‘You must <i>feel</i> it. If you do karate without feeling it, it's empty: It doesn’t work’ – Aesthetic experience as motivation for women athletes’ continuity in sports karate

Women and girls who start practising in martial arts and combat sports (MACS) tend to abandon the practices early after joining them. Women and girls usually are not captivated to remain training, instead facing many challenges that push them out of practices. Yet a few continue. We wonder, then, what makes them do so. We explored this in a study with 14 women elite-level athletes, who were in preparation for the Tokyo 2020 (2021) Olympic Games, having our focus, therefore, on sports karate. Although they had the life project of an Olympic medal as a motivation to persist, this reason showed not to be the most meaningful for them. Thus, in this study we explore what makes women remain practising in sports karate when there seems to be so many challenges and difficulties for their continuity, as shown in the literature. We inquire on reasons that keep women athletes engaged beyond their commitment to a national team, from how they started, passing through some reasons for their permanence somehow more superficial, to finally those reasons that relate to meaningful experiences, as aesthetic experience. We close the paper with a claim that encompasses recommendations to the MACS scholar and practitioner community to turn practices into empowering experiences for women by listening to them.