💤 The Hidden Engine: Why Recovery and Sleep Are the Real Drivers of Health and High Performance
You’ve been treating working out/ training like you are a machine - like you are not human.
But in reality, the key to your transformation story is recovery.
Recovery and sleep aren’t optional, if you are goal is to be healthy in the long-term by building the habits that contribute to a active lifestyle, like strength training, cardiovascular training, and nutrition planning.
They’re a built-in, strategic part of our program — especially for adults over 40 who want to stay strong, lean, and pain-free long-term.
Let’s pull back the curtain on why recovery is the real high-performance secret — and how you can build your plan of action to finally train smarter and feel better.
Sleep: The "Magical" 8, Quality or Quantity
The issue usually is not the amount of sleep as measured in time, but the quality of sleep that you have, and this goes back to your habits and rituals if you will that you have established over your lifetime. There is usually no preparation for sleep time, and if you are over the age of 10 years old you have not had a ritual for sleep time that has worked to help you sleep in over 20-30 plus years, but even with that said we still fought the idea of going to sleep “early” before 9 pm. I remember when I was around 8-9 years old and it was the beginning of the school year and the time had not changed and it was still light at my bedtime(6 pm) and I literally had a temper tantrum in the bed kicking and crying because I could hear the other neighborhood kids playing outside and here I was being put to bed like a baby….
Dying a death of 1000 Breaths
There are several techniques that can be used to train your lungs and diaphragm to work more effectively, by increasing the lungs capacity which will help increase the amount of oxygen that is drawn into the lungs and strengthen the diaphragm. As an athlete, I would do a self-audit once a year always trying to see what I could do to improve my performance from year to year. I realized that my breathing was the one thing that was an issue and seemed to not improve as I played until later in the season and my endurance was below average. So I thought about what sport was dependent on developing endurance, so I started researching distance runners and I found that there was are breathing exercises that some of the top runners would do to improve their lung capacity.