powerDOJO

The Lost Ingredient to Recovery

Written by

Eric Wong

in

After popping my rib grappling on Saturday, I decided to take Sunday off. That lead me to this post.

There’s one thing that a lot of fighters totally screw up, and that’s recovery.

Recovery is not just ‘not training’ but can mean a lot of things:

– Enough quality sleep
– Nutrition including adequate high quality fats and protein
– Active recovery modalities such as massage and contrast showers

But one thing that a lot of people in general miss out on is mental recovery. From this I mean ‘unplugging’ yourself from all of the things on your mind and all of the madness of mainstream society like TV, newspapers, malls, and anywhere else your mind gets bombarded.

You probably don’t realize it but you’re being hit with 1000’s of messages everyday telling you to buy this or that this is the best offer.

You need a break from this once in a while! I decided to take a break by going for a long hike on a beautiful sunny Sunday. Check out some of the highlights:

The entrance to the hike.

Some nice light.

Don’t worry, he’s not poisonous!

The hike even came with free snacks.

My new ‘Walden Pond’.

So if you haven’t ‘unplugged’ yourself for a while, I urge you to go for a 1 hour or more hike, somewhere not so busy, and let your mind be refreshed, giving you an edge in training.

Comments

One response to “The Lost Ingredient to Recovery”

  1. zazen5 Avatar
    zazen5

    Eric,

    Your site is very well done. I would like to expand on your comments above about mental overload. First, what a person thinks consciously is later processed by the unconscious. When any voluntary training action is performed, it takes time for this training to consolidate in the nervous system. This is why for example, if you practice guitar, drums, keyboards for a half hour, an hour to two of rest away allows consolidation of the skills practiced. When performing mental/physical training, different parts of the brain are activated, and this is important to realize when choosing down time activities. I enjoy playing Go(board game) and international chess, but I have read about studies evaluating hemispheric function in both games. I have found that Go is more right hemisphere, and chess, more left. I have evaluated this information and tried to integrate it with my job and obligations. Although I like Go, I find that the right hemisphere is activated sometimes too much and as such this leads to stress. Given that I also am a musician as a hobby which is known for right hemisphere activation, I need more balance, so I choose to study chess much of the time. All situations have a different affect on right hemisphere and left hemisphere balance and I hypothesize that people’s moods are affected by this subtle balance all the time. For example, intense negative emotions very much activate the right hemisphere and logically a person would seek out left hemispheric activities to balance this. So awareness is key in choosing training activities to balance this. I have found also that chess study is invaluable during rest periods between heavy weightlifting. What I do is load up the barbell or dumbbells, perform the set, set the timer for 3 minutes, and during that time I have a chess board set up with which I review games, problems, openings and I find this interacts nicely with the physical training.

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

More posts