NFL Players Stress the Body More to Ease Stress of Their Mind
Football is America’s most popular sport, and according to Dan Rovell of ESPN, it has been for the last 30 years straight. It is this popularity that leads athletes, especially at the professional level, to feel the excessive pressure to be successful. This pressure reaches another level when players reach the pinnacle of their sport, the National Football League. Here, players have more than just pressure from their peers and coaches to perform. At this stage of the game, they have a salary and entire city on their back as well and can go to dangerous lengths to live up to these expectations.
The lowest salary in the NFL, being the minimum wage allowable for a rookie in the league, comes in at $450 thousand a year. The highest paid athletes earn upwards of $22 million a year.(Forbes.com) Athletes also make a great deal of money outside of their salary in the form of endorsements by company who use them to advertise their product as long as they are performing at a high level. For example, Peyton Manning made $12million in 2015 alone. This pressure leads players to work harder than ever before to become bigger, stronger, faster, and more focused in order to be the best possible athlete they can be.
To be successful, hard work needs to be a daily routine among athletes. Newsday.com posted a full detailed list of a typical week of an NFL player. This schedule shows their day beginning at 6 A.M and not concluding until later that day around 6 at night. The players start off in the weight room lifting weights and from there they head to meetings and study film on the game from the previous weekend. This meeting time leads directly into a practice lasting for two hours, followed by more meetings. Players are expected to perform well in all of these aspects just for being part of the team. However, in order to be great, and live under the pressure that the world around them has created and placed upon them, countless hours are spent alone working on the aspects of their game that they feel need the most improvement. This kind of schedule can put a lot of strain on athletes just to try and measure up to the expectations placed on them.
The pressure to be great and the strain of their work week can lead to a players use and abuse of performance enhancing drugs, or PED’s. These drugs are typically viewed as just being in the form of steroids and as a means to gain muscle and power, however, there is also many other forms of performance enhancing drugs that players can pick from. According to Akbar Gbajabiamila, a drug such as Adderall has widespread use among athletes in the NFL to help a player “zone in” on the game. On the other hand, steroids enhance the physical aspect of athletic performance. Taking steroids, such as testosterone, have been shown to increase athletic performance by five times that of a non-enhanced athlete in just six weeks. These numbers come from a study published by scientist Robert Weatherby of Southern Cross University in Lismore, New South Wales, Australia
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn6265-steroids-boost-performance-in-just-weeks/
http://www.newsday.com/sports/football/a-week-in-the-life-of-the-nfl-1.9218497
