What Is Too Much Stress? Are There Consequences?

We all know we can over train in tennis, but can we over stress? Recently people have been getting more and more worried about mental health, especially about stress. So, when does healthy competition become unhealthy?

A study conducted by NCBI had 8 female tennis players and 8 male tennis players tested for stress after their first match at a tournament and both had stress, women had more. Every athlete takes stress differently but they all have one thing in common, they take it badly, nobody has ever benefited from stress ( except from their opponent ;) ). Stress hits you in three different phases phase 1 is when you first recognize you’re suffering from stress, your mind automatically responds with a fight or flight attitude. Now we hit phase 2, the resistance stage this is when your body starts fighting back it will try to enzyme levels to shield itself from stress and to do that it needs rest, you know you’ve hit phase 2 once you start feeling tired. Phase 3 is where it gets ugly, you become irritable and even more tired from the body’s recovery or a lot of the time attempted recovery. Once you hit phase 2 you know you need to take a break from competition.

Stress has a lot of consequences, more than you think. The ones that most people know about are weight loss and sleep deprivation. But there’s a lot more to it, worse to it. In a Stanford study where they had high school students kept track of and interviewed all the students who suffered from stress suffered from headaches,stomach problems,sleep deprivation and weight loss with it. Did you know 43% of all adult adverse health effects come from stress? That’s crazy! Tennis should be fun not stressful if you’ve gotten to the point where you feel tired take a break from competition.