Dynamic Interactive Model of Sport Motivation.

Motivation variables in 11 motivational instruments of 357 Slovenian male athletes (168 elite and 189 young athletes from age 12-14) in nine different sport disciplines (basketball, football, handball, water polo, ice hockey, ski jumping, alpine skiing, sport climbing, and judo) were obtained. Different concepts of motivation were researched, such as achievement motivation, incentive motivation, participation motivation, goal orientation, satisfaction and enjoyment in sport, self-efficacy, effort, and ability attributions. The most popular framework for motivation in sport lately has been social cognitive perspective. The aim of this study was to form a dynamic interactive model of sport motivation. We tried to upgrade different models of motivation to one unique meta model of sport motivation, which would explain possible behaviours and motivation in sport situations. Different statistic methods were used to define differences among young and elite athletes and between athletes in group and individual sports. The results show important differences among those groups and suggest that specific sport discipline also has a specific footprint inside motivation. Factor analysis and discriminant analysis were used to explore sport motivation space. The results also suggest that it is possible to define some main determinants of sport motivation that can be connected to previous models of sport motivation.

Influences of Blood Lactate Levels on Cognitive Domains and Physical Health during a Sports Stress. Brief Review.

The present review aims to examine the effects of high blood lactate levels in healthy adult humans, for instance, after a period of exhaustive exercise, on the functioning of the cerebral cortex. In some of the examined studies, high blood lactate levels were obtained not only through exhaustive exercise but also with an intravenous infusion of lactate while the subject was immobile. This allowed us to exclude the possibility that the observed post-exercise effects were nonspecific (e.g., cortical changes in temperature, acidity, etc.). We observed that, in both experimental conditions, high levels of blood lactate are associated with a worsening of important cognitive domains such as attention or working memory or stress, without gender differences. Moreover, in both experimental conditions, high levels of blood lactate are associated with an improvement of the primary motor area (M1) excitability. Outside the frontal lobe, the use of visual evoked potentials and somatosensory evoked potentials allowed us to observe, in the occipital and parietal lobe respectively, that high levels of blood lactate are associated with an amplitude's increase and a latency's reduction of the early components of the evoked responses. In conclusion, significant increases of blood lactate levels could exercise a double-action in the central nervous system (CNS), with a protecting role on primary cortical areas (such as M1, primary visual area, or primary somatosensory cortex), while reducing the efficiency of adjacent regions, such as the supplementary motor area (SMA) or prefrontal cortex. These observations are compatible with the possibility that lactate works in the brain not only as an energy substrate or an angiogenetic factor but also as a true neuromodulator, which can protect from stress. In this review, we will discuss the mechanisms and effects of lactic acid products produced during an anaerobic exercise lactate, focusing on their action at the level of the central nervous system with particular attention to the primary motor, the somatosensory evoked potentials, and the occipital and parietal lobe.