It's The Little Things

When all of your competitors are training hard already and everyone is already eating the right food, what can you do to set yourself apart and gain an advantage?

Last week, on our trip to Woodbridge, our kids got a very good idea of what elite teams look like.  On the way home, the boys van had a discussion about what easy changes they can make in their daily lives in order to have the best chance of reaching their full potential this season.  I encouraged them to agree on 3 changes they could make that were: 1. pain free and 2. effective.  Here's what the boys came up with.

1. Get a minimum of 8-9 hours of sleep per night. Surprisingly, of all the ideas we talked about in the van, this is the one that got the most resistence, however, of all the ideas we talked about, this is the one that is most likely to allow us to jump to the next level.  Your body recovers and gets stronger when you're sleeping.  If you don't sleep enough, you don't recover enough.  If you don't recover enough, you can't train hard enough to actually be the best you can be.  Students think it's tough to sleep that much, but they don't realize how much time they waste, especially on games and social media.  My son was top 10 in a graduating class of over 500 students, he was the captain of the water polo team, he was the leading scorer in the CCAL his senior year, and he won multiple CCAL swim titles.  He had a girlfriend and a rich social life and he slept at least 9 hours a night.  If Sean could time manage well enough to do that, so can our kids.
2. Take a multivitamin every morning with breakfast.  Many of our kids already eat well, but not everyone does.  Nor does every kid have control over what foods get served at home.  Our athletes felt like it was a good idea to make sure that they were going to get enough vitamins and minerals, and taking a vitamin is a pretty easy way to do it.  It is important that these multi vitamins contain iron.  One nasty little fact about our sport is that runners tend to get iron deficient more than other athletes.  Our red blood cells tend to get crushed as they pass through the blood vessels of our feet as we pound out all of the miles we do.  Making sure we have enough iron to keep our Red Blood Cell level up is very important.....and easy to do. 
3. Rope Stretch and Foam Roll after every run.  This easy step will allow our kids to begin their recovery sooner and recover better.  

There's one last thing!

This week is going to be very hot.  It's disappointing!  I'm ready for our kids to have a break and be able to increase their training.  The heat this week is going to prevent that, to some extent.  So, For groups 1, 2, and 3, I'm suggesting short morning workouts on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.  We'll talk more about this at practice, but in short, due to the heat, I'm keeping our afternoon workouts pretty limited this week.  The kids that need more mileage will need to get it in the mornings.