Athletes are naturally competitive and that’s one of the reasons we are so attracted to CrossFit. So it’s natural that many of us end up competing not just in our chosen sport, but also in CrossFit. The chance to measure ourselves against thousands of others is too tempting to resist.

“You have to decide what your priority is for the season. Do you want the best result in CrossFit that you are capable of? Or the best result in your sport?”

But when it comes to juggling sport and Crossfit at the same time, you can’t expect to win at both. This is the third year I’ve done the Open whilst in the midst of the Australian beach volleyball tournament season. And I can tell you, it’s not easy competing in two things at once.

Here are a few things I’ve learnt along the way that will help if you are doing more than just CrossFit this season.

Decide on Your Priority

With the upper levels of CrossFit improving each year, being at the top is now a full-time endeavor. And it is the same in any other sport. Talent is no longer enough to be the best at any athletic pursuit. Hours and hours of training are required.

You have to decide what your priority is for the season. Do you want the best result in CrossFit that you are capable of? Or the best result in your sport? Trying for both is a sure way to fail at both. Unless you are permanently transitioning into CrossFit, most athletes should focus on their sport.

Set Big Goals, But Have Realistic Expectations

After you decide your priorities for the season, set some realistic expectations. I find the best way to do this is to pick a challenging, but achievable target before you do each WOD. If you reach your target, then you have to be happy with yourself.

“Talent is no longer enough to be the best at any athletic pursuit. Hours and hours of training are required.”

You can also set yourself a stretch goal – a number of reps or a weight that seems almost impossible, but may be achievable if everything goes right. Your target is your expectation. You should be disappointed if you don’t hit it. But your stretch goal has to be exempt from expectation.

Forget Stalking the Leaderboard

That competitive streak that athletes have means you constantly want to see how you compare to others. I’ve caught myself thinking, “If I wasn’t so focused on my sport, imagine what place I’d be sitting in on the leaderboard.” But if CrossFit isn’t your main sport, this is your chance to enjoy a bit of competition, without the stress on results that comes with your priority sport. Focus on your performance, not your placing.

Cut Out Extra Training

If you are doing another sport, then chances are you’ll only have space for a limited number of CrossFit sessions each week. Use that time to focus solely on what is likely to appear in the WODs. The variety of CrossFit is now your enemy, but over the past four years of the Open, only fourteen different movements have actually been used. So, you should be doing thousands of reps of these and not too much else.

Focus on What You Will Lose First

Studies have shown that you lose strength and power less quickly than you lose aerobic conditioning and muscular endurance. I once stopped CrossFitting for six months and just played beach volleyball every day. At the end of the six months, my max lifts remained almost unchanged, but my performance in metabolic conditioning WODs was dramatically worse. If, because of your other sport, you don’t have the time or energy to do full CrossFit sessions, then skip the lifting, but not the metcons.

Rest Is More Important Than Another Session

It’s tempting to squeeze in “just one more” training session to help you prepare for the next WOD. But being rested and fresh will probably help your performance more. Make sure you also look after your body. Spend plenty of time stretching, getting massages, and eating right to ensure you are at your physical peak.

Be Mentally Tougher Than Everyone Else

You’re an athlete. You know the pain of losing by the smallest of margins. You know how to maintain composure under pressure. You know how to push through physical exhaustion for a bigger goal.

“You may not have trained CrossFit as much as others, you may not be as technically perfect in all the movements, but you can be the mentally toughest.”

Bring the mental game you’ve developed in your sport. You may not have trained CrossFit as much as others, you may not be as technically perfect in all the movements, but you can be the mentally toughest. In CrossFit, that counts for a lot.

The Best You Can Be

It’s certainly not easy being both an athlete and a CrossFitter. It is tough to juggle training and competition commitments – and manage your performance expectations. Whilst the tips above will help you get the best performance you can, in the end, it’s the work you’ve done all year that will be reflected on the leaderboard.

More Like This:

• What the CrossFit Games 2015 Changes Mean for You
• 3 Lessons We Can All Learn From the CrossFit Games
• 5 Athletes to Watch in CrossFit and the NPFL
• What’s New on Breaking Muscle Today

Photo 1 courtesy of Shutterstock.

