Are you also pushing yourself too hard sometimes?

When I competed on the highest level of my career in Judo, I still was very young. I just turned nineteen, qualified for the world cup in my age group and had a lot going on in my life. Right after I finished high-school, I started working part time one day a week, studied at university, worked out 4-5 hours every day with tournaments going on, on the weekends. Besides all that my parents got divorced which is even in that age quite an emotional stress for a young person living at home. Raised to be strong and not showing weaknesses, I was going on with working towards progress. I thought that nothing can affect me and living a full schedule with lots of things going on, is just the way a successful life has to look like. There was not single thought that this feels like stress to me and could do me any bad. So, I just focused on to manage my energy levels and started experimenting with caffein capsules. During these times I even had to make sure I don’t overdo it due to anti-doping regulations.

Well, you can imagine that it did not take a long time for this kind of lifestyle without any idea on how to live a successful but also sustainable life turned out to be messing everything up. Just a couple of months into my time at university, towards the end of the year I injured myself badly. The sharp sciatic nerve pain I was left with stood with me and after 6 months of no improvement I decided to undertake surgery. I managed a comeback one and a half years later, but my career has gone by the wind. From that day on in 2010 I started to change my life around completely. I became obsessed on how to live an active life, how to perform sustainably at the peak level, but without unnecessary setbacks, injuries or early career endings. Just to enjoy what one loves to do.

Therefore, one of the most important areas in the life of an athlete besides working out and competing at the peak level, is the phase of recovery. We all know that we need to have times where we force our body to take action, to reach the top, to push the limits or to win any kind of competition. You always need to be that one step ahead of your opponent. And pushing yourself out of your comfort-zone results in stress within your system.

But the characteristics of nature and so also of humanity is to stay in homeostasis or more exactly to get back to it after pushing yourself to a higher level. Your body is always looking for balancing out and compensating previous stressors.

This all takes time. Sometimes more, sometimes less, but what we have to keep in mind is that stressing ourselves all the time won’t do us any good. It will slowly but surely deplete our energy reserves and take away our progress. In general, you can say the better you recover, the quicker you can stress yourself again in a healthy way and the more you can train.

There are several definitions of stress outside and a whole lot of misinformation or misinterpretation about it. Stress is neither good nor bad. It is just what it is – it is stress. Trying to avoid it will probably cause more stress than trying to change your reaction to occurring stress. Stress is all around us and an essential part of life. Stress to our system provides the possibility for us to outgrow ourselves.

Due to the fact that many definitions of stress focus on the mental side, which is way too short-sighted in my opinion, my personal categorisation covers four major categories of stressors.

1. Physical

2. Psychological

3. Environmental

4. Nutritional

Also, they are not to be seen exclusively rather than inclusively and accumulative and even more important the interact with each other. What does this mean now for the area of being a pro athlete, a high performer or someone who just wants to improve his wellbeing.

That means we have to find a way to manage all stressors in life and this on the one hand comes down to the amount of stress we’re putting ourselves through, but also the way we react to certain stressors.

So, you can see there is not just one area you need to focus on, rather than focusing on all areas at the same time.

If you want to know more about it, let me know in the comments below, or send me a message with “OLYMPIC” to get my free guide about the “6 reasons athletes fail under pressure and how to fix it fast!”

All the best and have a great wednesday!

Wilhelm

p.s.: I am excited to announce, that my new E-Book “6 Reasons athletes fail under pressure and how to fix it fast” is coming out soon. Drop me a mail or a comment with “OLYMPIC” if you want to receive a free copy!

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