If you're serious about your health and performance than you want to know that you're doing the best you can with your efforts. And if you're not where you'd like to be weight-wise, performance-wise or in terms of your rehab than there are probably some things you could be doing a better job of. And if you are having some success in these areas than you are probably motivated to see what else you could do to ramp up your results even more.
I'll be honest...I know I could do more personally. A while back I stated some of my goals. A few of them included hitting targeted strength measures, improved fitness levels and a specific scale weight.
And while I'm on track to hit my goals I know I could be further along. I know I maybe under-estimated myself by selecting goals I knew I had a pretty good chance of attaining.
There's not a problem in doing that. But we want to make sure we are giving our best effort and setting new goals if necessary.
So while I'll probably wait until I realize the current goals I've set until I pick new ones there are a few things I know I can improve on until then. With that in mind here are 5 Things I Can Do Better to Improve My Health & Performance.
1. Improved sleep - I need 8 hours of sleep a night. Not 8 hours of bedtime on my computer, reading or doing sudoku puzzles but 8 actual hours of sleep. I need to make sure that I get as many of these 8 before midnight as possible. And I need to make sure to be as consistent with my time to bed and time to rise as possible.
2. More soft tissue work - Every workout should begin with some foam rolling. It doesn't have to be lots of time and the more I do of it the less time is necessary. But sometimes I'm a little short on time for training and this is what gets cut from the program. I need to remind myself how effective foam rolling is, how this restores alignment and posture, how it helps we achieve optimal technique on my lifts and allows me to recover more quickly between workouts.
3. Less sugar - For a while there I was in the habit of writing down the sugar content of everything I ate. Well not really everything but if it came in a package I was jotting in down. And this good because as you get your insulin under control your fat burning goes way up. I've got to get back to doing this again.
4. Drink more water - Sometimes I'll get busy writing programs or running errands and won't drink as much water as I should. As soon as you're 2% dehydrated performance drops off. Plus many of your muscle building and fat burning enzymes are hydrolytic and require water. There are a number more good reasons to drink more water and I know I have to increase my intake.
5. Watch out for compensations - As soon as we compensate we put stress on the body where it shouldn't be. And we then take longer to recover from this stress. Plus the longer we get away with our compensations the harder they are to undo and the greater the chance of injury. Specifically I need to watch that I am maintaining a neutral lumbar spine on all of my lifts. Only the weight should move and the rest of the trunk should be steady.
Well there are the areas I think I can do better in.
What about you? Where can you improve? Does it have to do with rest, training, nutrition or something else altogether? In the comments section tell me what you want to focus on and I'll reply to help you out.
Chris okanaganpeakperformance.com 'always moving forward'