Photos 2 and 3 courtesy of Jorge Huerta Photography

The post How to Simultaneously Succeed in Competitive Sport and CrossFit appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

The Soviet Union started using visualisation in sports from the 1970s, and now it is in the toolkit of most elite athletes. From scoring the goal, to flipping the somersault, to winning the race, visualisation helps you succeed.

I used visualisation daily as an elite trampolinist. I performed a few minutes of visualisation before practice to imagine what I wanted to get out of the session, a few seconds of imagery before each time I got on the trampoline to perform a skill, and each night I’d visualise my routines in their entirety. This practice helped set me apart from other athletes and I’ve carried it with me into my new sports – beach volleyball and CrossFit.

In a study by Dr. Biasiotto, athletes were tested to see how many basketball free throws they could make.¹ He then split the athletes into three groups for thirty days:

• The first group practiced free throws for an hour every day.
• The second group visualised making baskets.
• The third group did nothing.

Unsurprisingly the third group didn’t improve. The first group improved by 24 percent. And incredibly, the visualisation group improved by 23 percent, without even touching a basketball for thirty days.

So why does visualisation work, and how can you get better at it?

How Visualisation Works: 1. It Builds Confidence

First, visualisation builds confidence in your ability to perform when it counts. Doubt makes you tense and drains your energy. Confidence keeps you relaxed and helps you achieve flow.

When you’ve seen yourself perform a difficult skill hundreds of times in your mind, it doesn’t seem so daunting when you attempt it in real life. When you’ve imagined winning the race over and over again, it only seems natural to find a burst of speed in the critical moment to take the win.

I might visualise the grains of sand stuck to the ball as I toss it up to serve.

How Visualisation Works: 2. It Builds Neural Pathways

Second, visualisation works because of the plasticity of your brain. Your brain is made up of millions of connected neurons. When you perform an action for the first time, a new pathway of neurons lights up in your mind. You can think of this new pathway as a footprint in the sand. It’s pretty indistinct and can easily be brushed aside.

Once you take that action a few more times, your neural pathway becomes a proper path. Perform the action a few hundred more times and you have a paved walkway with railings. Do it a million times and you have a Grand Canyon sized neural pathway in your mind. You don’t even have to think anymore – there is only one path to take. Changing the course of that action would take the mental equivalent of hiking ten miles uphill to get out of the Grand Canyon.

Visualisation works because it lights up the same neural pathway in your brain as actually performing the action. This means you can “perform” a winning action over and over again in your brain and form deep neural pathways for successful outcomes.

How Visualisation Works: 3. It Builds on Your Training

However, visualising an action or outcome is not quite the same as actually performing it. Your mind gets distracted, your imagery is imperfect, and there isn’t the same intensity attached to the experience. Some theories suggest your muscles contain memories of movements. These memories aren’t being created when you sit and visualise using only your mind.²

A study by Guang Yue compared participants who performed physical exercises with those who visualised the workouts. Those who went to the gym gained 53 percent in muscle strength, whilst those who only visualised gained 35 percent.³ Visualisation adds to your training, but it can’t replace it.

This is where supercharging your visualisations comes in.

Supercharge Your Visualisations

The more realistic and intense your visualisation practice is, the more effective it will be. You want to use all your senses. Picture both yourself and the environment, imagine plenty of detail, and use an abundance of emotion.

Below are a number of ways to increase the effectiveness of your visualisation practice and bring it closer to completely mimicking the real-life action. This is an extensive, but by no means an exhaustive list. Please feel free to comment with additional ideas you have for supercharging your visualisations.

Supercharge Your Visualisations: 1. Sight

Colour: An image in bright, vivid colours is easier to remember than one in dull greys. It is the same with visualisation. Colour is much more powerful than black and white.

Video: The brain is hardwired to focus on movement. This harks back to our hunter-gatherer days, when seeing animal movement meant food or possible death. So when visualising, don’t use still frame images in your mind. Make it a movie.

Perspective: Each individual tends to gravitate towards either an internal or an external visualisation perspective.

• An external perspective means you watch yourself as a spectator would see you.
• An internal perspective means you are yourself during your visualization. You see out of your own eyes and feel your own body.

