Up Your Game
Elite level coach, Paul Winsper tells us how every athlete can keep pushing their performance levels.Nike SPARQ is a division of Nike that works with some of the world’s best athletes and teams, and has a mission to innovate ways to enhance performance. SPARQ is an acronym for ‘Speed, Power, Agility, Reaction and Quickness,’ and a SPARQ assessment covers all these areas in a multitude of sports for athletes around the world.
SPARQ Performance Director Paul Winsper heads up the team of ex-professional athletes, tech geniuses and psychology experts who dedicate their lives to helping elite sportsmen and women get even better. Here, he explains the things we can all do to increase our performance levels and up our game.
Selecting the right activity at the right time is vital.
If you can choose the right thing at the right time, you can really change your motivation. You shouldn’t be inflexible, like, ‘Hey, it’s Tuesday – let’s lift some weights!’ but instead, be smart about when to do what.
The motivation an athlete has to win a Gold medal is pretty different to the motivation somebody has to get up from the sofa and lose 10lbs, but the right timing is something that applies on every level, as we see from all the data we can track activity with today. The psychology of behavior change is about engagement and information. You don’t want your routine to get predictable or it becomes boring; on the other hand, there are certain good habits you can pick up. For example, exercising on a Monday before 9am sets you up great for the week ahead.
“People might be surprised to hear that high-level athletes do have down days, like everybody else.”
Improving your performance is not the same as punishing yourself.
Many people still make the huge assumption that people should give their all, all the time. That’s where the model of going to the gym came from – when you go a set number of times a week and every time lift weights till your arms give up.
But in reality, some days you’re not ready for the gym. Swimmers are very good at understanding their bodies, and if you’ve been a pro-soccer player for 15 years, you should have great core fitness and awareness. Some days, we might just do some yoga or stretching instead of cardiovascular work, because long term, that will be more productive. Once upon a time, people thought the sign of a good gym session was being sick afterwards. Those days are gone and today, we don’t even do that with the pros. Don’t push yourself so far that you forget your greater purpose.
Even superstars have down days.
People might be surprised to hear that high-level athletes do have down days, like everybody else. Sometimes things just aren’t clicking. When you get up and train seven days a week for years and years, it can get oppressive for people. For that reason, it can be hugely motivating sometimes for athletes to change or even blow off their training once in a while. Great athletes have their off-days, too. They move the same as the rest of us, their brain functions the same. It happens to everybody.