14 Steps To Changing Negative Behaviors For Success

Are you physically active for 30 minutes every day?

Do you exercise at least three times a week at a moderate to vigorous intensity for 30 to 40 minutes each workout?

Do you smoke?

Do you have more than a couple of drinks a week?

Do you take other drugs or medicine on a regular basis?

Is your weight what it should be?

Do you eat a well-balanced diet?

Are you able to cope with day-to-day stress?

Can you deal with big emotional problems when they arise?

Do you rely on eating, drinking, and/or drugs when problems arise?

If your answers to these questions reflect a healthy lifestyle, then you can skip this post. Most of us, however, have one or more habits that prevent us from achieving our highest possible levels of fitness and health. In fact, as a society we could make great strides in public health if we changed several aspects of the typical U.S. Lifestyle.

If you have thought about changing the way you live so you can be healthier, then this post can help you.

For those areas in which you have decided to make a change immediately (preparation), you need to identify exactly where you are at now, set some long- and short-term goals, and get professional help (if needed) to determine the dimensions of your new behavior. For example, what type, how much, how frequently, and for how long are you going to engage in physical activity tomorrow? What specific changes are you going to make in your usual breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks tomorrow?

As you begin to make changes in your life, don't feel that you have to do it alone, ask for help. Choose someone who is a good role model for the desired behavior and who will be supportive of you as you make changes. Your fitness instructor, a counselor, or a close friend are good choices for people to enlist to help you throughout the process.

14 Steps To Changing Negative Behaviors For Success

1. Acknowledge desire to change
2. Analyze history of problem.
3. Record current behavior.
4. Analyze current status.
5. Set long-term goals.
6. Set short-term goals.
7. Sign contract with friend(s).
8. List many possible strategies that could be used.
9. Select one or two strategies to use.
10. Learn new coping skills.
11. Establish regular contact with helper.
12. Once goal is reached, outline potential maintenance problems.
13. Learn new coping skills.
14. Maintain periodic contact with helper.

This general plan has several components, but you won't necessarily use each step for every habit

you want to change. A procedure that helps you to resolve one particular problem may not work for someone else, and it may not help you resolve other problems. The steps outlined above provide a general plan of steps that can be reduced, added to, or modified depending on what works for you.

Winning Tips for Optimum Recovery

Overtraining, as we have seen, is a complex syndrome with no guaranteed solutions. However, certain interventions show promise for prevention and treatment. A key concept is recovery, the antithesis of overtraining. One of the biggest difficulties in dealing with motivated but overtrained athletes is that the interventions generally consist of asking them to do less: “Take a day off from training.” “Take it easier on those intervals.” “Don’t do that workout.” “You’re hurting yourself by training too much.” The idea of doing less presents a dilemma to athletes who likely became good through tough training and pushing through the bad days and who are seduced by “if this much training is good, more must be better” thinking. They overtrain by simply doing more of what made them good. The message of doing less is therefore extremely difficult for these athletes to hear and goes against most training philosophies. A typical reaction: “What do you mean, do less? My competitors aren’t taking a day off.”

Recent developments in research on overtraining have shifted focus from overtraining to the idea of underrecovery. Instead of telling an athlete to cease some aspect of training, we can instead channel their need for action toward recovery activities. Indeed, the concept of effective, regular, and varied recovery activities has become part of the language of today’s smart, professional athlete, which is also the best way to sell it. Statements like “You’re not doing everything you can to succeed if you’re not taking care of your recovery” challenge athletes to tackle recovery (and decrease susceptibility to overtraining) in a way that telling them to reduce their training regimen never could. How can coaches and athletes recovery principles to enhance training and decrease the chance of overtraining? Individualization is key. The

first step is to incorporate recovery systematically into training. If a periodized training program is used, it’s important to incorporate more recovery activities into the higher-volume and more-intensive training periods.

An ideal training program that incorporates passive and active recovery activities should include a variety of techniques. Just as there are numerous ways to work on endurance training (hill running, strength and conditioning programs, sustained skill practice), and good coaches mix things up to maintain motivation, there are many ways to enhance recovery. Coaches and athletes should keep this aspect of their training programs as fresh and interesting as the rest of their training.

Coaches must be good teachers and enforcers of recovery principles with their athletes. For example, an active rest day at the track shouldn’t turn into a track meet if rest is the goal. Particularly at the elite level of sport, athletes need to learn that

appropriate recovery is as much a part of their job as is their training regimen, diet, or sleep.

