| Techniques for Managing Stress in Soccer |
By Kimberlee Bethany,
David W. Eccles and
Gershon Tenenbaum
This article was extracted from Insight Journal, The FA’s Coaches Association technical coaching journal. For overseas membership check out Insight Live, the online coaching resource providing discussion forums, voting, plus access to all the same valuable coaching content including, audio interviews, coaching vacancies industry updates, sports science articles and of course Insight Journal and its archive stretching back some 30 years! http://insightlive.thefa.com.
Stress is a part of football, for players and for coaches, both on and off the field. Stress matters because it makes an impact on performance. With too much stress, performance disintegrates – a player suffering from either fear or anxiety is more prone to technical mistakes and judgment errors. With too little stress, though, performance also diminishes – a completely relaxed player may be overconfident, lacking in motivation and insufficiently aroused to notice critical cues on the field.
All players have what has become known as an “Individual Zone of Optimal Functioning” (IZOF). Their IZOF is the level of stress that produces the best performance. Getting to know players and assessing their stress reactivity can help coaches figure out how to approach their players. Before the match, some players will need relaxation, while others will need a little fear and fire. Likewise, getting to know yourself and figuring out your peak level of stress (the level of arousal at which you are most aware and best at decision making) will help you improve your coaching performance. However, understanding the implications of stress and figuring out the IZOF for yourself and each of your players won’t, on their own, make an impact on your practice sessions and the outcome of a match. You need to know how to get into and stay in this zone by learning how to manage your stress. You also need to know how to get back into the zone if you suddenly find yourself too hyped or too lackluster. Stress-management training should be an integral part of any training program.
Defining Stress
Several terms are associated with stress, but mean slightly different things – arousal, stress, fear and anxiety. It’s helpful to distinguish among them to understand more about how we function under stress.
• Arousal is basic and physiological – your heart racing, your breath quickening, an increase in sweat. Arousal is about your body and its physical reactions – you have the same rush of pulse, breath and sweat across situations as varied as a fistfight, a roller coaster ride and a romantic encounter.
• Stress is the emotional way in which you interpret your body’s arousal, and may be categorized as either eustress or distress.
o Eustress is positive stress – the excitement of the opening match of the season, the flurry of emotions after a match-winning kick, the high of an after-victory party.
o Distress is negative stress – the knot in your throat after making an error that costs your team a match, a churning stomach when you’re not sufficiently prepared for your opponent, the sweaty palms when you’re unsure of your next move.
• Fear – When your distress is in reaction to a real threat to well-being (for instance, the horror of seeing an opponent’s spikes slam into your star player’s knee), you experience the concrete reaction of fear.
• Anxiety – When your distress is in reaction to an imagined or anticipated threat (for instance, worry about a potential loss in a championship match), you experience the vague reaction of anxiety.
Figuring out the IZOF
Essentially, there are two main components to consider when evaluating how much stress is the right amount. First, you want to evaluate how much arousal you are feeling (what is the physiological reaction – heart rate, sweating, etc.). Second, you want to evaluate how pleasant the feeling is. Does it feel bad (distress) or good (eustress)?
· High arousal with low pleasure is bad. That’s watching your star player’s knee blown out.
· Low arousal with low pleasure also is bad. Think about Friday afternoon before a holiday, the last hour before you can leave the desk behind for a full week, and how slowly the clock ticks.
· Low arousal and high pleasure is a wonderful thing – like the soft lull of a massage or relaxing on a tropical beach with a fruity rum concoction in your hand. However, this is not the best state of mind for sport (except, perhaps, for golfers who need to relax into their swing or rifle marksmen who need their hands to be perfectly still).
For football players, the best level of stress is likely to be the kind that is both high arousal and high pleasure – excitement coursing through your blood, your heart pounding furiously and all the while you’re enjoying every moment.
Simple common sense tells us that the best stress is the kind under which you – and your players – perform the best. You have to become a keen observer: On matches at home when the stadium is packed with roaring fans and the pressure to achieve is high, which players perform the best? At away matches during the beginning of the season when the stakes are low and there are fewer people watching, who dominates on the pitch? Do you make better decisions about the match plan if you’ve just come from a relaxing cup of tea, or if you hang up the mobile phone from an argument with someone just as you pull into the club car park?
Be systematic – try to use a diary to evaluate yourself and every player on your team throughout several practices and matches. Talk to your players about what you’re doing – make sure they understand that this evaluation will not determine when, if or how they play, but rather how you approach them. You don’t want the process of learning about your players’ ideal stress levels to create even more stress. Explain at a team meeting that you’re trying to get a better grasp on ideal conditions for everyone, and that you’ll be asking them to tell you how aroused they feel (zero, ready to go to sleep, through 10, coursing with electricity) and how pleasant the arousal is (zero, absolutely unpleasant, through 10, the most enjoyable experience possible).
