Looking for major success? Sleep better.

Achieving optimal sports performance is a major goal for everyone involved in any type of physical activity, whether professional or amateur. Could we apply all the knowledge about sports performance to our work and thus achieve greater success in our professional careers?

Does this question make sense? That is the purpose of this article.

Sports performance is built over three fundamental pillars: training, nutrition, and rest. The right balance between these three pillars will help the body to progress and reach the sporting goals set.

This balance is a fundamental requirement to preserve the health of the different systems of our organism in order to optimize sports performance. Ensuring an adequate food intake according to the training load, as well as respecting recovery periods, and getting enough sleep, are necessary conditions to optimize sports performance.

These three pillars directly impact the four factors that determine the performance: physical, technical, tactical, and psychological.

So, could we establish the feasibility of comparing our work with a sports discipline?

As we have seen before, the first pillar is training. However, we can understand practice in two different ways: mental or physical exercise.

If we understand training as a mental exercise, it seems evident that the activity affects technical, tactic, and psychological factors. Training can improve any discipline to the point of mastery.

Now, we can consider whether investing time in improving our physical condition through exercise has a direct impact on the way we work on a daily basis. Our physical condition will determine our energy, our ability to concentrate, how well we perform in our daily work routine. Additionally, training coupled with good nutrition habits and adequate sleep will improve our immune system. In this way, we will have fewer “injuries” in our working “season”; therefore, we will obtain more performance.

Science has proven all this through several studies. Nevertheless, it is also true that the Greeks already knew that constant exercise is a shield that protects our brain, stimulates learning and memory. Exercise produces a molecule called “Brain-derived neurotrophic factor” (BDNF), fundamentally related to the capacity for growth and plasticity of neuronal connections, and learning is nothing more than brain changes in synaptic levels. Therefore, we can conclude that physical health leads to better mental health.

That being said, training is not the only thing that affects our brain, but also what we eat. Some foods are vital for our brain, such as Omega-3 fatty acids. Without this Omega-3, we would have to stop doing many things because it is a brick for our brain. The answer to this question is in the water because life comes from the sea, which explains why these fatty acids are mainly in fish.

Another example of vital food for our brain is folic acid. Also known as Vitamin B9, this vitamin is essential for cellular detoxification, neurotransmitter production, and slowing down cognitive decline. Folic acid can enable us to increase our mental health in the elderly.

However, the excellent effects of nutrition are silent results, and we must turn them into habits to experience their outcomes. Not perceiving immediate results does not mean this is not important or necessary.

This leads me to the final point, which is sleep and rest. Do you think those aspects affect our brain and body? Do you remember a time when you were unable to sleep well and how you felt the next morning? According to the latest researches, sleeping less than eight hours a night is linked to cognitive decline and memory loss. That is, this sleep deprivation has an effect on the mental capacity to learn, think, argue, problems solving, make decisions, memory, and attention capacity. We can not build nor maintain the brain’s pathways that allow us to learn without sleep.

While we sleep, our brain is occupied removing toxins, restoring wear and tear caused by daily use, labeling, and generating memories. The brain is constantly collecting information while we sleep, even if not consciously. It is thanks to its great plasticity, which allows us to store throughout the day data that is processed while we sleep. And although science does not know the reasons yet, some research has confirmed that our brain actives areas related to creativity and learning while we sleep.

With this in mind, we can conclude that the three fundamental pillars of performance can be applied not only to sports but also to the mental sphere, state of mind, and physical condition. It may seem obvious, but for some reason, we find it hard to realize that it is actually a spiral. If you don’t exercise, your mental and physical states will be worse. In those states, it will be harder to exercise every day. Working long hours will not let you exercise, eat healthily or get adequate sleep. Inevitably this will lead you to a worse physical and mental state, which will lead you to work longer hours to counteract that low performance.

Working long hours will not let you exercise, eat healthily or get adequate sleep. Inevitably this will lead you to a worse physical and mental state, which will lead you to work longer hours to counteract that low performance.

Finally, it may be concluded that everything we know about sports performance should apply to our professional career. Investing time in these three fundamental pillars of sports performance would augur us more effectiveness and bigger professional results.

In essence, if you abandon your body, your brain will follow.