How To Stay Motivated

The subject of motivation is a complex one—in short, it’s an intangible variable that can ebb and flow widely in short periods of time. Athletes with seemingly unparalleled drive lose it. Loafers show up to practice one day with a fire lit inside them. From week to week, teams, athletes, and coaches fluctuate in their intensity and level of dedication.

Norman Triplett is generally credited with the first formal experiment in sport motivation psychology. A psychologist at Indiana University, Triplett was a bicycle enthusiast who had noticed that racers seem to ride faster in pairs than alone. In 1889, he tested his hypothesis by asking children to reel in fishing line in a number of competitive conditions. As predicted, the children reeled in more line when they performed next to another child. The same held true when Triplett examined racing times—cyclists rode faster when paced or pitted against others than when they rode by themselves.

Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud argued that motivation was a product of the subconscious instincts of sex
and aggression. Our behavior, he said, is largely shaped by our instincts.

Behaviorist B.F. Skinner was on the other end of the nature–nurture continuum. He didn’t believe in
the subconscious. To explain motivation, Skinner put forth stimulus–response psychology, claiming that all behavior is controlled by external reinforcements. We are essentially a black box, Skinner said; what goes in determines what comes out.

Although their beliefs were radically different, these psychologists agreed on one thing: Motivation is not up to the individual. They professed humans to be, essentially, products of genetics or the environment. The argument at the time laid groundwork for the nature-versus-nurture debate that still continues today: Is our behavior dictated by our biological makeup or is it a product of what our experiences have taught us? The answer is both.

The most robust motivation—the sort that can push through four years of grueling training for the Olympic Games, or dealing with a coach who doesn’t believe in you—is rooted in the heart and the soul. Motivation strategies should foster autonomy, competence, and connectedness. Examples include:

Push the edge - Find a weakness or hole in your game and get excited about where your game will be after you change it. Similarly, be creative. Think up something no one in your sport has dared or perfected. Experience success - When learning new skills and strategies, go step-by-step. Start with an easy piece, master it, and then move on to the next-easiest piece. Or begin by modifying the skill to something you can do well. Let yourself experience success. Keep track of your PRs and how many times you can break them.

Change your thinking - The old adage about learning from your mistakes is well and good, but over time you should have a short-term memory for failures and a long-term memory for success. Keep a vivid mental catalog of your greatest performances.

Get involved - Autonomy directly improves motivation, and perhaps the greatest contributor to autonomy is having input on decisions that affect you.

In both individual and team-sport settings, athletes should feel ownership of training rules, competition choices, and strategy decisions. Interestingly, on the professional level, many head coaches comment that their success depends entirely on their players’ belief in the “system” or playbook. The easiest way
to ensure this is to get them involved!

Praise others - If you can’t see positive or exciting things in the athletes and coaches around you, how can you do the same for yourself? Moreover, a sense of connectedness depends on everyone’s awareness of the contributions that others make.

Vary training - An imbalance between high competence and low task difficulty can result in boredom. So too can constant hammering at one task. A significant portion of training—just as much as is reserved for skill advancement—should be devoted to play for the sake of play, without rules or evaluation.

Put yourself first - Human beings are most productive at homeostasis since in that state they are not distracted by conflicting basal drives. Make sure to eat properly, stay hydrated, and get ample rest.

Find motivated peers  - Both on and off the playing surface, spend your time with people who want to accomplish great things, aren’t afraid to talk about it, and get revved up by other people’s dreams. An effective support system is vital to motivation, especially during difficult times. Conversely, motivational
“black holes” are people who always criticize the coach, moan about bad calls, loaf in practices and workouts, and generally focus on obstacles, frustrations, and what can’t be achieved.

Think positively - What conversation goes on in the back of your head? It’s with you all day, but how much of it do you pay attention to? Actually, all of it, subconsciously. You’d better start paying conscious attention. Is it positive or negative? Is it about what you can do or what you can’t do? Is it hung up on difficulties or engaged in a search for solutions?
Remember your dream - Don’t make revisiting your dream a rare event. Spend time frequently reconnecting with the real reason why you perform—once again the heart, soul, and will of it all.

Overtraining: Balancing Tough Practices and Performance

Josh is a nationally ranked football player, a senior in high school who is preparing for D1 college. With his sights set on graduation and moving up to the college level, Josh sets out not only to attend his team’s twice-a-day practices and semiweekly weightlifting sessions, but also to do more than any other player every day. He comes to practice early in order to work on foot work and stays afterward to lift weights. He’s up early each morning to get in an extra run. After week one, Josh is tired but confident that he will be in far superior condition than his competitors. Week two brings on increasing fatigue and difficulty sleeping, which begins to worry Josh. Josh tells me, “I need to learn how to relax or something—I can’t seem to get myself ready for practice.” After learning more about his symptoms of hard training and fatigue, I broach the subject of overtraining, but Josh isn’t interested in hearing about it.

