How fast can you run? How high can you jump? How strong can you get? How fast? What adventures can you overcome?

You can feel a beating in your heart, a desire to push yourself to the next level…

But somethings in the way.

Stress

How well can your muscles heal when fight or flight mode turns off your healing? How well can you stick to a diet when you have a hard time absorbing their nutrients? How safe are your adventures when fight or flight is known to decrease overall vision (as we’re forced to focus on singular targets, areas etc. when others can quickly become of higher concern.

More than any other field, Athletes in particular must fully understand fight or flight mode and learn to overcome their stress.

The combat of wellness largely deals with what it takes to improve and become your better self, overcome stress etc and thus will be the athletes best friend.

The two main questions of athletes is ‘how hard can I train’ and then ‘how quickly can I recover form that training.’ When suffering from stress, more specifically stuck in fight or flight mode, the answer is going to be very little. There’s nothing like a nice fight to take the wind out of a good body building session, sure they can “take it out on the weights” but their performance and gains are going to be shot. That fight will generally leave negative feelings in the mind of the athlete and it’s important to say the positive versions of them, as in affirmations, followed by a walk around the block, followed by brief meditation to get their head back into the game.

Sometimes we don’t have time to get our head back and it’s up to our own will power, and strength of our focus alone to get our Zen like center back. The quarter back yells “Hike!” and instead of worrying about whether or not we have a home to go back to, we’re in motion, plowing our way past defenses that are able to unleash tons of pressure against us, snapping our heads back for a moment to catch the glimmer of a vision of the ball, just enough to catch it into a crash landing, gaining 15 yards in the process.

More than anything, an athletes challenge is to do their best to mitigate drama and pain from lovers, finances and friendships. Communication can be something they struggle with as we all can tend to master the area of our focus yet find the more subtle art of human interaction a little strained. Athletics are far simpler than complicated associations of the human element.

Additionally, it’s important to recognize there is a big difference between will power and drive. Drive will bring you to your limits, however, will power should be used with caution or you can actually override the warnings in your Golgi tendons and pull muscles completely, just out of sheer will power.

Key tips for athletes

• Make use of our motivation section to help give a little extra energy

• You are what you eat. We can either have success in our taste buds or in life, not both.

  • • My personal favorite diet is a nut diet. They’re chock full of healthy carbs, protein, fiber and are anti-inflammatories (which are technically performance enhancing as you’ll take longer than others to inflame your muscles from strenuous movement and hit muscle failure). As well as steam distilled water with organic trace minerals added back in, lime, turmeric, cinnamon spice and a drop of organic plant based peppermint essential oil.

    • Peppermint essential oil is considered toxic as 10 drops per cup. However it’s also proven to increase ATP production, increase energy and also fight inflammation.

• Master the combat of wellness.

• Before a work out or event, mix peppermint essential oil and lavender and rub it over the muscles that will face a majority of resistance. You’ll find they will be able to do a little more than normal and with a quicker recovery time.

• After or even during an event as allowed, re apply an application of the essential oils. They are amazing at accelerating after workout recovery.

• Consider purchasing an IR LED light for after workouts, specifically once they begin to feel sore from the activity done.

  • • Check out some top research on IR technology HERE.

    • Consider setting up a home gym, or going to one that covers the work out area in IR light.

      • • • 660 and 820 nm show a 90% effectiveness rate in fighting inflammation and increasing energy. Only problem is 660 is very visible and can possibly damage your eyes. Yet finding a 820nm only led is very hard to do since “no one wants to pay for a light that doesn’t light.” You can call led companies directly to make a panel. Give them the same wattage specs per led bulb as many sellers go with online. There are also 850nm ‘security camera lights’ where they create a large field of IR light. Just what we need, 850nm is only around 60% effective but at least we’re getting that invisible boost to our energy and recovery time.

• Purchase a hot stone massage kit for accelerated self healing. Simply placing essential oils and oil over sore muscles and moving hot stones back and forth over them work wonders to speed up the process of recovery.

• Ideally follow exercise routines and hot stone work with some ice packs. This helps fight inflammation that we cause that will cut down on the bodies ability to heal. Better healing = better muscles.

• Don’t get caught up worrying about how much further other athletes are. It’s YOU vs YOU. And just like the story of Mt Everest, stay in motion and one day you’ll look up to realize you made it to the top.

At interventional wellness, we find the world of athletics quite fascinating, and especially look forward having our massage protocols, training and education tested to their own limits. Perhaps we can even sponsor an athlete or a team a test to our own abilities to help people achieve their highest potentials.

For athletes interested in seeing how far we can get them as a possible sponsorship, contact us.

Photo by Victor Freitas from Pexels