Sports | Recovery

Hi and welcome to day one of the recovery pack. Now, rest and recovery in sports is probably the most underrated and neglected aspect of training. The truth is, the more intense your exercise and competition, the greater the need for rest and recovery, the body simply will not perform at its optimum level if it's not given enough rest. Now of course, there's two different types of rest and recovery. There's the short term, immediately after an event, and then there's the long term, how do you build in a pattern of rest and recovery over the long term? Whether that's part of your training cycle, part of your off season, your rest cycle. These next 10 days are really how to approach that in such a way that it starts to feel productive rather than feeling lazy and unproductive when you're not doing something, instead, recognizing the benefits and understanding how rest impacts performance. Now the exercise we're going to use is a visualization exercise. So if you haven't done any of that before make sure you watch the visualization video first. As always, I'll lead you through the exercise. But to start off with, just make sure you're sitting comfortably. Whether that's on a chair or on a bench, on the floor, eyes open, and nice soft focus. And when you're ready, just starting with some big deep breaths. Breathing in through the nose and out through the mouth. And with the next out breath, just gently closing the eyes. Just feeling the weight of the body pressing down. And just starting to notice the different sounds in the space around you. And just bringing the attention back to the body now, starting to notice how the body feels right now. A big part of rest and recovery is learning to listen to the body. So starting at the top of the head just gently scan down towards the toes noticing what feels comfortable, what feels uncomfortable. We're not trying to change anything, we're just listening and noticing how the body feels. And as you become more aware of those different sensations in the body, starting to notice the movement of the breath, that rising and falling sensation the body creates as it breathes. Sort of a more subtle sensation. And just taking a moment to notice the rhythm of the breathing right now. Now having focused the mind in that way, just like you to imagine a really strong ray of sunshine just beaming down from above your head down into the body. (indistinct) though it was very warm, comforting. I'd like you to imagine it almost has a liquid quality in the sense that it flows. We're going to imagine almost as though the body is like a vase or a jug just filling up with this quality, and as it does so, it just washes away any discomfort, any toxins, any lactate, whatever it may be that's built up in the body and instead...