Our self-confidence, experience and skillful goal setting have a huge impact on the level of stress. Mental training is as important and engaging as running itself. However, if we combine these elements, the effects will be spectacular.
Eliza Czyżewska talks to Katarzyna Selwant.
I have the impression that little is said about it, but playing sports and competing in competitions are activities that, apart from giving us fun, also stress us a lot.
Certainly, many things can stress us when practicing sports, e.g. the audience, the fact that people who know us will watch us. We are stressed that we can lose because we have high ambitions, we are stressed by the result, the pressure of the environment and our inner feeling that we want something very much. In addition, there is the entire background of the competition, understood as a situation of public speaking. Because it’s not like we run in the park or the forest alone, but we perform in front of other people. In the case of professional sport, we can be stressed by heavy training, and amateurs will be able to make it, whether they will go out for training, or whether it will be hard. Often, when we do not go out for the planned training, there is frustration and stress that we let go and let everything go.
This can take away the joy we get from sport, not to mention “burning up” during training or competitions. What to do to avoid stress?
It’s not like we can not get stressed. Even professional athletes who can deal with stress become stressed. Once upon a time I had a player whose mother wanted her daughter not to fail. That is not possible. She will experience failures. However, it is important how long it will do this. We are biologically prepared to experience stress and that is very good for us. Stress is our body’s reaction, it shows us that we, as cavemen, have to run away. We won’t change it, it would be unhealthy. In an emergency, we get nervous, our body gets tense and we run away, we save our lives. This is an impulse. However, we can work to deal with stress, shorten this time of tension, and reduce its intensity.
We all get stressed and yet we have different perceptions of stressful situations.
Exactly. Everyone has a different level of stress. We differ in temperament that we have innate. Some react with a lot of stress to a small stimulus, and some do not notice a small stimulus at all and only feel something great. The temperamental test that I do for the players asks: “Do you see the stars flicker?” Interestingly, I personally noticed them only after I read this question. Asking yourself such a question is a great test to see if we respond to tiny stimuli or not.
The entire article can be found in the Magazyn Bieganie (May 2016) and at Magazynbieganie.pl (click the link)