Are the Factors Behind Burnout Different for Boys and Girls? — A 2025 Study on Sport Motivation in 638 Adolescent Athletes

🌏 日本語版はこちら：燃え尽き症候群に関連する要因は男女で違う？

“He was working so hard, and then one day he just stopped showing up…”

This is something coaches and parents quietly bring up on the mat.

“After the national tournament ended, he burned out and quit the next month.”

“She still shows up to practice, but the light has gone out of her eyes lately.”

“She gave everything to the sport in elementary school, and then in middle school it all suddenly stopped.”

For adolescent athletes, burnout is often a heavier issue than winning or losing. And what makes it so puzzling is this: in the same gym, with the same coach and the same workload, some kids burn out and others keep going. What accounts for that difference? In this post, I’d like to introduce a 2025 study that pushes directly into this question.

To put the conclusion up front: motivation for sport is associated with lower burnout in adolescent athletes — and the pathways through which that association unfolds appear to differ between boys and girls. This emerges from data on 638 adolescent athletes.

One important caveat from the start: this study looked at adolescent athletes in Chinese specialized sports teams across more than ten sports, not wrestlers specifically. Wrestling athletes make up roughly 6% of the sample, but no sport-specific analysis was conducted. Even so, the findings offer enough for the wrestling environment to take seriously, and I’ll walk through them carefully below.

Overview of the Study — Reading 638 Adolescent Athletes Through “Motivation,” “Mental Toughness,” and “Life Satisfaction”

The paper I’ll be discussing was published in 2025 in the Journal of Human Kinetics.

Zhang H, Ma H. The Effect of Sport Motivation on Burnout in Adolescent Athletes — Chain Mediating Effect of Life Satisfaction and Mental Toughness. Journal of Human Kinetics, Vol. 99, 239–252 (2025).
Source: https://doi.org/10.5114/jhk/201433

• Participants: 638 adolescent athletes from Chinese specialized sports teams (345 boys, 293 girls; mean age 15.64)
• Sports: track and field 20%, basketball 15%, table tennis 10%, wushu 8%, gymnastics 7%, wrestling 6%, kayak 5%, weightlifting 5%, boxing 4%, taekwondo 3%, archery 2%, and others (more than ten sports combined)
• Method: Cross-sectional questionnaire survey. Conducted in September 2023 across multiple teams in Shaanxi, Henan, and Beijing.
• Four psychological measures: sport motivation (MPAM-R), life satisfaction, mental toughness, and athlete burnout

Measuring “Sport Motivation” Along Five Directions

The “sport motivation” used in this study is measured along five directions: health, appearance, enjoyment, competence, and social. The point is to capture why a young person is doing the sport — not narrowing it to “winning” or “results,” but including more inward-facing drivers such as wanting to be healthy, wanting to improve, enjoying teammates, and finding pleasure in movement itself.

Key Terms: “Mental Toughness” and “Life Satisfaction”

Mental toughness refers to the psychological elasticity that allows an athlete to absorb hard hits without breaking, to keep going, and to bounce back. Life satisfaction refers to overall satisfaction with one’s life — not just one’s sport, but everyday life as a whole.

The paper analyzes how sport motivation is associated with lower burnout through mental toughness and life satisfaction, with the analysis run separately for boys and girls. In technical language, this is called a chain mediation model. In plain terms, it’s a way of asking, “Does A reach C by passing through B?” and tracing the route step by step.

Results — The “Pathways That Protect Against Burnout” Differed in Boys and Girls

The results came out clearly split by gender.

What boys and girls had in common: sport motivation was associated with lower burnout in both

• Boys: correlation linking sport motivation to burnout, r = −0.523, p < 0.01 (a negative correlation — higher motivation, lower burnout)
• Girls: correlation linking sport motivation to burnout, r = −0.491, p < 0.01

At the broad level, the relationship was the same in both groups: athletes with higher sport motivation tended to report less burnout.

Where they differed: what linked motivation to burnout

Here is the central finding of the paper. The “sport motivation → burnout” link is decomposed into three pathways:

• Pathway 1: motivation → life satisfaction → burnout
• Pathway 2: motivation → mental toughness → burnout
• Pathway 3: motivation → life satisfaction → mental toughness → burnout (the chain mediation)

When the relative contribution of these three pathways was broken down by gender, the picture looked like this.

