Prof Kruger on COVID-19 and elite sport

2020-06-19

The second part of Prof Pieter Krugers’ article written for Men’s Mental Health Week, tackles COVID-19 and the effect it has had on elite sports people. 

Prof Kruger is the Director: Centre for Health & Human Performance at NWU and a Consultant Clinical Psychologist.

Impact of COVID-19 on elite sports people

Over the past 10 weeks I have been working with a range of elite sports people in rugby, premiership football, professional golf, as well as a few Olympic athletes, who found themselves in the void which COVID-19 had created in the world of sport. They were all faced with similar challenges i.e. empty stadiums, no training, social distancing, and a range of out of the ordinary circumstances. Like for most of us (despite the obvious challenges and concerns about the virus itself), it was an interesting new experience to spend extended time at home with our loved ones. This also meant for sports people an interesting new routine of not running between appointments, no travelling across the world to compete, not being paced by specific training schedules and suddenly working on a time-frame which might be more suited to individual chronotypes (your sleep-wake preference). Unfortunately, most people very soon realised that it is not as great as we thought it would be.

Not only were we forced to a geographically confined space (at home), but also inevitably, this started having a significant impact on people’s emotions and behavioural patterns. Suddenly we started sleeping at different times, eating at different times, training at different times, spent more time on technology, started moving significantly less (apart from the obvious one intense bout of exercise per day which most sport people did), but also prompting significant changes in our social patterns as well. 

Under normal circumstances, to deal with stress, people will go out to the movies or the theatre, meet up with friends for drinks, have people over for a barbeque or go out to play golf, cycle or any other outdoors activities. In a blink of an eye this all changed, as these changes were enforced upon us – with no exceptions. This significantly interfered with sports people’s ability to manage their stress and concerns, which in turn had a negative impact on some of them from a general mood perspective. A significant number of people found it very difficult to deal with these changes which lead to several anxiety related symptoms such as muscle tension, poor sleep quality, frustration and inability to control their mood, relational challenges, gastro-intestinal problems, concentration issues and even headaches. Some of them asked for help, some managed through this period by themselves, and some seemed to suffer in silence during this time. The level of uncertainty and helplessness unfortunately exacerbated this already challenging situation for most people.

Luckily, things are slowly returning to a form of normal with lockdown regulations relaxed, training resuming and the prospect of games are slowly returning. This will hopefully help players do deal with and alleviate current symptoms, although the return to training and concern about resuming highly competitive, intense games, will bring its own level of concerns. It is imperative that players have a mental plan to approach this new transition phase to ensure that they can prepare themselves optimally (physically and mentally) to return to training and to playing games again. Hopefully, franchises and unions will put the necessary support systems in place to help players during this new transition window and ensure smooth return to business as usual.



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