One major aspect of training I preach from the start of training is how the small things matter. What you’re doing in your workout and outside your workout will have a profound effect on the long-term trajectory of your results. Every decision you make in regards to eating, sleeping, and stress management will ether have a positive or negative effect on your ability to recover from each workout. It’s a challenge to be on point with everything inside and outside of your workout but you don’t need to be perfect you just need to be better then you were each day, week, month and year. Progress not perfection.
That being said here’s 5 things that I have found to be quite helpful when it comes to enhancing your ability to build muscle, increase performance and reduce risk of injury in your sport.
1. Sleep 9 hours per night
You’ve probably heard that 7 hours of sleep or more is healthy and I would agree with this. A bare minimum amount of sleep you should be getting is 7 hours, but in my experience, this isn’t optimum. 8 hours of sleep is great as well but 9 hours for a high school and college athlete who is growing, building muscle and constantly changing their hormone profile is the sweet spot. Any more than that you’re still getting the benefit of recovery and better hormone regulation but I’ve found that most athletes will wake up feeling just as tired as when they went to bed and/or stiffer and tighter. This can also take away from time in which you could be eating breakfast and getting your day started so 9 hours in the sweet spot.
2. Drink your body weightX0.7= amount of ounces of water per day you should have per day
If you’re dehydrated just slightly your performance will suffer, mobility and movement quality will decrease and your overall risk of injury will increase. Take your body weight multiple it by 0.7 and that should equal your baseline level amount of water you should have per day. Outside of that, if you workout and sweat a lot or go to a practice/game replace the water you lost in addition to your baseline water intake. Two ways I recommend doing this would be 1.- weight yourself before and after workouts and replace the weight you lost with water. Or for every hour of strenuous activity drink at least 16 ounces of water.
3. Eat 0.8-1X your body weight in grams of protein per day, plus drink BCAA’s during your workouts
High school and college athletes notoriously under eating protein. This is why I recommend first tracking you overall protein intake for a couple day to see how much your eating. Then make a conscience effort to eat your body weight X 0.8-1X your body weight in grams of protein per day. Trying to get closer to 1x your body weight in protein for the most optimal muscle building environment. Chances are you still will be selling yourself short so I also recommend drinking a BCAA drink before, during and after workouts and having a whey protein shake once per day as an insurance policy to make sure you’re hitting your protein intake.
4. Once every 2 months decrease your total work volume by 50% for a week. Decrease workout volume and decrease volume of sports
I see it all too often, an athlete has a nagging injury but is playing through the pain. They won’t take any time off, and eventually they get forced to take time off because they ignored the signs that were telling them that their check engine light was on. This is called a deload week when it comes to training but I extended it even further to even taking a break from your sport for a week as well. This can be hard to plan out but making it so once every 2 months you intentionally decrease your overall work volume by 50% in the weight room and in your sport, you will stay ahead of any overuse injuries. You’ll give your central nervous system time to recover and most of the time you’re come back after that week feeling fast and stronger.
5. Track you weights in the gym
You’ll never know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been. Tracking your weights each week is a big aspect of training in our gym, we encourage everyone to write down all the weights they were doing so the following week they know where to start and have an idea of where they want to finish. Still we will get many athletes coming up to us on week 2,3 and 4 of their programs asking what weight they should do with no notes from the previous week. Tracking all the weights you use on every exercise is an easy way to insure you’re progressively overloading over the course of your program and ensuring that you’re getting stronger from week to week, month to month and year to year basis. We track all our athletes programs, being able to look back a year later and seeing the massive increasing in strength, speed and power is a valuable tool to measure your success in the gym and check that the training program is giving us the results that we desire.
Hope this helps!
Feel free to reach out with any questions!
Rick Kompf
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