Navigating preconception and pregnancy in elite athletes: insights from Australian elite female athletes, athlete support staff and sport organisational staff
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVES: The primary objective of this study was to explore the experiences and beliefs of elite female athletes, athlete support staff and sport organisational staff regarding preconception and pregnancy in Australian elite athletes. Secondary objectives were to identify barriers and enablers encountered by elite athletes during preconception and pregnancy, and to use the study findings to develop recommendations to inform future pregnancy policies within sporting organisations. METHODS: 58 participants comprising 27 elite athletes, 20 support staff (eg, coaches, physicians, physiotherapists) and 11 sport organisational staff (eg, general managers, athlete well-being officers) from 25 sports participated in either a focus group (n=45) or semi-structured interview (n=13) conducted between 14 August 2023 and 21 November 2023. Focus groups and interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim and analysed using thematic analysis. RESULTS: The vast majority of athletes felt that organisational support for preconception and pregnancy was inadequate. Their feedback was categorised into four distinct themes: (1) planning, fertility and disclosure; (2) mindset; (3) training during preconception and pregnancy and (4) access to support and information. Within these themes, participants highlighted barriers (eg, lack of knowledge, impaired fertility, pregnancy symptoms) and opportunities for organisations to improve the current level of support provided (eg, education, fertility treatments, training flexibility). Overall, 22 recommendations were developed to guide Australian sporting organisations in future pregnancy policies. CONCLUSION: Australian elite female athletes continue to face numerous barriers during preconception and pregnancy. Sporting organisations can use the findings and recommendations within this study to develop pregnancy policies, which better support female athletes.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".