Regular exercise keeps the body on its toes and is the best protection against diseases of civilization such as obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure and elevated blood lipid levels. “Two to three times a week for 30 to 60 minutes of endurance sports, that’s recommended,” also says Dr. Robert Gugutzer from the Chair of Sports Psychology at the Technical University of Munich. But some athletes gradually lose all sense of the amount of exercise that is good for the body and does no harm.
Sports addiction and its symptoms
Running 20 kilometers through the park before breakfast, lifting weights during the lunch break and skating with friends in the evening – if they can keep up at all. “Recreational athletes who exercise more than an hour a day need to listen carefully to their bodies,” Gugutzer says. “Pain that indicates overload and signs of wear and tear must be taken seriously,” advises the sports scientist.
Even though sports addiction does not (yet) exist as a separate diagnosis, physicians define it this way: an addictive desire for athletic activity without competitive ambitions. This manifests itself in uncontrolled, excessive training behavior and leads to physical and mental complaints. Overall, sports addiction is quite rare. According to estimates, about one percent of recreational athletes are addicted to exercise. Popular sports among fitness maniacs include running, cycling, triathlon, as well as bodybuilding and weight training.
Why is exercise addictive?
Drugs are not involved in sports addiction, unlike some other addictions, unless the athlete dopes. For a long time, experts believed that the body’s own happiness hormones (endorphins) could be responsible for sports addiction. This is because under extreme stress, the body secretes endogenous drugs to control pain and endure extreme stress.
U.S. scientists at the University of Richmond found that the concentration of the body’s beta-endorphin increased after 45 minutes of aerobic exercise, but found no correlation between the amount of endorphin in the blood and an addiction to constant physical activity. Sports psychologist Professor Oliver Stoll from the Institute of Sports Science at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg proved that even relaxation training leads to an increase in endorphin levels in the blood. The happiness hormones are therefore not demonstrably responsible for addiction.
Stoll and his colleagues rather suspected that distraction from everyday problems plays a role in the development of sports addiction. During intense physical exertion, athletes focus only on the here and now. This shuts down thoughts and sweeps everyday problems aside for the time of the workout. It’s a state that athletes want to have again and again. A drug has no other effect. So athletes run the risk of living only in the physical activity.
Reality escape as a cause of sports addiction
Experts, however, suspect other factors than reality escape. The physical exertion could reduce anxiety. In favor of this theory is the fact that sports addicts tend to be insecure people. “With good athletic performance, they raise their self-confidence and compensate for frustrations they experience elsewhere,” says sports scientist Gugutzer.
In addition, a relaxation effect sets in after the big grind. On the soul life this works like a drug. “It’s completely unclear to us researchers which effect contributes most to sports addiction,” says Professor Tom Hildebrandt of the Institute for Eating and Weight Disorders at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. All of the answers could be true, but there are no concrete data on that.