Abstract
Elite basketball training causes high levels of physiological stress, which can lead to negative physiological disorders in female athletes. The aim of this study was to establish the impact of physical activity on the rhythm of salivary cortisol secretion in elite female basketball players over one week. The population sample included 9 women professional basketball players. The control group was made up of 9 women who did not do any exercise. Saliva samples were collected from all participants at 9:00 a.m. and 11:00 p.m. on training days. Samples from the basketball group showed a significantly higher cortisol secretion. Moreover, from the second night, the pattern of cortisol secretion of these players was reversed, showing higher levels of cortisol in saliva at night than in the morning. The results suggest that the secretion rhythm changed over the course of the week and according to competitive demands.
Highlights
To increase the players are more susceptible to injuries [30]. This is why, together with the accumulation of physical work, assessing the dynamics of salivary cortisol secretion over a week with training sessions and a competition game, may be important to establish adequate loading, training, and recovery guidelines, and to avoid the appearance of injuries, since the secretion of this hormone in saliva is greatly sensitive to physical exercise [8]. When performing this assessment in our study with elite female basketball players, elevated cortisol levels could be observed as early as Monday, which may indicate that players did not physically recover from training or from a match from the previous weekend, since the physiological stress on the players can take up to 48 h to reduce to initial levels after a match [31,32], which coincides with the results of a recent study [26]
There was a progressive increase in cortisol levels throughout the week until Friday that could indicate an increase in physiological stress from training that week, which could add up over the course of a season that begins in September and finishes in July
These players’ levels of cortisol are high throughout the week when compared with the same range of time for the control group, with the differences being statistically significant. This confirms the increase in cortisol is a consequence of physical activity, something that is already described in other studies which have demonstrated that moderate–high intensity exercise causes an increase in cortisol levels not observed in low intensity exercise, both in plasma [33] and saliva [34]
Summary
Training load for top-level competitions can lead to overtraining where one or more training factors (such as duration, intensity, or volume) increase more than the usual amounts in athletes (in other words, the overload principle) The purpose of this practice is to achieve successful training, which consists of obtaining a high compensatory response based on achieving an improvement in performance, after an adequate period of recovery [2]. When overtraining is excessive, it can lead to performance deteriorating quickly, yet this does not correspond to a period of rest or regeneration [3] This may be associated with the fact that overexertion prior to a competition involves an increase in physiological stress for elite athletes that is related to negative somatic emotions [4]
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