What is performance coaching?
Performance coaching deals with everything that happens outside of training, competition or professional life in order to create the best possible conditions for this. For poker players and gamers, the topics of fitness, nutrition, regeneration and mindset are at least as important as for competitive athletes. In performance coaching, I will teach you how to achieve more performance through healthy routines. Exactly what these elements look like for you or your team depends on what you already bring to the table. We build on that together.
Regular Training and Movement
Sitting is the new smoking. Most brain athletes find themselves in a position unfamiliar to us in our evolution. If you don’t incorporate short breaks and longer exercise units into your everyday life several times a day, you run the risk of developing poor posture.
With regular fitness training & movement, a better body feeling can be developed. More self-confidence and higher physical performance ensure more metabolic flexibility in your brain. This means that in addition to glucose, your brain can also use the lactate produced during exercise and ketone bodies, the production of which is stimulated by certain nutritional methods and through training. This results in increased cognitive performance and greater well-being.
Following an individual nutrition strategy
What Does healthy eating mean for brain athletes? Energy drinks and sugar? Hardly… The brain of a professional chess player alone consumes around 5000 kcal on a day of competition. Have you ever seen a chess player with candy in his hand?
As one of the most important organs, the brain can draw energy from the periphery of the body and use various energy sources. High food frequency, short-chain carbohydrates, and processed foods limit this ability. By eating less frequently, longer times without food intake and, above all, a diet that fills you up with natural foods and supports your body with a high micronutrient density, you give your body what it really needs. Let your brain grow!
Sleep deeply
„Sleep is the swiss army knife of health“ – Matthew Walker
If you train hard, you should recover even harder. Healthy sleep creates the basis for learning new movement patterns and action sequences. Through healthy sleep we ensure that we do not become demented, that our muscles grow and that our systems remain in balance.
Those who do not have a restful sleep can return to it through routines, the targeted use of food and exercise. The result is increased cognitive performance and a significantly improved sense of well-being.
Implement routines that last.
The right mindset is not only important in competition. In the time when there is no competition, you can develop personally by setting and implementing so-called SMART goals. Above all, the long term plays a role here. If you improve by 1% every day, you can achieve a lot in a few weeks. In addition to the focus on your competition, the setting of goals relates above all to the integration of the areas of exercise, nutrition and regeneration.
Further measures for more balance are meditation and breathing exercises. They can be used to modulate the vegetative nervous system, so that after some practice you have more focus and balance.