Overtraining and burnout in young tennis athletes: implication for sports coaches

Tennis is one of the sports that requires a high level of physical requirements, including speed, agility, strength, endurance, power, flexibility, footwork, and hand-eye coordination, just to successfully serve or receive a ball. In Malaysia, a total of 13 different tournaments, organized locally, and internationally, are available for young tennis athletes to participate in, where they are required to attend various scheduled and intensive training sessions prior to their tournament, ranging from 12 to 48 hours per month in different age groups. Given the chronic stressors including high training load, academic demands, and expectations from coaches, family, and the athletes themselves, young tennis athletes are predisposed to overtraining and burnout occurrence. Overtraining is defined as a longer period of negative unintentional consequences of training, resulting in decreased performance, which lasts longer than just a few days. Burnout is defined as a psychophysiological response to exhaustion, involving three components, including psychological, physical, and behavioural components, which manifests in three features including emotional and physical exhaustion, reduced sense of accomplishment and sport devaluation. Hence, this study aims to identify the risk factors of burnout and overtraining in young tennis athletes, to provide actionable recommendations to parents, coaches, and paediatricians, and in supporting young athletes’ wellbeing. A total of five articles which studies the correlation between training load or training volume and occurrence of burnout in young tennis athletes were included in this study. Results yielded were inconclusive to recommend the optimum duration of recommended training hours or training load in young tennis athletes, to avoid the occurrence of burnout, highlighting the need for further research to be conducted to establish the relationship between training load and burnout occurrence in young tennis players in Malaysia.