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The Athletic Wellbeing Podcast discusses the challenges and issues that athletes face in their lifestyle. Physical considerations include nutrition and the need for athletes to consume enough calories to fuel their energy expenditure. Overtraining can lead to mental and physical exhaustion, as well as overuse injuries. Social considerations involve the coach-athlete relationship, with supportive coaches positively influencing athletes' well-being, while abusive coaching styles can lead to anxiety and anger. Mental considerations include stress and balance, as well as body image and its impact on mental health. It is important to be aware of societal pressures and expectations. Hey, everybody. How's it going? This is the Athletic Wellbeing Podcast, and my name is Jordan. My name is Meg. And I'm Allie. And we're just going to go ahead and get into it. So to start off with what we are going to define athletic well-being is, it's the new challenges and problems that an athlete will face as they are athletes. Their lifestyle is very different than just the average person. They have to take on a lot of training and plenty of new responsibilities. So the first thing we're going to get into is the physical considerations, and I'll pass it off to Allie. Yeah, so for physical considerations, one of the things we looked at was nutrition. And athletes are not always aware of how many calories or how much energy they are actually exerting, and they really need a sufficient amount of carbs and calories to ensure they're functioning at their highest potential. However, like with our society, we have these new, like, trendy dieting techniques of, like, healthy eating, which involves, like, cutting carbs or finding ways to lose weight, restricting the time and the amount of time you eat during the day, which can all lead to becoming over-fixated on eating healthy, when in reality, athletes need more calories because they're burning so much energy. There are also many factors that come with the ability for athletes to ensure a nutritious diet. These can be financial restrictions, sports demands, such as, like, practice times, game and travel schedules, or other additional factors such as, like, work, school, obligations regarding family and friends. And all these factors just take away from the time to eat nutritious meals throughout the day or the ability to meal prep. Athletes just really need to be educated on their energy expenditure to ensure they're eating enough calories to maintain the energy they need to perform. They're actually – one of the big things they're doing at St. Thomas is they're hiring dietitians in an effort to help educate athletes on the importance of eating and eating correctly in an effort to help with their overall performance and their mental and physical well-being as well. So another big thing for physical considerations is overtraining, and Meg's going to give us a little information on this. Yeah, so athletes are often pressured by their coaches and peers to overtrain, which can lead to mental and physical exhaustion. This type of overtraining can easily turn into different types of overuse injuries or stress injuries. With athletes overtraining, it can also be hard for them to take enough time for the body to fully recover from their injuries. On top of that, coaches also expect their athletes to train on top of their injuries to benefit the overall team, but this can lead to worsening of their physical injury. It is also really common for high-level female athletes to miss their periods because of overtraining. On top of that, they can also be forced to miss their periods by taking birth control, and I know Allie has a personal story about that. I've heard some stories that during NCAA tournament time that they actually put the female athletes on birth control so they can specifically regulate their periods so they're performing at their optimal level when the tournament time is, which isn't naturally great for your body and it's not great for your well-being as well. With all the physical considerations regarding an athlete's well-being, there are also a lot of social considerations, and one major example is the style of being coached and the coach-athlete relationship. So coaches are truly the environment of a player, and they highly influence an athlete's future and overall well-being. Coaches that support basic needs, overall well-being, and mental health can create a lasting and big impact on athletes. When coaches are able to understand that there's a life outside of sports, it can influence athletes in a positive manner, and it allows for open communication and understanding between athletes and coach. However, there's another side where coaches believe sports should be the center of an athlete's life. This actually can decrease the motivation of an athlete, and it completely disregards the athlete's well-being as they're only prioritizing their sport and training, and this can just lead to a lot of anxiety and anger in athletes. There's also a lot of different coaching styles, and some include emotional or physical abuse, and this can include yelling, screaming, verbal harassment, or even throwing things at given times, and this usually results in fear in athletes because they're worried it'll get them cut from the team or potentially benched. This just goes to show that coaches have a huge impact on athletes' desires to continue to play or if they end up quitting due to the different coaching styles and the unnecessary pressure. Yeah, I totally concur. Coaching pressure definitely can impact on how an athlete will perform. Coaches who talk negative on their athletes will definitely have a correlation to make that athlete perform worse, or in the other way, if a coach gives positive affirmations, then that also helps on giving them the motivation and confidence they need to do better, and this kind of pressure can be very good or very bad. It doesn't just limit to coaches. This also goes to how they talk to themselves whenever they are going through their practices or performing. Positive talk will definitely have really good effect on them, and negative talk will definitely bring them down even further, and this also goes with family, friends, teammates, and this can compile to affect the person's overall mental status. Yeah, so from here, we're going to move into mental considerations of athletes. One of the big things is stress and balance. Athletes are under a great amount of increased stress because of all of the pressure that Jordan was just talking about, specifically student athletes who have to learn to balance school, athletics, social life, and even possibly work. This is a whole other aspect of life for them to learn how to balance that a regular student doesn't even have to think about. Another thing to consider from mental considerations is body image and how one's view of themselves regarding their body and physical appearance can affect their mental status. So body image is influenced by media, peers, parents, and coaches. The media portrays a certain type of body and how someone should look, but then coaches require a certain fitness or weight that can restrict how much an athlete is eating, and those requirements don't always add up to how someone wants to look for the media, and this can really affect someone's mental health. And this flows back into attitudes and behaviors such as counting calories, making sure that you burn a certain amount of calories in each workout, and just restricting yourself in very unhealthy ways that can be detrimental to somebody's overall health. So that's why we need to be aware of not to fall into these pitfalls in society and expectations for all of us, whether it's how we look, what we're eating, and the pressures that we face internally and externally from everybody in our communities. And that's why I want to thank Allie and Megan for coming together so that we could have this podcast.