To get the most out of your visualisation, you should be able to switch between the two. For instance, a soccer player might use an external perspective to see himself on the entire field of play and improve his ability to make strategic plays, and then use an internal perspective when he visualises his foot connecting with the ball to score a goal.

Zoom: Play around with close ups and long-distance images. As a beach volleyball player, I might see the individual grains of sand stuck to the ball as I toss it up to serve. I might then zoom out to see my opponents’ movements. I could zoom out even further to see the entire stadium of people cheering. Don’t limit yourself to one range.

Supercharge Your Visualisations: 2. Sound

Volume: Hear the screams of the crowd, the crunch of flesh as you tackle an opponent, the soft swish of air after you hit the golf ball down the fairway, or the slap of hands as you high five a teammate. Make these sounds loud or soft as you go through your visualisation. The changes in imagined volume make your brain pay attention.

“Playing music while visualising or imagining music within your visualisation can act as a trigger for moods and performance.”

Pitch and tone: Accents, cadences, and tones add life to a visualisation. Imagine the hoarseness in your coach’s voice as he yells across the field, the foreign accent of an announcer when you compete overseas, the hasty instructions to a teammate in the heat of the moment, or the whisper of your own voice as you talk to yourself before you leap off the diving tower.

Rhythm: There is emerging research on how attention, focus, memory, and brain power can be enhanced by rhythmicity.⁴ Finding rhythm in your movements, thought patterns, and the structure of your sport can enhance the effectiveness of your visualisation.

Music: Playing music while visualising or imagining music within your visualisation can act as a trigger for moods and performance. For example, imagine the victory of your football team and the emotions that come while listening to your club song. When you hear that song at the start of the game, it will trigger the same emotions and confidence you developed using visualisation.

Supercharge Your Visualisations: 3. Touch

Kinesthetic sense: This is the feel of your own body during movement. Think of a gymnast standing before the apparatus before a routine. You will often see them practicing the movements of their routine on the ground. They put their arms up, tighten their abs, spin around to mimic the feel of twists, and bounce on their toes to get the feel of jumps. They are engaging their kinesthetic sense as they visualise. You don’t have to actually stand up and do the movements, although it can help, but you should bring what your body feels like into your visualisations.

External sensations: Imagine contact with external objects and people. Visualise the coolness of the trophy, a tackle by a competitor, a hug from your coach, the feel of the ball in your hands, the grass as you slide along it, or the water as you dive into it.

Bringing how your body feels into visualisations is a powerful process.

Supercharge Your Visualisations: 4. Taste

This can be the most overlooked sense, but it is a powerful one. The sense of taste connects more directly to the memory system than the more obvious senses of sight and sound. Bring this into your visualisations by including the dry taste in your mouth from the heat of the day, the sweetness of sports drinks, or my personal favourite, the mint of toothpaste. I always brush my teeth right before I compete, and the taste helps me trigger the right mental state for competition.

Supercharge Your Visualisations: 5. Smell

Similar to taste, your sense of smell connects directly with the memory centers in your brain. Taste and smell are connected as well. The sensation of flavor is actually a combination of both senses. Bring smell into your visualisations by imagining scents such as the freshly cut grass, the chlorine of a pool, the saltiness of the ocean, the scent of the locker room, or the petrol of your car.

If you want to take it one step further, you can use a particular smell when doing your visualisation, and then bring out that scent again before competition. This acts as a trigger for mood and mental readiness.

Supercharge Your Visualisations: 5. Speed

Add novelty and interest to your visualisations by playing with speed. Speed makes your brain pay attention. Think of the super slow-motion shots they show during the Australian Tennis Open. Can you imagine your own movements in that much detail? How about speeding up your visualisation so you can see a whole string of victories over an entire season? You can even treat your visualisations like a DVD – fast forward, rewind, pause, slo-mo, and play. Have some fun with them.

Supercharge Your Visualisations: 6. Emotion

This is the most powerful visualisation tool. Remember, visualising something once is like making a set of footsteps in the sand. Instead of visualising something thousands times to make your neural pathway into a road, you can add powerful emotions to your visualisation and shortcut the process.

