How do I develop optimally as an athlete?

How do I develop optimally as an athlete?

There are many different training programs out there, but no matter how we train or what sport we play, there are skills, capacities, and lifestyle choices that support the activities we love. We may not give that support system much thought, but it is inescapable regardless.

How does this apply to me?

No matter what drives you in life or the hobbies you partake in, you need a solid foundation to continue enjoying those activities for as long as possible. 

The base

The two things that matter most in your development as an athlete is also the hardest to apply: sleep and nutrition. No matter how sophisticated your training regime is, no matter how hard you try,  adequate sleep and good food, everything else becomes so much harder to do! The importance of these two factors are impossible to understate. With respect to sleep, we want to get uninterrupted sleep in dark room for as long as we can. Life is life, but we should definitely be aiming for over six hours of sleep. Eight hours is a generally optimal range for most, and ten for higher level athletes. With respect to food, no need to follow some crazy diet, but try to eat what you need to perform, but not too much to put on weight.

Conditioning

With those two things down pact, it’s time to build that proverbial engine. Beyond the classic “cardio” movements, there are endless ways to enhance our metabolic conditioning. Those in the CrossFit world know we can get quickly out of breath with high volume gymnastics! Which brings me to:

Gymnastics

Gymnastics encompasses anything that requires to move our body through space. Once we can perform body weight tasks without being short of breath, it’s time to develop skills that allow us to master ourselves. From the classics like pullups, pushups, jumping to the more complex like climbing, balancing, and inverting ourselves, gymnastics forms the basis our how we navigate our world. Just getting out of a chair requires a squat!

Adding weights

Once we can adequately control our bodies, it’s time to start adding some things to play with!  Obviously lifting in a gym counts, but throwing is maybe a non obvious example. It’s very difficult to execute a jump shot in basketball without the coordination to place the ball, jump, and then throw. Mastering ourselves gives us the capacity to use external objects to the best of our abilities.

Sport

Most sports puts us in the face of novel tasks. In order to perform at a high level, we’ll need to adapt to rapidly changing stimuli. And so here we are: we’ve fed our bodies, we’re well rested, we have to capacity to endure moving ourselves, we’ve developed awareness of our bodies, we’ve mastered external objects, and now, we get to apply that and get the most out of whatever we love!