Key result
Deep End Fitness training significantly increased the use of problem-focused coping strategies and positive affect in athletes compared to CrossFit training.
Why the study?
Athletes experience unique stressors affecting mental health, and the authors investigated whether adding psychophysiological variation through underwater breath-hold exercises could provide unique mental health benefits.
Does Deep End Fitness training improve mental health and coping in athletes compared to CrossFit training?
Does Deep End Fitness training improve mental health and coping in athletes compared to CrossFit training?
Deep End Fitness training provides unique benefits to positive affect and problem-focused coping in athletes compared to traditional CrossFit training, while both effectively reduce stress.
Answers are grounded in this paper and cite their sources.
May support Deep End Fitness for athlete coping; hypothesis-generating and requires randomized confirmation.
Physical exercise is known to improve mental health. Athletes can experience unique physical and emotional stressors, which can deteriorate mental health and cognitive function. Training apathy can lead to cognitive dissonance and further degrade performance by promoting maladaptive, avoidance coping strategies. Introduction of psychosocial and training variables, such as those used in CrossFit (CF) and other community-based fitness programs with strong peer support have been shown to help reduce training apathy and negative affect. Here, we explored whether addition of psychophysiological variation, experienced as "hunger for air" during underwater breath-hold exercises, could provide unique mental health benefits for athletes. We studied the influence of CF and Deep End Fitness (DEF), a community-based underwater fitness program, on several outcome measures of mental health and emotional well-being in volunteer athletes. We observed a significant reduction in stress scores of both the control CF training group and the experimental DEF group. We found that DEF produced a significant improvement in positive affect while CF training did not. Further supportive of our hypothesis that the psychological and biological stressors experienced in underwater, breath-hold training cause positive adaptive changes and benefits, DEF training uniquely increased problem-based coping. While our observations demonstrate both CF and DEF training can improve mental health in athletes, DEF produced additional, unique benefits to positive coping and attitudes of athletes. Future studies should further evaluate the broader benefits of community-based, underwater training programs on psychological and physiological health in athletes and the public.
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Cansler et al. (2023) studied Healthy athletes (n=66). Deep End Fitness training vs. CrossFit training was evaluated on Problem-based coping score (p=0.04). Deep End Fitness training significantly increased the use of problem-focused coping strategies and positive affect in athletes compared to CrossFit training.
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