The memories that stick in our brains are linked to strong emotions. Likewise, the most effective visualisations are those that incorporate feelings. Add the pride you feel when your coach says he or she is proud of you, the jubilation of the team as you kick a goal in the championship match, the relief at bringing home the gold medal, or the intense satisfaction of executing a skill perfectly.

Emotions will ultra-supercharge your visualisations and take your performance to a level you never imagined – or perhaps you did.

More Like This:

• Strengthen Your Mental Muscles: Think Like a Champion
• The 5 Key Mindset Qualities of Successful Athletes
• Are Pre-Performance Rituals Helpful or Harmful?
• What’s New on Breaking Muscle Today

References:

1. Haefner, J Mental Rehearsal and Visualization: The Secret to Imporving Your Game Without Touching a Basketball! Breakthrough Basketball.

2. Muscle memory (strength training) Wikipedia.

3. Levan, AJ Seeing is Believing: The Power of Visualization. Psychology Today.

4. Gazzaley, A and Hart, M Rhythm and the Brain Project. Gazzaley Lab.

Photo 1 courtesy of Mark Rigney.
Photo 2 courtesy of Luigi Fardella/Shutterstock.

The post See It, Do It, Win It: Charge Up Your Visualisations appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Rafael Nadal is probably just as famous for his long list of rituals and habits as he is for his tennis playing. These include:

Have you ever watched a football player pull out a tuft of grass before they kick for a goal? Or gymnast close her eyes and visualise her routine for a few seconds before presenting to the judges? Or do you have a mate who wears the same pair of socks for a week-long tournament without washing them, despite the protests of his team mates?

Rafael Nadal is probably just as famous for his long list of rituals and habits as he is for his tennis playing. These include:

• Always taking a cold shower 45 minutes before a match
• Wearing both socks at exactly the same height
• Sipping from recovery drink, then water bottle. And then placing both bottles to the left of his chair on the ground, diagonally facing the court.
• Using the towel after every single point. Left side of his face first, then right, then left arm, then right.
• Bouncing the ball at least ten times before serving
• Never walking on the sidelines, and being sure to step over lines with his right foot first
• Adjusting the left, then the right, shoulder of his shirt. Wiping his nose. Putting his hair behind his ears. And then…
• Picking his wedgie.

Everyone has these rituals and quirks. But does making sure you only wear a particular piece of underwear on competition day actually serve a purpose, or does it just mean you’re somewhat neurotic? Sports psychologists have discovered plenty of evidence that personal rituals can help your performance.

Rituals can be used to align your physical and mental state.

Rituals Can Quiet the Mind

Pre-performance rituals can help quiet the mind and enhance your focus. When you go through a series of familiar actions that don’t require thought, it can help reduce the internal “chatter” many athletes experience before or during games.

Nadal puts it like this: “Some call it superstition, but it’s not. If it were superstition, why would I keep doing the same thing over and over whether I win or lose? It’s a way of placing myself in a match, ordering my surroundings to match the order I seek in my head.”

Rituals Can Trigger Positive Emotional States

Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) teaches that actions can become triggers for certain emotions and mental states. For instance, someone patting you on the head makes you feel small because when you were a child you got touched on the head. Conversely, being pat on the back makes you feel camaraderie because that’s how team-mates and friends show affection.

Similarly, performing the same action over and over again when in a heightened emotional state can link that action to the mental state. If you pump your fist in the air every time you score a goal, then pumping your fist at another time can bring on the same feelings as scoring the goal did. This can be useful when you want to recreate a particular emotional state.

Rituals Can Aid Performance

Rituals can help athletes believe they will be successful. In fact this is how most pre-game habits start out. The athlete remembers when they were wearing a particular outfit and ate gummy bears before their previous game, they won. Even though we may know these are not the true reasons for winning a game, the thought pattern goes that “it can’t hurt” to do the same next match. And so a ritual is born.

Studies have shown that athletes who believe a ritual will help them be successful actually perform better. A 1986 study found that basketballers who believed that tugging on their ear before a free throw was lucky, performed better after completing the ritual.¹ But for players who didn’t believe the ear tug was lucky, there was no effect on performance. The key here is the belief that it will help – not the ritual itself.

