If you want to become a highly efficient athlete, you need to have the necessary conditioning and strength. If you want to achieve this, there a few areas that you need to address, such as injury prevention and structural balance.
- Strength: Athletes should try to exert minimum force to achieve goals and overcome external resistance. You need to push your strength level to an optimum level. Your physical components should increase exponentially. As an example, you can increase strength by doing various exercises, such as bench press, deadlift and squat
- Power: You can define power as the amount of work you do for a specific unit of time. It means that you can lift the same amount weight faster than one month ago, then you have increased your power. You need to become stronger, relative to your body weight. The more powerful you are at a given body weight, then you will become faster when moving.
- Speed: You can define speed as the ability of your body cover a certain distance for a specific time. However, different sports have varying definition about speed. As an example, being fast isn’t enough for one type of sports if you can’t sustain it long enough.
- Agility: Agility can be defined as the ability to change direction quickly. It’s a physical activity that may potentially cause more injuries, it’s especially true if you don’t have a high enough strength level. Agility can be a difference between a decent athlete and s great athlete.
- Endurance: Endurance is the foundation of physical fitness. If you don’t reach full potentials, you won’t be able to perform at your best. Aerobic endurance is needed if you want to sustain steady efforts. You also need to have anaerobic endurance and it’s your ability to recover from maximum efforts repeatedly. Both are important for your physical performance and they need separate attentions.
- Flexibility and mobility: Both are sometimes used interchangeably, but flexibility and mobility are actually two separate entities. Flexibility is more about muscle and fascia. It’s associated with one plane of movement. Mobility is about a range of motions thanks to your joints. Athletes need to achieve a proper balance on both areas. There’s no use having great flexibility, if you have mediocre mobility.
- Mental toughness: When you have proper mental toughness, you can cope with any stress of competitive sport. Mental toughness is essential if you want to achieve an edge over your opponents. It is also about pushing yourself harder and be committed to your original program. As an example, you need to stay off alcohol, have healthy diet and rest properly. Mental toughness is crucial and can be among the trickiest component to address for many athletes.
These are seven important components if you want to boost athletic ability. Examine issues related to these components properly. Competitive sports require you to be fully prepared physically and mentally. By increasing each component, you should always be ready for the next practice session or game.
