Flow in Sports and Exercise: A Historical Overview

Originally, Csikszentmihalyi studied activities such as rock climbing, playing chess, composing music, modern dancing, playing basketball or conducting a surgery. Csikszentmihalyi’s interest was to determine, why people pursue these activities even though they might offer little, if any extrinsic rewards. He claimed that if we better understood, what makes us put a lot of effort into something that is seemingly lacking an extrinsic reward, then it may help us be less dependent on extrinsic rewards (cf. Engeser, Schiepe-Tiska & Peifer, Chap. 1). Competitive sports, as well as physical exercise (in terms of prevention) are often linked to extrinsic rewards (e.g. performance & money in competitive sports, or gaining and stabilizing health in prevention settings). Nevertheless, there are a lot of sports activities, which can’t be explained with extrinsic rewards, such as marathon-running as a hobby. Since the early 1990s, flow-experiences were often in the focus of sports- and exercise psychology. The aim of this chapter is to describe the historical development of flow research in sports and exercise settings and furthermore methodological as well as theoretical advances (e.g. neuro-cognitive aspects) related to sports and exercise will be reported and discussed.