Nik Krygios recently revealed that he had contemplated suicide in 2019. Naomi Osaka has taken extended breaks from competition citing her mental health. Mardy Fish twice withdrew from the US Open due to anxiety attacks. Mihaela Buzarnescu and Serena Williams have also talked about suffering from depression. The list goes on…
These tennis stars are helping bring awareness to mental health issues, and are working to lift the associated stigmas. Hopefully it is also helps them manage their conditions.
***
Pro tennis is tough. There is only one winner each week. It involves endless international travel across multiple time zones, sometimes with last minute changes if knocked out early from a tournament so that another can be squeezed in. Income is irregular with exponential discrepancies between rounds and tournaments. There is uncertainty surrounding the match schedule and upcoming opponent. Not having home-cooked meals. Obligations to family, friends, media, sponsors, staff, and fans. On-line trolls, threats, and verbal assaults on the approach to the stadium reflect poorly on our society and underscore an undeserved abuse that many elite athletes face. This list also goes on…
All of these things are stressful and can take a toll on mental health, which has been getting a lot of attention in the press over the past few years, and rightfully so. It is bringing awareness to mental health issues, trolling, and harassment. These things deserve our attention. The media is doing a decent job of highlighting the many stressors faced by high-level tennis players.
One thing that is missing from the media coverage is the role that overtraining may be playing in some of these mental health cases.
Overtraining syndrome results from a complex, long-term interaction of physical, physiological, social and psychological stressors. It expresses itself through a myriad of symptoms including —but not limited to— fatigue, depression, anxiety, and decreased performance.1
In an attempt to gain incremental advantages over their competitors, most elite athletes are striving to maximize their training and teeter on the brink between maximizing adaptations and spiralling into overtraining syndrome.
The same media stories that discuss mental health in tennis are often accompanied by video footage of the players doing things in training that are of questionable value to their health or performance. It looks cool —which is good for TV and Insta posts— yet this may not reflect what the players and coaches are actually doing in their training times. For this article I will give them the benefit of the doubt and say that their real training sessions look quite different, and are optimized for achieving their long and short-term goals.
However, one thing thing nearly all pro tennis players seem to do is ride a stationary bike post-match as part of an often lengthy cool-down process.2
The idea that an active cool-down like this might improve recovery gained widespread popularity in the late 1990’s. It was based on an incomplete understanding of lactate and metabolic acidosis. The theory behind the desired benefits completely falls apart when the biochemistry of lactate or energy metabolism is considered.3 Furthermore, rigorous research demonstrates that these types of cool-downs produce no benefits and may even have negative impacts on subsequence performances and mental health.4
This is important, so bears repeating: There is insubstantial evidence 5 that active cool-downs post-match improve recovery, lessen soreness, or improve next-day performance in tennis.6 There is no good reason why it would either.
Nonetheless there are bikes backstage on the ATP and WTA tours, and they are being used post-match.
After a 2 or 4 hour match in 30° heat, another 10 to 15 minutes of light or moderate intensity biking in an air-conditioned room does not seem like much, but its negative impacts are tripled: (1) not only does it represent 10-15 minutes of additional work and energy expenditure, (2) it wastefully burns lactate fuel that would otherwise have been converted into glycogen and stored for the next match, and (3) the start of the recovery process is delayed by 10-15 minutes. All of this increases the risk of overtraining and concomitant depression, and may be just enough to nudge them over the edge.
Other popular modalities like cold tubs, stretching, massage also do not seem to do much either, other than take time away from sleeping and eating —two things that are critical to the recovery process and mental health.7,8
Changing tennis players post-match routine is not going to magically cure depression or anxiety, yet eschewing cool-downs is one —literally— effortless change that has no downside. It removes a set of stressors, and replaces them with a period of relaxation/recovery.
Tennis players to do need elaborate post-match routines. Physiological and psychological benefits can be had by from not cooling down.
– CG
1Likewise each of those symptoms may have a myriad of causes, and overtraining is not always one of them.
2Meyer, Tim, et al. “Regenerationsmanagement im Sport.” Sportphysio 6.01 (2018): 24-32
3Robergs, Robert A., Farzenah Ghiasvand, and Daryl Parker. “Biochemistry of exercise-induced metabolic acidosis.” American Journal of Physiology-Regulatory, Integrative and Comparative Physiology (2004).
4Van Hooren, Bas, and Jonathan M. Peake. “Do we need a cool-down after exercise? A narrative review of the psychophysiological effects and the effects on performance, injuries and the long-term adaptive response.” Sports Medicine 48.7 (2018): 1575-1595.
5In some combat and racing sports situations where there are multiple bouts/heats in the same day, a 5-10 minute cool-down aimed at decreasing acidosis may make sense. If the sport requires continuous anaerobic output AND the next fight/race is less than a four hours away, blood may remain slightly acidic because at rest, it takes about this long for the body to fully bring pH back to baseline levels. The rate at which H+ ions produced in the muscles diffuses across the membrane may be dependent upon the pH difference between those muscle cells and the blood. Supporting evidence for this theory is provided by bicarbonate supplementation which can improve performance of this type of activity. So if you’re competing in an all-out event lasting 30-360 seconds —which is going to produce very acidic conditions in the muscle— if the blood is also a bit acidic from an earlier event performance may be limited. An active cool-down between matches (and bicarbonate supplementation) may be beneficial.
6Wiewelhove, Thimo, et al. “Recovery during and after a simulated multi-day tennis tournament: Combining active recovery, stretching, cold-water immersion, and massage interventions.” European Journal of Sport Science 22.7 (2022): 973-984.
7Cullen, Michael-Flynn L., Gretchen A. Casazza, and Brian A. Davis. “Passive recovery strategies after exercise: a narrative literature review of the current evidence.” Current sports medicine reports 20.7 (2021): 351-358.
8Wilson, Stuart Gardner. “Deliberate recovery: Exploring the relationship between sleep and expertise in athletes.” (2018).