Strategies to deal with stress in men who practice extreme skiing

Abstract

Extreme skiing is growing in popularity. This kind of sport is designed to expose athletes to greater thrills and risks than are found in traditional sporting activities. Also practicing this sport gives you more emotional experience in extreme than the traditional cultivation of recreational skiing activities. Theoretical perspectives on extreme sports and extreme sport participants have assumed that participation is about risk‐taking and stress exposure. In this paper we compare style of stress coping among two groups of skiers (“extreme” and “recreational”). We have examined the group of 54 male skiers ages 30 to 45 years with minimum 15 years of skiing experience). They were applied interview with the skiers relating to the preferred lifestyle and Questionnaire COPE – a Multidimensional Coping Inventory (Carver, C.S., Scheier, M.F., & Weintraub, J.K.) in order to determine the dominant styles of coping with stress (problem-focused coping, seeking of emotional support and denial-focused coping). Results indicate that active style of coping dominated in the both groups, but the extreme skiers score higher the skiers from recreational group. The difference is on significance level of 0.05.