Exercise, Resilience, and Cognitive Flexibility among University Athletes: A Cross-Sectional Study in Pakistan

Abstract

Physical and cognitive challenges associated with university sports along with those related to academics create a dual-career environment, which requires university athletes to be psychologically adaptable to cope with these difficulties. The cross-sectional study currently undertaken was designed to examine the relationships among physical activity, psychological resilience, and cognitive flexibility in 200 university athletes (male = 140, female = 60) selected conveniently from University of Gujrat, Zamindara Football Academy, and fitness centers of Pakistan. In order to measure the variables, the International Physical Activity Questionnaire - Short Form was used to measure physical activity, the Brief Resilience Scale was used to measure the psychological resilience and the Cognitive Flexibility Scale was used to measure the cognitive flexibility. The results of the Spearman correlation test showed a positive correlation between physical activity and resilience (ρ = .383, p < .001). On the other hand, the results of the simple linear regression test showed that physical activity significantly predicted the resilience (F(1, 198) = 13.723, p < .001, β = .255, 6.5%). Physical activity did not have a significant correlation with cognitive flexibility (ρ = .123, p = .083), whereas resilience did not have a significant correlation with cognitive flexibility (ρ = −.038, p = .594). Mann Whitney U Tests showed that males, team-sport participants, and private university athletes scored significantly higher physical activity and/or resilience scores than their opposite categories, whereas no statistically significant demographic differences were found for cognitive flexibility. The internal consistency of all measures used in the study was relatively low (.470 for IPAQ-SF, .268 for BRS, .614 for CFS), which is considered to be one of the study’s limitations. The results provided in this paper serve as evidence to stress buffering and biopsychosocial models of the exercise-resilience connection in the non-Western developing countries.