The saying "that's why you play the game" resonates. All of us want to see the underdog win, or the favorite succeed despite the pressure to perform, or some unknown surprise the field. Human potential, put on display, to actualize that potential is riveting.
World championships are one such event. It is basically an Olympics. Medals. Rounds. Days of competition. After every major event, I always try to sit back and think about what happened after a little bit of time has gone by and the emotion has left the room. Coach Dan Pfaff calls this a debriefing. He would do it with athletes. I do it for myself. What went well, what went poorly. Everything from operations, like meal timing, travel, sleep, to the actual event.
The thing I kept coming back to this time was the management of stress. Perhaps that is all there is. Again, these are just my thoughts.
The Great Ones are stress managers. Imagine every human has an energy score. Let's make up a number and call it 100. Let's make up some other arbitrary numbers as well for this example. Zero is death. We can almost never obtain 100 it's mythical, kind of like Madden football. 99 is coveted and only a few people ever will get it. The 99 doesn't always happen every year either, keep that in mind. 40 is sickness, like the cold. You hit 40 and you get a cold. 50 is some nagging injury.
If we want to make it a little more complicated lets robustness of the athlete has a genetic component and some will have 100, but some will have 90. Again, these are made up.
Training is 30 points. Every day, if you were to train the maximum amount of your ability it takes 30 points.
How do you recover points after training. Sleep, nutrition, mental health, social bonds, ect. all the things most people have heard of. Have you ever thought of it from a performance perspective? Does my off training periods align with my truest recovery. I'm bringing a 26 instead of a 30 to my training every day. Every day. Over the course of a year, that little bit less adds up to that coveted few pounds on the bar, few tenth or seconds off the clock, a few more percentage points at the plate.
The scary thing is that athlete, that coach, they all think he or she is at their optimum. Unrealized potential.
The other side of the coin is that they recover enough to bring the heat when they need to bring the heat in the workout but the ability of the body to adapt to stress (training) is always a function of how healthy the body is. Recovery is impairing the work they are doing. Their recovery score is 27 instead of 30 consistently. Again, they recover enough to train at maximum, they are improving. But not at the rate they could be. Unrealized potential.
At the most elite level, it's not just showing up and training hard with talent. It's everything. The 21 hours per day are just as important as the 3 hours of training. Perhaps even more important. The more lifestyle stress you accumulate the less stress you can put into your training. The more lifestyle stress you accumulate the less stress the body can adapt to.
The better you are at the total picture, anxiety becomes nerves. Nerves are good. Nervousness is free energy, the butterflies, it's a symbol that you care about what is about to happen. Anxiety is the man in the mirror test. It's showing up with perhaps a subconscious pattern of knowing you didn't do all that could have been done, or perhaps you are coming with less than ideal circumstances, sickness and injury come to mind.
The great ones are not great by accident. They are great managers of stress. Look at your lifestyle when things don't go your way or when they do and a record is broken or an achievement is made. It works both ways. Where was my head and life the months leading up to a break through moment. Obsess over the other 23 hours of the day.
