Student athletes: Tips for balancing sport with your studies
The life of a student athlete ebbs and flows. Study demands vary across the semester depending on assignments, study commitments, and exams. Sporting demands also vary across the semester and year; in addition to regular training throughout the year the intensity of training peaks for major sporting competitions. Balancing school and sport naturally triggers a need for trade-offs, and finding an optimal balance between study and sport is a process of trial and error – there is no one-size fits all approach. It takes time to work out what your responsibilities and expectations are at sport and school (and paid work too if you do that). Understanding how much you can realistically commit to ensures that your wellbeing is not negatively affected.
LEARNING TO JUGGLE THE LOAD (YOUR FUTURE SELF WILL THANK YOU!)
There are so many positives to learning to manage your load as a student athlete, and these are skills that will benefit you not only now, but well into the future. Benefits include:
Increasing your resilience by boosting your ability to bounce back from stressful experiences.
Building your toolkit of coping strategies for maintaining performance whilst not compromising wellbeing.
Developing your identity – more than just as an ‘athlete’ or ‘student’. It is possible to achieve across different areas!
Putting things in perspective - how do schoolwork and sport fit into your bigger picture?
Managing perfectionism to avoiding burnout and poor mental health.
Managing yourself and your time by learning to prioritise and follow through.
With so many benefits from learning to juggle the student and sporting loads, let’s turn now to our top tips on how to achieve this.
TIP 1: WORK OUT YOUR PRIORITIES
What matters most to you? Is it achieving an A in chemistry? Making the top team for gymnastics? Striving to get into a particular university on scholarship? Meeting with friends over the weekend? Rather than scrambling to do too many things, and feeling unable to give enough time or attention to any of them:
Start first by thinking about what your priorities are (from most to least important) - this helps you to stay focused when you start to feel overloaded.
Next, set goals that link to each of your priorities.
Then, break down these goals so that you can measure progress during the term (consider SMART goal setting).
Whether it’s for sport or studies, understanding your priorities can help you to remain laser-focused.
TIP 2: PRACTICE ACCEPTANCE
As we’ve noted earlier, balancing school and sport naturally triggers a need for trade-offs. It is a reality of life that there’s a limited number of hours in a day - by accepting this (rather than struggling to do it all and to do it all perfectly) you can keep stress levels at a manageable level:
Balancing studies with sport can be tricky, particularly when peak season for competition coincides with assignment deadlines and exams. You may feel really under the pump, but know that this time won’t last forever – there will be moments where you can step back and relax (such as holidays). Instead, learn to surf the wave of overwhelm, and tune in to how you can help your body’s response.
Accepting the juggle also means looking at your standards for performance - are they realistic given your commitments, or is unhealthy perfectionism leading you down the path to burnout?
Practising acceptance helps you disengage from feelings of unfairness (compared to other students who may be able to devote more time to their studies) and focus instead on moving forward.
TIP 3: ASSEMBLE YOUR SUPPORT TEAM
It’s a well-ingrained mindset in athletes that achieving peak performance involves the support of a team - from a coach to help you with your technique, a conditioning coach to help with fitness, a dietitian to help with nutrition, a psychologist to help with mindset, as well as your personal support team.
As a student athlete you’re doing more - and so you’ll need additional support to help with the load that you carry. Yet so many students believe that success is determined by how smart one is, rather than skill, practice, and the availability of support. Your inner voice may tell you that you should manage it all yourself, but asking for support is not a reflection of your capabilities. Who can you go to when things start to pile up? Start conversations with your family, coach, support team, psychologist, teacher and tutor about how you can work through your priorities and lower your stress. They can steer you in the right direction so that you stay on track without burning out.
TIP 4: ASSEMBLE YOUR STUDENT-ATHLETE TOOLKIT
Performing as a student-athlete draws on a range of skills, so give some thought as to the skills in your student-athlete toolkit. Consider adding (1) skills that help you to increase your efficiency at sport and school, (2) skills help you to stay balanced and avoid burnout, and (3) skills to manage your busy life. Here are some of our favourite skills for a student-athlete toolkit:
(a) Time management
Time can easily slip away when you’re a student athlete juggling school, training, competitions, studying, a social life, and paid work. To stay on top of things, set aside time each week to plan the week ahead. Diarise times to complete homework tasks or pre-session activities (e.g., 15-minutes to stretch before swimming). You can learn more in our article on how to use your planner to organise student life. Other time management tips that we love include:
Match the task with your energy levels (e.g. packing your lunch when you feel drained right after a late afternoon training session rather than jumping into difficult maths homework).
