Fitness: What is the best way to get top athletic performance?

Head or heart? Is tracking or ‘going with the flow’- the secret way to achieve athletic performance?
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Sleep, food, nutrition, home, finance… there’s an app to track that.

Are you systematically tracking your every step, breath, and sip, rapidly pedaling the frantic chaos of life?

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Or perhaps you just go with a gentle flow? But what actually boosts our health and fitness to achieve our peak in optimal time?

Tracking how your body is performaning is a great way to help you fine-tune your athletic display. (Photo by JUSTIN TALLIS / AFP) (Photo by JUSTIN TALLIS/AFP via Getty Images)Tracking how your body is performaning is a great way to help you fine-tune your athletic display. (Photo by JUSTIN TALLIS / AFP) (Photo by JUSTIN TALLIS/AFP via Getty Images)
Tracking how your body is performaning is a great way to help you fine-tune your athletic display. (Photo by JUSTIN TALLIS / AFP) (Photo by JUSTIN TALLIS/AFP via Getty Images)

It all depends on your unique profile and total fitness level.

If you haven’t yet mapped out your energy cycles, behavioural patterns, and bodily functions, it can be useful to observe these first.

You can use either apps, paper journals, drawing pictures, or taking photos to gain an insight into what your day looks like in terms of activities, consumption, mood, productivity, feelings and actions (behaviours).

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I would document this diary for at least two weeks to give you an idea of what is serving your wellbeing and what is distracting us from experiencing deep health.

We can also start to make small adjustments when we live more consciously.

Whilst clarity is key, reaching for brain cluttering technology to log minute data points, I find it’s more important to identify what we need to prioritise in life.

Ironically by carving out tech-free time in nature is ideal to gain such clarity of how we function and feel.

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We forget that our human minds and bodies are the greatest natural devices flowing through the seasons of life which can be positively and negatively impacted by our mindset, environments, and natural cycles.

By noticing our Circadian Rhythm (24-hour sleep-wake cycle) and for many women our menstrual cycle (Infradian Rhythm), affects our energy levels.

How you consciously track or keep motivated is down to individual circumstances too.

For me, I check in via coaches, especially as a coach myself, I value the holistic support of mind mantras and rituals from Quantum Coaching, progressive muscle relaxation exercises from Lemon Tree Coaching, and the energy healing movement of Qi Gong and Reiki from Beyond Healing.

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By carving some space to reflect, we can notice whether we need to move our body more to shake off some tension from our daily lives, eat or sleep well to give us more energy and/or for some people, like me, who used to live their life like a long HIIT class until burnout, where we need to focus more on our mental wellbeing.

I have experimented with every tracking device going, but before I resort to the extra stress of a gadget.

For me it has become more important to become truly in tune with my mind, body, and soul first… something that is finally becoming more mainstream.

In doing so, I too have personally noticed the inflammatory effects of sugar which triggers my fatigue and brain fog, and dare I say it, caffeine too (but the latter I am still working on).

It is deep health that is wealth which is why it’s important for you to identify your own needs and factors affecting your total fitness

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