Recovery and Well-being in Sport and Exercise

Interdisciplinary Insights

Michael Kellmann, Jürgen Beckmann, Michael Kellmann, Jürgen Beckmann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000530070
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Applied Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Bringing together the world's leading experts, this multi-disciplinary collection examines both the psychological and physiological dimensions to recovery from sport.

Featuring chapters on overtraining, sleep, the relationship to injury, as well as the role of stress, this volume illustrates how performance, both as an individual and as a team, can be better managed through understanding the recovery process. It also covers the impact of travel on performance, as well as guidance on measurement and training. Based upon the contemporary models of recovery and performance in different scientific disciplines such as medicine, psychology, and sport science, expert contributors also explore implications for applied and strategic interventions to retain and stabilize performance ability.

With a large overlap from Sports, Recovery, and Performance, published in 2017, this book has seen substantial modifications with new and revised chapters. This is a must-have resource for students and scholars across the sports sciences as well as any coach interested in the latest research.

Part I

Conceptualising the problem

1The value of recovery-stress monitoring for athletes’ well-being

Jahan Heidari, Sarah Jakowski, and Michael Kellmann

DOI: 10.4324/9781003258117-2

Introduction

When thinking about the life of elite athletes, the general population often considers only the benefits and amenities associated with that profession. Fame, money, and admiration are certainly factors contributing to upsides of being an athlete, but all these concomitants are accompanied by significant sacrifices and challenges. These demands stem from a highly competitive environment including strenuous training sessions, frequent travels, and interactions with the media and fans (Hayes et al., 2020; Reardon et al., 2019). This already closely timed schedule has been taken to a new level due to the global spread of the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19). Apart from the significant health-related risks and socioeconomic consequences resulting from COVID-19 for all individuals, athletes from a variety of sports suffer from substantial restrictions with regard to their training conditions, the predictability of entire seasons, or important competitions that might occur once in a lifetime, such as the postponed 2020 Olympics in Tokyo. Even if competitions can be continued, they require a lot from athletes in terms of even more condensed schedules, competing without fans, or being isolated in a bubble like in the NBA’s 2020 playoffs (Singh et al., 2021). To illustrate the experiences and struggles of elite athletes, the following exemplary description of an NBA player’s season is used to introduce the overall topic of recovery and stress, the value of monitoring these factors, and their relationship with well-being and mental health of elite athletes. The report is based on personal experiences by the authors and illustrations by Carroll (2013) and Medina (2020), who vividly described the physical and mental challenges NBA players are confronted with during their season and particularly in the current situation while taking COVID-19 into consideration. Typical daily life situations and events of an NBA player are delineated, indicating potential starting points for appropriate and effective monitoring and recovery management in sports settings.

NBA player, 4th season (with reference to Carroll, 2013; Medina, 2020)

Under regular circumstances, an entire season lasts from October to April encompassing a total of 82 games. Depending on the standings of the regular season, the playoffs might be added on top which may last until June. That means that you are exposed to a stressful and tough schedule up to nine months each year, involving meetings, practice, multiple games per week, constant travel, and other, non-sport-related responsibilities. Apart from the intense physical demands you are constantly confronted with, mental strains that require resources exist as well. It is a fast-paced life, leaving almost no room for detachment and cognitive processing of all the stimuli and experiences you have to deal with. Your focus and concentration are exclusively directed towards winning the next game in order to attain the overall goal: to win a championship. In the course of the season, family and social contacts come short and do not receive the attention they deserve, as travelling time, game preparation, and tactical meetings consume a considerable amount of time. Especially during the re-start of the season in July 2020 in the so-called NBA “bubble”, schedules were even more compressed and teams were isolated from the outside world as a result of the health and safety protocols. This procedure reportedly took a toll on many players and served as an additonal psychological stressor for the athletes. While technology and scientific progress have led to significant improvements in load and recovery management, the majority of the innovations (e.g., pneumatic recovery units) focuses on reducing the physical costs of the game and aims at accelerating the physiological recovery. These recovery routines take up a significant amount of time during a regular week. You basically only train lightly and concentrate on tactial aspects in practice concerning your next opponent. Sessions for video analyses are also sprinkled in and occasional meetings with specialists from the staff need to be organised, too. On road trips, you obviously spend a lot of time on the plane, a situation you get used to over the years; however, it is not ideal to be accompanied by a omnipresent feeling of being on the move. The longer the season lasts, the more you experience minor injuries in addition to the feeling of mental exhaustion due to an exhaustive season. Under these circumstances, the long-awaited offseason offers the possibility to provide an extensive period of recovery for my mind and body.

