With Finals week right around the corner a lot of our
student athletes are probably feeling stressed. Stress, whether mental or
physical, is a natural part of life and the ability to manage it a common trait
shared by just about everything. Like all other living organisms on this planet
we are constantly performing homeostasis. Homeostasis is our ability to
maintain a certain series of internal conditions. Our bodies can only function
properly under these conditions. Stress is anything that forces our bodies to
deviate from our normal “setting” if you will. Your body is constantly adapting
to stress to bring you back to those normal conditions.
The only downside to this mechanism is that we don’t have an
endless capacity to overcome stress. Because of this our bodies prioritize the
most dangerous stresses and adapt to those and before it handles all the sub-lethal
stresses. A good analogy for this is to think of your body as having a set
number of points or money it can use for recovering from stress. If your
recovery capacity is your monthly paycheck, then the essential bodily functions
are like rent and utilities. They get paid before money is spent on frivolous things
or else you are in real trouble. If you only have 100 stress points and it
takes 80 points to perform the essential bodily functions, then you will only
have 20 points to use on things like working out or studying before you start
functioning less than optimally. This is a key point for our student athletes
to understand. They are expected to function optimally; their demands are above
and beyond just merely surviving. Competing in the top levels of a sport and
maintaining excellent academic standing requires them to function at a higher
level than most. Just “getting by” is not the end goal; it must be a given and
the true end goal is to thrive and perform better than everyone else.
We are constantly preaching about the ways to improve your
capacity to overcome stress; a way to get more magical recovery points, or to
be more efficient with the points you already have. Your body uses sleep,
nutrition, and hydration to aid in the stress adaptation process. The trick is
to lower the “cost” of your essential functions to allow yourself more capacity
to recover from the extra stress of playing sports. Eating fast food or junk
food because you need calories will be enough to keep you alive, but your body
will end up using more of its recovery capacity to process that food and make
it useful instead of helping you recover from a long day. Not getting enough
sleep means your body has to put in overtime to keep you alert and functioning,
instead of working at remembering the key points of the chapter you just read,
or overcoming the soreness in your hamstrings. If you are not sleeping and
hydrating properly, or eating food “just to get the calories in” then you are
compromising your ability to do the other things that are demanded of you. Your
body doesn’t care how well you do in practice or in the
classroom. It only cares about maintaining those conditions that keep you
alive.
You, however, DO care how you perform in the classroom and
in your sport and you must work extra hard to “eat your cake and have it too.” Not
taking care of your body is just going to make it work harder to survive at the
expense of your athletic and academic performances. If you want to manage
stress better, be consistent and be proactive about taking care of your body. The
less work it has to do to maintain those essential conditions, the more
capacity it has to recover from those “above and beyond” stresses that you
place on it.
