Investigating stress levels and stress coping strategies in judo athletes

This study seeks to determine how stress coping strategies of judo athletes are shaped by the sport they practice. The study uses the screening method and is descriptive and deductive in nature. The study was carried out in 2022 and involved 134 competing judo athletes based in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, who volunteered to participate. To collect empirical data, the authors used a demographic information form and the ‘Inventory of strategies for coping with stress in sports’s cale. The collected data were processed with SPSS 25.0 statistical software. Other procedures included the Student’s t-test for pairwise comparisonsusing the collected data, the ANOVA test for multiple pairwise comparisons, and the Tukey’s multiple comparison test for deciphering significant differences between the groups. Regarding the gender variable, there was a significant difference between male and female athletes in how high they scored on the subscales of mental imagery, venting of unpleasant emotions, and mental distraction. On average, male athletesscored higher than women on the logical analysis and disengagement subscales depending on their athlete level and their status of (not) being a member of the national team. There were also significant differences in the participants’ scores on: the subscales of support seeking, logical analysis and disengagement depending on their competitive level; the subscales of thought control, mental imagery, effort expenditure and support seeking depending on the age variable; the subscale of mental imagerydepending on the competitive experience variable.