Question

Compare and contrast how stress can be both good and bad in relation to training.

Answer 1

Stress could be caused by emotional, biological and also for physical. Its an integrated response of sympathoadrenal medullary and hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal cortex axis. Training or exercise for an athletes can be a caused of stress. Physical stress signal is perceived by the cerebral cortex, limbic system, Reticular activating system (RAS) of the brain. The signal from these areas acivate the adrenergic, ADH and CRH neurons of the Hypothalamus. Adrenergic neurons stimulates Nor-epinephrine and epinephrine secretion through sympathetic nerves. ADH and CRH neuron stimulates ADH, ACTH and TSH hormone secretion that will stimulate adrenal cortex to secretes Cortisol in response to stress. There are some good and bad affect of stress in relation to training.

Good Affect: i) Due to increased catecholamines (Nor-epinephrine and epinephrine) secretions by stress response in body, it stimulates gluconeogenesis. This means body generates glucose from the non-carbohydrate source like lactic acids. So, by this process the lactic acids produced by the exercised muscle is used for the glucose production. This helps in less accumulation of lactic acids in body during training and enhance the endurance power of the athletes.

ii) stess also increased lipolysis, to provide Free fatty acids as a fuel during exercise or training.

iii) Due to enhanced sympathoadrenal discharge, huge amount of blood is flowed to the active contracting muscle during training and maintain coronary, cerebral blood flow. This increased blood flow to the active muscle helps to provide high oxygen, glucose and free fatty acids for increased metabolism.

Bad Affect: i) Due to enhanced Nor-epinephrine secretion in case of stress during training, this will cause enhanced aggressiveness of that individual. This enhanced aggressive behaviour is harmful for that athletes/player to compete with others. A athletes should have to be cool, calm and focused in their game.

ii) Corticotropin releasing hormone(CRH) producing neurons are actiavtes during the stress response, that will inhibit the growth hormone, gonadotropin release and sexual activity. This CRH neurons also inhibits the appetite and feeding behaviour which is a alarming condition for an athletes to maintain his diet requirements during training schedule.

iii) Stress during a training session produce anxiety, panic and depression in some athletes. This will hamper the training benefit for that individual. That's why sometimes a motivator psychologist should be there to motivate the athletes for the training.

In this way stress can be both good and bad in relation to training.