Once they learn how to answer quickly, you can have a staff assistant ask them for their stress levels at intervals such as water breaks, during stretching, in between running laps. You then will record how they report they feel, as well as your own observations about how they are behaving (fidgeting, sweating before the match starts and little tics like continually running fingers through hair can be indicators that a player is feeling stress).
Include performance assessments in the diary, then look for patterns. Perhaps one player makes more goals when his numbers are 5 and 5, whereas another plays better defensively when her numbers are 8 and 4. The pattern will be different for every player and each member of your coaching staff. The individualized information will help develop personalized plans for achieving peak performance.
Stress Management Techniques for Sport
Once you’ve figured out your zone of optimal functioning, you need a plan to train for it, just as you train for every other aspect of the match. Your stress-management-for-sport plan needs to include two things: short-term techniques that help immediately manage stress; and long-range activities that help you learn ways to cope with stress and achieve peak levels of arousal. Short-term techniques may make an immediate impact on performance, but to really improve your game, (you guessed it) you have to practice. The skillful use of stress management, like any other component of sport, requires consistent training. Three simple stress management techniques that can have an immediate effect are lists, reframing and thought stopping.
• Lists: The reason that lists are effective is because they free up mental space. Imagine that on your way to practice, you are worrying over your daughter’s new boyfriend, your conflict with another member of the coaching staff and the 15 errands you have to do before heading home. If you try to manage the practice session while thoughts clutter your head, you will have only half your mental “space” available. This may seriously affect your work. On the other hand, if you have a pen and paper in your car, you can write down every worry you have and every task you have left to accomplish. You then can clear your mind completely, knowing that the list is safely awaiting your return. You can head to practice with 100 percent mental space available. If you have players that tend to perform more poorly when they are experiencing other stressors, you might give the players notebooks and pens and make list-writing a normal pre-practice activity.
• Reframing: Reframing is another stress-managing technique that can be done by the coach, who tries to change the perspective on a situation in order to reduce its stress-inducing potential. Just as people look different when they are in their workout kit versus when they are in evening clothes, thoughts “look” different when they are placed in a different “frame.” For instance, imagine the middle of a rainy, muddy match when you are two goals down. Your players are discouraged and ready to give up and accept a loss. Using reframing, you would imagine that the opponents are going to get lazy and that you will have an easy victory. Your job is to capitalize on their poor judgment, play your hardest and smartest and bring about a crowd-pleasing turnaround. It’s the same picture, but with a different frame – everything looks different. Reframing can take a bit of practice, but it can make a world of difference – the difference between success and failure isn’t the situation, but how you approach it. To learn reframing and teach it to your players, start with small tasks – straightening out a disorganized locker could be a disgusting task, or a chance for a player to clean up and learn a little about discipline.
• Thought stopping: Thought stopping works in the heat of the moment, when you don’t have time to pull out paper and pen for a list and when reframing would take too much effort. Imagine the middle of a practice and you’re working with the goalkeeper on his defensive technique. He is getting frustrated by the problems he is experiencing in changing his technique and beginning to “talk back.” Before getting angry at his insubordination and wasting a few minutes of valued practice time, you imagine a big red stop sign and think “Stop!” You can teach your players to try the technique whenever unwanted thoughts attempt to steamroll the task at hand. If a player with a tendency to self-doubt finds herself questioning her ability in the middle of a match, she pulls out her stop sign and gets back on task. Although thought stopping generally is an individual technique, it also can work for maintaining focus in groups. A “group stop” might come in handy if one team member has a tendency to start to talk pessimistically when the team goes two down. Another team member can give a simple stop before everyone else gets caught in the pessimism. However, make sure you explain that thought stopping is for critical events, in order to get back on task. The stop should be short, neutral and non-judgmental. Don’t allow it to be used for censorship or exclusion – it should be a technique for helping maintain the team’s productivity.
Relaxation and Mindfulness Practices
Relaxation techniques, such as mindfulness practices, body work and progressive relaxation, may ease stress levels, but are more fully experienced as part of a long-term plan.
