We often hear people saying “train smarter, not harder”, but we can be unsure of what this exactly means. This is for the athletes who go out there and bust their butts day in and day out and do not see the results they would like. This is also for the athletes who just keep running into injury problems. It is not always about just going out and training just to train, every calorie you burn training should be for a specific reason.
1. Know when to stop pushing
This is a tough one because giving 100% effort does not mean pushing yourself to the point where you are over training and thus run into an injury or just become worse. You have to live to fight another day. There must be a balance found between training really hard and training to the point where you are just breaking your body down beyond repair.
2. Listen to your body well
If you listen to your body it will tell you when you are doing too much damage to it. It will tell you when you have an injury you can train through and when you need to sit out. As athletes our bodies are our tools and we must make sure our tools are taken care of or else they will not do their job well.
3. Dont take injuries lightly
When something is bothering you in any way, shape or form make sure you tend to it. It is never ok to be hurting and just assume that it will go away. Do something about the problem until it does actually go away then you do not have to worry about it. Many times athletes let those small injuries that start as nothing creep up on them and get worse and worse and eventually become season ending injureis.
4. Train with Someone Better than You
It makes you smarter to train with someone better than you or more expereinced than you because they can pass down knowledge that they have gained. Any wisdom they pass on will then make you that much smarter of an athlete.
5. Train with Someone worse than you
You know you have a concept down pat when you have the ability to teach it someone else. If you are training with someone worse, you now become that mentor and it is your responsibility to bless others with what you know. It also helps hold you to a high standard.
6. Get inside the coaches head
The reason I am able to do a lot of what I do with CG is because I always learned as much as I could from my coaches. My dad is a football coach and he loves everything to do with training. I always get inside his head on things to do with training. My highschool coach on the track had an abundance of information and I always found ways to learn from him and figure out why we were doing what we were doing. Now my track coach here at Iowa State is the same and I have probally learnt the most from him. I always want to know why we are doing something. Not because I dont trust coaches but because I know the more understanding I have the better I can make myself.
7. Less can be more
I use to get caught in the trap of thinking the more I did in training the better. I would do a million different things at practice, go to the weight room and do a million extra movements and all it did was get me hurt. I was doing to much and thats when I learned that less can be more.
8. Study the Game
It has amazed me the amount of people that play a sport and do not know anything about the sport. They do not know any of the greats or know what the best in the world are doing right now. To be a smart athlete you have to be a student to the game and let your love for the sport shine.
9. Connect the dots of the past
To make it official that you are becoming a smarter athlete you must have that 20/20 hind sight vision. Meaning you can look to the past and figure out what you should have done. A lot of people either can not look to the past and figure out what went wrong, or even when they do they do not want to make any changes. This is a big problem. You have to be able to look back figure out what went wrong and use that information to make you better and stronger.
10. Beleive in Yourself
A lot of people just do not think they are smart. If you do not think you are smart how can you ever be smart. You have to first beleive you can be a smart athlete and you know what, it will begin to show!
So What…
It is time we step our game up as athletes in every possible way.
(original image by zat asyraff)
