Enforce Responsibility

Make your child responsible for packing their gear, whether spikes, shin-guards, sticks, or pads. You can casually look over their shoulder to make sure it is being done correctly. However, packing their own gear will help them understand and learn responsibility. Equipment is mandatory, so if they don’t have it, they won’t play. If you make your child responsible for their equipment, it is a small detail that has a greater positive impact in life. Responsibility teaches preparation and being prepared exemplifies care.

Another way to teach them responsibility is during a game. If your child makes an error or lousy play on the field, have them own it. Have your child take responsibility for their actions so they know how to accept, adjust, and change rather than blame. Being responsible will make your child feel confident.

Increase Their Confidence

Make your child feel confident with their decisions on and off the field. Give them high fives, pats on the back and hugs, for good plays and good grades. Let them feel the difference when they play well, show respect and good sportsmanship, are honest, and work hard. Your affection will help your child develop these qualities more and understand the rules to grant them independence. Your child ultimately, and sometimes you don’t see it through bad behavior, want your affection and praise. So, show them what you like and don’t like to help them be confident in what to do.

Confidence develops responsibility, and both of these qualities will make them feel secure.

Make Them Feel Safe

To be independent, you need a sense of security. Feeling safe makes experiencing and learning easier and better, and your child will not be scared to say yes or no. When your child does not feel safe, being insecure leads to poor decision-making and maybe agreeing to something that puts them in harm’s way. You have to combat this by dealing with social pressure, the feeling to be perfect created by social media. Create a safe environment for them to make mistakes in a controlled situation, which is what sports teach your child; to deal with the agony of defeat and turn it into success.

Make your child feel safe by listening to them. Knowing that you will listen to them, unconsciously tells your child they can speak to you about anything.

Let Them Experience

During games, your child is learning to make decisions with sports experience. They have to know what to do and when to do it correctly. This is key to have independence. It is these decisions that not only pertain to the game but in life. These sports experiences structure their mindset and behavior. Your child experiences and learns best by playing in general; however, sports bring about a greater sense of responsibility and decision-making. Qualities like teamwork, sportsmanship, and respect arise to form your child’s emotional ability. And it is through experience, they can learn to be accountable.

Accountability

Accountability is important. Teach your child to be accountable for their actions rather than blame. This will help discourage bad behavior. Your child needs to be held responsible for their actions, especially their mistakes. They need to know mistakes will be made and it is ok. However, make your child learn accountability by giving them chores to do in a timely manner, like taking out the garbage, cleaning the dishes, or cleaning their room. Make sure you have consequences if they don’t do their chores, for example, no phone or television.

As a parent, you need to create the rules, so your child knows what to do. Your child is more intelligent than you think. They are smarter than lawyers (LOL). Your child can talk their way out of a box, so eliminate as many loopholes as you can to keep them accountable. For example, remind your child of consequences before their actions so they can’t talk their way out of it.

Parents need to let their children experience situations to practice and learn to be independent. It is a trial and error environment that needs to be safe and controlled; to turn failures and mistakes into understanding how to act correctly. That is why you can use sports to your advantage. From responsibility to affection, you can create the best situations and outcomes for your child to develop your trust to be independent. Of course, as a parent, you will always worry. It is the name of the game. But when you can trust your child, it can make you more relaxed. Well, maybe just a little bit.

READ MORE:

• Youth Sports Psychology: How to Ensure Your Athletes Stay Motivated and Have Fun
• Why a Strong Parent-Coach Relationship is Essential
• How to Run an Effective Youth Baseball Practice

Confidence is Key

When you let your child have fun, it produces confidence. Confidence is essential in sports and life because it helps your kid play better. And when they are confident, they are more willing to learn and develop their skills. As Joe Namath, ex-San Francisco 49ners quarterback, said, “When you have confidence, you can have fun. And when you have fun, you can do amazing things.”

Losing is OK

Boris Beck said, “I love the winning. I can take the losing. But most of all, I love to play”. Wanting to win is ok; there is nothing wrong with that. It is the obsession to win, and the emotional disruption of losing that eliminates the fun for your child. Losing is ok as well. Your child needs to know how to lose and learn from their losses, not lose the love of the sport. Loving to play and having fun are the most important things because they lead to be better, optimism and improvement. What you love is never work, and you are willing to put all your energy in to develop yourself more. You need to help your child understand this so they can have fun even when they lose.

Listen, Respect

Listen to your child and respect their choices. Doing this makes them feel good and excited because they construct their fun, not be told what and how to play. As a result, they begin to comprehend what they like and dislike, which helps them understand themselves and sport better. When they know their sport better, they want to play and learn more.

Be a Cheerleader

No matter win or lose, praise your child’s efforts. When you applaud their efforts, it takes the stress off of them. They will learn that winning or losing does not matter, and they can understand and enjoy “the fun of playing.” If you criticize them for not winning or playing poorly, it takes the pleasure out of the game. They will feel stress and pressure, and that is what they will understand and not look forward to games every weekend.

Lead by Example

You are the role model, and what you say will keep them stimulated and engaged, or not. Instead, praise your child for their effort regardless of the outcome. Praising them helps your child understand their feelings. When kids can identify with their feelings of sadness, frustration, or disappointment, you can help them know it is just a game and ask, Did you have fun playing?

