Recovery Nutrition: The Hidden Driver of Competitive Performance
As athletes, we often focus on how hard we can train, stacking sets, grinding through metcons, and pushing our limits every session. But what happens ...
Competing in a sport is a skill. Over years of coaching we’ve seen time and again that many athletes believe the keys to achieving success in sport are grounded in the idea that the physical training is the most important variable. In the early years of CrossFit, it was a commonly held belief that in order to excel, you needed to hurt every day and amass as much volume as possible without getting injured. As the sport has evolved, the testing bodies have changed, and more athletes have aged from rookies to veterans, there has been a shift towards taking a more mindful approach with balancing volume and intensity. But, even with changes in better training approaches, we’ll still encounter athletes who fail to translate their fitness capacity to their ability to execute under pressure.
There is tremendous value in refining your personal understanding of the art of competing. This can be categorized as mental training, which is often overlooked, but can be an incredibly beneficial performance enhancer that doesn’t require any additional physical effort in the gym. These tactics include: how to warm up effectively, how to create optimal strategies for each workout, how to plan and time nutrition intake, how to maximize recovery methods, how to prepare your mind state, and how to review your execution so that you can learn from mistakes. Whether you’re an athlete looking to improve your competition abilities or a coach looking to guide your athlete, we want you to walk away from your competition knowledgeable and aware of how to control the controllables and proud of what you accomplished.
Developing a pre-event plan will help you take out some of the guesswork that goes into competing. We know that writing something down commits it to memory. Take the time to think through the below for each event
The unknown and unknowable is a staple of this sport that makes the mystery of the event tests both exciting , but also sometimes anxiety inducing. Despite not having control over what the workouts are, one way to leverage your mental preparation is by asking questions to identify what you do have control over. The questions below are a starting point for determining your event planning and strategy for each event:
Asking and answering these questions ahead of time will create a structure to analyze, strategize, and visualize every obstacle of the workout before it begins. It will also keep the focus on yourself and your own performance – not a competitor or other variables outside of your control.
The vast majority of competitors at the highest level of any sport will often tell you that no matter the circumstances, you may never feel 100% prepared. You might have the best training block and taper of your career, and you still may doubt yourself, you still may be afraid of choking in big moments, and you still might fear that you won’t be able to endure the discomfort. Recognizing that these fears are a very normal and natural part of competing may help alleviate a negative association with feeling nervousness. Using pre-event mental tactics such as visualization, pre-event “walk throughs”, and having strategic discussions with a coach can build confidence by rehearsing the event ahead of time and planning strategies to tackle any obstacles.
Visualization is one of the secret weapons used by elite athletes in nearly all sports. Sport psychologists have been researching and implementing visualization techniques for over 60 years. The idea is simple, get yourself into a relaxed state and watch yourself perform your event. There is debate about the effectiveness of first person (watching through your own eyes) versus third person (watching yourself on TV), however there is no debate that mental rehearsal of movements and events will lead to better performance.
Taking advantage of the benefits of visualization definitely requires some practice. Most popular types of visualization require you to go through a relaxation process prior to engaging in mental rehearsal, this can help clear your mind of unwanted distractions. Once you’re physically relaxed your goal is to recreate the sensations (visual, auditory, tactile) of your competition environment as closely as possible while performing an event according to your plan. As a way to practice, start by doing a relaxed mental “walk-through” of your workout for the upcoming day. This will give you an opportunity to practice visualizing movements and combinations of movements that you haven’t experienced before and will carry over to game-time visualization.
Piggybacking off of visualization, another technique used by elite athletes to maximize performance is to do a “walk-through” of an event prior to their full-effort attempt. In some cases this may mean doing a portion of the event at lower intensities, or doing a full-version of the event with no load (or an empty barbell). Performing a pre-event walk-through can offer you a number of benefits including:
● stimulate an immediate learning effect
● find “sticking” points in a workout
● refine strategies
● practice variations of movements
● perfect new movement standards
You should work with your coach to determine if doing a pre-event walk-through the day before your first attempt makes sense for you based on your training background.
The most obvious pre-event planning hack is to discuss your plan of attack with your coach! There are so many instances where athletes could have spared themselves a workout repeat if they would communicate their plan with their coach. Getting an outside perspective can be invaluable in a sport where qualifying for the next level literally comes down to single repetitions in 400+ rep events. If you do not have a 1-on-1 coach, reviewing these same thoughts with a knowledgeable friend or your training program community like TTT Compete can help you communicate your plan.
One of the largest challenges for athletes during competition is managing the highs and lows of each event. For those who are aiming to qualify for the next stage, feelings of pressure can cause distractions, drain energy, or create a lack of enjoyment during the experience. If you find yourself battling these challenging feelings during competition, revisit what you identified in the beginning as your “big picture.” Being able to shift focus solely to your own performance and your effort versus what placement you get can create a lot of liberation. Athletes who are handicapped by the fear of losing or not achieving their goals impede their investment in focusing on what they need to do to win. Nobody can control the workouts or what athletes are doing, but you can control doing your absolute best and giving your 100% effort.
When you get nervous…
