Using Athletic Characteristics to Personalize your Performance Lifestyle
“Who ARE you? Who do you WANT to be?”
We ask ourselves this, in some way, every. day.
We judge who we are – frowning at the mirror. We judge what we’re capable of – criticizing performances and complaining about energy. We even dream about our potential – our Prime Athlete.
Unfortunately, many of these “judgments” are actually comparisons. We compare ourselves to professionally-shopped Instagram models. We compare our performances to 24-hr gym rats. We even compare what we eat with life-hacked food-porn.
Stop.
Stop the comparisons. Don’t use others to judge YOUR potential.
Be an individual. Find the style that defines YOU. Otherwise, you won’t reach YOUR potential and just loathe the lifestyle that takes you to someone else’s.
How can we define our own style? One strategy is identifying the athletic characteristics you want highlighted by your Prime Athlete. Consider the following features of an athlete:
Hypertrophy
Strength
Power
Endurance
Speed
Body Composition
Functional – Mobility and Movement IQ (Something ALL athletes will maximize)
Now ask yourself – “What’s important to you? What features do you want your Prime Athlete to exhibit?”
When deciding, take into account your expectations. Do you want to EXCEL or GENERALIZE?
It’s easier to excel in a smaller number of features, i.e. you can become an EXPERT at hypertrophy and strength, but not all 6 characteristics. In this case, the 4 other features aren’t ignored; instead hypertrophy and strength are simply prioritized.
OR you could choose to GENERALIZE in all 6, and not excel in any.
While this is a VERY simplistic portrayal of adaptations, it can help you narrow your focus when you’re considering your personal style.
1. Choosing your Athletic Features provides a Checklist of Lifestyle Requirements
By identifying your preferred characteristics, you’ve essentially established basic lifestyle guidelines. Each athletic feature has its own training protocols, nutrition plans, etc. that stimulate their development.
Example 1 - Athletic Feature: Strength. This training protocol should focus on a higher %1RM to target strength-specific adaptations. The nutrition plan should be fairly balanced between protein and CHO, as strength-focused athletes don’t require high-CHO diets. Their lifestyle should promote significant recovery, especially between heavy days, with sufficient sleep and recovery opportunities between days.
Example 2 - Athletic Feature: Endurance. This training protocol will rely on medium-to-high volume aerobic work with 1-2 resistance training days. The nutrition plan would emphasize CHO to fuel aerobic work and performance-related interventions, like peri-event hydration and fueling. Their lifestyle will require finding a balance between long training sessions with their personal responsibilities.
Therefore, by simply choosing your Prime Athlete’s characteristics, you’ve essentially accepted a rubric of goals (AKA routines, nutrition choices, and exercise programs) needed to achieve them.
2. Each Performance Feature Checklist has Multiple Strategies for Success - Find Yours
While each performance feature has general guidelines for success, they can be achieved through many different strategies.
You may have heard: “There’s no ONE WAY to get strong.”
And since general doesn’t fit into our personal lives, it’s up to you to decide what strategies work for you. By selectively choosing which strategies to implement, you’ve essentially established your personal process.
Reusing Example 1 (from above) - Athletic Feature: Strength. You prioritize the lifts you want to get stronger at. You decide what foods you incorporate into your meal plan to achieve a balanced nutrition plan. You decide on what training days are heavy, moderate, light based on your work and responsibilities. You find strategies to help you recover, learning how to sleep earlier or committing to recovery days.
This individualized process is the basis for your Individual Style that facilitates the adaptations for your Prime Athlete.
This personalized lifestyle needs to account for YOUR life. No one else does what you do. They don’t have the same responsibilities, routines, preferences… everything that makes you YOU. This means your style has to account for everything YOU – exactly why comparisons aren’t helpful.
Additionally, your lifestyle must address your goals and preferred progression. How advanced do you want to become? Do you intend to train for the Olympics, or to feel competent and powerful? How quickly are you trying to progress? Are you in a rush to achieve “summer” results, or is it about the process? These will help define the intensity of your lifestyle – AKA will you need to become a 24/7 gym rat?
I think the biggest mistake we make is trying to fit someone else’s life into our own. We try to eat the same foods, complete the same workouts… We fall into the same traps as those we follow and admire even AFTER they’ve warned us.
What we SHOULD do is stay true to ourselves. BE PICKY! Only choose strategies that work within your life – don’t try to also be your trainer (who lives in the gym) or your dietitian (who might live in the kitchen). Why? Because you simply can’t live multiple lives.
Be yourself. Find YOUR Prime-self.
One of the GREATEST benefits of establishing your individual style is ensuring CONSISTENCY. You’ve essentially developed a lifestyle that’s sustained by your regular routines, habits, choices, and programs. Stuff you WANT to adhere to. And if ANYTHING is going to promise goal achievement, it’s consistency.
And honestly, I wouldn’t wait. Take some time this week to consider what choices or aspirations you’ve made this year, so far. What compromises have you made to pursue your goals, and are the consequences worth it?
If you’d like help establishing your personalized performance lifestyle, reach out to Preston Performance! Size me up with a Free 15-minute call or jump right into an appointment!
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