Exigencias superyoicas de rendimiento y riesgo de lesiones musculares en nadadores máster.

Abstract

This research addressed the relationship between superegoic performance demands and the risk of muscle injury in high-performance masters swimmers who competed in the 2025 South American Masters Swimming Championship. The study originated from the observation that several of these athletes continued training and competing despite pain, raising the need to understand sports injury not only from its biomechanical dimension, but also from the psychic demand that accompanies it. The general objective was to analyze this relationship from a qualitative approach, through three specific objectives: to analyze how superegoic demands operate in the subjective experience of the masters swimmer from psychoanalysis and sport psychology, to determine the risk of muscle injury considering sustained stress, performance pressure, and the experience of bodily limits; and to identify the articulation between that demand and the occurrence of injuries. A hermeneutic phenomenological design was used, through semi-structured interviews applied to five masters swimmers and two clinical psychologists experienced in working with athletes. The results showed that the relationship between performance demand and injury risk did not operate uniformly, but rather depended on how each subject managed, or failed to manage, symbolically the performance mandate that inhabited them, in cases where this processing was less successful, the body ended up assuming, through pain and injury, the function of a limit the subject had not managed to establish otherwise.