Self-determination and healthy lifestyles: an exploratory study on veteran athletes

The Theory of Self-determination relates to motivation and assumes the importance of meeting basic psychological needs in the appearance of self-determined behavior, as the future engagement with sports or exercise that leads to other healthy lifestyles habits. We intend to: i) characterize the motivation and satisfaction of basic psychological needs to practice sport ii) knowing the lifestyles iii) realize that self-determination variables influences the healthy lifestyles. Agreed to participate 684 veteran athletes of both sexes (age: 43.8 ± 8.6 years; mostly with 3 to 5 hours of weekly training, years of practice: 19.5 ± 12.2). We have applied the Portuguese versions of Basic Psychological Needs Scale Exercise (BPNES), the Behavioral Regulation in Sport Questionnaire (BRSQ) and Healthy Lifestyle Questionnaire, with the inclusion of sociodemographic data. We used SPSS software (IBM, Statistics 21.0) for processing data, with a focus on descriptive statistics, Pearson correlation coefficient and multiple linear regression. The level of significance was set at p