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University of Florida's well-known
coach, Urban Meyer has been one of the most successful coaches of
the last 10 years. He has helped his team achieve national
championships twice in the last five years. He has been exceptional,
a peak performer at the top of his field. But that wasn’t
the entire story.
Last week Coach Meyer stepped down as
head coach sighting the effects of stress as the reason. It turns
out he was admitted to a hospital last month because of chest
pains following the team’s loss in the Southeastern Conference
championship game. Coach Meyer was experiencing the pressures of his
work - on a continuing basis. He later commented, “It was the
pattern of what I was doing and how I was doing it. It was
self-destructive.”
The experience of Coach Meyer
demonstrates one of the major consequences of failure to master
stress in sports and in life: Burn-out. Burn-out comes from the
cumulative build-up of the strain of pressure, tension, worry,
and the simple but ongoing activation of the body. Meyer spent all
season coaching under intense pressure and sky-high expectations.
When you are a young athlete, burn-out seems very far away, partly
because it takes time for the problem to develop. As Meyer said in
a statement, “I have ignored my health for years, but recent
developments have forced me to reevaluate my priorities …”
Other
revelations indicated that Meyer also suffered from
persistent headaches caused by an arachnoid cyst that becomes
inflamed by stress, rage and excitement. Here we notice a symptom
that usually precedes burn-out. In fact, headaches, stomach aches
and difficulty sleeping are all signs of the inability to master
the effects of stress. These can occur much
earlier in ones
career. In fact, I see these symptoms all the time in young teen
age athletes experiencing the tension and pressures of
competitive sports.
In my next article I will address the
effects of stress on performance, but for now, let’s look at a
few things you can do to better handle the stresses which are
inevitable, if you are going to compete and have a burning desire to
win.
Training your body to handle stress
Just as you
train specific performance skills, such as your swing, you also need
to train your body to manage stress. Stress triggers multiple
changes in your body including increased heart rate, and muscle
tension and release of adrenalin throughout your body. These
reactions use up valuable resources of the body. Like stretching a
rubber band… you must relax it before you can stretch it again.
Otherwise it will break! Once again, headaches, stomach aches and
difficulty sleeping are all signals that your stress is not being
properly managed.
As an athlete, you need to get into the
habit of turning off the tension when it is not needed. This is
optimized by taking time to actually train your body to relax. By
doing this, you are enhancing the recuperative abilities of your
body. Not only will this ward off burn-out and physical symptoms,
but it will also improve your stamina during your performance.
I
have created a simple relaxation exercise that you can access as
a download. By listening to this on a regular basis it will help
you begin the process of mastering stress. In subsequent articles
I will tell you how stress affects performance and additional
approaches to stress mastery and resilience.
