How can you enhance your sports performance?

Have you ever wondered why you are so efficient in a sprint but cannot realise your full potential in a marathon? Why does this happen? Your individual genetic variation & genotype impacts your sporting & endurance performance.

Whichever sports you play, being at the top of your training has both physical & physiological effects that can boost your health & fitness & can optimise your fitness performance. Genetics has a huge role to play in enhancing your performance therefore DNA insights both on your physical training & nutrition can help you align your health strategy with your overall sports performance goals.

Ever wondered when your team or you train with your workout partner, why does everyone get different results ? It is because we all improve at different rates. You may get extraordinary results from high intensity training while your workout buddy may show little improvement, be more fatigued than you & require a longer period of recovery between sessions/exercises. This happens because of inter-individual variation. By understanding what makes us unique & different from others, we can use this information & insights to improve & optimise our performance.

We have been, for long, used to one solution fits all standard solutions when it comes to fitness & nutrition. How many times has a fad diet become popular in your gym or a new superfood has been talked of in the office or your friend circle? How do you approach? You try to see if it works for you. On the flip side you may see your workout buddy developing high strength! They witness excellent energy & results which you are still demonstrating sub-optimal performance. You are getting frustrated & wondering why is it happening? There is nothing wrong you are doing! Perhaps you need to understand the difference between the two of you- A genetic test can give you relevant insights & explanation that you probably need a distinctive workout schedule & set of exercises different from those performed by your workout buddy.

Although, we all have exactly the same DNA, genetic variations & small differences in our genetic code can cause wide differences between us. Understanding your genetic code can give you ample of insights that can help you in optimising the performance. These cover insights & information on various parameters related to fitness, nutrition, stress & sleep. Each of these subsets are vital for improving our sports performance.

We have already discussed training related factors in our previous blog which details about how our speed gene can impact our athletic performance. The following paragraphs would be discussion on non-training & non-nutrition related aspects.

Recovery, caffeine & sleep are some focal points to begin your sporting performance improvement journey. However, you must be wondering how these factors can improve our sporting & endurance performance? Let us discuss these factors in detail:

Post workout recovery

When we think of fitness, often, physical training- running, weight training, cardio & nutrition comes in our mind! Yes these are important to evaluate & enhance our sporting performance. However, we usually forget that recovery is as vital as are sweat heavy sessions. Not having a proper recovery can be detrimental to our health & body in the following ways

Injury
Underperformancer
Overtraining Syndromer
Tracking how we recover using insights from our genetic evaluation can take our performance to the next level.

Caffeine

Here we are not talking about one morning cup of coffee. Caffeine is one of the most prominently used performance enhancing drugs in the world consumed by 80% of the global population. We consume this drug for a variety of reasons from overcoming tiredness to coffee dates with your best pal. Besides, caffeine is used by athletes for its performance benefits across a range of workouts.

Caffeine is termed a competitive adenosine receptor antagonist. Adenosine is a naturally produced chemical & makes us feel tired & relaxed. Caffeine competes with adenosine for its binding site preventing it from exerting its relaxing efforts. This helps us stay alert during training. Besides, caffeine increases adrenaline secretions & increases alertness. This is the reason athletes use it to enhance their performance.

Sleep

Having the required amount of sleep is a part of strategy for sportspeople to enhance their sporting performance. It is not as powerful as weight training is but is certainly vital for performance enhancement. Sleep is infact linked to caffeine. Caffeine can be really productive if managed well else it can interfere with your sleep & can damage your enhancement/improvement.

Caffeine is effective in overcoming sleep induced fatigue. When we are awake adenosine accumulates in our brain over the course of day, thereby inducing a feeling of sleepiness. When we sleep we get rid of this adenosine. However if we do not sleep long enough, some of this adenosine remains & hence we feel sleepy.

Make sure that you get enough sleep, neither too less nor too much.

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