Many of us have, at one point in our lives, held visions and dreams of someday making it big in our sport of choice. Some athletes have opportunities to do just that but many others find themselves thrown onto other paths. For those of you who want to chase these dreams, there are many things that will go into a successful journey and a long career playing the game you love.
Paramount in importance has to be taking care of your body. Far too often, promising athletes are forced to move away from their sport of choice because of career ending injuries that, in many cases, could have been prevented or managed more effectively. As an athlete, at any age, we need to make an effort to reduce the wear and tear of training and competition on your body to allow you to compete at a higher level for a longer period of time.
Reducing the wear and tear is a relatively simple concept and it makes rational sense that too much of any one thing can eventually wear you out and lead to an injury. This is what we call over use injuries and they can pop up in any part of the body where a motion or movement has been repeated too often without managing appropriate rest, nutrition, or movement variation.
How much is too much?
A difficult question to answer and it will be different for everyone. Therefore, the best methods are always preventative; take good care of your body by nailing down nutrition, rest and recovery. Then you can start adding different types of variation into your training to help reduce the repetition of a singular action over time. The old adage of 100 push ups a day for the rest of your life can really be hard on the elbows for certain people and they might benefit from switching between multiple exercises.
At a minimum these tactics applied effectively can have major positive benefits to you performance now and they can also create significant improvements in your ability to perform far into the future. In most cases their application will be difficult on your own and this is why we believe that everyone should have a quality coach to help you get on the right track and keep you there.