2 Habits Every Young Athlete Needs

Summary

• Habits are automatic. They don’t take much energy to perform.
• Developing good habits can make life easier. Therefore, every young athlete should be developing as many good habits as they can. It can help in their sports career and beyond
• Two main habits that every young athlete needs to have is 1) Time Management and 2) Cooking.
• Time management doesn’t have to be complicated. Every athlete should be able to use a calendar and mark down important dates. As they grow older, they can start managing times of practices, and when schoolwork needs to be completed.
• Time management is a very important skill and should be practiced and almost mastered before they go off to college. You don’t want them to “figure it out” when they have a full load of college work, practices, social life, etc.
• Cooking is the second habit every athlete should have under their belt. It is what is going to fuel them or help recover from school, sports, and life in general.
• Every athlete should feel comfortable in the kitchen. They should be able to make several meals that are healthy, quick, and easy.
• As parents, our job is to allow them to build these habits.

Full Transcript

Hey, David Sabi here with Kid to Athlete. We're going over habits. Why habits? Because habits don't take a lot of energy and they're automatic. So if you've got good habits, which is what we want our kids to have, then they're going to be doing good things automatically without spending a lot of energy. Now there are two things that I think every kid should be building good habits for. The first one is time management. Time management doesn't have to be crazy. You can use a simple monthly calendar to start with and they should just know what is going on for that month, right? If they have a soccer tournament, or if they have a school project that's due, they should be able to see, Oh, this is the day that I need that done. As they advance, then they can get into the habit of, maybe scheduling out their week or even their day, depending on how busy that day might be.

So, it's just a good habit so that they can use less energy and it becomes automatic. Why is this really important? Because when they go off to college, and especially if they're a college athlete, that's going to mean that they're going to be having to manage a lot of time and energy. And so if they've got the time management habits down, then they're going to have an easier time taking that energy they saved, because they've made those good habits and they can put it into learning in class, performing on the field, or in the pool, or whatever sport they're doing. Social life and even work maybe, they might be working as well. So being able to manage your time, getting those good habits early on is very important. So the second thing is cooking. Your kids need to have good cooking habits, right?

They need to be able to shop. They should be able to shop with you and they should be able to prepare simple, easy to make meals, right? Because food is super important. I don't think people will understand that they think, Oh, school, school, school. But if you're not fueling yourself correctly, then you're not going to learn as much as you could, if you were fueled and thinking correctly. So food, very important, make sure that you do that and if they're a collegiate athlete, guess what? Food is not only fuel, but it's also for recovery, and so they need to have good food and if they don't know how to cook and they don't have those good habits of knowing what to get and how to prepare meals easily and it doesn't become a habit, it's going to be a struggle and it's going to drain energy and it's not good for when you're trying to use that energy that you should be using for class or your performance.

So make sure you build those good habits in preparing meals. And that's what I want you to focus on. Time management and cooking and build those habits so that they become automatic so that your kid doesn't have to use willpower the whole time because that only has so much energy. And again, what we're trying to do is reserve that energy or save that energy by just making everything automatic so they don't have to think about it. Hope that helps. Again, my name is David Sabi here with Kid to Athlete, to help parents raise athletes so that they can be not only good athletes, but happy, healthy, and high-performing. So if you haven't already hit that subscribe button, I will see you on the next video. Thanks for watching.