The Palgrave Handbook of Burnout in Sport - Robert C. Eklund

This handbook provides the first comprehensive, dedicated compendium on burnout in sport, bringing together conceptual, methodological, and applied perspectives in a single volume. Although burnout has long concerned athletes, coaches, and sport scientists, scholarly work has remained dispersed across journal articles, special issues, and isolated chapters. Addressing this gap, the book offers a top-down, state-of-the-art account that is theoretically rigorous, empirically grounded, and practically relevant.

Organised into five parts, it moves progressively from foundations to applications. It opens with the conceptualisation, measurement, and clinical features of burnout, including its physiological markers and its distinction from related conditions such as overtraining syndrome and depression. It then examines social and motivational determinants, individual factors such as passion, perfectionism, and emotional regulation, and finally prevention and remediation strategies at both individual and organisational levels. A concluding epilogue charts future directions.

A central argument runs throughout the book; burnout cannot be understood through a single level of analysis, but emerges from the interplay of individual, biological, social, and organisational processes. Bringing together leading international scholars, the book speaks to practitioners seeking evidence-based guidance and researchers requiring a rigorous foundation for future inquiry. It is essential reading for sport psychologists, coaches, sport scientists, and clinicians.