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 brain athletes, the topics of exercise, nutrition, regeneration and mindset are at least as important as for competitive athletes. In performance coaching, I will show 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 have with you. We build on that together.
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 exercise, 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. This results in increased cognitive performance and greater well-being.
Nutrition
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 micronutrient density, you give your body what it really needs. Let your brain go!
Recovery
„Sleep is the swiss army knife of health“ – Matthew Walker
If you train hard, you should also recover hard. 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.
Mindset
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 0.1% every day, you can achieve a lot in a few weeks. In addition to the focus on the type of sport, 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.