Every athlete serious about getting to the next level is working hard on improving in their sport.  Most of the athletes I work with are students in high school and college with a full academic load on top of their practice and training regimen.   Many of them have packed schedules with barely enough time to eat 3 healthy meals and often short themselves on sleep hours during test crunch times.

I have heard it and I get it.

We are built for short-term periods of super productivity, yes.  When obligations and commitments are overwhelming, we have some built in mechanisms to help us get through those times and kick things into another gear…that’s true.

But…you can’t burn the candle at both ends all the time. It always catches up to you.

What you may not realize is that if you are constantly pushing and not giving yourself some time for relaxation and regeneration (and it doesn’t need to be much), then you may be holding yourself back.

A perfect illustration of this is in weight lifting.  Athletes progressively get stronger and lift heavier and heavier weights only because they give the worked out muscle time to completely relax and provide the nourishment.  If you just keep working a muscle without giving it time to come back from that exertion, you actually slow down the process of rebuilding it.

This works for the mind just the same! It’s common sense and the reason why we take vacations and call it “charging our batteries.”

Now, I’ve always been an efficiency fanatic wanting to find the most effective means to achieve my goals and getting the biggest return for the time and energy I expend and that applies here as well.

In order to avoid the negative effects of over training, it’s not really how MUCH time you spend balancing your life with relaxation, but it’s the quality that matters.

Yes, it would be great if you could spend a half an hour meditating or doing self hypnosis every day to reset the body from all that stress. That would probably do it for you. But that’s not necessary.    If you would spend just 1 minute, 5 times a day, using a conscious breathing technique I have for you here, this would go a long way to that balance you need to maximize mental and physical regeneration.  Here’s the steps:

1. Get in a place where you don’t have to pay attention to anything like driving.  You can do this anywhere and at any time you have a spare minute. We all have spare minutes throughout the day. Start looking for them.
2. Direct your thoughts to your breathing.  Think about everything you can about the act of breathing such as:  the sound and feel of air moving through your body, your muscles expanding and contracting, oxygen exchanging with carbon dioxide at the surface of the lungs, the rhythm of your breathing, etc.  This is called conscious breath.
3. Make your breath a little bit slower and little bit deeper than normal.

4. After about 30 seconds, breathe naturally and normally and the direct your attention to your body.

5. Imagine sending a wave of relaxation through your body starting at the top of your head to the tips of your toes.  Literally direct your mind to each body part as the wave flows through you and do your best to relax that body part.

That’s a very effective and efficient relaxation technique that acts like a re-set button for stress and triggers the regeneration of your cells.
There are many variations of relaxation techniques like this. I would encourage you to include some sort of conscious breathing mechanism as that has proven to trigger a relaxation response in the rest of the body.

As far as your actual workouts and not over training, you need to get the advice of a professional physical trainer and follow their advice to the letter because recovery times vary widely from a couple days to a full week depending on the workout.  Do not take generic advice on the internet or from someone who doesn’t know you and your training about this. It’s highly individualistic.

With regards to taking a break from drills and repetitive practices, we have found at the mental toughness academy that periods of relaxing the body and mind while visualizing yourself executing your skills perfectly has more benefits than mindlessly doing it just to say that you work hard.

You can’t just beat up on your body (and brain) all of the time. You’ve got to give them some time to re-integrate and then come back stronger from the experience. For the mind, that is the essence of mental toughness.

Let’s do this,

Craig Sigl