Josh’s lack of competitive motivation continues; he is uninterested in eating and lethargic, and he becomes increasingly anxious about his prospects at. At the beginning of the season, he plays poorly.

Josh’s case is all too common—an athlete who seeks to put distance between them self and their competition by doing more, and then more again. Josh’s opposition to acknowledging that he might be overtraining is a frequently observed feature of this syndrome.

What is overtraining, and how can you tell when you or an athlete you coach is overtrained? One of the major difficulties in answering this question is the lack of a reliable way to assess whether an athlete is training at the optimal level versus entering the negative realm of overtraining.

Overtraining, defined by the U.S. Olympic Committee (USOC) in 1999 as “the syndrome that results when an excessive, usually physical, overload on an athlete occurs without adequate rest, resulting in decreased performance and the inability to train,” is on the rise.

While we might argue that overtraining is an almost inevitable by-product of elite athletes being willing to do anything to “get the edge,” this phenomenon is spreading to other levels of sport as well. Researchers are noting an increased incidence of overtraining among even the youngest athletes, who appear all too ready to absorb our culture’s messages about “more is better” and “no pain, no gain.” More recently, of course, overtraining has come to mean something very different—an undesirable outcome of too much training that actually prohibits positive adaptations. For the sake of this discussion, I will limit the term to refer to an undesired outcome of fatigue and performance decrements.

Causes of Overtraining

Stressors related to training and nontraining can cause overreaching and overtraining. In the training realm, an overtraining effect can be elicited in several ways: sessions that are too long or too intense, progressions of training increases that are too steep, and too little time devoted to recovery between sessions, to name a few. Although training volumes and intensities and competition frequency are important factors in this equation, athletes and coaches need to be aware of nontraining stresses that can contribute to overtraining, including nutrition, general health, lifestyle issues such as sleep behavior, and environmental stresses caused by juggling life areas such as school or family. When a number of these stressors combine, they can lead to emotional distress and an increased susceptibility to overtraining. So just as all athletes may react differently to the same training load, they may also react differently to other life elements that interact with their training and lead to overtraining. Good coaches and self-aware athletes pay attention to such outside stressors and adjust the training accordingly.

According to physiological research, we cannot define the exact point at which training goes from being effective to negative for all athletes. In fact, our understanding of the interaction of physical and psychological stress shows that such a point cannot exist, since overtraining is an individualized response. The good news is that this understanding points to a direction for intervention. Although simply reducing the training load is not a guarantee against overtraining, careful and individual tailoring of the training load, with a simultaneous awareness of the effects of other life stresses, helps to optimize training plans.

Athletes can help themselves by doing the following:

• Developing self-awareness of how training and other life stresses are likely to affect them

• Proactively learning strategies to deal with sport and non-sport stressors

• Recognizing the symptoms of overtraining

• Regularly using training logs and other behavioral monitoring techniques to assess optimal training levels

• Learning and properly using recovery techniques

• Striving for balance between sport, school, work, family, social aspects, and other life elements

• Choosing the right coach, who, balances support and challenge in training situations; is a good communicator; encourages recovery, and helps other athletes thrive.

Coaches can help themselves by doing the following:

• Understanding the causes of overtraining, including the fact that it can be brought on by numerous sport as well as non-sport factors

• Taking time to know their athletes, understanding how all kinds of stress may affect them and how vulnerable they are to overtraining

• Creating a supportive and challenging coaching environment that allows athletes to honestly share their thoughts and feelings about their training

• Incorporating regular monitoring of training intensities for each athlete by using logbooks, heart rate assessment, and pencil-and-paper tests

• Adding recovery strategies as a regular part of training, and using good training/recovery principles

• Keeping hard training fun

How coaches and athletes can more effectively accomplish this task will be the focus of future blog posts.

When To Use Heat On An Injury

Heat has been used for thousands of years in the treatment of different types of pain. Experience shows that it has a beneficial effect on pain arising from inflammation, which is the body’s defense mechanism in cases of injury due either to accident or to overuse. Injuries caused by trauma or overuse, such as ligament injuries and muscle ruptures, are often treated during the acute stage by cooling and bandaging so that the bleeding in the injured area is limited. After the initial 48 hours, heat treatment can be introduced to help the healing process. Heat may be started once the risk of hemorrhage is over, and aids healing by increasing the blood flow to the injured area.

