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Athletic Performance: Top Ten Tips
We admire outstanding
athletes. Most of us wish we were able to perform at the same level, and
some of us harbor fantasies that we can. Some of us seek to improve our own
athletic performance so that we perform at our personal best. If you are in
that last group, this article is for you. The
following are the top ten tips for improving your athletic performance:
- For general athletic prowess, do more than one
sport. For example, mix climbing with skateboarding and basketball. Choose
some sports that are similar, so they reinforce each other, but also
sports that complement each other by developing different areas.
- For a particular sport, practice the sport. If you
want to be an elite climber, for example, confine your sports to climbing
and only similar activities. Ballet--or any dancing--is excellent training
for climbers. So are most martial arts.
- Learn more about your chosen sport(s). Read books
about your sport, train with others who are outstanding in the sport, and
so on. Find an older person who is "retired" from the sport and consider
having that person coach you--the results may amaze you.
- Lift weights to develop muscles, bones, ligaments,
and tendons. One myth in some sports training circles is weight training
will make you slow or throw off your coordination. That may be true if you
exercise on machines. With free weights, that isn't true, provided you
engage in a full range of motion and stick to standard bodybuilding
principles and practices.
- Practice balance and coordination drills. The more
balance and coordination you have, the more you will shine as a natural
athlete. You will be faster and have more economy of motion, plus you will
have more power and less chance of injury.
- Get adequate rest. When you are 20% sleep-deprived,
you have the mental acuity of a person who is drunk. When you have enough
rest, your reflexes and agility are at their peak. But rest also entails
sufficient recovery time between training sessions. Muscle growth occurs
during the resting phase, only. You need rest between drills, as
well--when you tire and your form becomes sloppy, continuing to drill will
train your body to execute a given movement in a sloppy and inefficient
manner.
- Don't deliberately eat toxins. Eliminate refined
"foods" from your diet, and do not drink "soft drinks" (osteoporosis, fat
gain, and esophageal cancer in a can) at all.
- Stay lean. A man with double-digit fat is far too
fat. Drop the fat, and performance goes up. Every woman will need to
determine her individual body fat target--what's optimal for one may be
suboptimal for another.
- Engage in an intelligent program of nutrition.
Ignore the fads. Eat more leafy green vegetables, and you automatically
increase nutrient density while lowering caloric density. See our many
diet articles on this site.
- Engage in an intelligent program of
supplementation. At the very least, get a good meal replacement
powder (MRP). Use this for foundational nutrition three times a day (eat 3
small "whole food meals" and three small MRP shakes, and watch your
Adonis body emerge). Other worthwhile supplements include CLA, HMB, and creatine.
Watch those "athletic bars"--most of them are junk-laden calorie binge
bars. We have reviewed every bar on the market and found only
a few that are good.
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Building lean muscle mass is not easy.
It takes incredibly hard work, dedication, and the right nourishment for
your body. In short, you need a system. We provide that. We've put together
this selection of highly-effective selection of supplements to give your
body the nutrients it requires to pack on those thick muscles!
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HMB
is my favorite supplement, because it flat out works. The FDA
won't allow us to come out and say this stuff actually does what
we know it does, because it's a "supplement" and all supplement
promotions can only say something "may" do this or that. Try it
for yourself, and you'll see the FDA isn't doing you any favors in
regard to
HMB.
Do you know that, before coming to the
market for bodybuilders, HMB was used to help burn victims
recover? Yep. It's got a great track record.
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Creatine
pulls water into your muscles, adding volume to them. When the
muscles are more full, they can contract harder--this means you have
more strength for your workouts. Hefting more weight (safely) improves
the rate of muscle gain and fat loss. Additionally, the extra water
helps the cells rid themselves of waste (such as lactic acid), thus
speeding up recovery. |
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