The importance of stress management in sport

The vast majority of professional athletes have had to deal with setbacks or situations during their sports careers that have caused their level of sports performance to decrease. One of those situations is the onset of stress, anxiety during the competitive period. In these cases, overcoming these setbacks is vital to the achievement of sports goals.

How stress and anxiety affect sports competition

When we talk about anxiety, we are talking about a emotion, which can be defined as a state of physiological and psychological maladjustment due to a potentially uncertain situation for the individual. This It usually occurs because the athlete, when competing, makes a conscious or unconscious assessment of the situation and the circumstances that surround it, Those athletes who think that there is a great difference between what the environment demands of them and what they can give, that is, they have a perception of self-efficacy negative about that situation, they begin to feel stress. One of the symptoms of stress is anxiety.

This is a fairly common phenomenon in high competition. Professional athletes such as tennis player Rafael Nadal, have ever gone through periods when your anxiety level during competition has been excessive, and this has led to a drop in performance. This is why the presence of sports psychologists within high competition is increasingly necessary.

All those people involved in sport, in which their main role is to prepare and optimize the qualities of athletes, agree that excessive levels of anxiety in competition interfere with the performance.

Sports psychologists are professionals who can help improve the performance of athletes. You can read this article to know the strengths of this profession: "10 reasons to put a sports psychologist in your life”.

Main consequences of stress in competition

The presence of stress and competitive anxiety produce consequences or symptoms both at a physiological and psychological level. They are as follows:

Physiological Symptoms

• Increased blood pressure
• Increased breathing rate
• Accelerated heart rate
• Increased sweating
• Increased blood glucose and adrenaline secretion
• Upset stomach, dry mouth

Psychological Symptoms

• Decreased mental flexibility
• Confusion
• Visual distortion
• Doubt in decision making
• Increased negative thoughts
• Less ability to focus on acting

These physiological and psychological reactions can be caused by real game situations or by the factors that surround the competition, however, it has been proven that it is the athlete himself with his inadequate mental representation of the event that usually causes these states.

Tools to combat competitive stress

So this shows once again that everything that happens in the body is controlled by our brain. Each variation in our physiological state is associated with changes in the cognitive or emotional state, and vice versa.

There are different procedures to combat competitive stress and, therefore, improve sports performance

Relaxation procedures

According to different experts, to relax we can follow two strategies that achieve the same effects: go from the mind to the muscles or from the muscles to the mind. In other words, to overcome this situation that interferes with sports performance, we can focus our attention in different relaxation techniques to relieve the tension of our mind and our Body

In this way, we have relaxation techniques that focus on the perception of body cues such as the level of muscle tension:

• Jacobson's progressive relaxation
• Breath control
• Mindfulness techniques

Or we have relaxation procedures that focus on relaxation ideas or images. These techniques are called "mind-to-muscle techniques":

• Schultz Autogenic Training, using relaxation ideas and thoughts.

Consequently, the improvement of this relationship between the mind and the body, having a constant emotional stability throughout the course of the competition, ensures the use of all the faculties of the individual within the sporting competition.

The different tools given in this article help considerably to control the high levels of anxiety and stress that high competition causes.