An experimental study on stress management of college students by physical exercise

Objectives: Stress refers to subjective feeling when internal and external environment stimulus exceeds the individual's tolerance, which has an important impact on physical and mental health. With the rapid development of times, current college students face lots of stress in economy, study, personal relations, professional career and so on. As predicted by World Health Organization predicted that by 2020, adolescents with mental problems worldwide will increase 50%, which becomes the top five ranks leading causes of adolescents' diseases, disabilities and deaths. Cannot recognize and deal with students' stress in time, which would be a possible threat for physical and mental health, and even their life. So, effective stress management shows it's necessary. As an exercise mode, most studies said physical exercise had a significant impact on stress. Stress management group counseling refers to helping members to recognize and face up to pressure under the leadership of group leaders, so as to change their cognition, attitude and behavior. Our study is going to use tennis, taichi and stress management group counseling as intervention method, to find out its effect on college students who suffering from stress problem, to establish a kind of pressure management method that can be conductive to college students. Methods: This study was a randomized control trail. We did recruitment and interview in Hubei University of Arts and Science. 45 participants were selected finally, including 24 females and 21 males, age ranges from 19 to 22 years. They were randomized assigned to tennis group and taichi group and control group with 1:1:1 ratio. Tennis group (n = 15, female = 8, male = 7) with tennis exercise and stress management group counseling, taichi group (n = 15, female = 8, male = 8) with taichi exercise and stress management group counseling, control group (n = 15, female = 8, male = 7) with stress management group counseling. Tennis group and taichi group practice tennis and taichi exercise 12 weeks by 3 times a week (60 minutes each time) after mastering some tennis and taichi skills. We analyzed pre‐and post‐tests of the three groups by means of the Stress Scale for College Students (SSCS). Results: After 12‐week of exercise training and stress management group counseling, we find out that tennis and tai‐chi and stress management group counseling were benefit to college students who thrive on stress(P < 0.05). Compared to pre‐test, the stress level of tennis group was lower from 47.68 ± 16.75 to 40.10 ± 17.40 after post‐test. Of taichi group was lower from 48.12 ± 14.37 to 43.90 ± 16.10. Of control group was lower from 50.01 ± 17.40 to 47.63 ± 15.89. In terms of overall effect, tennis exercise, taichi exercise and stress management group counseling could reduce college students' stress level; the curative grades were tennis superior to taichi, taichi superior to stress management group counseling. Conclusions: Exercise training could alleviate stress level of college students, and tennis exercise was better than taichi. That is to say, compared to taichi, grid confrontation project could achieve effect. In our study, from the perspective of ethics, students who are suffering from stress, stress counseling could not be stopped in the process of exercise intervention. So, during the whole exercise intervention period, we did the stress management group counseling for participants.