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Recovery and Relaxation Tips for Athletes
By Aniela and Jerzy Gregorek

The most important factor in improving and maintaining performance of any kind is recovery. This includes both physical and mental improvement and maintenance. Ernest Hemingway said that when he was writing, he would continue until he reached a creative peak, then he would stop. He knew that he had stopped at the right point when he sat down the next day to write again and found that his writing was effortless. In between, his mind had processed new images and new situations automatically, both when he was awake and when he was asleep and dreaming.

Rest Improves Athletic Performance

The same principle applies to athletes. Most athletes are driven to work harder than they should to achieve their goals. Therefore, they burn themselves out or injure themselves and never achieve their goals.

If you want to improve your athletic performance, you must control your rest as well as your work. On the other hand, if you rest too much, you will not have done enough work to improve your performance. So to find the right balance between your performance and your recovery, you must observe your accomplishments on a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly basis, and determine at which points your performance failed to improve. Those failures are the result of either too much work and not enough recovery, or too little work and too much recovery.

Relaxation Burns Fat

After a serious workout, such as weightlifting, you need to relax your mind as well as your body. We've found that meditation is superb. The body has two nervous systems: the sympathetic, which controls action, and the parasympathetic, which controls recovery from action. The first system uses adenosine triphosphate (ATP) as energy, which helps one to lift. The second system uses fat as energy, which helps one to recover. Therefore, the more relaxed we are after we exercise, the more fat we burn.

To relax both the body and the mind without the help of other people, such as a masseuse, or complicated, expensive equipment, such as a sauna, one need only practice daily meditation. We have found, after much experimentation, that this works best combined with aroma therapy and meditative music. For these, a bottle of essential oil, such as lavender, and an iPod or CD player are all one needs. We like Jules Massenet's "Thai Meditation," played by the Budapest Philharmonic Orchestra. When they have used aroma therapy and music for several weeks, our clients not only lose fat and gain muscle, but they also become calmer, more rational, and more pleasant.

R&R Tips for Athletes At-a-Glance

Athletes who remember to rest, recover, and rejuvenate will be healthier than those who push themselves relentlessly. Here, at a glance, are R&R tips to remember:

• Balance rest with work. If you want to improve your performance of any kind, you must control your rest as well as your work.
• Avoid burnout. Like writers, artists, musicians, in fact anyone who works, athletes need to quit training each day before they reach the point of exhaustion.
• Breathe. Remember to inhale before each exercise motion and exhale after.
• Observe your inner being. As you exhale, become aware of where you are in time and space and which parts of your body are in or out of balance.
• Heed the body-mind connection. Massage, hot baths, saunas, steams, and such are some of the many ways to relax your body. But you also need to relax your mind.
• Meditate. Meditation triggers the parasympathetic nervous system. The parasympathetic nervous system controls recovery from action and burns fat for energy as it does this.
• Inhale relaxing vibes. Aroma therapy, with the aid of essential oils, stimulates both mind and body relaxation.
• Experience mindful music. Calming music helps you to not only lose fat and build muscle, but also to become a more rational and pleasant person.
• Get enough sleep. A restorative sleep requires the right expenditure of energy (exercise) and the right intake of food (proper nutrition).
  

Aniela and Jerzy Gregorek are founders and head coaches of the UCLA weightlifting team, and own a successful personal coaching and athletic training practice in LA. Aniela is a five-time World Weightlifting Champion who holds six world records, and Jerzy is a four-time World Weightlifting Champion with one world record. They have devoted the last 30 years to researching and designing The Happy Body Program, and now share that program in a new book, The Happy Body (www.thehappybody.com).

Are Endurance Exercises Aging Us Faster?
By Aniela and Jerzy Gregorek

In the late 1960s, the Cooper Clinic promoted running as an inexpensive way to achieve fitness and good health. Back then, only about 100,000 people in America were runners. Now that number is more than 30 million.

The problem is, endurance running--and other aerobic exercise that relies on repetitive motion over a long period of time, such as stationary biking or the step master--results in premature symptoms of aging: slower reflexes, shorter and weaker muscles, less flexibility, worn out joints, broken posture, and inflammation that takes hours to stabilize.

Does that mean running is bad? Not if you sprint. Let's compare sprinting to marathon running.

Sprinters are the fastest of runners and use the widest range of motion in their legs. Marathon runners, at the other extreme, are the slowest of runners and use the narrowest range of motion in their legs. While they are running, sprinters' bodies are as hard as possible during the moment of impact with the ground, and then as soft as possible when they fly through the air between strides. The gap between the hardness and softness of the sprinters' muscles is extreme, as it the speed with which they go from one state to the other. In contrast, marathon runners' bodies are far less hard at impact and far less soft during flight.

At rest, sprinters have the most flexible bodies of all runners and the softest, supplest of all muscles, whereas marathon runners have the least flexible bodies and the hardest, densest of all muscles.

All interval or power exercises make us better by increasing our youthfulness--defined as flexibility, strength, speed, and posture--and all endurance exercises make us worse by contributing to our hardening and aging process.

The common misconception, is that only endurance exercises have cardiovascular benefits. The truth is that both interval and endurance exercises have cardiovascular benefits, but the former has them without the side effects of exhaustion, inflammation, and musculoskeletal degeneration. In fact, interval exercises are better for the heart than endurance exercises because the range between the highest and the lowest number of heartbeats is far greater, and therefore the muscles of the heart are stronger.

The whole purpose of our Happy Body program, which helps people regain youthfulness, is to slow down the again process by retaining the body's softness when it is relaxed while simultaneously developing its hardness for action. The bigger the gap between a body's hardness and softness, the better; and the faster that one can go from one to the other, the healthier, more elastic, and more powerful the body. A weak brittle body is like a solid glass ball. Throw it against a wall and it will shatter. A strong, elastic body is like a rubber ball. Throw it against a wall and it will bounce back with force.

People who train for power have endurance without trying to. Power athletes are happy and energetic. Endurance athletes are tired, sore, and in pain. If you love to run, as many people do, then get in the habit of breaking up your run with 45 minutes' worth of frequent, intense wind sprints, instead of slow, steady jogging. Hopefully, you will phase out the jogging altogether.

Aniela and Jerzy Gregorek are founders and head coaches of the UCLA weightlifting team, and own a successful personal coaching and athletic training practice in LA. Aniela is a five-time World Weightlifting Champion who holds six world records and Jerzy is a four-time World Weightlifting Champion with one world record. They have devoted the last 30 years to researching and designing The Happy Body Program, and now share that program in a new book, The Happy Body (www.thehappybody.com).

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