Be a good sport and model good sportsmanship. Children learn by watching you. They learn by observing your behavior at the game, during the game, and after the game. Your child understands behavior more than you think. Therefore, cheer for other children on the team, not just your child. Give encouraging positive words to all players on the team. Learn to applaud the other team’s good plays and efforts. And, let your child know it is essential to shake hands after the game no matter the result. These actions will show them that sport and playing are about fun.

Step Back

Don’t interfere. Try not to take the game so seriously. Don’t obsess over who is winning or losing or playing good or bad. Just let your kid play and have fun. That is what childhood is about, remember?

Be Helpful, Not Critical

Don’t compare or critique your child. When you do this, it makes them feel like they did something wrong. And if they feel like they did something wrong, it makes them nervous, and they will associate stress and nervousness with the sport, and the sport will lose its fun. All children have different styles and abilities of learning. There is no need to compare them to other children or yourself when you were a child. The positive, optimistic way is the best. There is no pressure, no stress, and your child will enjoy running around on the field.

No Pressuring

Don’t pressure your child to perform. Pressuring your child makes them nervous, takes away the fun, and leads to mistakes. And when they are anxious, it causes more errors. When your child is having fun, it will help them discover new skills and improve their performance without knowing if they made a mistake or not.

The last thing you need to do is ruin the game and their love and enjoyment of the sport. Use fun to your advantage because your child is receptive to learning when excited and having fun. If you add pressure, stress, worry, criticism, or obsession, your child will disengage. Think about the boss breathing down your neck. It stresses you. Now, imagine your child; they don’t have the emotional maturity yet to understand the stress and take it personally. Taking it to heart disrupts them mentally and physically.

So, could you sit back, relax and let it flow? Just let yourself go and teach the same to your child.

8 Training Program Guidelines

These aspects will set the foundation and prevent injury as your athlete advances over the years.

You can challenge and progressively increase the volume and intensity of training, not crush your child. Remember, every child is different. If you crush your kid, it is not suitable for their physical and mental growth.

1. Teach various exercises and movements that require coordination, stability, balance, changes in direction, and spatial orientation. Use a variety of exercises like sport-specific, functional and multilateral movements.

2. Design drills that continue to develop fundamentals to reinforce technique and skill development.

3. You can teach more complex skills, but only if the fundamentals exist. It is like playing the video game Pacman, and the joystick can’t move Packman to the right. Therefore, you can’t play the game effectively. Just like with skills, if you can’t move to right very well, it will affect advanced skill development.

4. Emphasize improving flexibility.

5. You can introduce your child to general strength training exercises, for example, Pull-ups, Bench Press, Rows, Shoulder Presses, Deadlift, Squats, Lunges. These exercises will develop the foundation to build strength.

6. Emphasize developing the core and the hips for stability and power.

7. Continue developing aerobic capacity.

8. Introduce specific anaerobic training. You can increase the amount and distance in sprinting. In younger athletes, sprints are usually to the 50-yard line. Now you can sprint the field. This will help them adapt to a higher anaerobic capacity.

When puberty starts, your child better understands coordination, balance, visual timing and perception, and rhythm. It is the phase these attributes begin. So, it becomes the perfect time to implement them. These attributes are not quite in their developed stage with younger kids. However, they need to be introduced at that time. It will stress the importance of these movements to be more thoroughly trained when older.

Use the KISS factor when teaching any skill, technique or movement pattern. Keep It So Simple. If it is too hard, they will not learn or disengage.

Strength Train, Don’t Bodybuild

Strength training is often confused and associated with bodybuilding. They are different. At this stage, don’t emphasize building big muscles. You can do strength training, and it is recommended to start as early as age 8, but you must keep it light. Too much weight puts too much stress on muscles and tendons. Bones are still developing at this time, and growth plates are still working. So, heavyweights are not advisable until later, at the age of 18. However, lightweights have a green light.

Tips To Start Your Child Strength Training

• Consult a professional. Find someone you trust and who has years of experience.
• Warm-up. Start each strength training session jogging or jumping rope for 5-10 minutes. This warms up the body and prepares it to do more intense training effectively.
• Cool down. End each session with a lower intensity exercise like walking to bring the body back to normal gradually. Doing this helps prevent fatigue and feeling tired.·
• Focus light. Focus on light resistance about 12-15 reps with proper technique and controlled movements. Show your child how to strength train using bodyweight movements, free weights, machines, med balls, and resistance bands. Two sets of 12 to 15 repetitions are enough.
• Emphasize proper technique. Your form serves as the basis of good functional technique. The technique is more important than weight. Form creates function, and function produces good movement.
• Supervision. Kids need supervision. It is easy for them to be tempted to do something they are not supposed to do, like lift heavyweights!
• Rest between workouts. Make sure your child rests a few days between workouts. They should only be doing this once or twice a week.
• Keep it fun and interesting. Change up the exercises so they can learn a variety of movements to connect with their sport.

The results at this age are not important; the foundation of being functional is essential. Compounding strength on asymmetry and poor alignment is unhealthy. It leads to injury if you are not balanced, stable, or functional enough to move well.

Check out my book, Instant Strength to know more about training and The Balanced Body to know more about stability and alignment.

