High Performance, High reward
Clinicians and practitioners in sports medicine world wide preach that their performance plan, technique, and programs will help athletes peak their performance. With the saturation of social media and ample content online, it can be hard to understand what steps you should take to get where you want to be. This process of understanding your body, and shifting through clinicians and content, can leave athletes and individuals looking for help confused and frustrated.
The program that will help anyone peak their performance is the one that is flexible, and takes all personal and physical factors into account. There is no perfect science, but the clinician who listens to your concerns, works to understand all aspects of your life and treats you holistically will be the person who helps you get the closest to your peak.
But what is peak performance, how can we define it, and how realistic is it to get there? Let's start with some basic talk about the yin and yang of the human body. The human body is made up of many systems that work together in harmony. The optimization of one system will optimize another, and the decline of one will eventually lead to decline in the other. As you look at your own ability to perform at a high level it is important to look at all of the potential systems and factors.
Example #1: Take a highschool aged female basketball player who is training hard and hoping for a college scholarship. With these high goals, comes a long list of factors to consider. These factors include stress levels, high physical workload, school studies, daily practice, fatigue, proper nutrition, injury prevention and recovery, sleep hygiene, different body systems and their relative efficiency (like the muscular system and its relative strength and activation, or the neurologic system and its relative reactivity and connection to the body), hormonal regulation and the female monthly cycle, etc. While it may seem far fetched, all of these factors could have the potential to be the reason this athlete suffers in performance. If she is not sleeping enough, she could feel weakness when she plays. If she is not feeling confident with her studies, it could lead to stress and lack of focus on the court. All leading to decreases in performance.
But how realistic is it to optimize all of the factors in a given person's life? We only have so much control over this. However there are so many ways to systematize and modulate the majority of those factors so that you perform at the highest level your body is capable of controlling that day. This is achieved by a simple understanding of what factors and systems have greater effects on eachother, and what daily habits and routines can be put in place considering those factors.
Example #2: Fatigue. With high volume and high training load, in addition to high psychosocial and physical stress, comes fatigue. It is incredibly unreasonable to expect an athlete who has a high training load outside of their bodys current adaptation, to get into competition and perform at their highest (however we do see incredible athletic feats, so not saying it’s impossible). While they may have high fitness levels due to the extensive training and practice, all of the fatigue accumulated has the ability to cancel out those gains and lead to high decreases in performance in competition. So then how do you keep a high fitness level and high performance level at the same time?
The answer is understanding and timing. The first step, through this short example, you now have. You have to recognize that an athlete training high can have low performance if not modulated correctly. The second step is all careful planning. Take our highschool basketball player. We want her to perform at her highest during season and let's say season is in October making preseason July-September. We first recognize that in July-September she will be fatigued due to high training load, however we still need to develop that base fitness level. This is important to allot for as gains in fitness also take their own amount of time. Then, as the season gets closer we decrease her training load and increase the competition time. So instead of weightlifting 6 days a week on top of skills training and practice. We cut weights and conditioning to x2-3 a week to allow for increased recovery and to decrease DOMs (delayed onset muscle soreness) which can have effects on performance if not properly managed.
You can see here the power of timing. Just using fatigue alone you can modulate workload to peak performance at a given time period. While this is a very generalized example, you see that there are factors in the body that have a yin and yang. While we need strength, power, and fitness, we can also utilize programmed rest (active recovery, etc.) to decrease muscle and metabolic fatigue, to then peak performance.
High performance is very rewarding and takes incredible mental, physical, and emotional strength and intelligence. If you are looking to peak your performance I encourage you to start with your mindset. We see in sports and athletics more often than not, that the people who have learned to control their mind, focus, and discipline reach the highest of goals and truly set the bar for everyone around them.Then address your physical fitness for your given sport, activity, or goal. I always encourage collaboration with a clinician or professional that can assist you in looking at all of your factors and help you create a plan. Find a few good additions to your team thinking quality over quantity. Lastly, remember your “why”. What is driving you to want to reach these high goals? Is it a broken past? Is it a dream of a life you want to live? Is it the pure love for sport? Is it to see the full expansion of your body? Whatever that may be, remember it and let it drive you through the tough and muddy times. The journey to peak performance is not easy, but the rewards are endless.
