Becoming a Better Athlete: 5 Simple and Natural Habits You Should Adopt

Everyone should strive to adopt a healthier day-to-day routine, and lead a healthy lifestyle. But for you as an athlete (whether you’re a pro or an aficionado), adopting healthy habits is a must. You cannot hope to achieve your fitness goals, or excel at your sport if you’re not optimizing every hour of your day, and constantly looking for ways to improve your routine. From the way you work out to the foods you choose to fuel your body with, all the way to how you handle emotional stress and the way you sleep, these and many other factors can drastically affect your results.

That’s why today, we’ll be going over the most important aspects of your routine in an attempt to make each one more efficient and effective, so that you can become a better athlete and reach your goals. Here’s what you should do.

Periodize your training

Let’s start with your training cycle. It doesn’t matter if you’re a professional athlete or an amateur with concrete fitness goals, the most important thing is to optimize your workout split and training schedule for maximum effect. Unlike your friends who dare to skip a few days from working out, you cannot afford that kind of luxury, not if you want to stay ahead. But aside from mere consistency, you also have to be smart about your training.

You can’t expect to achieve your long-term goals if you’re constantly maxing out in training, and pushing past your limits. This is why you need to prioritize parts of your split. It’s important that you focus on one aspect of your training for a period of a few weeks, while keeping other aspects at maintenance. Say you’re looking to build muscle – instead of pushing every body part to its limits, you can prioritize certain muscle groups in volume and intensity, and keep other body parts at maintenance. This way, you will be able to recover and grow faster, and achieve better results without the risk of injury.

Tidy up your diet plan

Every athlete should understand the importance of healthy eating, as there is no better way to stifle your progress and set yourself up for a nasty injury if you’re not supplying your body with the right macro and micronutrients on a daily basis. The key factors you should focus on are calories, proteins, fats, carbohydrates, as well as vitamins and minerals. If you were an average gym-goer, you could just focus on getting enough protein in on a daily basis, and you would reach a certain fitness level.

However, if you’re serious about your sport, then you have to calculate your exact caloric requirements, and calculate the amount of macronutrients you need to lose weight, gain muscle, or maintain your physique. Prioritizing vitamins and minerals will further help you support healthy processes in the body, recover faster, and help your muscles contract.

Leverage natural supplementation

Supplements are just that, they can help you improve your game, but you shouldn’t focus solely on them to reach your fitness goals. Why? Because there is no supplement in the world that can contradict a crappy diet and a poorly-devised workout routine. That said, natural supplements have their place I your routine, especially if you’re an experienced athlete and have been in the game for a few years.

As an experienced athlete, your workouts should be tough and grueling at times, so you need a steady supply of energy. But instead of taking synthetic performance-boosters, you can find a reputable kratom shop and supplement with plants that have a proven energizing effect, minus the side effects. The popular exotic plant, Kratom, is excellent for this purpose, so be sure to explore natural supplements such as these before reaching for the synthetic stuff.

Focus on your post-workout routine

One of the major differences between professional and amateur athletes is that professionals really do care about stretching and mobility work. Most of us have no problem to give it our all during training, but when the time comes to stretch and loosen up, everyone’s got to run home. That’s not how you reach the next level.

Proper post-workout flexibility and mobility work should be one of your top priorities if you want to maximize your muscle-building and athletic potential, prevent and treat lower back pain, and recover from muscle soreness faster.

Just sleep more

And lastly, no matter how interesting that show on Netflix might be, you really should go to bed. Professional athletes know that sleep is crucial for a thriving fitness career, and they make sure to go to bed at the same time every night, wake up at the same time every morning, and sleep a hearty eight-hour cycle to optimize total-body recovery. If you want to reach that next level, you should follow their example.

Wrapping up

People who are jogging three times a week just to be active can get away with some less-than-healthy habits, but for a true fitness aficionado like yourself, there can be no room for mistakes. Be sure to prioritize these habits in your routine in order to become an even better athlete, and take your game to the next level.