The Importance Of Stress Control In Sports Competition
The vast majority of professional athletes have had to deal during their sports career with setbacks or situations that have caused their level of sports performance to decrease. One of those situations is the appearance of stress, anxiety during the competitive period In these cases, overcoming these setbacks is vital to achieving sporting goals.
When talking about anxiety, we are talking about an emotion, which can be defined as a state of physiological and psychological imbalance 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 them. Those athletes who think that there is a big difference between what the environment demands of them and what they can give, that is, who have a perception of negative self-efficacy regarding that situation, begin to feel stress.. One of the symptoms of stress is anxiety.
This is a fairly common phenomenon within high competition. Professional athletes, such as tennis player Rafael Nadal, have ever gone through periods in which your anxiety level during the 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 performance.
Sports psychologists are professionals who can help improve the performance of athletes. You can read this article to learn about 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 the following:
Physiological Symptoms
Psychological Symptoms
These physiological and psychological reactions can be caused by real game situations or by the factors surrounding 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
Therefore, this proves 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 our 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: going 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 on different relaxation techniques to relieve tension in our mind and body.
In this way, we have relaxation techniques that focus on the perception of body cues such as the level of muscle tension:
Or we have relaxation procedures that focus on relaxation ideas or images. These techniques are called “mind-to-muscle techniques”:
Consequently, improving this relationship between mind and body, having constant emotional stability throughout the course of the competition, ensures the use of all the individual’s faculties within sports competition
The different tools given in this article help considerably to control the high levels of anxiety and stress that high competition causes.
