Day to day lifestyle stress has a major influence on athletic performance and overall well-being. An elite athlete might train for 3 – 4 hours a day or even more, but what they do in the remaining 20-21 hours can have a huge impact on their performance. A balanced healthy lifestyle is crucial for success. Coaches are only with an athlete for a small portion of their day or week and are often unaware of the lifestyle stressors that are affecting their athletes. Stress and anxiety levels have skyrocketed amidst a changing world for both athletes and coaches. Ensuring athletes are fit and healthy from both a physical and mental perspective is essential to allow performances to flourish.
Know your athletes
At a training session, coaches are focused, and rightly so on the specifics and objectives of that training. On match day, all focus is on performance on the field. Parallel to this it is important to ensure that your athletes are fit and healthy – both physically and mentally – and motivated to perform at their best. Trying to keep a close eye on the growing amount of detail required by today’s coach can be difficult and takes time and energy away from preparation and training. Where is the time to ‘know your athletes’ and understand the lifestyle stressors they are faced with on a day to day basis? With shorter seasons and uncertainty, due to the current pandemic, many teams may think that it is not worthwhile investing in an athlete monitoring tool; but monitoring, when done correctly, doesn’t take up more of your time, it actually saves you time and helps you focus in on issues and take actions that ultimately can make a difference to performance and more importantly the overall well-being of your athletes.
Lifestyle Profiling
Like anything you want to monitor, it is important initially to know what your baselines are. What are your team’s weaknesses and strengths? How can you educate your athletes and encourage good lifestyle habits that help improve the performance of every athlete on your team? Educating and empowering athletes to make informed decisions to improve their lifestyle can pay huge dividends on the playing field. Metrifit’s new lifestyle profiling provides invaluable insight into the well-being of your team with clear visuals that help you make informed decisions to prepare your athletes for optimal performance. Developed with our Chief Research Advisor, Dr. Catherine Blake, Deputy Head of UCD School of Public Health, Physiotherapy and Sport Science, our detailed lifestyle profiling survey makes use of a number of validated questionnaires as well as some bespoke questions on nutrition habits, training knowledge and health and well-being.
How it works for the athlete
The athlete completes their lifestyle profiling questionnaire and is provided with a dynamic multi-page report. This report includes easy to read visuals with scoring information as well as feedback on the different areas. Educational infographics and suggestions are included to help show how improvement can be made. We value the privacy of the athlete and individualized reports are private to each athlete. An athlete has the option to give permission to their coach(es) to view. Each month the report will be dynamic and provide new information based on latest research and recommendations for the key areas. The aim is to educate athletes to help them understand how lifestyle habits affect their performance and how to improve in areas that they are struggling with.
How it works for coaches and staff
Once your athletes have completed their monthly profiling survey, these can be collated and a detailed team overview for coaches can be generated. This includes collated information across the whole team, whilst protecting the individual athlete’s information. As a result, coaches are:-
- more aware of how various lifestyle factors are affecting their athletes
- able to education and communicate to promote change in key areas
- creating an environment for improvement which ultimately leads to optimal performance
The summary page will show how different lifestyle stressors are affecting athletes using an easy to read traffic light system to clearly highlight any issues.
Analysis of key questions in different areas such as sleep, stress and nutrition allows the coach to drill down into specific lifestyle stressors that are affecting his/her athletes.
Our infographics are used to highlight key information and tips for each area to promote learning and education.
Conclusion
Multiple lifestyle factors can have a significant effect on athletic performance. Evaluating these is important to help each athlete reach their potential. An athlete who is not sleeping and is suffering from chronic stress is more likely to burnout and dropout than perform their best on the sports field. Early intervention identifying issues and educating athletes on how lifestyle stressors can affect their performance can reap immeasurable rewards. Metrifit’s profiling is scientifically supported and offers a practical way to assess and improve lifestyle strategy for your team.
Original Content: https://metrifit.com/blog/lifestyle-and-athletic-performance/
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