Adiestramiento en la relajación progresiva para disminuir la ansiedad precompetitiva en deportistas

Abstract

Pre-competitive anxiety is established as a factor that can affect an adequate sports performances (Vaca, 2017) generating the need to execute techniques aimed at reducing this pre-competitive anxiety, such as relaxation techniques and, especially, training in progressive relaxation (Parás, et al, 2017). This research project corresponds to a review on the effectiveness of training in progressive relaxation to reduce pre-competitive anxiety in athletes. This research has a quantitative and quasi-experimental design, in which the Revised Competitive Anxiety Inventory (CSAI-2R) was applied to 26 athletes from the athletics and chess disciplines, who were between 18 and 19 years old, 30 minutes prior to the competition. Subsequently, 6 training sessions in progressive relaxation (PRA) were executed and finally, a post-test was carried out on the instrument in question. In this way, a statistically significant decrease in the levels of cognitive and somatic anxiety was found in the post-test of the experimental group, while in the control group, both pre-test and post-test did not present a statistically significant difference. However, there was no statistically significant difference in the levels of self-confidence corresponding to the pre-test and post-test of the 2 research groups. Therefore, this technique denotes its effectiveness in reducing cognitive and somatic anxiety in athletes, prior to a competition. Finally, this contribution suggests more research in relation to the use of relaxation techniques in its different modalities in order to compare the effectiveness of the variants on these techniques aimed at reducing precompetitive anxiety.