Ethics is a big part of the sport, but trash-talking often develops the ego and leads to poor sportsmanship. And, this can trickle into other aspects of life. For example, trash-talking on the field can lead to teasing and bullying in school. It can also lead to talking back to teachers and elders. Trash talking can empower the child’s ego, thinking it is ok to do to whomever at any time. In any event, trash-talking leads to worsening a player’s behavior and performance, giver and recipient.

Trash Talk Leads to Violence

Here is a perfect example of how insults and trash-talking go wrong. Take Zidane, for example, in the 2006 World Cup, where he delivered a head butt to the chest of the Italian soccer player, Materazzi. Materrazzi called Zidane a terrorist and Zidane retaliated using an act of violence. Materazzi called him a terrorist because Zidane was born in France, but his family is Algerian. Zidane’s Mom and Dad moved to France before the start of the Algerian War. However, despite this, how do we know what insults will go too far and too much? How do we know what words will make an impact to create an explosive emotional result?

Trash Talking and the Inconceivable

Kwane Doster was a 21-year-old running back who played for Vanderbilt University. Kwane was shot to death after stopping at a sandwich shop with two friends leaving from a nightclub on a Sunday after midnight in Tampa. Kane’s friends had a verbal exchange with three other men about whose car was better outside the nightclub. They all unexpectedly met at a stoplight and exchanged insulting words again. As they went on their way, Kwane and his friends went to a sandwich shop. In the parking lot, the other antagonist group met up with Kwane and his friends once again. One of the men from the other car got out and fired a shot at Kwane’s friend’s vehicle. Kwane just happened to be sitting in the back seat where the shot was fired, killing him. No one else was injured.

You see how something so trivial like trash talk can cause something so inconceivable like death, the death of someone not involved in the word exchange.

To-Do or Not to Do

The youth in sport are more sensitive. Kids lack life experience, judgment, and emotional skills that sports are trying to build for them. In youth sports, it should not be allowed because kids have not developed maturity yet. And in most incidences, it leads to a road of bad behavior and ego that will diminish their performance and behavior. Those who play great don’t think about being great. They control the ego. Those who think they are great to have ego controlling them. I won’t name names, but it is easy to see in professional sports today if you are a victim of trash talk, smile and nod and give a thumbs up. You kill ignorance with kindness and a smile.

Trash talking goes against what it means to be a professional. Silence is gold and develops reverence. When a trash talker knows they can’t get under your skin, it gets under theirs. Like I was taught when I was young, the bigger the mouth, the louder the words, the worse the player and more insecure. So, never run your mouth and put the scores on the board.

Integrity is Essential

Sportsmanship represents the qualities of respect, honesty, and fair play. In contrast, trash talk creates and leads to the opposite; disrespect and arrogance. The two do not integrate nor coincide to produce life qualities or personal development. Trash talk promotes disrespect and can elicit an angered response like with Zidane and the death of Kwane.

Rather than being a positive aspect of the sport, trash talk is negative. What seems to be playful is many times not and leads to escalation. The little things you say tend to step over more and more boundaries, leading to more harsh and offensive words. What we practice, we become, and the repetition of this practice widens. For example, saying “you suck” develops and lowers and devalues a player’s personality and behavior, leading to more significant insults of someone’s race or nationality. It will happen with trash talking. It will eventually go too far.

Today, society is more polarized than ever. Kids and adults are at an intensity of 8 out of 10 rather than a relaxed score of 2. The “depends” variable is essential. This means that depending on the time and situations we are in, you can allow it to happen. Trash talk has been swept under the rug for years. But is now time to stop provoking, protect an athletes’ integrity, and understand the value of sportsmanship and respect.

It is ok if you want to pound the path forward and succeed athletically. But athletes need to have respect. In the youth, there is a nurturing process occurring. In professionals, it is a waste of energy. Remember, the path you choose is what develops, positive or negative; evolution always occurs, for good and bad.

Degrading a player on the field can lead to doing it off the field in life. In the long run, insults produce invisible scars that are unnoticed, pushing an athlete to the point of no return. If your kids are unconsciously learning and discovering through sports, then trash-talking interferes with their discovery.

Read More:

• How Parents Are Ruining Sportsmanship
• How to Deal with Trash Talk

Many great athletes like Phil Mickelson, Kareem Abdul Jabar, Kobe Bryant, and Herschel Walker practiced martial arts and became very successful in their sport. Martial arts are a discipline that can teach your child honor, respect, focus, and empathy and, at the same time, develop their reflexes and reactions of a cat. It teaches not only to improve their body but their brain as well.

1) Discipline

Martial arts teach you to have an open mind, instructing that “one” is always a student no matter how advanced they are to continue evolving and progressing. Discipline helps you think more rationally than impulsively, giving you the ability to control your emotions. Having discipline helps you stick to your training goals, sport, academics, etc., making you more responsible and dependable.

2) Respect

Martial arts teach respect for yourself and your opponents. You must learn how to win and lose gracefully. It teaches kids to respect their classmates, partners, instructors, and teachers.

