Scientific Programme
Psychology, Social Sciences & Humanities
IS-SH03 - Rediscovering Creativity in Sport: Enhancing Learning, Performance and Well-Being through Creative Movement
Date: 09.07.2026, Time: 08:30 - 09:45, Session Room: 1ABC (STCC)
Description
Creativity is increasingly recognised as a key component of human adaptability, performance and well-being, yet it remains underexplored in sport and movement sciences. Rather than a purely mental skill, creativity is a complex and embodied phenomenon that emerges from the interaction between individuals and their environments. Far from being an innate gift reserved for a select few or geniuses, creativity can, like any motor skill, be systematically trained and cultivated. Although sport training has traditionally focused on physical, technical and tactical skills, the past decade has witnessed a slow paradigm shift in the literature, starting to recognise the significant impact of creativity on performance. This invited session brings empirical and theoretical contributions examining how motor creativity can enhance learning, performance, and health. The speakers will present research addressing these issues from complementary perspectives: the assessment of movement creativity and adaptability in children (James Rudd), the framework Creativity in Motion to enrich training environments with creativity-supportive tasks and movement prompts (Veronique Richard), and studies exploring creative movement practices to enhance well-being (Carlota Torrents). Together, these works provide converging evidence that nurturing motor creativity promotes motivation, resilience, adherence to physical activity, performance and holistic well-being.
Chair(s)
Carlota Torrents Martín
INEFC University of LLeida, INEFC
Spain
Speaker A
Carlota Torrents Martín
INEFC University of LLeida, INEFC
Spain
Read CVECSS Lausanne 2026: IS-SH03 [4751]
Integrating the Development of Creativity into Physical Exercise Programs
Traditionally, health-oriented physical exercise programs have been based on repetitive and highly structured training. Although their benefits are well established, it is striking that such programs have not evolved toward practices more consistent with a complex, bio-psycho-social view of health—one that understands human functioning as dynamic, adaptive, and emergent from the continuous interaction between body, mind, and environment. Movement is arguably the most powerful tool for enhancing human well-being; however, new objectives must be incorporated into exercise programs aimed at promoting holistic health. These include fostering adaptability to the multiple and changing contexts people face in daily life, and supporting the development of basic psychological needs such as autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Including such goals requires practices that represent meaningful challenges for participants—activities that promote problem-solving, collaboration with others who share common aims, and emotional engagement with the practice itself. Play, creative dance, and the exploration of motor possibilities during training are among the strategies we have explored to assess their potential to enhance both well-being and creativity. This presentation will draw on empirical studies conducted in our laboratory with more than 200 participants, which examine how creative-based motor practices can promote holistic development in adults. Findings suggest that creative movement sessions characterised by psychological safety, emotional engagement, and social support foster increases in motor creativity, ideational fluency, and confidence in one’s creative capacities. Participants also reported improved well-being, a stronger sense of connection with others, and greater openness to experimentation both within and beyond the movement context These results challenge the assumption that creativity primarily grows through discomfort or external challenges. Instead, they emphasise the importance of supportive and stimulating environments that strike a balance between novelty and safety, enabling individuals to explore new movement possibilities and enhance their well-being. Results also highlight the importance of embracing complexity in exercise design—integrating creativity not as an accessory but as a core element of human adaptability and sustainable health.
Speaker B
james rudd
Norwegian School of Sports Sciences, Teacher education and outdoor education
Norway
Read CVECSS Lausanne 2026: IS-SH03 [35940]
Introducing the River Challenge Movement Assessment
Many movement assessment tools focus narrowly on the performance of specific motor skills, rather than on children’s capacity to skilfully adapt to environmental and task demands. Also, movement assessments tend to be heavily structured and completes as an assessment or test conditions. Under such conditions that can cause unintended stress and anxiety for children. The focus on a particular motor skill also heavily favours children who have had prior experience performing such skills and may miss a child’s true movement/ athletic competence. As a solution to these challenges we have developed a new movement competence and creativity measurement of movement competence called the River Challenge (RC). The RC, has many advantages over traditional measures of MC it involves 3 aspects of movement competence. 1. The performance of movement adaptability of locomotor and balance skills under ever changing conditions as well as creativity and resourcefulness to find solutions to movement problems. 2. The performance of movement adaptability of object control again under changing environmental demands and to find creative solutions to movement problems that involve object control. 3. Creative play and lateral thinking. In this presentation the structural validity of the RC will be discussed along with the reliability of the measures. Initial investigations of validity have found that the 3-factor structure is supported along with excellent inter-rater reliability and intra reliability. Inter-rater ICC for Challenge 1 ,985 and for Challenge 2 was calculated at ,838. For Intra-rater reliability the ICC for Challenge 1 was ,985 and for Challenge 2 ,856. This approach prioritises movement adaptability and creativity over performance or technical ability metrics. As it aligns itself with the idea that true competence lies not in reproducing fixed skills but in flexibly adjusting to dynamic and changing contexts. Together, these ideas support a developmentally coherent, playful story based movement assessment that assesses movement competence and creativity in children in a similar way to how they naturally move, explore, and learn.
Speaker C
Véronique Richard
Univerity of Queensland, School of Human Movement Movement and Nutrition Sciences
Australia
Read CVECSS Lausanne 2026: IS-SH03 [41461]
Creativity in Motion: Moving Creatively to Ignite Adaptability and Creativity in Athletes
In high-performance sport, adaptability and creativity are critical for success, yet psychological training often neglects the embodied dimensions through which these qualities emerge. Moving creatively may represent a powerful pathway to ignite athletes’ adaptive potential by engaging the mind–body system in dynamic interaction with the environment. Creativity in Motion is an embodied and embedded framework grounded in ecological dynamics and the constraint-led approach. Guided by the principles of Enrich–Explore–Expand, Creativity in Motion enriches training environments with creativity-supportive tasks and movement prompts that destabilise routines, invites athletes to explore without judgment, and expands reflection linking new insights to sport performance. Two applied studies examined the impact of Creativity in Motion on athletes’ adaptive and creative responses. The first study, conducted with Tennis Australia’s top under-13 athletes, combined on-court constraint manipulations (e.g., Hand Ball Doubles, Controlled Chaos, Points with Emotion) with off-court creative embodied sessions integrating improvisation, rhythm, and emotion-based movement. Compared to a control group, the Creativity in Motion group demonstrated improved performance (serve accuracy and speed) and movement creativity, suggesting early behavioural benefits and feasibility of implementation in youth development contexts. A second study with Surfing Australia’s national-level athletes applied eight Creativity in Motion sessions over four weeks. Results revealed increased creative self-efficacy and lower perceptions of creative task difficulty, leading to a higher probability of creative adaptation. Qualitative analyses indicated that athletes expanded their openness to risk-taking and emotional awareness and began to engage more intuitively with their performance environments. Together, these findings highlight that moving creatively can cultivate adaptive and creative potential across behavioural, affective, and psychological dimensions. Creativity in Motion offers a promising embodied approach for sport practitioners seeking to integrate creativity into training to better prepare athletes for the complex, uncertain realities of performance.