Thanksgiving break is a chance to get away from school and everything that goes along with it. Most of you will probably welcome a week without crossfits, but completely shirking your workout schedule can spell disaster for the Tuesday that you come back to the Armory.
Now, I’m sure all of you have convinced yourselves that you’re going to do a crossfit everyday, and you’re going to come back and be a god on the indoor track. Yeah, right. We both know that ain’t happening. You don’t want to sit there watching football and eating turkey all week either. So, what’s a good ultimate player to do over Thanksgiving break?
I advise you to focus on flexibility. Flexibility is the most ignored factor of fitness, yet it is a key part of becoming faster, stronger and better. Increasing flexibility increases your range of motion. If you cover more ground with fewer steps, then you are faster (it’s obvious I know). Also, increasing your flexibility increases the number of muscles you work with each exercise. This means that more muscles are getting stronger with each rep, and you will gain more strength versus a person doing the same exercises with less flexibility.
“How do I increase my flexibility?” The obvious answer is stretching, but you need to be stretching correctly. Make sure your muscles are warm before you reach for your toes. Stretching while your muscles are cold increases your risk of pulling a muscle. There’s a good reason why we use a dynamic warm-up instead of standing in lines and stretching. Go for jog. Do some light lifting. And then stretch. Go through our post-practice stretching, except take 30 seconds for each stretch. Anything less only maintains your flexibility, but you want to increase it. Take your time. Listen to music and don’t switch your stretch until a song is over or something like that.
Take this turkey week and stretch out. Your muscles will thank you come Tuesday.
2 comments:
You got a point there! but what if bothering me the most is not the muscle but my lung, I often feel that I can hardly catch my breath after running crossfit, suicide, or some crazy small boxing drills.
I am not a doctor, but that could be sports induced asthma. You may want to get that checked out by a doctor if it gets worse.
Other than that, my advice is to calm down and steady your breathing after a drill. Once you finish a crossfit, breath deep into your lungs. Imagine that you are taking the air not only into your stomach, but into your lower back as well. This maximizes the amount of air you take in your body, while minimizing the number of breaths.
Remember, wait til after a crossfit to do this. Let you lungs breath hard during a crossfit because your body needs that air.
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