Bad habits in your lifestyle are cracks in the foundations of your athletic performance. Sportsmen and women, whether it’s as professional or recreational players, want to perform as best they can. While professional athletes often have a wealth of medical professionals, nutritionists and strength coaches available to them, players who do not benefit from these advantages may find their performance is not as clinical as they would like. This could be for a number of reasons.
Therefore, it’s important to understand lifestyle habits that you may have developed which can negatively impact your performance. You can be the best technical player in the world, but if you have bad lifestyle habits you’re going to suffer when it comes to match day.
Here are 3 key areas holding you back.
Poor Sleep
It is well-documented that sleep is vital. This is not just in the context of athletes, but all people. Lack of sleep can have serious health consequences in the long run. For sportsmen and women, it becomes even more important, particularly if you are competing at very high levels.
If you’re not getting enough sleep and you get on court, you can already tell you’re not going to be able to play at your best. You just feel fatigued. But there’s a lot more to why sleep is imperative for athletes to perform their best.
How Poor Sleep Can Affect Your Game
Studies have shown that sleep has a direct impact on cognitive abilities. This is the brain’s ability to understand problems, create solutions, reasoning, learning and attention span. On the court, this translates to the ability to make good shot choices, understand patterns of movement on the court and have mental fortitude.
It also affects how you train, and how well you absorb the knowledge given to you during training. During sleep, the brain organises what you’ve learned during the day. In terms of training – this might be muscle memory to play certain shots or movement patterns. Lack of sleep will produce a knock-on effect on how well you are able to reproduce what you’ve learned in training on match day.
Another area which is important for players in terms of sleep is muscle recovery. When we train hard, whether it’s off or on-court training, this is a stimulus for our body to grow stronger and adapt. However, there are two parts to this. The first is the physical act of training, and the second is the body’s biological processes which result in muscle growth. In general, when we stress our muscles, we create micro-tears, basically damaging the muscles.
During sleep, our bodies repair these tears by releasing the Human Growth Hormone. HGH promotes among other things, tissue repair. This is released in abundance during sleep, and there is also an increased blood flow to muscles, bringing nutrients, proteins and oxygen to help repair muscles. Not getting sufficient sleep may disrupt this process and can affect your performance or training quality as a result since you have not adequately recovered from the previous session.
Metabolic Effects
Lastly, sleep is important to the metabolic processes of the body. Lack of sleep can lead to a decrease in the production of glycogen and carbohydrates. If you’ve read my articles on energy systems, you’ll know how important these are to the generation of energy to perform physical activities. So less sleep may lead to reaching a fatigued state faster, poor concentration/decision making and lack of recovery. All these factors will heavily affect your game.
Poor Nutrition
Nutrition is not a diet. Generally, a diet is a short term attempt to reduce your calories. Nutrition is a long term commitment to eating quality foods. Generally, high-quality foods are not particularly calorie-dense (think vegetables and fruits).
For an athlete, nutrition is especially important. When we think of the general training of a badminton player, for example, they might train every day in a variety of different methods and with different goals but usually at high intensities. The body needs nutrients to fuel your body with the right kinds of foods to keep it functioning optimally. This is one of the bad habits that is easy to rectify.
An example is carbohydrates, which helps with producing energy. Proteins are essential for recovery and water is important to keep yourself hydrated to support all functions of the body! For active individuals, a higher nutritional intake is required given the energy expenditure in their daily routine.
Nutrition and Biology
It’s not just physical activity energy is required for, but also for other biological processes which take place inside the body. So it’s not only your physical performance that will suffer but also it will create inefficiency within your body which will cycle around and affect your performance.
I will be going into nutrition in a lot more detail in upcoming articles, so I don’t want to give away too much here. Generally, this is not groundbreaking stuff. Having a lifestyle that consists of McDonald’s and KFC 5 times a week is not good for you. Everybody knows this. Bad nutrition, leads to weight gain and a wealth of other health problems that could otherwise be avoided.
On the court, being overweight makes it difficult to move around the court as effectively. Firstly, you’re carrying extra weight so this already makes it more difficult. Secondly, being overweight puts more stress on the heart to pump blood around the body so you are likely to fatigue much more quickly. And lastly, it can lead to more injuries. Extra stress on the joints from the increased weight, particularly the knees and ankles, means they’re more likely to give way given the movement common to badminton
Smoking
If I have to explain why smoking is bad for you, I guess you never saw the lung experiments in school. It is often quoted as one of the worst bad habits you can have. There are no benefits to smoking and particularly if you’re an active person, it’s stunting your ability. Obviously, there are many dangers to smoking but since this article is about affecting your performance I will stick to this and not depress you with cancer warnings(!).
Smoking has a significant impact on your aerobic system. One effect of smoking is that it introduces carbon monoxide into the bloodstream via the red blood cells. Once the red blood cell has bonded with the carbon monoxide, oxygen can no longer be transported on the same red blood cell. This means there’s less oxygen to be used to generate energy. In the aerobic system oxygen is a vital part of the chemical process needed to create energy. As a result, the system becomes much less efficient and you are likely to fatigue much quicker.
Another chemical found in cigarettes is Nicotine. This can increase blood pressure and heart rate. Combined with narrowing the blood vessels, this all contributes to the lack of oxygen and the inefficiency of the body to produce energy. Smoking long-term can also damage the air sacs in the lungs, causing them to be less efficient in their intake of oxygen, and therefore the is less to be transported around the body compared to healthy lungs. Again this would lead to shortness of breath on the court.
Bad Habits – Conclusion
In general, all three of the above bad habits should be avoided. Yes, we are all humans and enjoy junk food and every now and then, a smoke when we go out with friends and stay up late some nights. I’m not saying you can’t do any of these things, but they should not be the norm in your life if you want to perform your best on the court! However, if you are seeking to be a professional athlete, or simply want to commit to being the best player you can be, you need to avoid all the above. As the standards increase in sports, so the margins for errors decrease. All the above factors will play a pivotal role in your on-court ability.
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