When Rituals Become Harmful

So it seems that rituals are beneficial in a few ways:

• They help quiet the mind before performances
• They help athletes achieve a particular emotional state by acting as triggers.
• The belief that rituals help can actually lead to better performances.

So beyond having to put up with your team mate’s smelly unchanged socks, it doesn’t seem like rituals could possibly hurt, right? Not quite. Sometimes these harmless rituals can tip over from normal to neurotic. When your rituals become crutches – that is, your performance begins to depend on them – they become unhealthy.

Think of a gymnast who can only perform a certain trick when her coach is watching. This dependency definitely limits her ability to train and compete. Or a football player who can only kick goals when he has enough time to go through a mental routine, which means he can’t kick goals during running plays. Or a swimmer who listens to a certain song before racing, and then their iPod malfunctions before an important meet.

Case in point: A study by psychologists at University of Cologne in Germany asked participants to bring a lucky charm with them and then to sink golf putts.² Half the participants got to keep their charms, and half had them removed. Those who had them removed performed significantly worse. The belief in the efficacy of the lucky charms directly impacted the participants’ ability to sink the golf ball in the hole.

Tiger Woods always wears a red shirt in the final round of a tournament.

Believing that a ritual will help performance can actually improve performance. But as the study shows, if the athlete is unable to complete a ritual, and they believe that not completing it will harm their performance, then their performance will suffer. The belief that the ritual is essential to perform well can be the downfall.

A Fine Line

There is a fine line to walk between using harmless rituals to help you perform and becoming dependent on actions, things, or routines that don’t relate to performance.

Perhaps the best approach to take is the one espoused by Australian Olympic gold medalist diver Matthew Mitcham:

I’m superstitious about having any superstitions. I do my best to quash any that start creeping up on me.

References:

1. Schippers.M, et al“The Psychological Benefits of Superstitious Rituals in Top Sport: A Study Among Top Sportspersons.” CiteSeerX

2. Begley, S. “Olympics-Mind games of the victorious.” Reuters

You’ll also enjoy:

• Habits vs. Supertstitions (Does it Really Matter if You Wear Different Socks?)
• Why Does Your Pre-Workout Ritual Make a Difference?
• How to Perfect Your Pre-Race Ritual Before Race Day
• New on Breaking Muscle AU Today

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.

The post Are Pre-Performance Rituals Helpful or Harmful? appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

With all the dignity a teenager can muster, I would inform them it was actually an Olympic sport, and that I’d like to see them try a double-twisting, double-somersault while nine meters in the air.

Trampolining Trend

For a long time trampolining was the purview of a select group of elite athletes, as well as a few kids whose parents didn’t mind the risk of broken bones from a backyard trampoline. But there has been a resurgence of trampolining -sometimes called rebounding – across my country of Australia, and elsewhere around the globe. Here, we have numerous centers like Bounce and Flip Out, rebounding exercise programs, bungee trampolines as rides at festivals, and many safety innovations in the humble backyard trampoline. Trampolining is now accessible to everyone.

“NASA’s research found that ten minutes on a trampoline was a better workout than thirty minutes of running.”

With that accessability has gradually come a change in the way we view the activity. It is no longer the domain of only children or elite athletes. It is now a legitimate form of exercise in its own right. Below are some of the reasons you should add a little bit of bouncing to your exercise routine.

It’s Just Great Exercise

Trampolining is both an effective and efficient way to work out. In fact, NASA recommends rebounding for all its astronauts. Their research found that ten minutes on a trampoline was a better workout than thirty minutes of running.

It’s Low Impact

A commonly held misconception about the trampoline is that because you are jumping high there is a lot of impact on the body. But in actuality, the bed of the trampoline absorbs approximately 80% of the rebound shock – sparing your joints from the impact. This makes rebounding the perfect form of exercise for growing kids, rehabbing athletes, your grandmother, and those of us with joints that complain from time to time.

It Makes You Strong and Stable

Not only will you build incredible jumping muscles (think quads, calves, and glutes), but you also have to engage your core constantly to stay balanced. Forget those plank exercises, trampolining will give you great stabilizing muscles throughout your core.

