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Whether you are an elite athlete or just trying to bring your performance to the next level, it’s important to understand the science of stress and how it affects both your body and your mind. That way, you can make the best decisions about when to push yourself and when to rest.
The Shadrack Kipchirchir Story
Training for a race or any other long-term athletic endeavor is about setting short- and long-term goals, and having the patience to overcome the inevitable setbacks. It’s about preserving the sacred machine of body and mind that you’ll need to succeed in whatever competitive arena you choose.
Distance track and field Olympian Shadrack Kipchirchir has notched up titles in the Pan American Games, the World Championships in Athletics, and the USA Outdoor Track and Field Championships, where he won the cross-country crown in San Diego. But in his eleventh year as a competitive runner — right before the 2021 Olympic Trials in Tokyo — he tore a muscle in his left calf. Shadrack had bought into the myth that a real athlete trains right through his pain, so he ignored the warning signs.
At Gate River Run in Jacksonville, Florida, Shadrack fell down a mile into a race and had to be carried off the field. He arranged to see a team of physicians and rehab specialists at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Following doctor’s orders, he took a break for six weeks. But after the six weeks, the tear had filled up with blood and he was told he would need surgery.
Over the next ten months, Shadrack underwent rehab. He was determined to heal and often showed up twice a day. His persistence paid off. In San Diego, Shadrack snatched victory from the jaws of defeat.
A Quest for Answers
Despite his comeback, Shadrack knew there was more to discover. He wanted to know what was happening inside his body and mind before he entered a competitive event. He went online to look for guidance. That’s when he stumbled across some articles about cortisol and became acquainted with its role as the “messenger of stress.” He wondered if he had over-trained and unwittingly put undue stress on his body and mind.
The Cortisol Connection
As a hormonal messenger, cortisol is thought to be involved in regulating essential functions in the body, including alertness, energy production and metabolism, blood pressure, blood-glucose levels, inflammation, and immune response. Additionally, cortisol is regulated by intricate feedback loops between the brain and the adrenals. Shadrack became increasingly convinced that cortisol was the biomarker to watch — more so than testosterone, heart-rate variability (the amount of time between heartbeats), and VO2 Max (a measure of the maximum amount of oxygen the body can utilize during periods of increasing physical intensity). These other biomarkers vary little day by day, so that it’s hard to rely on real-time information about changes in the body that athletes and their coaches need to know. Indeed, research to date does not show any significant correlation between heart-rate variability (HRV), for example, and an athlete’s physical recovery post-exertion.
While more data needs to be collected, cortisol remains the most relevant biomarker for assessing whether it’s safe for an athlete to train and compete. Dr. Maria Hopman, professor of integrative physiology at Radboud University Medical Center in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, postulates that cortisol is a better biomarker than HRV because it can change over a relatively short period of time. HRV doesn’t. Testosterone doesn’t. VO2 Max doesn’t. If something doesn’t change, how can you use it as a metric for anything?
The Mind-Body Connection
Mindset affects the way an athlete’s body responds to both mental and physical stress. One well-known study of track and field athletes participating in the 2015 European Games in Baku, Azerbaijan, found that athletes tend to experience increased cortisol levels when they lose or win to other top athletes in their field. In fact, their stress level quantifiably increases when they defeat a fellow athlete they revere. In short, losing hurts but winning can hurt too!
The Baku study also found that an increase in cortisol (and testosterone) before a competition may be detrimental to performance in track and field athletes. Athletes with a less pronounced endocrine response in the 24 hours before an important competition fared better than those exhibiting greater endocrine changes.
Is Winning Supposed to Feel this Bad?
Data show that some 35 percent of elite athletes suffer from stress, eating disorders, body image issues, burnout, suicidal thoughts, depression, panic attacks, or anxiety. Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps, USC volleyball player Victoria Garrick, and NBA player Kevin Love have all spoken frankly about their mental health struggles.
Clinical psychologist Alia Crum believes that although we generally perceive of stress as something negative, we need to be aware of the positive effects of stress; having the right mindset can help shape our response to stress in a way that can help us win a race or achieve any other competitive goal. Ali Crum’s mindset philosophy: We can influence the way our body responds in part by changing our mindset.
To support her point, Crum and her Stanford colleagues devised an experiment to demonstrate how an affirmative mindset can help students cope with a high-stress situation by assigning a performance task and evaluation. What they found was one group of students freaked out, and not surprisingly, showed a rise in their cortisol levels. The other group seemed to be sort of disengaged from the task and their cortisol levels hadn’t moved much, and in some cases, they were lower. They opined that neither freaking out nor being disengaged is an adaptive way to approach a stressful task; the truly adaptive response was a moderate level of cortisol elevation. The students who had a ‘stress is enhancing’ mindset were more likely to be in this desired middle range of cortisol response.
When it comes to stress — in the classroom, the gym or the sports arena — the most adaptive approach to a challenge harkens back to the Goldilocks principle: You want your porridge (that is to say cortisol level) just right: not too hot, not too cold. When it comes to athletic performance, you want a mindset that’s just right enough to incite your inner competitive beast without destroying your sense of self.
Putting it All Together
Back to Shadrack. In order to learn more and find out what he could do to avoid injuring himself again, Shadrack committed to a study to determine his baseline cortisol levels and pre- and post-performance levels. What he learned after his first competition in almost 10 months was that, according to his cortisol readings (which were super high and didn’t come down as expected), he was showing signs of burnout and his massive exertion could have temporarily exhausted his body. In order to avoid injury, he would do best to wait until they came down before heading to the track.
The take-away lesson: It’s critical for athletes to understand their cortisol diurnal curve baseline and monitor changes in order to know how much stress they’re under to optimize training and reduce injuries.
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This content is brought to you by Wibe Wagemans and Ioana A. Bina, M.D., Ph.D.
Photo by Jacek Dylag on Unsplash