Improve your performance in your sport without overstress

Improve your performance in your sport without overstress

Injury is often considered a part of sports and training. Some part of the body seems always to be resisting, when one problem is treated, another one appears. Of course injuries occur in sports from time to time, but when done right, training and practicing shouldn’t break our bodies!

I strongly believe that especially children should practice a variety of other sports in the long term in addition to their main one.

I used to work as a massage therapist in a physical therapy institute where I worked in collaboration with the sports teams in the area. In addition to tests done by physiotherapists, many young future athletes used physiotherapy and massage to treat the areas that were causing them problems. I used to always ask and map how the youngsters who came to have a massage were training.
I can tell you the workload was high; generally, there was training once a day, sometimes even two times a day. On the weekends there were usually matches or tournaments where you try to give everything you can.
The training I mentioned before was purely sport-specific, which nearly always involved working hard at over 70% of maximum intensity. There were no shared light training sessions, and they were left for the individual to complete on their own time.

For me, this is the biggest problem in sports; we put aside building good basic fitness (stabiliser muscles, mobility, basic fitness) by concentrating too much on the sport-specific training. It’s unfortunately very common these days to see and hear people consider only the type of training that takes the body to its limits and makes you want to throw up as real training.
This type of thinking only creates more ability to perform rather than health, so it’s not surprising when the body starts to resist, and there are back and knee pains as well as injuries.

Whether you are an athlete or take part in some sport for the joy of exercising, you can make use of the tips in this article on how to improve your performance in your sport.

The 70% rule

If you want to stay healthy and be able to practice your sport without injuries, you should pay
attention to overall stress from training. A good rule of thumb is that around 70% of training should be at 70% intensity, and the remaining 30% should be high-intensity training.

In practice, this can mean, for example, three harder training sessions a week combined with four or five lighter sessions.

As a rule, for every high-intensity training session you do, include another session of lighter training and preferably for the same length of time. This allows you to maintain the balance in overall stress caused by the training, and you won’t overstress your body.

Building the base

Even if you don’t build houses for a living, you understand that a house needs good foundations to support the burden caused by the house on top. If the base is weak, the house won’t last. In the same way, a sufficiently wide base built well guarantees the house has a lasting foundation.

I use this metaphor often with my clients when we go through the basis for basic fitness. When we talk about human fitness, the foundation is made up of basic fitness, stabiliser muscles, and mobility.

These areas must be greater than performance or sport-specific skills, otherwise, problems (for example injuries, stress) start knocking on the door. So make sure that your foundation has enough capacity compared to the demands set by your sport.

Make your training more diverse

In addition to practicing a sport, whether it’s floorball, weight lifting or dance, it’s good to remember that our bodies need a variety of movement. In sport-specific training, we complete a lot of repetitions from the same positions and many sports, for example, bat and ball and racket sports, stress one side of the body more than the other which can play a part in developing muscle imbalances in the body.

You should be brave in expanding your training by using a variety of different training on the side.

Take into account the overall stress caused by life

It’s good to remember that in addition to the physical stress caused by exercise, the stress of
everyday life from being busy at work, possible financial problems, relationships and so on cause their own stresses on our body.
If we are not able to recover from both physical and mental stress enough, the body starts to slow down at some point, and we risk overstressing it. When going through a stressful phase of life, it’s good to pay attention to the intensity of training; if you do a lot of high-intensity training when you are already stressed, you burden the body’s capacity to handle stress to its limits. Adjust the intensity of your training according to the overall stress in your life.

Focus on recovery

This topic relates closely to the overstress we talked about previously.
Athletes practice sports for a living, and in addition to sport-specific training, there is a strong
emphasis on recovery. For the rest of us, work is something else than sports and recovery, which means we have to take into account the overall stress from life in order to recover sufficiently. We touched on this when we talked about overstress: high-intensity exercise causes the body physical stress, and for example, being busy, work pressure, and relationship troubles create mental stress for our bodies.

The body doesn’t separate between physical and mental stress, it reacts to both the same way, so we must take into account the overall stress so we can recover sufficiently.

A good way to add active recovery into training is to do a good warm up and cool down where youtake advantage of for example dynamic stretches and foam rolling and make sure you activate the stabilizer muscles.
In addition to using foam rolling during training, you can get great active recovery when you do some slow foam rolling with maximum painless pressure before you go to sleep in the evening. Slow, calm stretches can also function as active recovery as well as taking a leisurely walk.
In addition to these, note that nutrition and sleep are part of passive recovery, which is an important part of overall recovery.

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