It Works Your Pelvic Floor Muscles

I know many women who say they will never get on a trampoline after having kids because they experience issues with leaking. But the trampoline is actually an excellent tool for fixing this problem. Every time you land on the trampoline, your pelvic floor has to contract to keep everything in place. While it could be embarrassing to jump straight back onto the trampoline with your kids, starting with some gentle rebounding (your feet don’t even have to leave the surface at first) can be a great way for moms to build those muscles back up.

It Creates Strong Bones

Increasing bone density works the same way as building muscles – you stress the bone, which then encourages your body to reinforce and strengthen your bones so they can deal with greater stress the next time. There are two ways to positively stress your bones in order to increase bone density: resistance training or impact training. Trampolining falls into the impact category. But unlike other impact activities like running or skipping, it doesn’t stress your joints. Add trampolining to your resistance program to build strong bones, protect against osteoporosis, and reduce the risk of fractures.

“Admit it – your inner child secretly wants to get in that jumping castle at the party, launch into the foam pit at the gymastics center, or try out a flip on your neighbor’s backyard trampoline.“

It Builds Coordination and Spatial Awareness

Jumping requires your whole body to move together in a coordinated way. We’ve probably all had a little laugh at kids who don’t understand how to coordinate their body properly – they lift their knees really high, pump their arms up and down, and move about two centimenters off the trampoline. Conversely, you’ll notice that kids with a background in gymnastics, diving, dance, or trampolining typically pick up new sports quicker than other children. This is because trampolining, especially when you add some tricks and somersaults, forces your brian to develop a new understanding of your body – an understanding of where each of your body parts is in space and of how to move each of those parts in a coherent, linked way. Qualities we commonly refer to as spatial awareness and coordination.

It Improves Your Immune System

Your lymphatic system is responsible for clearing toxins out of your body, producing white blood cells, and protecting your body from disease. Unlike the cardiovascular system, which has the heart to pump blood around the body, your lymphatic system requires movement and gravity in order to stimulate the flow of lymph fluid through numerous one-way valves. Rebounding is one of the most efficient ways to do this. Bouncing causes all those one-way valves to open and close increasing the flow of this system by as much as fifteen times.

It Makes You Smarter

A chiropractor first told me this and I have to admit to disbelief until I went and researched it. There are numerous studies that demonstrate exercise in general improves mental performance in areas such as focus, memory, and mood. Trampolining adds to this in several ways:

1. The action of bouncing aids the development of young children’s neural pathways.
2. The additional element of the spatial awareness required means more areas of your brain needs to be active compared to other forms of exercise. This means more neurons are firing in your brain on a regular basis (more neurons = smarter).
3. The effort required to keep your eyes focused while your body is in motion is linked to the ability to keep the eyes moving while the body is still. Essentially,the ability to track words when reading.

“Forget those plank exercises, trampolining will give you great stabilizing muscles throughout your core.”

It’s Fun

Admit it – your inner child secretly wants to get in that jumping castle at the party, launch into the foam pit at the gymastics center, or try out a flip on your neighbor’s backyard trampoline. Having fun and laughing are even good for you – reducing stress, improving blood pressure, and releasing endorphins.

Why Not Give It a Try?

So change up your exercise program with some trampolining. You can easily buy a rebounder trampoline, head to your nearest trampoline center (they’re popping up all over the world), buy a trampoline for your backyard, or even enroll in some lessons at a trampoline or gymnastics club.

But it’s time to get jumping – it’s not just for kids!

Read more on jumping for fun:

• Love at First Bounce: The Benefits of Rebounding
• How to Do Precision Jumps for Distance and Accuracy
• Friday Flicks: Damien Walters
• What’s New On Breaking Muscle Today

References:

1. A. Bhattacharya , E. P. McCutcheon , E. Shvartz , J. E. Greenleaf, “Body acceleration distribution and O2 uptake in humans during running and jumping,” Journal of Applied Physiology Nov 1980, 49: (5) 881-887, http://jap.physiology.org/content/49/5/881.

Photos courtesy of Shutterstock.

The post Bouncing: It’s Not Just for Kids appeared first on Breaking Muscle.