Stress in sports performance
Answer to human situations of pressure is stress. An important element of how to overcome this situations is to stop for a while and try to find out why are we under stress. It often helps us when we take a deep breath, concentrate on regular breathing, realizing the coordination of our movements, drink water, imagine that the match is over, leaving the field with a feeling that we did a good job, take ourselves in our mind into a nice place with friendly people.
After the big game, it is necessary to relax actively, swim, going to sauna, spend some time in nature – it will purify our mind and body. Common problem why we are in stress is the pressure from our surrounding “to be successful”, fear of failure and mistakes. Surrounding requires success, failure is not tolerated. We observe ourselves too much, we try a lot and because of that we fail more. We forgot to do things for the pleasure, we are not loose and we fail. However, pretty often our small failure is forcing us to think about it and it´s pushing us forward.
An important rule is to know yourself. Every person has a different driving force for stress. Players and coaches have different pre-match rituals which helps them to be more confident before an important match, tournament. Someone needs a communication with teammates, coaches before the game, someone needs an absolute peace and to be alone. You need to know to learn from previous mistakes and try not to repeat them. For someone it actually helps to get over previous mistakes, not to return to them and not thinking of them. A great role plays the experiences of a player, older player which has played more games, knows how to deal with the pressure from surrounding on his performance almost all the time. Lots of players are nervous/stressed only in the locker room, when they get on the field they act with confidence and don´t feel any pressure.
To feel as part of the team means to feel well among the teammates. The sense of responsibility for ourselves and feeling of responsibility towards the game is on the right place. Know how to adequately adapt, have realistic goals and be satisfied with certain things which we have done with the maximum effort.
