Scientists from Tomsk State University have found that esports athletes need a recovery period after participating in intense competitions just like regular athletes.
The press service of the university reported this to RT.
As the authors of the work noted, eSports competitions take place more often than regular sports tournaments.
During cyber competitions, players experience serious stress associated with the need to maintain concentration and reaction speed for a long time.
However, until recently, there has been virtually no scientific research into whether gamers need a recovery period after competition, the authors of the work note.
Cybersportsmen themselves are not always aware of the need for a recovery period.
To clarify these points, the study authors gathered two groups of volunteers: one included e-sports athletes, the second included their peers who were not involved in e-sports.
Volunteers from both groups were given equally complex gaming tasks, during which scientists recorded the neurophysical indicators of the participants.
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“We recorded how quickly the participants reacted to various stimuli, how much they were able to concentrate on a specific task when exposed to additional stimuli, and assessed some gaming skills - for example, aiming accuracy,” Candidate of Medical Sciences, Associate Professor of the Department of Sports and Health Tourism, told RT. sports physiology and medicine TSU Yulia Kalinnikova.
At this stage of the experiments, the expected results were obtained: the e-sportsmen felt confident and calm in their usual situation.
They also did not respond to distractors in the interference immunity test.
Beginners, on the other hand, felt anxious and could not concentrate.
Thus, scientists have found that professional cybersports players develop a number of qualities that allow them to successfully complete gaming tasks.
At the second stage of the study, scientists measured the heart rate of volunteers after the competition.
Heart rate indicators allow you to assess the state of the human autonomic nervous system.
In this case, one group of subjects included esports athletes, and the second group included students of the Faculty of Physical Education, who were taking the test at the time of the experiments.
Gamers had to take part in a gaming tournament.
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It turned out that the stress that esports players experience during competitions is comparable to the stress that students experience during exams.
“Based on heart rate indicators, we talk about the activity of regulatory mechanisms, how stressed the autonomic nervous system is - is it overstrained and what reserve is there for intense work.
It is necessary to understand how long the state of high stress persists after tournaments and how necessary it is to level out this state.
Despite the fairly high quantitative indicators of the strength of nervous processes, noise immunity and reaction speed, we found that during this period e-sportsmen really need to enter the recovery stage,” emphasized Yulia Kalinnikova.
In the future, scientists intend to experimentally find out which recovery formats are optimal for e-sportsmen, as well as how long this period should last.