3) Focus and Mental Acuity

Sports is one way to increase your focus, but martial arts enhance it. There are more specifics and details to instill, develop and train when learning techniques. When training martial arts techniques, a form is a must for all, from kids to adults. It requires you to synchronize, focus, and integrate your breath, mind, and whole body to move, something a coach does not really teach you. Developing mental understanding will keep you alert and sharp, but most important, rational.

4) Improves Stability, Coordination, and Timing

Martial arts require a high level of coordination and timing to perform the movements correctly and to strike or block effectively at the right time. Learning to block and avoid attacks helps to develop stability and your center of gravity. Martial arts training develops the coordination between the nervous systems and muscles. It effectively transfers this process into sport, more than a person playing the sport itself. This also crosses over into sport, for example, by being able to time and coordinate passes more effectively and faster to another player. Kids can learn to synchronize their movements and muscles better and enhance their hand and eye coordination.

5) Develops the 3 Planes of Motion

The body moves in three-dimensional planes of motion, but people often move in only one-dimension. Martial arts develop strength, speed, power, and reflexes in all planes and ranges of motion. By incorporating all three planes of movement into your training, you will increase your range of motion and produce greater stability and strength for your body.

6) Reflexes, Agility, and Reactions

Fast reflexes are required for martial artists to block and defend as well as to counterattack. Blocking and dodging produce faster reflexes, reactions, and agility that transfer onto the playing field or other sports. Martial arts build new neuromuscular pathways of movement and neural patterns in the brain. Your reaction times become faster on and off the field, and you will be able to anticipate your opponents’ movements as well.

7) More Explosive

Martial arts require you to kick or punch faster than your opponent to strike them. It also teaches you to defend and dodge your opponents’ attack and strike.

8) Memory

Martial arts teach muscle and mental memory. Kids need to learn quality repetitions with each punch, kick, or throw. This memorization leads to greater strength, speed, power production, and improved performance. It carries over into academics, helping them retain information in school.

9) Perseverance

Repetition and demand for quality develop perseverance. All in all, martial arts will develop qualities that transfer into sport and life. It has a more in-depth development of the brain and nervous system that improves athleticism across the board. Today, there are many sports teams like rugby, hockey and football, that are training their players with tactical fighting skills because of how it translates into their sport and has made significant and notable differences in their performance.

Read More

• How Martial Arts Training is Making Elite NFL Pass Rushers Unstoppable
• The Secret to Alabama Football’s Success? The Hardest Practices in The Nation

Training the brain to develop the mind-body connection requires these 3 things:

1) Perception
The ability to hear, see and feel to become aware through your senses. This leads to awareness.

2) Awareness
The ability to pay attention to or know something. This leads to mindfulness.

3) Mindfulness
Being fully present and conscious of what is happening and what you are doing. This leads to change.

These three things will help you to understand your reality. I like to say, mindfulness is bringing the unconscious into the conscious to understand or change something. It develops the ability to direct your attention where it needs or where you want it to be.

Breathing

Most people have a low perception of their breathing. You are involuntarily breathing; therefore, your mind slips away from your breath. You do not pay attention consciously to your inhalation and exhalation, whether it is shallow, deep, fast, or slow. Once you perceive and feel yourself breathing shallowly, you become aware of it to take deeper breaths. Being mindful of your breathing helps you adjust and change your breathing pattern.

Ways to Train Your Brain

The Dali Lama says, “Just one small positive thought in the morning can change your whole day”.

Mindfulness changes actions that lead to changing outcomes to formulate a better result. And so, you need to be mindful of what you do and understand why you do it and the consequences before you do it. For example, smokers are conditioned to smoke. They just do it habitually without thinking about any health consequences. Another example is when people run, they are not attuned to how they are breathing which creates fatigue, not permitting them to improve their running. Habitual poor conditioning severs the mind-body connection. Therefore, mindfulness needs to come from your own attention, perception, and awareness to change actions.

Become More Aware and Mindful

Being mindful is excellent to improve health, well-being, and performance. It helps you break away from conditioning and habits developed in the past that are disrupting the present.

Stress
Don’t stress. Learn to be relaxed and calm in situations. Stress narrows your thinking and makes you react without reason or intention. Stress in the mind tenses the body is leading to physical ailments.

Social Interaction
Understand how friends and certain people make you feel energetic. The Dalai Lama says, “Don’t let others or things around you destroy your inner peace”. It will definitely affect your mental and physical health.

Life
Be rid of unsatisfying things that make you unhappy and do things that make you feel good, happy, curious, and interested. Be mindful of negativity.

Get Off Auto-Pilot
Learn to smell the flowers when you walk by them, learn to breathe the fresh air when outside, learn to appreciate the day, or simply look at a beautiful mountain or the sky. Perceive and pay attention longer, and be more aware of your surroundings. Positive feelings open the door to heightened experiences. Get away from things like your TV, phone or computer.

Nutrition
Write down the things you eat each day and understand what is good and bad for you. Understand what you are eating and why you are eating it before you put it in your mouth. Many people just eat because it is fast and convenient and doesn’t care until they develop cardiovascular disease symptoms.

Breathing
Learning to focus on how you breathe is an excellent way to become mindful. Take time throughout your day to stop and take a few deep breaths if needed. Post notes around to remind you to check in on your breath if needed.

