Jason told me what great several months of training and performing he’s had. I thought to myself, “Is he lucky, as rarely can a person put in top performances several months in a row.”
That’s the exception to the rule in the world of high performance. What’s normal for a great training program is to have a period of performance brilliance followed by a performance decline. The decline signals the body’s in need of a recovery that must be carefully controlled otherwise a delay in recovery becomes more possible. Delayed recoveries set the stage for preventable injury or illness - key things any competitor should avoid like the plague.
The usual script goes something like this:
I’m having a period of great performance and am euphoric over it.
I know it won’t last forever so I need to get the most out of it before I have the inevitable pullback in performance.
The intoxicating effect of performing spectacularly well and at the end, feeling as if you didn’t do anything is a performers nirvana.
Trust me, I know that all too well. Few things match that sensation. But, to try and ride the wave farther when it’s as good as it gets accelerates the onset of the falloff in performance. Ideally, when performances are at their best is when it’s best to pull back and do less to ride the high-performance wave longer. This is perhaps the hardest thing of all to do as you’re asking someone to purposely step away from heaven on earth. The mind answers this by saying, “You’re crazy, why would I want to pull back when I’m at my peak?”
To the uninitiated continuing to train and perform at higher levels is predicted along with the disappointment, injuries, and illness that come from pushing a percent or two too hard when a pullback is what’s required. When a pullback is done mind and body function increase enabling continued high levels of performance to occur along with great recovery.
On today’s 100km ride with friends I had a magic day as at the end I felt as if I hadn’t even ridden.
The temptations there to go and do the same ride tomorrow. No, thanks, I’ll pass.
I want to ride this wave as long as possible.
If you search for “energy supplement” on amazon, you get over 4,000 results.
How can any reasonable human sift through all that and find the ones that work? Or which ones are bogus?
I did a deep dive into the truth about “increasing your energy” in another article. It gives you a framework for understanding how real energy supplements work and why.
But here I want to do something different.
I want to get practical and tactical with 10 proven ways to boost energy production in your cellular energy factories –– your mitochondria.
We’ll start with the lifestyle and dietary ways to boost your mitochondria and then look at a few powerful supplements.
Let’s start with the cheapest...
Your average health food store has an entire section devoted to “energy.”
The products on the shelf, with their fancy logos and specially designed packaging, make grandiose claims about what they will do for your “energy levels.”
But the truth?
Most of them are stimulants in disguise, artificially jacking you up to give you the sensation of energy.
But in the end, they do more harm than good. They increase cortisol, cause dehydration, and deplete you.
Because almost none of them do anything on the biological level that supports your real energy system: your mitochondria and metabolism.
That’s why in this article I want to show you what to look for with any new supplement.... and why.
It’s the “most wonderful time of the year” according to Andy Williams. Or should it be the most wonderFULL time of the year? I’m referring to the last 6 weeks of the year which is fraught with one nutritional landmine after another.
Let’s face it, things like pumpkin pie, stovetop stuffing, eggnog, pumpkin-spiced lattes, peanut brittle, homemade fudge, and divinity only make their appearance during this brief window so we might as well gorge ourselves with as much as we can, right?
No wonder the average American gains 2 to 5 pounds (or more) over the holidays. You’d think we were part bear by eating all…the…things before going into several months of hibernation. Unfortunately, this is a major reason people gradually gain weight over the course of years and decades. Gaining weight is easy while losing it is another story.