• Mindfulness Practices (such as yoga, meditation, Tai Chi, Alexander Technique and martial arts) are useful for improving stress-management skills over time. These practices help you achieve greater control in reacting to events in your life. For instance, in one form of meditation, called Anapana meditation, you sit completely still, in silence, and focus on the sensations of your nose. You feel the tingling at the tip of your nose, the rush of air into your nostrils, the flow of exhalation onto the skin below your nose. If your low back twinges from sitting, or your ear itches, or your knee begins to ache, you do not allow yourself to become aware of these sensations, and you return all your focus to your nose. The purpose of Anapana meditation is to teach you that you are entirely in control of your awareness. While meditating, you choose to focus 100 percent of your attention on your nose; in a match, you’ll use that same ability to focus entirely on the task at hand, in spite of the noise of the spectators, the drizzle of rain or the taunts of the opposing team’s players and fans. All forms of mindfulness practice are intended to help achieve a sense of control. Consequently, they can improve the ability to make clear, rational decisions under pressure.
• Body work. Because a great deal of stress is experienced physiologically (e.g., tension in muscles), body work can be an important component of a long-term stress management plan. When you are stressed, your muscle tension increases. Therefore, learning to recognize the feelings of muscular tension can help you learn to recognize the experience of stress. Massage therapy can help the body recover from the ongoing effects of stress. Massage therapy also can be informative, because after a session you are able to feel the physical differences in your body. Perhaps after a massage you do not have the usual ache in your low back or thumping in your temples. If you feel these sensations returning, you can recognize the onset of stress and take action to manage it. Massage therapists also will be able to point out where you experience muscular tension and thus increase your body awareness.
• Progressive Relaxation (PR) can be a useful group exercise to practice with your players in order to help them learn how to distinguish between tense muscles and relaxed muscles. To use PR with your players, first ask them to lie down on the floor in a cool, dim room. Instruct your players: “Beginning with your left foot, clench the toes as tightly as you can. Feel the muscles tense and contract. Hold them tighter and tighter.” After about 10 seconds of tension, instruct them to release and relax the left foot completely. Continue on through the body – the right foot, each calf, each thigh, each side of the buttocks. Continue up to the abdominal muscles, the lower back, the upper back, the shoulders, each hand, each forearm, each upper arm, the neck, the muscles of the face. Then, instruct them to first tighten and then relax the upper body, then the lower body and finally the entire body. At the end, tell the players: “Feel completely relaxed, having released every bit of tension out of your bodies. Let your entire body sink into the floor.” The entire process should take about 15 to 20 minutes, and you should provide a few minutes of total body relaxation at the end. This exercise enables your players to physically experience the difference between muscular tension and muscular relaxation and provides them with a practical strategy for creating either muscular tension or relaxation as dictated by the situation. Once the technique is learned, players can do a quick one-minute relaxation when challenged by stress.
Turning Stress Up
Sometimes you will need to increase arousal levels to maximize performance. Use any strategy that will increase heart rate, breathing rate, sweating and adrenaline. Pump loud, stimulating music into the locker room (or through headphones, if you are trying to meet the needs of players with differing IZOFs). You can have players engage in quick bursts of aerobic exercise pre-match to get heart and breathing rates up. Give loud, energetic pep talks in the last few minutes before the match. Pay attention to which preparatory activities seem to increase energy in your players and do them right before the match to boost arousal levels.
The Final Score
You need a four-step plan: (1) watch yourself and your players to determine the conditions under which you and they perform optimally (the IZOFs); (2) learn stress management techniques that can help you re-create those conditions on demand; (3) practice and use the techniques regularly so they become a solid part of your skill set; and then (4) forget everything and just play (which is easy if your stress-management skills have been learned well). You certainly don’t need to add to your stress levels by worrying about your stress-management plan.
Further Reading
Davis, M., McKay, M., & Robbins, E. (2000). The relaxation and stress reduction workbook, 5th ed. Oakland, Calif.: New Harbinger Publications
Kornfield, J. (2001). Meditation for beginners (Audio CD). Louisville, Colo.: Sounds True.
Pargman, D. (2006). Managing performance stress: Models and methods. New York: Rutledge.
Editor’s note: Kimberlee Bethany is completing a doctorate at Florida State University that involves researching the impact of yoga on psychological health and undertakes sport psychology consultancy with university and other athletes. She is certified as a fitness instructor, personal trainer and yoga instructor and has taught yoga, meditation and stress-management workshops for more than 10 years.
Dr. David Eccles is an assistant professor at the Learning Systems Institute and the Department of Educational Psychology and Learning Systems, Florida State University. He has published in the areas of expertise and skill acquisition. He is an accredited sport psychologist with the British Association of Sport and Exercise Sciences and served as the sport psychologist to the Welsh Canoeing Association from 1998 to 2001.
Professor Gershon Tenenbaum is Benjamin S. Bloom Professor of Sport and Exercise Psychology at the Department of Educational Psychology and Learning Systems, Florida State University. He is a past president of the International Society of Sport Psychology and currently editor of the International Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology. He has published extensively in the areas of emotion, cognition and expertise.
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