Top In-Season Recovery Tips
Athletes will spend all offseason working on getting bigger, faster and stronger in hopes of having their best season ever. Once season comes, often times athletes will stop training and will focus purely on playing their desired sport. While I am a BIG proponent of in-season training, schedules can often get crazy and time can be limited. Even if schedules get tight, we still want to make sure that we are finding every opportunity to get better that we can!
At higher levels, the things that separate the good athletes from the great ones are the little things. Most athletes will show up for their game, play, head home and that is it. In reality, we need to be taking care of ourselves during the season! During season is when the injuries occur, many of which are preventable. Below are our Top 5 tips for staying on top of your In-Season Recovery!
SOFT TISSUE WORK
While this is a super simple thing to do, hardly any athletes focus on maintaining good tissue quality during season. This means foam rolling, trigger point, massages etc. Take the time to get on a good foam rolling program and feel the changes in your body! As you play your sport, you are contracting, using and beating up those muscles. After a game is the time to take care of them and help them heal. If you want your body to perform for you, you must take care of it!
MOBILITY
Stretch, stretch, stretch! Another small action with a BIG reaction. Your best athletes in the world take their mobility seriously. If I can generalize, most athletes don't take the time at all to put any mobility work in outside of whatever their team makes them do (which is usually a half hearted effort with no direction or purpose). Stretching is one of the simplest ways that you can help your body recover. Instead of finishing your game, hopping the car and heading home to play Fortnite all evening... take the time to stretch post game. While it might not be the "cool" thing to do, you will be happy you did when you are still healthy at the end of the season.
OPTIMAL HYDRATION
Often times overlooked is optimal hydration. We like to tell our athletes that they need to be getting half of their bodyweight in fluid ounces of water, EVERY DAY! This is just the start! If you are playing a sport, you need to be drinking way more than this. I would guess that most of us aren't even getting to our base level of hydration a day. Our bodies are mostly water, so we need to hydrate and continually flush it with good hydration!
POST GAME NUTRITION
Hot dog and a soda!? Nope! I know that is the Little League special, but it isn't the best when it comes to fueling up post game. Lots of high schools will have "Carb Load" nights before a game. We often think a lot about the pre-game meal, but not as much about post game. Your recovery starts as soon as the game is done. Be sure to be refueling with good quality proteins and carbs to help restore glycogen and repair muscle tissue. Like I said, hot dog and soda won't do the trick! Good fuel in, good performance out!
SLEEP
This is everybody's favorite that nobody does! Everyone wants to stay up and watch the latest Netflix documentary, or shall I dare say again Fortnite binges. As an athlete you must sleep! That is when your body repairs itself and heals. Not to mention all of the hormone processes that occur while you sleep! You must must must get your sleep. The old 8 hour adage is still pretty good!
There you have it! Our top 5 tips on In-Season Recovery that you can implement right away! This is by no means a comprehensive list! If you want to watch the Facebook Live where we went more in depth with these topics you can click below! Be sure to share with any athlete you know that is needing to amp up their In-Season Recovery!
Watch The Facebook Live Here ----> Watch Here
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