Utilizing Stress for Athletes

by Mitch Hauschildt, MA, ATC, CSCS

As we all know and have heard over and over, we are living in unprecedented times.  We have never seen this type of environment and it is creating challenges for all of us.  Many of us are working remotely from home and utilizing technology to help us through this.  But, what does that do for our athletes?

I have a lot of concerns rolling into the fall for collegiate and high school athletes.  They will be asked to get ready to compete very quickly and with a compromised offseason.  That is a recipe for soft tissue injuries if I have ever seen one. 

What can we do right now to help mitigate these risks?  

The most obvious is to train efficiently and effectively.  That sounds great, assuming that everyone has a full gym of equipment in their basement or garage, but what about the majority of people who don’t have access to equipment to load their body or train them in a somewhat “normal” manner?  Well, we have to get creative.  

Stress is a good thing

We have to use stress to our advantage.  Most of us have had it engrained in us that stress is a bad thing.  Which, in many cases it is.  But, we also can use stress for good, especially for athletes.  We need to stress them to evolve them over time.  We should think about athletic development as a simple form of evolution.  Give the body stimulus and watch it evolve.  If you give it the right stimulus, you get a good result.  If you don’t give it what it needs, you get a result that you don’t want.  What you give the body can be defined as stress.

The biggest concern going into fall sports will be specifically with the sports that involve equipment like football, lacrosse, etc.  How will our athletes respond to the stress of the extra load on their system?  This is not just the physical weight of the equipment that is somewhat concerning, but it is the increased body temperature, decreased comfort, restricted range of motion and the mental stress related to wearing equipment.  

I think the best answer for these athletes in the short term is to be creative and utilize a number of stressors on their body and mind as part of their training.  This can encompass a number of different ideas and here are a few that come to mind for me:

• Environmental Stress:  Have athletes train in the rain, wind, heat or cold.  Obviously we need to keep people safe, but exposing athletes to these types of external stressors forces them to adapt their body positions and movement strategies.  This type of stress can reduce predictability which prepares athletes for sport.
• Terrain:  Changing the terrain that people train on can be a significant stressor to the body.  Having athletes run on hills, trails or other uneven surfaces will change overall intensity and make an athlete more reactive.
• Odd Objects:  This can be a bit more challenging for some people, but having athletes lift or carry odd shaped objects can be a great stressor to the body.  If your athletes lives in the country or somewhere where they have access to things like logs, firewood or large rocks, have them lift and carry them.  Developing strategies to work with these types of items can develop an athlete’s athletic abilities.  Another idea is to use unstable implements that can be made from items available at a home center like sandbags or slosh pipes.  These constantly changing tools stimulate the nervous system in ways that can’t be done with other tools.  
• Mental Games:  We can’t forget about stressing the central nervous system.  Build in mental challenges and games in the middle of an activity.  I like to do this even when we aren’t living in the strange COVID world that we find ourselves in right now.  It can be as simple as playing rock-paper-scissors and reacting depending on the result or can involve commercially available apps that are on the market to play brain games.  Doing this under times of fatigue will help your athletes know how to react mentally in difficult times.  

I’m sure you can think of other creative and fun things to do with your athletes.  The biggest goal is to have fun with it and give the body new stimulus on a regular basis.  That status quo means that they are usually falling behind.  Use stress in a positive way and you will see a slightly different, but resilient athlete when things start back up.