Psychological Intervention Based on Mental Relaxation to Manage Stress in Female Junior Elite Soccer Team: Improvement in Cardiac Autonomic Control, Perception of Stress and Overall Health

Abstract

Chronic stress may represent one of the most important factors that negatively affects the health and performance of athletes. Finding a way to introduce psychological strategies to manage stress in everyday training routines is challenging, particularly in junior teams. We also must consider that a stress management intervention should be regarded as “efficacious” only if its application results in improvement of the complex underlying pathogenetic substratum, which considers mechanistically interrelated factors, such as immunological, endocrine and autonomic controls further to psychological functioning and behavior. In this study, we investigated the feasibility of implementing, in a standard training routine of the junior team of the Italian major soccer league, a stress management program based on mental relaxation training (MRT). We evaluated its effects on stress perception and cardiac autonomic regulation as assessed by means of ANSI, a single composite percentile-ranked proxy of autonomic balance, which is free of gender and age bias, economical, and simple to apply in a clinical setting. We observed that the simple employed MRT intervention was feasible in a female junior soccer team and was associated with a reduced perception of stress, an improved perception of overall health, and a betterment of cardiac autonomic control. This data may corroborate the scientific literature that indicates psychological intervention based on MRT as an efficacious strategy to improve performance, managing negative stress effects on cardiac autonomic control.

Analysis of the Sports Psychological Profile, Competitive Anxiety, Self-Confidence and Flow State in Young Football Players

“…Furthermore, the results indicated that a superior sports psychological profile and lower competitive anxiety are also linked with a heightened flow state. This is consistent with prior studies [ 47 , 48 , 49 ]. Additionally, Hut et al [ 50 ] detailed in their study that mental training, in addition to improving the sports psychological profile and enhancing the connection with the task at hand, reduces athletes’ levels of competitive anxiety, leading to greater well-being and enjoyment in sports practice.…”

Effects of a Psychological Intervention Program on Competitive Anxiety and Psychological Profile in Young Soccer Players

“…A statistically significant decrease in stress control was evident even among participants in the control group. First, with respect to the CPRD assessment of the experimental group showing a significant increase in stress control and motivation, existing literature has highlighted benefits from relaxation (Mosley et al, 2023;Pagani et al, 2023), and mindfulness (Ajilchi et al, 2022), suggesting that those techniques may have assisted our participants. In addition, self-dialogue has been used to manage stressful thoughts and create a motivational internal dialogue (Cabral et al, 2023), and these methods have fulfilled a proactive function and helped athletes improve sports performance (Guicciardi & Prinzis, 2021).…”

Assessing the cardiac autonomic response to bicycle exercise in Olympic athletes with different loads of endurance training: new insights from statistical indicators based on multilevel exploratory factor analysis

“…Of particular interest is the issue of how coaches and athletes could implement the study of the autonomic nervous system using HRV in their everyday practice. Nowadays, this methodology might be helpful to detect the ANS modifications during routine training ( Lucini et al, 2021 ), to define different ANS profiles characterizing different training routines corresponding, for instance, to different roles in soccer ( Lucini et al, 2020b ), and to show the benefic effect of mental training to manage stress in female elite soccer players ( Pagani et al, 2023 ). The complex approaches to HRV analysis employing ad hoc statistics also seem ( Lucini et al, 2018 ) to be helpful: “ to understand the differences in autonomic regulation between excellent athletes and those skilled enough to qualify for the Olympics ” ( Miglis and Muppidi, 2018 ).…”