Associations Between Interoceptive Awareness, Psychological State, and Physical Performance in Sport-Science Students: A Cross-Sectional Study

Background/Objectives: Interoceptive awareness may support stress regulation in sport, but its association with objective physical performance remains unclear. This study examined relationships between self-reported interoceptive awareness, perceived stress, anxiety, sleep quality, and field-based performance in sport-science students. Methods: Eighty-five students (54 men, 31 women; 20.65 ± 2.43 years) completed the MAIA-2, PSS-10, STAI, and PSQI and performed handgrip, countermovement-jump, sit-and-reach, and bilateral Y-Balance tests. Analyses included Pearson correlations, Welch tests with false-discovery-rate correction, HC3-robust hierarchical regression, and exploratory age- and sex-adjusted bootstrap indirect-effect models. Results: The MAIA-2 composite was inversely associated with perceived stress (r = −0.461, 95% CI [−0.614, −0.275], p < 0.001) but showed no detectable association with physical performance (r = −0.003 to 0.136; all q ≥ 0.961); equivalence testing indicated that four of the five performance correlations were statistically equivalent to zero within a ±0.30 bound. Women reported higher stress and anxiety, whereas men showed greater handgrip strength and jump height. Individual-sport participants reported higher state anxiety than team-sport participants (g = −0.886, q = 0.004). Interoceptive awareness did not significantly increase explained variance in any performance model, and exploratory indirect-effect confidence intervals all included zero. Conclusions: Self-reported interoceptive awareness was related to perceived stress but was not detectably related to brief field-based performance in this sample. Longitudinal and experimental studies are needed to test temporal and causal mechanisms.