The scenario describes the course of a typical year for a professional basketball player competing at the highest level. Regardless of the type of sport, strict schedules resembling those of NBA players are on the agenda of elite athletes. According to the example, this potpourri of sport-specific challenges and influences may be considered as stressful by athletes, which can result in a disturbance of the balance between recovery and stress. Nevertheless, an interference with the organismic equilibrium via challenging external and internal stimuli cannot be generalised as a genuinely negative event (Lazarus, 1999). For professional athletes with ambitious goals (e.g., NBA championship, Super Bowl), certain stressors can be contemplated as adequately challenging, such as tactical or strength training sessions. They enable athletes to perform on a higher level in crucial situations, for example in the final minutes of a playoff game. Hence, it is the concept of distress, which is characterised as an aversive, adverse state, in which stimuli are perceived as stressors exceeding the personal coping resources. Referring to the aforementioned NBA example, the susceptibility of players to potential stressors, such as travel or training sessions, may vary significantly. While one player perceives travelling as exciting and a way to unwind appropriately, another athlete might feel disturbed by the repeated travels and time away from home. Notably, not only interindividual differences may be present, but each athlete experiences certain situations (e.g., the NBA bubble) as varyingly stressful depending on their psychological resilience, which is modified by competitive, organisational, and personal factors (Sarkar & Fletcher, 2014).

The relationship between recovery and stress

In response to these multi-faceted stressors, ensuring comprehensive recovery has emerged as an essential strategy to establish psychophysiological well-being and a functional health condition as a foundation for continuous ability to perform in elite sports (Heidari, Beckmann, et al., 2019; Kellmann et al., 2018). Recovery can be defined as:

an inter- and intraindividual multilevel (e.g., psychological, physiological, social) process in time for the re-establishment of personal resources and their full functional capacity. Recovery includes a broad range of physiological processes like sleep, motivated behavior (like eating and drinking) and goal-oriented components (like relaxation or meeting friends). Recovery activities can be passive or active and in many instances recovery is achieved indirectly by activities, which stimulate recovery processes like active sports.

(Kallus, 2016, p. 42)

The basic concept of recovery consists of the idea that resources need to be restored to regain a homeostatic and biorhythmic balance. Essentially, recovery depends on a reduction or change of as well as a break from stress and comprises a gradual and cumulative process that is dependent on previous activities or events (Kellmann et al., 2018). Challenging events such as an NBA playoff series between two teams on an equally high level with multiple close games might exhibit considerable psychological and physical stress on the players and require extensive recovery depending on the specific needs of each athlete. Peak performance is achievable only if athletes are recovered appropriately after exposition to demanding activities by optimally balancing stress with adequate recovery throughout a longer period of time, for instance an entire season of an NBA player (Heidari, Beckmann, et al., 2019). Potential recovery strategies can be divided into active, passive, and pro-active methods. Active recovery involves moderate exercise during the recovery process to eliminate the results of fatigue through a target-oriented physical activity (e.g., a cool-down programme directly after a match or on the following morning). A passive approach could consist of sauna, massages, or just sitting or lying quietly. During the intervention, physiological reactions to physiological stimuli such as heat, cold, or pressure to restore pre-task performance states are initiated and are accompanied by psychological adaptations. In case recovery includes a purposeful, self-initiated, and self-determined action, it can be characterised as pro-active recovery (e.g., dynamic stretching or systematically breathing for just a few minutes during a half-time break). In addition, recovery is tightly linked to environmental circumstances (Kellmann et al., 2018). Exemplarily, athletes are frequently obliged to give interviews after demanding matches, causing a postponement of their recovery routines and nutritional procedures (Mujika et al., 2018). Research in football (Laux et al., 2015), basketball (Calleja-González et al., 2016), and cycling (Hammes et al., 2016) highlights the importance of the recovery process regarding injury and training monitoring in a variety of sports.

Implications of a recovery-stress disparity

In case demands become overwhelming and sufficient recovery is not applied, a return to a state of physiological and psychological homeostasis with a balanced recovery-stress state cannot be realised (Goldstein, 2009). This transition from a stable recovery-stress state to an imbalance of stress and recovery can be characterised as a gradual process, with stress and recovery representing intertwined and interdependent constructs. According to Kellmann et al. (2018), a nuanced recovery and stress management can be conducted appropriately only when considering all factors that influence performance, such as training (e.g., extent, frequency, intensity, training techniques), lifestyle (e.g., sleep, nutrition, recreational activities), health status (e.g., cold, infections), or the social environment (e.g., family, team members, school/university). Being unaware of the importance of the recovery-stress balance may lead to dysfunctional behaviour which may be reflected in poor time management, excessive training without adequate breaks, or ineffective priorities. A continuous exposition to this potpourri of dysfunctional demands may overwhelm the resources of athletes, ultimately causing hazardous health conditions such as underrecovery, the overtraining syndrome, or even the burnout syndrome (Gustafsson et al., 2017; Heidari, Beckmann, et al., 2019). A constant downward spiral illustrates the relationship between these three states. Und...