Athletic fatigue and academic burnout in physical education students: emotional exhaustion, resilience, and latent profiles

BackgroundPhysical education university students face the dual demands of athletic training and academic responsibilities. Athletic fatigue may be associated with academic burnout through a possible “spillover effect,” yet its underlying mechanisms, boundary conditions, and population heterogeneity remain unclear. This study integrates variable-centered and person-centered research approaches to develop and test an integrated model of the relationships between athletic fatigue and academic burnout among physical education students.MethodsA convenience sample of 539 physical education university students from a sport university in Hubei, China completed a questionnaire survey. Multi-group path analysis was used to examine the cross-group consistency of the model. Latent profile analysis was applied to identify psychological risk subgroups.Results(1) Athletic fatigue showed a significant positive association with academic burnout. Emotional exhaustion partially mediated this relationship. Resilience significantly moderated the “emotional exhaustion → academic burnout” path, with high resilience buffering this negative effect. (2) Multi-group analysis indicated that this moderated mediation model demonstrated cross-group consistency across different sport types and athletic skill levels. (3) Latent profile analysis identified three profiles: low resilience-low exhaustion type (5.2%), general type(89.6%), and high resilience-low exhaustion type(5.2%). Notably, the low resilience-low exhaustion group exhibited the highest academic burnout despite low emotional exhaustion, a pattern that may reflect repressive coping or a dissociation between emotional awareness and actual resource depletion. Significant differences in athletic fatigue and academic burnout were found across profiles.ConclusionGiven the cross-sectional design, all findings are correlational and do not imply causation. The findings show that athletic fatigue is associated with academic burnout, that this association generalizes across groups, and they identify a high-risk “low resilience, low exhaustion” subgroup among physical education students. This provides an integrated explanation of universal patterns and individual differences, offering empirical support for targeted interventions.