The importance of stress management in sports competition

A stressed athlete tends to make many more mistakes.

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

How does stress and anxiety affect sports competition?

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

This is a fairly common phenomenon in high competition. Professional sportsmen, such as tennis player Rafael Nadal, have gone through periods in which periods in which their level of anxiety during the competition has been excessive, and this hasand this has led to a drop in their performance level. This is why the presence of sports psychologists is becoming more and more necessary in high competition.

All those involved in sports, whose 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 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 some consequences or symptoms both at the consequences or symptoms at both physiological and psychological level.. They are the following:

Physiological Symptoms

• Increased Blood Pressure
• Increased respiratory rate
• Accelerated heart rate
• Increased sweating
• Increase in blood glucose and adrenaline secretion
• Discomfort in the stomach, dryness in the mouth

Psychological Symptoms

• Decreased mental flexibility
• Confusion
• Visual distortion
• Hesitation in decision making
• Increased negative thoughts
• Decreased ability to focus on performance

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

Tools to combat competitive stress

Therefore, this proves once again that everything that happens in the body is controlled by our brain.. Every 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, to 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 the tension in our mind and body.

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

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

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

• Schultz Autogenic Trainingusing ideas and thoughts of relaxation.

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

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