlete. The first was the sheer scale of elite sport as a time commitment: training, competition, travel and recovery consumed the hours that peers spent on study, part-time work, hobbies and socialising. The second was relocation for recognition, as promising athletes moved away from home, often in adolescence, to access better coaching, facilities or selection opportunities, severing the familiar occupational routines and support networks of their home environments. These are not merely logistical inconveniences; from an occupational science perspective, they are disruptions to the pattern of meaningful activity that scaffolds identity and wellbeing during development.

The remaining factors exposed the uncomfortable commercial and institutional realities of youth sport. Athletes described being treated as a commodity, valued for their results and potential rather than as whole people, which shaped how they understood their own worth and their willingness to admit difficulty. Meaningful relationships emerged as a powerful protective force supporting life balance, with family, friends, coaches and partners helping athletes preserve a sense of self beyond performance. Access to formal support varied widely and mattered enormously, as did what the researchers termed superhuman barriers to help-seeking: an ingrained cultural expectation that elite athletes should be physically and mentally invincible, making it difficult to acknowledge fatigue, anxiety or distress without fearing that a place on the team, a scholarship or a contract might be jeopardised.

Taken together, the findings reframe athlete wellbeing as an occupational balance problem rather than purely an individual psychological one. Occupational balance, a core concept in occupational science and occupational therapy, refers to a healthful distribution of meaningful activities across a person’s life, including work, rest, play and social participation. When elite sport monopolises a young person’s occupational repertoire, displacing sleep, education, friendships and leisure, the conditions for depression and other mental health difficulties are quietly established. The study’s authors argue that this perspective exposes opportunities for imbalance that a purely psychological or performance-based framing can miss, and it opens a door for occupational therapy to contribute to sport as an emerging practice area, supporting athletes not just in their sporting roles but in their lives as students, family members and friends.

The implications reach well beyond the clinic. Sporting bodies, academies and national institutes invest heavily in the physical development of young athletes, yet this study suggests that investment must be matched by systems that protect whole-life balance, monitor the mental health of female athletes and competitors in individual sports, cultivate enthusiastic rather than coerced commitment, and dismantle the superhuman norms that silence help-seeking. For a population the International Olympic Committee has labelled neglected, the message of this research is clear: the making of an elite athlete is an occupation in the fullest sense, and if we want young people to reach the podium and flourish afterwards, we must support the entire balancing act, not just the performance that happens on the field of play.

Occupational science, the discipline underpinning this study, emerged in the late twentieth century when researchers began arguing that human health cannot be fully understood by examining symptoms in isolation from the everyday activities that structure people’s lives. Within this tradition, occupation refers not only to paid employment but to the full range of purposeful activities that fill a person’s days, from sleeping and eating to studying, socialising and training. Applying this framework to sport represents a relatively recent extension of the field, and the current study is notable for treating athletic development itself as an occupational transition, comparable in scope to the transitions into parenthood, retirement or chronic illness that occupational scientists have long studied.

The emphasis on transition is particularly relevant given what is known about adolescence and early adulthood as developmental windows. During these years, young people typically consolidate their identities through experimentation with multiple roles, build peer networks outside the family, and establish habits of self-care and study that persist into adult life. When a demanding elite pathway absorbs a disproportionate share of a young person’s time and identity resources during precisely this window, the developmental work of building a diversified occupational repertoire may be deferred or derailed. The retrospective accounts gathered from experienced athletes in the study are valuable in this respect, because they offer a view of how early occupational imbalance echoes across a sporting career rather than only how it feels in the moment.

The statistical associations reported in the questionnaire data also invite careful interpretation. Because the design was cross-sectional, the findings describe patterns present at a single point in time rather than causal pathways. It is possible, for example, that the poorer mental health reported by female athletes and those in individual sports reflects unmeasured differences in coaching environments, media exposure, injury burden or resource allocation, and longitudinal follow-up would be needed to disentangle these possibilities. The sample of 39 questionnaire respondents and eight interviewees, while rich in depth, is modest in size, which means the quantitative estimates should be read as indicative rather than definitive.

Even with these caveats, the convergence between the two data streams strengthens the overall picture. The statistical correlation between enthusiastic commitment and lower depression mirrors the qualitative accounts of athletes who described thriving when their sporting lives remained connected to genuine enjoyment and supportive relationships, and struggling when obligation and external evaluation dominated. This kind of mixed-methods agreement is often taken as evidence that a phenomenon is robust across different ways of knowing.

The authors also frame their work as a contribution to the growing conversation about mental health in elite sport, an area that has gained visibility as prominent athletes have spoken publicly about psychological distress. By grounding that conversation in occupational balance, the study offers sporting organisations a practical vocabulary for auditing their programmes, asking not only whether young athletes are performing, but whether their daily lives retain the breadth of activity, connection and rest that sustained wellbeing requires, both during their careers and after they eventually leave the podium behind.

Subject of Research: Occupational balance and mental health among youth athletes transitioning to elite sport

Article Title: Balancing Act: An Occupational Lens on the Process of Becoming an Elite Athlete

Article References: Wilson, J., Prichard, I., Petersen, J., & Stenner, B. (2026). Balancing Act: An Occupational Lens on the Process of Becoming an Elite Athlete. Scandinavian Journal of Occupational Therapy. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44474-026-00006-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44474-026-00006-2

Keywords: elite athletes, youth sport, occupational balance, mental health, occupational therapy, athlete wellbeing, grit, enthusiastic commitment, help-seeking, International Olympic Committee, mixed methods, occupational science