Boys: almost a single “mental toughness pathway”

• Pathway 2 (via mental toughness): indirect effect −0.174, accounting for 46.52% of the total
• Pathway 3 (chain mediation): indirect effect −0.072, 19.25%
• Pathway 1 (life satisfaction only): not statistically significant

For boys, the dominant route was “motivation → mental toughness → lower burnout.” Rather than whether life as a whole felt fulfilling, what most strongly differentiated who burned out and who didn’t was whether psychological resilience was being built.

Girls: all three pathways were involved

• Pathway 1 (life satisfaction only): 7.15%
• Pathway 2 (mental toughness only): 25.12%
• Pathway 3 (chain mediation): 7.32%

For girls, the “life satisfaction pathway” functioned independently as well, and all three pathways operated in a direction associated with lower burnout. Unlike the boys’ “mental toughness alone” picture, multiple routes were involved — including the satisfaction of life outside the sport, and the way that satisfaction can in turn translate into resilience.

The correlation was statistically significant in both groups, but the total effect was larger for girls (−0.601) than for boys (−0.374). In other words, across the whole pathway, the link between sport motivation and burnout was stronger overall in girls.

Why Might the “Pathways” Differ Between Boys and Girls?

The paper offers the following interpretations for this gender difference. Read them as hypotheses, not conclusions.

• In the paper itself, most of the explanation centers on the girls’ side. The authors propose that “females tend to be more sensitive to subjective well-being and more likely to draw on life satisfaction as a psychological resource.” As for why the mental toughness pathway stood out so much for boys, Zhang & Ma do not push explicitly into that question themselves.
• To add a researcher’s footnote: in the broader literature on sport psychology and gender, there is a long-running discussion that boys are more often pressed to be “tough” and “not to show weakness” as a cultural expectation. That may sit somewhere in the background of these findings as well — but this is general context outside the paper, and should be read as such.

These are results from a Chinese sample, and the patterns cannot be assumed to apply directly to other countries. Even so, the underlying perspective — that the “entry point” for protecting against burnout may differ between boys and girls — is a question worth carrying with us when we work with young athletes.

In my own experience, things outside of wrestling — school life, friendships, family — tended to register more heavily for the female athletes I worked with.

How This Applies on the Wrestling Mat

To repeat the caveat: this study was not limited to wrestlers. Wrestling athletes make up about 6% of the sample, and no sport-specific analysis is reported. Still, there are several points that translate naturally to the wrestling environment.

1. For Athletes and Parents — Look at the “Contents” of Motivation Together

The “motivation” measured in this study isn’t just about wanting to win or get results. It includes five directions: health, competence, enjoyment, social, and (in this scale) appearance.

When a child says, “I’m not feeling it lately,” asking only about the desire to win may not lead anywhere useful.

• “Lately in practice, have there been moments where you felt you got better at something?” (competence)
• “What was the most fun part recently?” (enjoyment)
• “How are things going with your teammates?” (social)

Of the five directions, which one is fading? Untangling that together — before pushing harder — may be one way to pause at the entrance of burnout rather than walk through it.

2. For Adults Around Boys — How to Cultivate “Mental Toughness”

For boys, the pathway with the strongest contribution was mental toughness. That said, mental toughness does not grow from “just take it” or “don’t be soft.” If anything, it grows from:

• Stacking up small challenges and small successes — in quantity
• After a failure, reviewing together: “What didn’t work? What would you try differently next time?”
• Creating space where it’s okay to say things out loud — “that was frustrating,” “that was scary” — rather than swallowing the feeling

This kind of repeated cycle of recoverable failure is what builds mental toughness over time. The first article in this series — Does Wrestling Strengthen the Mind? — A New 2026 RCT on Adolescent Boys — pointed to this same dynamic, framing wrestling as a sport in which “small failures happen repeatedly, by design.”

3. For Adults Around Girls — Keep “Life Outside the Sport” in View

What stood out for girls was that the “life satisfaction pathway” contributed independently. This hints that attending only to what happens during practice may not be enough to protect female athletes from burnout.

• Is there enough room for school life, friendships, and family time?
• Are they wearing themselves out trying to hold up sport, study, and relationships all at once?
• Away from the sport, do they have time that feels filling to them in their own terms?

This is not only a question for girls — it matters just as much for boys. But because the boys’ data showed mental toughness as the more prominent contributor, it can be easy for adults to fix their attention only on what happens inside the gym. The boys’ side, too, deserves a re-read: don’t lose sight of life as a whole.

