3 Easy Ways to Help Your Athlete Recover

Summary

• There are many ways you can help your athlete recover from practices, games, and tournaments. Some ways are simple needing no equipment to complex using expensive tools and machinery.
• We will be focused on 3 ways to recover: 1. Sleep, 2. Nutrition, and 3. Relax
• Sleep is an underrated way to recover. A lack of sleep can reduce coordination, accuracy, energy level, and more. Make sure your athlete avoids or reduces this by getting quality sleep consistently.
• Nutrition is a way to fuel up for practices, games, and tournaments. It’s also the best way to recover. Eating high quality, nutrient dense foods is the best way to go. Real foods likes fruits and vegetables. Keep simple. That goes for drinks too. Hydrate with water. No need to complicate things.
• Last way to recover is to take a break from the activities that the athlete has been in. Depending on the duration and intensity of the sport will determine how long a break an athlete will need.

Full Transcript

There are plenty of ways that you can help your athlete recover from practices, games, tournaments, and some are really complex ways of helping them recover by using expensive tools or machinery. But in this video we're going to go over three ways that are simple and that you can do today to help your athlete recover from practices, games, or tournaments.

Hey, my name's David Sabi here with Kid to Athlete to help parents raise athletes. And if you want to raise an athlete, you have to remember that they're going to be working hard, but they need to recover from that hard work that they put in. So how can you help? Well, the first one is sleep. Sleep is, I think, an underrated way to recover. It's easy. It's simple and it's powerful. Make sure your athlete is getting quality sleep and consistently. There had been plenty of studies that show a lack of sleep reduces coordination, accuracy, energy level and all that. Make sure that they're getting quality sleep consistently and you will see that they will be able to recover. Though their body will recover, but also their brain, which in most sports, if not all, you need your brain because it helps with that skill that you're going to need when performing. Sleep is the first way.

Number two is nutrition. Nutrition is the best way to help your athlete recover. Keep it simple. High quality, nutrient-dense foods. Real foods, not the processed stuff that you buy in a package, but real foods. Basically, fruits and vegetables. Yes, you're going to need protein. So yes, you could do quality meat, poultry, fish. Again, the highest quality, the better. You do not need meat, poultry and fish or seafood for protein. You can get plenty of protein also plant-based, meaning seeds, nuts. There's plenty of ways you can get protein if you are going vegetarian or vegan. So don't let that hold you back, but keep it real. Keep it as real as possible. Unprocessed, high quality, high nutrient-dense foods, and make sure you get a variety because each vegetable, each color, they all come with benefits. And so you'll want to make sure you get a variety of those as well.

Hydration is also key. Water is pretty much what you need to hydrate, so drinking plenty of water. Now don't think that you have to drink the 10 glasses or have your athlete drink 10 glasses of water a day. I always recommend sipping water throughout the day. That way you can keep most of that, retain most of that water, but it also helps you just hydrate. Now with hydration, I just want to do a little side note. Make sure your athlete is drinking throughout the day and then tapers off toward the night. So most of your hydration should be during the bulk of the day, the morning, afternoon. That way at nighttime they're not drinking a ton of water so that when they go to bed they can just sleep through the night without having to wake up because they drank too much water. So nutrition is very important.

The third one, another activity. I don't really care what it is as long as it's not what your athlete has been doing. So if they've been practicing hard for soccer, then do something that's not soccer related. Something else that they're not running, kicking, jumping, all that fun stuff. Make sure it's, it could be another sport, it could be painting, reading, just another activity. You need that time to recover from practice so if you have a one to two hour practice, you're going to want a certain amount of time, like a day, to recover. If you've got a tournament three days long, let's say, then you're going to want longer.

If you've got a long season and it's been a tough season and your athlete's been pushing it for weeks now, they may want to take a break from that. So if your athlete's been throwing fastballs and they're just pitching at a hundred miles per hour all season long, they may need to take a break and that that break may be a longer now weeks of a break. They can sign up for another sport. They can do something else. If you think about it, the pros also have an off season and there's a reason there's an off season. That way they can fully recover and that's what you want when you're thinking of recovery. You want your athlete to try to fully recover before they go out and give it 110% again. And so use those three different techniques of getting your athlete to sleep. Quality, consistency is key for sleep.

Nutrition, keep it real, real food. Try to go unprocessed as much as possible. Get that quality again and high nutrient-dense foods and a variety of it. And then your third one is just another activity just to take a break from whatever they were doing and just to recover completely. But those are the three, sleep, nutrition, another activity. Put those into action. Recovery is key to helping your athlete become a happy, healthy, high performer. That's all I have for you for today. I hope you enjoyed this video. If you liked it, give it a thumbs up. Hit that subscribe button and please leave a comment. Let me know what you're thinking. Let me know what you'd like to see in the future and hopefully I can make a video on that. And until next time, take care.