Why stress about it?
An athlete came into my office the other day and said to an athletic trainer colleague of mine, "Hey, my face is going numb and I'm beginning to lose feeling in my legs also. This has never happened to me before and I'm freaking out. Can you help me?" He was obviously very scared about what was going on (fair enough really!). The AT calmed him down and asked him to recount what had happened to him prior to this. He proceeded to explain how he was doing school work then all of a sudden felt like he was about to fall off his chair, at which point he began to get the numbness in his face and knew something wasn't right. The AT reassured him he was okay, gave him some medication and told him to take as long as he needed in the office before dealing with another athlete. So, being nosy and wanting to reassure the athlete that he was okay, I decided to tell him about how I experience migraines and get blurred vision and numbness from them. The basic gist was to reassure him he was okay and that it was likely something not serious but potentially low blood glucose, stress, panic attack related (specificanalysis from me!). He then replied with, "Panic attack?? It can't be one of them, I've never had one before," to which my Sherlock Holmes response was, "Well how do you know what one feel likes then?" He checked on his iPhone to see the symptoms of a panic attack, trustworthy Wikipedia no doubt, which positively affirmed some of his own symptoms. Now to briefly interrupt this story, stress and stress management has been on my radar for a few weeks now. I have seen, as I will explain, numerous stress-related incidents that result in a decrease in performance with my athletes. So, I ask him the question, are you stressed right now? He pauses, has a little chuckle to himself and says, "You know what, this is probably the first time in my life I have been stressed out. I failed an exam earlier this week, I have a lab report due in 3 hours, my computer crashed while I was doing a test yesterday and I got an F on it, when I am normally a 4.0 student!" Bingo, I thought! I had just passed my College Level 101 Investigation and Junior Detective class!
Now I haven’t just recounted that story for a pat on the back and congratulatory email about helping this poor kid. No, I have done it to highlight one thing; stress is real and it affects our collegiate athletes way more than both the athletes themselves and coaches realize. It was after my conversation with this athlete that I thanked him for coming in that day as it was the kick up the backside I needed to start this article and explain the need to stress the significance of stress!
As I write this my university is currently in its 7th week of the fall semester. As a graduate assistant coach and student this means tests, and important ones at that! Homeworks are building, the introduction classes are well and truly over, the semester is in full swing and the academic demands placed on my athletes are high. Result: athletes are missing sessions due to illness; more are in the training room complaining of soreness; more are asking trainers for medication; more are coming to morning workouts extra puffy-eyed than before and requests to do the workout at a different time due to test revision are becoming a daily occurrence. A long sentence for a long list of problems. I am a huge advocate of effective time management in juggling studies and athletics, yet it seems more than ever that athletes are being pulled in one direction by their professors and the opposite direction by their coaches. Both are demanding 100% application and effort with every homework they set or session they coach. This is without considering time to do the following:
-Eat
-Socialize
-Have healthy relationships with their friends and family
-Rest
-Sleep
-Work to help fund college
-Complete homework
…and find time to enjoy college!
Now don't take this as implying that I am giving these athletes a free ride to be late, to miss sessions and not apply themselves fully to the workouts and practice. Tardiness, ownership, accountability and effort are mainstays in any program. But can we expect athletes every session to be a model professional in how they approach training and workouts when their schedule is rammed from 7am-7pm while the real professionals are playing golf most afternoons after working out for 2 hours and getting paid thousands to do so? If you feel they should, and that all their responsibilities listed above are very easily managed, then I suggest you stop reading now as it's clear you have made your mind up about student athletes and their “laziness”.
I had a very informal corridor discussion with a coach of one of my teams recently in which I told him how our morning lift went and explained how one of the lads messaged me the night before saying he couldn't be there. He is a nursing major and had to be at the hospital at 6am, which means a 5am wake up and a likely light breakfast as it’s too early to contemplate eating anything substantial at that time! He would have had practice at 12.45 that day, which in September in Alabama = a seriously hot/humid day (around 90 Fahrenheit/30+ Celsius). The coach in the session would have rightly expected maximum effort, application and quality from this player, especially as he is one of our captains. However, the coach was unaware of theplayer’s exact schedule that day, his early wake up and consequent morning at the hospital with scarce opportunity to properly hydrate and fuel pre- session. Upon being told about the player’s schedule and having heard my run through of his likely morning, the coach realized his expectation for this player in that session would probably need to be adjusted slightly. Without this information the coach may have said, as I'm sure every coach has to himself, “What’s wrong with .... today? He looks well off the pace and like he doesn't want to be here." (Cue coach shouting at the player and player thinking how much worse can this day get!)
My point here is that stress is real, and for the collegiate athlete it is a real problem. The grave effects are something we as professionals need to consider when talking to athletes and wanting to get the best out of them. We can't and shouldn’t neglect this at the college level; we are responsible for them and should have strong relationships with our athletes that involve trust, open communication and respect. It isn’t fair on them and it isn’t right of us in our quest to serve them the best we can to just assume school is going well, all is great in their personal life, and that they are stress free and A okay. I don't have the perfect formula to manage the stress for them. This is not the purpose of this article. Time management is a skill student athletes will develop and, hopefully, fine tune as they become more independent young adults. However, I can help by communicating better with them, asking how things are going, how they are feeling, how many tests they have that day/week, how much sleep they've been getting, if they are passing their classes etc. In doing this I can assess their current state of mind/health and stress levels. Together, as coach and athlete we can better control their stress and maintain or even improve their athletic performance instead of neglecting it and seeing a decrease in performance and greater risk of injury.
To conclude I want to briefly mention an in-house study a strength coach I have worked with conducted on his athletes. He tested their vertical jump height using the ‘Just Jump’ mat each week in the semester. The results are shown below in a graph, along with his hypothesis for the potential reasoning behind the decrease in performance at certain important academic points in the school semester. Everyone loves a bit of data and science to reinforce their point and give weight to their argument so here is mine. Notice anything? Do we have any College 101 junior investigators out there…?
Average vertical jump for season was: 28.23
Lowest average was: 27 (finals) (4.26% less than season average)
Highest average was: 29.4 (right after Christmas, no class, plenty of sleep, training only)
In Coach Dickson’s words, (the man behind the experiment): the list below are the reasons why he believed they jumped poorly during midterms and finals.
-Increase in cognitive work load/stress
-Lack of sleep
-Lack of proper nutrition
-Potential dehydration due to stimulant use (coffee, caffeine, etc.)
My thanks to Ron Dickson at UTC for sharing his study with me and letting me use it for this article; great mentor and excellent coach.
Thanks for reading, if you have any comments about this article please email me, .
Matt Aldred, BSc MSc CSCS, Graduate Assistant Strength and Conditioning Coach at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.