4. For Coaches — The Same Words May Land Differently for Boys and Girls

In mixed-gender practice settings, coaches usually use the same language with everyone. If we take this study seriously, one possible shift is:

• For boys — language that supports building resilience: reviewing failures, opportunities to try
• For girls — language that also keeps life outside the sport in view: school, family, recovery

A small change in where the emphasis lands may matter for preventing burnout. Of course, splitting the world into “boys are like this, girls are like that” is risky — individual differences outweigh group differences. Take this only as a frame to hold loosely.

Limitations of This Study — What to Keep in Mind

The original paper does not include an explicit “Limitations” section. Still, in the interest of reading the work honestly, there are several considerations I think are worth flagging as a researcher. The five points below are drawn from the Methods, Discussion, and Implications sections of the original paper, and reflect what can be inferred about the study’s design.

• It is a cross-sectional study: data were collected at a single point in time via questionnaire. We cannot strictly determine whether “higher motivation leads to lower burnout” or “lower burnout makes motivation easier to sustain” — the direction of causality remains open.
• All measures are self-reported: every score comes from the athletes’ own questionnaire responses. The pull to present oneself favorably — “I’m tough,” “I’m satisfied” — may be mixed into the data (social desirability bias).
• Chinese specialized-sports-team sample: cultural background, developmental systems, and how gender roles are framed differ from country to country. Whether the findings transfer cleanly to the wrestling environment in Japan, or elsewhere, would require separate testing.
• No sport-specific analysis: more than ten sports were pooled together, and the data were not analyzed for wrestlers alone. How wrestling’s particular qualities — body contact, the structure of a weight-class sport — interact with these findings is a question for future work.
• The gender-difference interpretation is still at the hypothesis stage: whether the contrast (“boys via the mental toughness pathway, girls via three pathways”) is biological or a culturally reinforced pattern of behavior cannot be distinguished within this paper.

The honest reading isn’t, “For boys focus on toughness, for girls focus on life — and burnout will be prevented.” A more careful reading is: “What contributes to burnout is unlikely to be a single factor,” and “Within the same team, the form of effective support may not be the same for every athlete.”

What I’ve Seen on the Ground

Over the years, I’ve worked with wrestlers from elementary school through university across several settings. The experience of seeing an athlete suddenly stop coming is, I suspect, familiar to many coaches.

Looking back, the athlete often couldn’t put into their own words why they had quit. “I just couldn’t keep going.” “At some point my heart wasn’t in it anymore.” Burnout rarely arrives in a single day; more often, it arrives a little at a time. Reading this study, I came away thinking that to keep an eye on that gradual “little by little,” it’s worth observing an athlete’s state of mind through three lenses — motivation, mental toughness, and life satisfaction.

Conclusion — The Value of Continuing, Beyond “Winning”

What this paper suggests is that sport motivation is linked to burnout — and that the factors involved may differ between boys and girls.

Helping athletes win, helping athletes get stronger — these matter, of course. But before winning, there is the more basic matter of being able to keep going. Once an athlete keeps going, opportunities to win and to grow follow. Thinking carefully about how to protect against burnout is, in another way, about protecting the other value of sport beyond winning — what an athlete carries away from the experience.

That the contributing factors may not be the same for boys and girls is, in part, a reminder that the same words don’t always land the same way. Look at the athlete in front of you through three lenses — motivation, resilience, and the fullness of life outside sport. This paper, for me, was a useful nudge in that direction.

Read the other articles in this series:
Part 1 — Does Wrestling Strengthen the Mind? A New 2026 RCT on Adolescent Boys
Part 2 — How Parents at Home Shape Kids’ Behavior on the Mat: A 2026 Study on Autonomy Support

Reference

• Title: The Effect of Sport Motivation on Burnout in Adolescent Athletes — Chain Mediating Effect of Life Satisfaction and Mental Toughness
• Authors: Zhang H, Ma H
• Journal / Year: Journal of Human Kinetics, Vol. 99, 239–252 (2025)
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.5114/jhk/201433
• PMID: 41245963

About Wrestle InSight

Wrestle InSight is a media outlet that examines wrestling through three combined perspectives — former wrestler, coach, and researcher. It is run by Sho Ito, who moves between the practical knowledge built on the mat and the scientific knowledge built in the university. The goal is to add one step of depth to information that too often passes by as “just a vague impression.”