This research project examines performance blocks in artistic gymnastics, those moments when an athlete suddenly loses the ability to perform a movement they previously mastered. Rather than seeking to explain why these blocks occur, a question already widely addressed in the literature, the thesis takes a different approach: it seeks to understand, from the gymnasts' own lived experience, how they manage to overcome them.
The chosen theoretical framework is enaction, which views cognition not as abstract information processing but as a living, continuous coupling between the individual and their environment. From this perspective, the block is no longer a mere technical or psychological failure, but a moment of transition in which the athlete actively reorganizes their way of acting. To grasp what is concretely at stake in this reconfiguration, the project also draws on phenomenological psychology, which places lived bodily and sensory experience at the center of analysis, based on the idea that gymnasts often rely on very fine-grained cues and adjustments that are largely inaccessible to spontaneous verbalization.
To explore this, ten young gymnasts from an elite development training center (pôle espoir) will be recruited, selected for the diversity of their profiles (level, apparatus, duration of the block experienced) and because they have succeeded in performing again the skill that had been problematic. The approach will combine several tools: a retrospective questionnaire to characterize their experience and identify lines of investigation, direct observation during training and competition, and above all explicitation interviews focused on a specific, successful situation that each gymnast freely chooses to recount. The aim of these interviews is to bring out the embodied lived experience of the action rather than a general discourse about the block.