Meditation
Meditation does not have to be a one-hour-long session. You can meditate for 5 to 10 minutes a day to help you perceive and be more aware and mindful. Some athletes meditate for 10-15 minutes a day. If you do not like meditation, lay down and relax and listen to some relaxing music.

Athletics and the Mind-Body Connection

Slow it down in the gym.

Do slow functional movement training to be mindful of your movements by focusing on how far your muscles can stretch and contract and how your joints are moving. Understand your body awareness.

Video Record Yourself
Recording your movements when training or practicing can show you unconscious things that you may do that hurt your performance. For example, I record people doing an exercise to make them more aware of how they physically move. It helps them to visualize and understand more thoroughly and be mindful to do it correctly.

Visualize Playing Your Sport
Visualizing yourself scoring a goal or mentally practicing. This will enhance your performance! Visualization can increase ball movement and concentration. Visualize making a perfect soccer pass, a slap shot, sinking a free throw shot, or for a gymnast, or doing a floor routine review in your head.

Breath
Learn to slow down and relax your breathing during practice to incorporate during competition. This helps eliminate stress, and overreacting in a practice or a game, and saves energy.

Breathing and Training
Do slow movements where you have to inhale for 4 seconds, pause, and exhale for 4 seconds. You can use any total amount of seconds. This will connect your mind and breathing to your muscles stretching and contracting.

Tai Chi or Yoga
Develops and integrates strength, breathing, and movement flow.

Famous athletes who practice mindfulness and meditation

• Lionel Messi
• Cristiano Ronaldo
• Novak Djokovic
• Roger Federer
• Tom Brady
• Seattle Seahawks
• Kobe Bryant
• Michael Jordan

Vitamin D is essential to build healthy teeth and bones. Vitamin D also plays a critical role in the reduction of inflammation and reduces inflammatory responses, especially in many diseases, for example:

• asthma
• diabetes
• lung/bronchiole infections
• atherosclerosis
• inflammatory bowel syndrome/ colitis
• liver and kidney

In these diseases, Vitamin D availability or presence tends to be lower. The proper level is essential to be maintained through diet and medication. Vitamin D supplementation has been shown to decrease inflammatory biomarkers in healthy and diseased populations.

Understand, inflammation is a normal response in the body, whether it is fighting an infection or breaking down energy. Your body learns to respond and regulate it appropriately. Without the ability to be controlled, more significant amounts of inflammation occur, which becomes a more severe threat. Being deficient in vitamin D is where problems can start.

How Vitamin D Works

Vitamin D Needs Magnesium.
Magnesium activates vitamin D. According to a review published in The Journal of the American Osteopathic Association, Vitamin D cannot be absorbed without adequate levels of magnesium.

Calcium Needs Vitamin D
Vitamin D regulates calcium absorption. Without vitamin D, calcium will not be absorbed, and, when needed, calcium will be extracted from the bone. Also, low absorption leads to free-floating calcium in the blood which causes plaque to build in the arteries and bone to calcify.

Calcium And Magnesium Directly Affect Each Other’s Absorption
When calcium intake is high, it decreases magnesium absorption. And, likewise vice-versa, high magnesium affects calcium absorption. That is why it is essential to balance the ratio to 1:1.

Calcium and vitamin D depends on magnesium for proper absorption. You have to understand that vitamins and minerals function like locks and keys. They open the door to enter cells, to be absorbed and support and activate their function.

Vitamin D and Covid-19

Vitamin D is not the cure for Covid-19, especially with comorbidity. If it were that easy to prescribe vitamin D for Covid-19, there would be fewer fatalities and less symptomology. However, there is a more significant problem with comorbidity than just vitamin D deficiency that creates vulnerability. Think of structure and function. If the structure is not constructed correctly, it will not function well. Normal levels of vitamin D can help stabilize and reduce the inflammatory effects caused by Covid-19. But, people with comorbidity issues have more of a structural problem that is dysfunctional to control inflammation.

When the body cannot control inflammation, it proliferates and turns into something called a cytokine storm. A cytokine storm causes a hyperactive inflammation response. The inflammation response tends to be fast and severe which the body cannot control. This seems to be the effect Covid-19 has on people with comorbidity. The proliferation is so quick and unable to be controlled that it diminishes health quickly.

So, suppose you have a deficiency in vitamin D. In that case, it is more about the body’s ability or inability to control the inflammatory response, especially created by Covid-19.

Having A Sufficient Level Of Vitamin D Can Help

Your body does not make vitamin D. You have to get it from the sun, food, and supplements. So, it’s important to maintain the proper level. Overdosing on vitamin D will not help reduce inflammation. It can have an adverse effect, actually inducing an inflammation response in your body. Therefore, always maintain the level and don’t go above and beyond it.

Many studies say that vitamin D plays an essential role in controlling the immune and inflammatory response to viruses and diseases. However, vitamin D supplementation and Covid-19 require further evaluation, especially with comorbidity. Make sure you are getting enough vitamin D to have an appropriate, effective, and efficient response to pathogens like Covid-19, diseased or not.

A Better Health/Covid-19 Concoction

Why is it better? Remember, to optimize and maximize the effectiveness of vitamin D you need magnesium. Magnesium is also excellent to support and strengthen the cardiovascular, musculoskeletal, and nervous systems and treat inflammation.

