A study on the influence of athletes' psychological safety on training persistence and its chain mediation mechanism

Introduction As competitive training shifts from a traditional “load-optimization” paradigm toward an integrated “load-experience-development” framework, explaining training persistence requires greater attention to athletes' situational interaction and subjective experience. Drawing on psychological safety theory, the self-regulatory resource model, and self-determination theory, this study proposed a chained pathway model linking psychological safety, cognitive fatigue, training enjoyment, and training persistence. Methods Questionnaire data were collected from active athletes ( N = 526). Structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to test the hypothesized relationships among psychological safety, cognitive fatigue, training enjoyment, and training persistence. Multi-group comparisons were further conducted to examine whether the focal pathways differed across endurance, skill, and strength/competition disciplines. Results The results showed that psychological safety was negatively associated with cognitive fatigue and positively associated with training enjoyment. Cognitive fatigue and training enjoyment were, in turn, significantly associated with training persistence, and the sequential pathway from psychological safety to training persistence through reduced cognitive fatigue and enhanced training enjoyment was supported. In addition, the magnitude of the focal pathways varied across discipline types, indicating that the relationship between training interaction conditions and sustained engagement was context-dependent. Discussion These findings suggest that training persistence should not be understood merely as a manifestation of individual willpower. Rather, it reflects the combined influence of cognitive resource expenditure and affective reward, both of which are shaped by enduring interaction patterns within the training environment. The study extends current explanations of training persistence and offers practical implications for fostering psychologically safe training climates, calibrating load-recovery rhythms, and strengthening process-oriented motivation in high-performance sport settings.