Start early - chip away on assignments and tasks as you receive them rather than waiting for deadlines Things often crop up when least expected, so rather than waiting for the last moment place yourself under more stress, why not make an earlier start?
Shift your mindset - with your busy schedule it’s helpful to shift your mindset away from waiting for a large chunk of time before you can start a task, and move towards approaching studies and sport in bite-sized chunks. For example, rather than waiting for a two-hour block of time before you start studying, think about doing 15-minute pop quizzes whilst commuting from training to school.
(b) Active self-reflection for managing mood and mindset
Staying on track with studies and training can be tricky following setbacks and an increased workload. Unhelpful (clinical) perfectionism, critical self-talk, unrelenting and unrealistic standards, can easily creep in and result in stress, anxiety, depression, and procrastination. Reflect on:
What unhelpful patterns do you notice? Understanding why you get derailed (for example, when you choose to clean your room because you’re avoiding training or procrastinating on an assignment or heading to training) means you can start to find ways to improve.
What strategies work for you when you’re stressed or overwhelmed? There are many stress management techniques around, so reflect on which ones actually work for you. For some it may be connecting with friends, for others it may be checking in with their psychologist, and some may prefer to disconnect and get into nature.
Consider dedicating 10-minutes towards journaling and recapping at the end of each week. During stressful times it’s easy to feel overwhelmed, get caught up in strong emotions, or become hyper focused on what is happening right in front of you. After the event, take time to step back and reflect – what helped and what could you change if you were to experience this event again? For example, did taking a few deep breaths help you get through the moment? Alternatively, rather than getting swept up in the larger goal, perhaps focusing on one subgoal at a time enabled you to get through your work more effectively?
(c) Effective study skills
Whilst student athletes may recognise that developing the right technique is critical to succeeding in sport, there can often be a mental block when it comes to succeeding in studies. However, just as performing well as an athlete isn’t just about ability and potential – it involves refining technique through a process of trial and error.
Similarly, performing as a student involves refining study skills through a similar process. Indeed, some students believe that they are ‘not smart enough’ when in reality they may not be studying in a way that maximises retention of what they have learned. For example, students may think that time spent on studying is what matters, but what is really helps for performance come exams studies is testing yourself. Similarly, rather than just making notes from lectures and textbooks, understanding how to structure studies and focusing on priorities of the unit are essential particularly when your time is limited as a student athlete.
Techniques that we have found helpful in our work with students include:
Understanding how memory works and using a range of memory tricks to enhance performance.
Taking effective notes. Rather than writing down what is said verbatim, try to paraphrase just the essentials so you can check your understanding of what you’re reading/hearing.
Engaging in meta-learning to remain focused on the essentials of the unit (what you should be studying according to the unit outline) rather than diving into rabbit holes of non-essential facts (what is nice to know if you have spare time to focus on them).
If study skills and time management are where you regularly fall down, check out Nimble Noodle, our online self-paced course to help you to sharpen study skills, prepare for exams, and manage your time and mood better.
(D) Truly decompress during quiet moments
Quiet moments can be few and far between when you’re juggling training with studies. However, when they do come around, it’s all too easy to just hop on social media and zone out for an hour or two. If this sounds familiar, it might help to ask yourself if you truly decompress whilst on social media, or does it trigger FOMO and other insecurities? If being on social media isn’t helpful for your wellbeing, find other ways to decompress – it may be seeing friends in real life, getting out in nature, or even chilling and listening to music.
Make the most of these quiet moments, as taking the time to restore your energy helps set you up for a good week.
Hopefully the above tips help you juggle studies and sport better! If you’d like a more tailored approach you can book in with one of our team.
REFERENCES
1. Folkman, S., & Lazarus, R. S. (1985). If it changes it must be a process: Study of emotion and coping during three stages of a college examination. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 48, 150-179. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.48.1.150
2. Debois, N., Ledon, A., & Wylleman, P. (2015). A lifespan perspective on the dual career of elite male athletes. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 21, 15-26. doi:10.1016/j.psychsport.2014.07.011
3. National Collegiate Athletic Association. (2014). Mind, body and sport: Understanding and supporting student-athlete mental wellness. Indianapolis, US.
4. Kimball, A., & Freysinger, V. J. (2003). Leisure, stress, and coping: The sport participation of collegiate student-athletes. Leisure Sciences, 25, 115-141. doi:10.1080/01490400306569
The life of a student athlete is truly a busy one, so how can you balance sport with studies without burning out?