74 STEP FOUR: ENERGY MANAGEMENT Managing your energy, first and foremost, before your time and results. Have you ever stopped to wonder how long you can keep doing what you’re doing? How long your physical self will hold up to the pace you’ve been keeping? How long your mental self will hold together with all that you have to think about and are responsible for? For most of us, we don’t even have time to think about what we’re doing to our physical and mental selves, let alone how we can move forward to replenish our weary and often worn-out minds and bodies. With the human machine, maintenance and replenishment needs to happen in order to maintain and sustain optimal performance. Without it, the energy source within us burns out. Most likely you wouldn’t expect your car to keep running if you didn’t fill it with fuel. We are not so different than our cars in this way, but why do we have a completely different expectation for our physical and mental engine? How we fuel ourselves and how we manage our energy comes at the end of the proverbial line for so many of us. The only thought we usually give to our energy is a desire to have more and that thought usually doesn’t go any further into how to actually get it. Science has known and has ample evidence that the athlete with the most reserves and best management of his or her energy usually wins. This is due to the science of periodization used by elite athletes around the world. Simply put, periodization is the science of measuring work/rest ratios for optimal performance. It focuses on how the human body must replenish fundamental biochemical sources of energy after expending it. So, if an athlete increases the intensity of their training or their performance demand, their method and length of recovery and replenishment must commensurate with the increased amount of output in order to boost and push the limits of their performance. To be a champion an athlete must give physical and mental replenishment as much importance as training protocol, performance, and results. In other words, they master the management of their energy, not their time or even their results.
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