This new concoction is Vitamin D, magnesium, and B12. In one experiment, they gave patients with Covid-19 vitamin D3, magnesium, and vitamin B12. Vitamin D protects respiratory function and controls inflammation. Magnesium activates vitamin D. And, B12 helps improve the good flora bacteria in the small intestines for an effective immune system function. There results and findings were very good and had the potential to offer a better preventative concoction for the general and comorbid populations to control and regulate inflammation more effectively.

Read More

• Your Vitamin D Supplement Probably Isn’t Working. Here’s How to Change That
• The Scientific Reasons You Feel More Tired During Winter
• Flu-Fighting Vitamins and Minerals

Most people think flexibility is just about stretching muscles. There really is more to it than that. Let me explain. When joints are stable and appropriately aligned, it optimizes flexibility. It is more effective because the joints are in the correct position for muscles to stretch and move properly. When joints are not, a compensated process occurs because of the joint’s incorrect position that causes functional imbalances in the muscles.

When the glut is weak and not stabilizing, the hip tilts forward, causing the quads to tighten and lose flexibility. This compensates flexibility and changes the muscles’ ability to stretch because the quads have to do the glutes’ job to stabilize. When you restore stability by strengthening the glute to stabilize the hip properly, the quads will restore their ability to stretch more effectively and maximally.

Therefore, the position of the joint and how you stretch and breathe maximizes flexibility. Understand and incorporate these three things to create instant flexibility and produce dramatic results in your range of motion!

Reciprocal Inhibition

Describes the neurologic process of muscles on one side of a joint relaxing to accommodate contraction on that joint’s other side. Reciprocal Inhibition is a feedback reflex. It works by first contracting the muscle that opposes the stretching muscle before you stretch in the movement—for example, your glutes and quads, quads and hamstrings. The contraction of the opposing muscle initiates a relaxation signal for the muscle to be stretched. Furthermore, the muscle contracting stabilizes the joint providing a more effective proper stretch of the muscle.

For example, when you lunge, contract the glute first to initiate the relaxation signal then stretch the quads.

Autogenic Inhibition

Autogenic Inhibition simply is holding the muscle’s tension barrier during a stretch for 7-10 seconds to relax the muscle further into a stretch. Your muscles know to the finest coordinate the length and speed in which they can stretch. By using autogenic Inhibition, you will be able to stretch further and further instantly, if you do it a few times during your stretch.

For example, when you stretch your muscle and the stretch stops due to tension, if you hold the tension for about 7-10 seconds, the muscles will relax and increase the stretch.

Breathing

Inhalation facilitates the contraction of muscles, and exhalation facilitates the relaxation of muscles. When you inhale, it stabilizes muscles, and when you exhale, it relaxes them. So, inhaling and exhaling using reciprocal Inhibition and autogenic Inhibition enhances muscular flexibility. The inhale supports the contraction, and the exhale helps the stretch. As you cycle your breathing through the stretching pattern, it increases more and more by adjusting, adapting, and changing the range.

For example, inhale as you stretch to the tension point in the stretch. Hold for 7 seconds, then exhale into the stretch further.

To stretch correctly, you want to incorporate all three things into your stretching routine.

Wait for the adjustments. Let the adjustments adapt. The adaptation will change and develop more range.

When you finish the stretch and motion, you will have an optimized pathway to move more freely through your range of motion. Flexibility is a process, not just stretching.

Isolated Stretching

Just stretching and stretching produces limited flexibility. Just stretching a muscle alone is not the best thing either. When you stretch muscles without initiating the proper signals, it pulls the muscle fibers apart. Stretching:

• Makes muscles lax,
• Desensitizes muscles’ ability to absorb and produce force and be explosive.
• Loses resiliency- the ability to restore their shape after being stretched.
• It creates inhibition of motor units firing to contract a muscle, meaning that they cannot contract as forcefully and fast, which is why it affects speed and power.
• Prolonged, increases the length of a muscle but decreases the tone.

As an athlete, muscles need to be able to stiffen, be springy, and explosive. Static stretching removes this ability. You want muscles to be resilient and springy, having the ability to stretch and recoil fast with power.

Static stretching doesn’t hurt you, but it decreases muscle force and contractility. However, it would be wise to understand why and when to stretch. Stretching with resistance is your best bet because even through you are stretching muscles, they still maintain resiliency, firmness, and stiffness with the ability to contract explosively, all at the same time. The added resistance makes the muscles absorb force at the same time, whereas static stretching does not.

Static stretching doesn’t have any detrimental effects, but when you go to load your body or use any kind of strength training or force production, this is where the problem starts to exist and underlie because your muscles don’t respond effectively.

Static stretching muscles reduce muscular stiffness in the lower body, decreasing runners’ running economy. (Running economy is the energy demand for a pace of running determined by measuring oxygen consumption.) The decrease in muscular stiffness due to stretching reduces the springiness and force production. When your muscles perform eccentric contractions and have stiffness and springiness, less oxygen and ATP are used. Less heat is produced because of using elastic energy. Static stretching does not enhance an athlete’s performance but diminishes it. The article also stated that flexible storage was more favorable for athletes with stiffer muscles and tendons.

