The gift that keeps on giving

Here is a short elaboration on each point.

• Stop back pain from limiting your freedom.

Recovering from a hernia or wanting to avoid injuring your back (again)? You want to learn how to activate your system, improve your pick-up technique, practice the technique weekly, improve your taxability, and have the habit of picking up heavy things with good technique – even under time pressure.

• How to adapt your nutritional routines without extreme diets and YO-YO effects.

Trying out diets you can not adhere to leads to the yo-yo effect. This means you get heavier with every diet you try, consequently worsening your overall health. Plus, failing every time greatly demotivates you to try again, or stick to it, for life.

• Understand how habits work, create awareness of bad habits, and set up disruptors to unlearn old habits and grow new healthy habits.

By now, most people know that a huge percentage of our daily lives is governed by habits. But, most people don’t know how unaware we are with regards to our bad habits. Whilst you are busy with something on a conscious level like a good conversation, your automated capabilities can guide you through activities you do not even register when looking back.

Like finishing a bag of chips or buying calorie-rich snacks whilst we’re in the supermarket.

Creating awareness of this, gives you the chance to create disruptors, to break your habits.

For example: someone has shoulder pain during the cold months. For years, physios can’t pin-point the problem, so they can only work on the symptoms. Accordingly I’ll check how the preson put’s on his jacket, and see the cause, for the shoulder discomfort.

Accordingly, I’ll advise them to put a color ribbon on the jackets the person wears most often, during the week. This creates a reminder to put on the jacket in a correct manner. I will also have the person add a reminder in their agenda, to change the ribbon color, once a week. And, I will have them do this agenda reminder, placed on every Sunday, late afternoon. As that’s the one time of the week when we are usually at home, and do not get distracted.

Within a week, the shoulder pain is gone. But the habit still needs to change, all in good time, and practice. Including planning for the next winter, just in case.

If you have questions about this example, please reach out to me, and I will gladly explain the full context.

• Understand yourself, mentally and physically.

For example, know that chronic stress reduces your recovery rate, making you more susceptible to illnesses and injuries.

Also, know that reduced sleep quality and quantity, reduces your focus, decision making and drive to stick to your good decisions.

• Strengthen your weakest links/joints/movements/liabilities.

More often than not, we avoid using our weakest parts. But, as our bodies are great with being energy efficient, what we don’t use, becomes weaker. This in turn though, only creates more weakness, and increases the risk of injuries.

And nobody likes injuries slowing us down, or stopping us from things we love doing.

• Support your immune system.

Creating a rhythm and a weekly routine that includes getting outside a bit, moving a bit, training a bit, eating a bit better, and sleeping a bit better, will accumulate to support your immune system a lot.

Small changes are achievable. And small changes you can keep going, will motivate you to make more small changes. And so on, and so forth. Consistency is key.

• Improve your sleep routine, time and quality.

Think of food types, before you go to sleep to improve your sleep quality.

Think of reducing liquid rich foods late at night to avoid waking up in the middle of the night.

Think of adapting smart lighting to create a sleepy environment in the evening, on time and creating an easy wake-up environment according to your optimal wake up time, per day.

• Support your recovery.

The better in better out concept is luckily gaining traction in medical circles.

But why only there?

We all get ill on occasion. We all get an injury on occasion.

So, what if you could greatly reduce your downtime, the accompanying irritation, and the demotivation?

• Train around injuries/sensitivities.

Understandably, we avoid exercising when we have and injury. Is this a good idea? No, the science is clear. You want to keep moving what you can.

For your mental as well as physical health.

And through the years of coaching (pro) athletes with sports injuries, and coaching people with specific medical and / or physical and/or mental sensitivities/complicatiosn, I’ve learnt how to fine-tune what I have studied, according to the person at hand, their goals, and their circumstances.

• Apply nutritional timing for meetings, sleep, training, and competitions. Think of water, coffee, food and supplements.

This is extremely useful, to adapt how you react, in specific situations. So you get the results you want. Just to give you three very small examples:

-If you want to be assertive in a meeting, don’t eat anything hours before the meeting, and drink 200ml of water, 20 minutes before the meeting. This way your hunger feeling, and need to go to the toilet will make you a lot more assertive.

-When you always tend to get involved in everything, but feel you should not do that in a specific meeting, eat a big, full meal, right before the meeting, without any coffee, and take a bottle of water with you, for tiny sips.

-Beta-Alanine can give some a jittery feeling, which can make them more prone to training harder. So take this thirty minutes before you want to train very hard. Side-note, how often do you need to go for a PR? Answer: probably less than you’d think.

• Take away mental, as well as physical hurdles with regards to moving, training, and sleeping better.

We humans often tend to dramatize how much time we think is needed to train or do an activity. So try 20 minutes rather than planning an hour, which means two hours because you need to get changed before, and shower and change after, and have something to eat as well.

Seriously, 20 minutes per week can still help a lot. Plus, when you feel better, you will want to add ten minutes, or maybe even another activity of twenty minutes, later in your week.

Also, have a bag of sports clothes ready and packed. And every Sunday afternoon, you pack it for the coming week. Put a weekly reminder in your phone agenda.

There are many more techniques, to help you reduce your hurdles in life.

• Reduce constant stress through stress and expectations management.

In this instant gratification world, we are living in, it’s tough to stay realistic.

But being unrealistic with regards to getting results, and keeping them, is just, uhm… unrealistic and demotivational.

We all have “fail” moments.

But don’t let a fail moment become a fail day, become a fail week, become a fail month, become a fail year, become a fail life – you know what I mean.

Learn how to get up and go again through all of the above.

• Improve your mobility, reaction capability, and balance – so to greatly avoid the risk of injuries.
• Breathe well to reduce the risk of injuries, as well as for improved performance.

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