SPONTANEOUS ATHLETIC TRAUMA
AS THE RESULT OF THE OVERTRAINING STRESS

By Renato Cocchi, neurologist and medical psychologist

(Italian translation).

Key words: Sport, overtraining stress, GABA, glutamate, acetylcholine, spontaneous athletic traumas.

Spontaneous traumas in a well-trained sportsmen are always something that escapes usual understanding. We guess that this is not an odd fact but could have a logical explanation within the frame of stress reactions.

This is what happens: A well-trained sportsman misses a habitual movement, without being externally forced to do it. So he/she breaks one of his/her tendons or damages one of his/her muscles although owning an ideal state of getting the automatisms of his/her sport acquired. We call it a spontaneous athletic trauma. Now the only odd stuff of it seems to us the moment in which this happens. I

f we watch at a sportsman like this after the trauma we can collect at least a signal that lead us to suppose a covert initial phase of an overtraining state. We could remember an increasing lack of precision in targeted athletic movements.

This drives at a failure of the synchronisms between posture and one or more targeted movements. If we could have observed all the movements - even preparatory movements - until the final gesture, we were early finding this lack of precision.

Only the final targeted movement reveals us what was really happening. That is an important point to remember because the spontaneous athletic trauma can befall in every step of the motion sequence. There are no doubts that overtraining exists and no doubts that it gives a raise to stress reactions. On this topic ther is a lot of recent literature.

Overtrained and stressed athletes are well-known exits of sport seasons, mainly when the championship lasts many months with weekly or be-weekly matches. Football and basketball are two good specimens of it. Which kind of stress? We can surely identify at least two types of it, a metabolic stress and a psychological stress, both nearly always acting in cooperation. But our interest is not in overtly overtrained and stressed athletes where the fall of performances could act as a defence mechanism against risks of traumas.

From the maximum of good form to overt bad form due to overtraining there is a period where spontaneous trauma can occur. This is the time where overtraining effects are still covert and not clearly felt by the athlete itself or by his/her trainer.

About stress reactions we can remind two operative rules. Different types of stress can add each others. Stress reactions use common final pathways independently from the type of stress or stresses that went to elicit them. Brain neurotransmitters' reactions to stress begin to be understood and the backward chain GABA-glutamate seems to play a major role on it.

We do not stay on it, but we ask your attention to an important experimental finding about the choline, the precursor of the neurotransmitmitter ACH. During stress there is an efflux of choline from the brain. What this means? At least two things.

As for the brain, there is a reduced synthesis of ACH, probably due to its reduced turnover, inhibited by type B GABAergic inhibition. The main following could be various degree of mental confusion, and clinical findings agree with that. As for out of the brain, we have more choline available for the peripheral ACH synthesis. Although we did careful research in world literature we cannot find any experimental paper supporting our hypothesis saying that is exactly what occurs. That is that there is an increasing synthesis of peripheral acetylcholine following stress.

Of course we did not find any papers that nullify the same hypothesis. We can only remind well-known anecdotal data. Both animals and men, in life threatening conditions develop a surprising strength. What happens in mentally retarded or schizophrenics in situations they feel as fearful is the same thing, and it needs explanation.

There are two ways for it, or muscles increase their bodies or they maximize their efforts. To do this latter, they need only to have a larger supply of acetylcholine in their neuro-muscular end-plates. Sportsmen are normally inclined to be or became more vagotonic, ie. more prone to peripheral cholinergic effects within the vagal district.

The overtraining stress seems to promote a similar condition of increased Ach sensitivity in all parts of their bodies. But when the muscular strength is magnified, postures and athletic movements do not yet fit the brain programming based on kinesthetic memory. So, a particular magnified movement, or simply the body weight can force out postural limits altered in their turn, giving the raise to the spontaneous trauma.

Of course part of this explanation is only deductive, but this is the first one that aims to link both stress and spontaneous trauma in a faisible and verifiable way.

Text revised of the paper presented at the 2nd World Congress on Strees, Melbourne October 25-29, 1998.

Author address: dr. Renato Cocchi, via Rabbeno, 3

42100 Reggio Emilia (Italy)

renatococchi@libero.it

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Sport

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