The Best Times to Stretch

Believe it or not, the worst time to stretch is before competition and training. Stretching diminishes nerve potentiation and force production by making the muscle more relaxed due to increasing the muscle’s length. It relaxes the firmness of the muscle to be less springy and explosive. The trade-off is; muscles lose contractility and gain flexibility. Something you don’t want for your muscles, especially as an athlete, because contractility is your ability to be explosive.

• A few studies say that regular heavy stretching with resistance for 10 minutes three days a week increases strength, speed, and power and enhances flexibility and mobility.
• Others say that dynamic stretching through ranges of motion, where muscles contract and stretch, improve flexibility and promote muscular stiffness.

Static stretching does have a time, place, and purpose. If you want to static stretch, do it on non-training and non-competition days.

Avoid performing before training or competition because it will decrease the explosiveness in your movements.

Slow focused stretching with weights or resistance maintains and enhances muscular stiffness, springiness, and neural potentiation, as well as flexibility.

To understand more about the process of stretching, stiffness, springiness, and proprioceptors my book, The Balanced Body and Instant Strength explains them all more fully.

Read More

• The Role of Flexibility and How It Affects Your Game
• The Importance of Stretching Throughout Your Day

You see, what truly creates happiness and health is your mindset, your thoughts, emotions, and feelings. They produce an environment. Follow these tips to help you construct your process to lead to happiness and health.

Be Mindful

Mindfulness does not create happiness. Instead, it leads to a greater sense of awareness. Mindfulness is being aware in the present moment of your feelings and thoughts and nurturing them for your environment to be better. Mindfulness institutes patience and acceptance through awareness.

By understanding the present moment, you can regulate your thoughts and feelings rather than descend into stress, anxiety, depression, or emotional disorder. As you become more present in life, mindfulness un-brainwashes you to make better decisions, let go of the distractions and disturbances holding you back, making you unhappy and unhealthy. You can manage your life and take back control of your thoughts to produce better and balanced emotions and feelings. This will lead to positive intentions.

Mindfulness is the key to a greater awareness that opens the door to institute patience and acceptance.

Learn to Accept

The world is not a perfect place. Never has been and never will. What will happen will happen. However, you can be happy right now. Happiness is a state of mind and based on your perspective. It is your thoughts and feelings that determine reality. The more you learn to accept, the more balanced you will feel. Whatever you think and feel releases hormones in your body and neurotransmitters in your brain, healthy or unhealthy, happy or unhappy. Your thoughts react to your unconsciousness and create a feeling that leads to physical outcomes like energy or fatigue. Like the medical industry says, stress is a silent killer. Turn your frown upside down. It is all about how you react to your environment.

When you learn to accept, patience is only one step away.

Be Patient

When you have patience, it is the key that opens the door to compassion and empathy and a whole new world that exists on the other side. Patience creates tolerance that reduces your emotional anxiety, criticism, fear, judgment, and frustration. Unlimited patience is hard to come by, but it will lessen the blow of stress that unconsciously diminishes your happiness and health, mentally and physically. It makes it easier to live, function and work because it frees up the mind. And a free mind enhances the body. It allows happiness to happen so you can feel it. To enter this euphoria, you must develop the patience to open that door.

When you have a grasp of the first three things, it will make the following tips easier. It is similar to using Windows or Safari OS. Neither can function on the same computer. And the same goes for your mind and body, health and happiness. You must upload and change how your system thinks and feels to perform differently to access new controls and programming.

If you don’t adapt, adjust, change and evolve, then your outdated system will be slow and challenging to live in a sensitive modern world today.

Avoid the News

The news was or is essential. However, you want to see it. So, you need to limit the amount of information you see each day. When seeing this information, keep at an arms distance. Unfortunately, the news is inundated with strife, suffering, and lies from all sides. These stories drag your mind into the negativity and make you depressed and emotional. The news causes you to lose control of your sense of self. And taking this dose daily, you lose happiness and health, as well as energy. If you repetitively watch the news these days, your mind will adapt to the negativity. And the negativity will become you. I see it happing with friends these days.

Limit Social Media

The power of social media has turned from good to malicious. It is still good, but the dark side is consuming it. Social media promotes too many false-negative experiences; how life is perfect when inadequacy and self-loathing are the real unseen issues. People are not entirely honest about what they post. Social media shortens your attention span. It affects mindfulness that leads to poorer mental health. Poor mental health leads to unhappiness and being unhealthy.

Get Enough Sleep

Sleep is essential that affects your mood and emotions. When you are tired, you are more pessimistic and short with people. Sleep deprivation affects you negatively and diminishes productivity, creativity, drive, motivation, and stamina. On the other hand, sleep is the best thing to feel happy and healthy for the next day, rather than heavy and tired.

Think Good Thoughts

Most often, people get jealous when someone is getting ahead or doing well. Learn to reverse the negative thought. Everything you do or think evolves into something more significant. It is why the slightest emotional disruption can intensely worsen. So, if you are jealous of someone and think negatively, it will lead to greater emotional disruptions like frustration, anxiety, and possibly hate. So, do the opposite, think positive, feel-good for someone’s hard work. You don’t know who deserves what put it will make you feel good, send good energy into the world, and surround you with good people. Compassion and sincerity will make you feel better and keep your mind balanced.

