Managing your energy - Making 'YOU' sustainable.
Well its January, we all hit it hard with New Year resolutions, best intensions and goals for the up coming year. It is certainly an exciting time for many of us.
As a coach and coach developer, I am certainly aware of the positive energy that is about me, lots of emails and conversations informing me of new goals, aspirations and training loads. I also love this time of year, lots of people trying lots of new things (I am certainly included in this)
With all these new goals and excitement, comes a busier then normal schedule, now we are fitting in a new activity, more training and further commitments to our already packed 6am - 10pm lives.
As a coach and coach developer my job is to support the athletes and coaches I work with, to not only achieve their goals, but do it in a way that is unique to them, supports their existing way of life and to make sure it is manageable, realistic and most importantly sustainable.
As a coach, athlete or practitioner you have a duty of care to look after yourself or those around you, making sure that your lifestyle if not going to end you in trouble energy wise. Remember its not just this year, we have months, years and decades still to live.
I know of some athletes in the past that have increased their training load, activities, intensity, duration of training (I could go on) whilst still doing the same amount in the day and just limiting their sleeping hours - Well the results were not pretty, they ended burnt out, with long term illness, or fatigue. Now I do not know if these cases were avoidable, however I do think as athletes, coaches and practitioners if we can understand ourselves and others better, there is less likelyhood of these chronic and extremely upsetting illnesses occurring.
By managing your energy well, this enables you to achieve your goals, still be there for your family and have productive work days. So I guess I am saying it is vital for you to know what energises you and what depletes you. How do you recover when tired, or even can you recover when tired!! If you were really honest with yourself, is your training load sustainable or do you need to make a bit more room to rest, sleep longer or drop the intensity of some sessions!!
For certain the more training we do the more rest and sleep we need to recover.
The more stimulus we get, the more we need to mange our down time.
My goal with this blog is not to stop you, far from it, it is to try and support you all by asking these questions. So heres a task: Start to notice what you do to rest and what restores your energy.
Maybe reduce situations when you do not have to be in environments that take energy.
Awareness is an amazing thing, I would love to hear from you, how you mange your training, what have you done well to create sustainable programmes and what has not gone so well. ( We all have many failures, I have 100s I could share) However its what we do with this information thats important- As long as you learn and change things in the future for the better thats all we can ask.
How can we help......Well.
ENERGY WORKSHOP.
19th Jan 10 - 4pm Lancaster.
This very reason is why myself and Jane under Active Blu have designed a workshop open for athletes, coaches and practitioners to start to learn about their personal energy how you replenish it, things that may deplete it and most importantly make sure we do not go into an energy crisis. (Which obviously is never going to happen to you - Well never, until it does.)
We look at working with others, noticing the signs in our athletes, ourselves or the around us that they could be struggling and strategies and methods to support and enhance your athletes performance.
Any questions please email me: emma@activeblu.co.uk
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