Your Mind: Nutrition & Training

I recently came across a couple of articles on the mind of an athlete. One focused on nutrition for the brain and the other on training the mind.

With regards to nutrition, the article talks about all the different vitamins, minerals and fats that are important to the brain. What I basically determined from the article is that taking a good Omega 3 supplemnet (salmon fish oil is supposed to be the best, but flax is also a good source) and a good multi-vitamin are important to maintain top brain function. When training, your body is using a lot of the nutrients you take in so a good multi-vitamin is important. I take Premium Insurance Caps from Hammer. This pack of multivitamins also supplements your Amino Acids. I covered the importance of that in my previous post.

With regards to training the mind, it is important to be able to control your stress and anxiety levels and also to work at eliminating negative thoughts. I can relate to both of these issues. I am working at keeping my heart rate to a manageable level at the start line because it has a tendency to increase well above my physical exertion level. Also, while I am generally a positive person, I also find myself with negative thoughts. For example, I didn't do as well as I would have liked in a recent race and I said after the race to my teammate "I suck". I said it kidding around, but I half meant it. Negative thoughts like that do not help and need to be eliminated from your mind. The article takes you through a process to help eliminate these negative thoughts. One of the techniques used is positive affirmations. When I think of positive affirmations, all I can think of is that Saturday Night Live skit. You know the one... "Because I'm good enough, I'm smart enough and, dog gone it, people like me". As quirky as that skit made positive affirmations out to be, they have been proven to work.

Anyway, here are links to the interesting articles:

http://www.velonews.com/train/articles/13178.0.html

http://www.pezcyclingnews.com/?pg=fullstory&id=5287&status=True