Surround Yourself with Good People

When you surround yourself with good people, you enjoy being around these people. And you will want to socialize more. Socializing is necessary for neurotransmitter release like serotonin. So, connecting with positive people and energy will positively energize you. On the opposite side, negativity leads to complaining, and complaining makes you feel heavy low energy and works against being productive and successful in your life. It narrows your mind.

Make Each Day Have Purpose and Meaning

Hanging around with negative people is a fast way to lose meaning and purpose. Instead, do things you enjoy and that bring about passion. For me, it is exercise. It clears my mind, makes me feel good. Even when I am tired, it supercharges me. It makes me think better to be more creative and relaxed at the same time. So, find that thing that brings meaning, purpose, and value to your day. If you don’t like exercise, then listen to music.

Do Exercise Routinely

If you feel tired, sad, or negative, go exercise. It is impressive the way it automatically switches your mood, energy, and health. Exercise relieves stress and tension as well as strengthens muscles. In addition, it releases endorphins that alchemize fatigue into energy and negativity into positivity and depression into feeling well and unhappiness into happiness.

Eat Healthy Food

When you eat healthily, you feel good and can change how you think. How you eat is connected to your emotional state. Eating high sugar and salt foods, refined carbohydrates, and processed and fast food, are linked to emotional anxiety, stress, and sadness. Consume various foods from all healthy food groups to get a range of nutrients to energize you throughout the day.

Choose fruits and vegetables rather than junk food. Many times, you can change your mood if you ignore the junk and choose healthy food. This action releases dopamine as a means of pleasure for reward. And, when eating certain healthy foods, it releases serotonin—another wellness good feeling neurotransmitter in the brain.

If you want to be healthy and happy, try to practice these things. But, of course, no one is perfect. The more you follow them, the better habits you will create. Repetition is the key to perfection. The small changes you do repetitively will begin to change the unhealthy and unhappy ones over time. Don’t start big; start small, and you will notice how one ramifies and connects to the rest to make it easier to change.

Read More:

• Making Healthy Eating Easier With These Items
• Important Healthy Eating Tips

What are muscle spasms and cramps?

Muscle spasms and cramps are basically the same. But with a spasm, it is usually an involuntarily forceful contraction of your muscle that will not relax. However, you can voluntarily invoke a spasm through a muscular contraction, for instance, by contracting your calves, curling your toes, rotating your spine. Many times, a spasm can happen because of possible strength deficiency. So, when you contract, it sends too strong of a signal to prevent injury due to weakness.

What causes muscle spasms and cramps?

Muscle spasms can be caused in many ways. Sometimes it is from low electrolytes like potassium and magnesium. Here are many ways spasms and cramps occur.

• Being inflexible where the muscles cannot stretch properly creates tension and shortens and contracts more.
• Muscular fatigue.
• Dehydration and exercising in the heat cause a loss of electrolytes.
• When your nervous system fires off a big impulse that causes your body to twitch, creating a reflex reaction like when being stressed.
• Poor blood supply to muscles.
• Too much exercise or overtraining, overusing your muscles.
• Sitting poorly over a long of a period of time affects your posture. When muscles cannot maintain position and alignment of the joint and are forced to contract.
• Standing too much on concrete with bad orthopedic shoes like hard-soled shoes.

Ways to treat a spam or cramp?

First things first, relax. Relaxing your nervous system will be beneficial because the nervous system controls everything. Secondly, you have to send the right message to your muscles.

• Slowly stretch your muscles. Never force the stretch. Forcing creates tension, which may be why it is spasming, sending it further into cramping.
• Massage the spasm. Use trigger point massage from your fingers. Find the tight muscle area caused by the spasm. Slowly push your finger, thumb, into the tension. You will feel some pain. Hold the area for 10-20 seconds, then release the point. Repeat about three times. As you apply pressure over time, you will notice the muscle relaxes more, the muscle starts to become more pliable. Again, using too muscle force is counterproductive.
• You can also stretch the muscle and then do the trigger point work on the stretched muscle simultaneously.
• Do contrast therapy. Contrast therapy applies cold and heat alternatively to a muscle cramp or spasm. Start with heat for about 10 minutes. The heat will relax the muscle. Then apply cold for 10 minutes. The cold will constrict the muscle. The idea is to flush the muscle of any inflammation and build-up of any fluid that exerts pressure in the muscle. It helps the muscle relax and bring in new blood and nutrients. Always end on heat.
• You can use rollers that help massage and flatten out the muscle.

How to prevent muscle spasms?

Here are several things you can do to prevent them.

• Stretch your muscles regularly.
• Do strength training.
• Drink water and fluids regularly and frequently.
• Avoid overconsumption of stimulants that send unnecessary impulses through your nervous system.
• Hydrate when exercising in warm/ hot weather.
• Avoid wearing flat-soled or hard-soled shoes often, and wear shoes that fit well.
• Eat fruits and vegetables. The electrolytes will promote balance and less cramping.
• Stand up every 15-20 minutes, walk around and stretch to reset your posture and system.
• If you are standing too much, sit down and relax your feet to stop cramping.

Just remember, try to understand what is causing the spasm or cramp. Therefore, you can treat it appropriately. If you are unsure of the cause, then make sure you create balance in your diet, activity, and stress levels