Playing, Living, and Dealing with Fatigue
Competitions help prepare us for life and the many struggles and challenges it throws at us. The obstacles, opponents, and difficulties of the sports we play exhaust us. This exhaustion and fatigue we experience in our bodies and minds mimic the tangible tolls life takes on our well-being everyday. These experiences help give us opportunities to deal with these hardships and learn to operate as players and people within these conditions.
Like in life, we are not always in the ideal state as athletes for competition. We can control our diet, sleep, and practice to a great extent but so many uncontrollable factors may affect our mood, energy levels, and situations. Sports are designed to push us to the edge of our abilities and that entails encountering the limits of our bodies and minds through the context of the game. The quality of our performance falls when we become fatigued and this tiredness can affect all aspects of our game. This occurs across all sports but this blog focuses on some examples in the game of basketball
Basketball and Fatigue
Effects of Mental Fatigue
We are not the same players when we are fatigued. When it is the second half of a game and we feel our legs getting heavy as well as our breathing, we begin to slow down. This is a frustrating part of competing because not only do our physical skills and movements begin to diminish but our mental game too. We lose our focus and become fixated on our own tiredness. Thus, our vision and awareness of the other players and the space on the court becomes limited. We revert back to our childish ways by worrying only about what is in front of us instead of picking our heads up. When we are fatigued, we get overwhelmed more easily and cannot balance the different aspects of the game as well.
The mental toll the game takes on us pushes us to be irrational in our decision making and in our reactions to events on the court. We make unreasonable passes without recognizing the defender anticipating them or closing the space. Fatigue pushes us to become impatient on offense leading to forced turnovers or bad shot selection. On defense too, this tiredness makes us lazy so we pick up cheap fouls or do not rotate to cover the help side. Our minds are not working as efficiently and are not settled into the moment of each play, and this impacts how a player controls their passions too. A player might be more easily enraged by a referee’s call or give a reaction to someone trash talking and lose their temper. This mental fatigue can push the player to react irrationally to stimuli in the basketball environment and not be in control of their emotional reactions. Fatigue makes us lose our minds.
Effects of Physical Fatigue
The physical signs of fatigue are the first ones we recognize as players. After a few full-court plays, we might begin moving sluggishly while we catch our breaths. Or we choose to not cut to the basket and stand outside of the three point line to get a break. The physical toll on our bodies is interwoven with the mental toll but the first physical aspects that diminish are the sharpness of our movements and our complex skills. Our movements become sluggish as our bodies do not have the same energy and sharpness as the first quarter. Instead of changing directions and speeds with explosion, our bodies start to round off our angles and move at the same speed. Our strides get longer and footwork gets forgotten. These longer, slower, and constant movements drain whatever energy we have left. These physical adaptations take us out of our original style of play.
This sluggishness makes it hard to perform complex skills and movements. For one, our fine motor abilities decrease when we are fatigued, and this combined with our lack of focus puts us in a bad position to do a combination move and make a floater with our off hand. The physical fatigue affects the foundational framework for these more complex movements so it is like building a house while an earthquake is happening. However, the detrimental physical and mental effects of fatigue challenge players to play within themselves and not be taken out of their original style of play. The tolls of fatigue are unavoidable but the player’s response can be intentional and helpful.
Final Thoughts
Like in basketball and sports, fatigue is unavoidable in life. The unpredictability of our everyday lives exhausts us and makes us irrational, lose focus, become sluggish, and reduces our quality of living. However, it is important to be mindful of these effects as people and understand that everyday (like every game or practice) has the capacity to exhaust us. When our abilities begin to diminish due to fatigue, we need to mindfully remind ourselves to play our game instead of getting carried into a different style of play. This means living within yourself and not becoming someone you are not because it is easier amidst the fatigue. Concentrating on your choices and actions especially when your mind is not working. Sports and life exhaust us and can pressure us into being lazy, irrational, and fake. But becoming mindful of these effects and choosing to stay true to one’s style of play can help us become better players and people.