If an injury is treated by heat applications in its acute stage the blood vessels expand, and the blood clotting procedure may be disrupted. The amount of fluid in the tissue increases. This leads to increased bleeding in the injured area, increased swelling and higher pressure in the surrounding tissues. The result may be more pain and slower healing than would otherwise be the case.

Perhaps the most important effect of heat treatment is its influence on collagen fibers. A tendon is composed of 90% collagen fibers and 10% elastic fibers. Collagen has viscous and elastic properties, which means that the more rapidly a tendon is loaded, the stiffer it becomes. Heat increases elasticity and plasticity, so after its application the collagen fibers become more flexible and more capable of rehabilitation exercises. Heat also decreases joint stiffness and relieves muscle spasm. This reduces the risk of injury.

Heat can be used in both the prevention and rehabilitation of overuse injuries and to combat the aftereffects of torn muscles and tendons. It can be valuable during warm-up before training sessions and competitions and in cold weather, increasing the mobility of joints.

Lunch: The Second Most Important Meal of the Day

Unfortunately for our health, today’s lifestyles rarely include breakfast and barely accommodate lunch and dinner, even when eaten on the run. Relaxing lunches and dinners—nicely prepared, attractively served, and shared with family and friends—are rare occurrences for many active people and sports families.

My clients commonly express dissatisfaction with their mealtime eating. Yet, when life is full, stress is high, and schedules are crazy, eating well balanced meals on a predictable schedule can provide the energy you need to better manage stress and prevent fatigue.

For active people who should be in the continuous cycle of fueling up for workouts and refueling afterward, lunch is the second most important meal of the day. Breakfast remains number one. Lunch refuels morning or noontime exercisers and offers fuel to those preparing for an afternoon session. Given that active people tend to get hungry every four hours (if not sooner), if you eat breakfast at 7:00 or 8:00 a.m., you are certainly ready for lunch at 11:00 or 12:00. But if you eat too little breakfast (as commonly happens), you’ll be hungry for lunch by 10:00 a.m.—and that throws off the rest of the day’s eating schedule. The solution to the “I cannot wait until noon to eat lunch” predicament is simple: You could either eat a bigger breakfast that sustains you until noon, eat a mid morning snack (more correctly, the second half of your too-small breakfast), or eat the first of two lunches, one at 10:00 and the other at 2:00.

For a nation of lunch skippers, eating two lunches may seem a wacky idea. But why not? Ideally, you should eat according to hunger, not by the clock. After all, hunger is simply your body’s request for more fuel. If you’ve eaten only a light breakfast or have exercised hard in the morning, you can easily be ready for lunch 1 at 10:00 a.m. and for lunch 2 at 2:00.

Despite the importance of lunch, logistics tend to be a hassle. If you pack your own lunch, what do you pack? If you buy lunch, what’s a healthful bargain? If you’re on a diet, what’s best to eat? Here are some helpful tips to improve your lunch intake.

If you pack your lunch, the what-to-pack dilemma quickly becomes tiring. Most people tend to pack more or less the same food every day and end up with yet another turkey sandwich, salad, or bagel. As long as you’re content with what you choose, fine. But if you’re tired of the same stuff, consider these suggestions:

• Strive for at least 500 calories (even if you are on a reducing diet) from three types of food at lunch. This means a bagel, yogurt, and banana or salad, turkey, and pita. Just a bagel or just a salad is likely too little fuel.

• Pack planned leftovers from dinner and heat them in the microwave oven. They’re preferable to the cup of noodles or frozen lunches that cost more than they’re worth.

• Remember peanut butter. Peanut butter is an outstanding sports food—even for dieters—because it’s satisfying and helps you stay fueled for the whole afternoon. Yes, it has 200 more calories than a standard turkey sandwich, but a  satisfying peanut butter sandwich allows you to nix the afternoon cookies and snacks that would otherwise sneak into your intake for the day.

What To Do In Case Of Emergency | Injury Management For Coaches

When muscles, tendons, or ligaments are damaged, blood vessels in the area are also torn, and bleeding spreads rapidly into adjacent tissues. The bleeding causes swelling, placing increased pressure on surrounding tissues, which become tense and tender. The increased pressure causes pain in sensitive tissues, and the combination of bleeding, swelling, and increased pressure can adversely affect and delay the healing process.

Once bleeding has been controlled, some blood remains in the tissues and has to be resorbed. This function is performed mainly by the lymphatic system. A variable amount of scar tissue forms in the area and constitutes a weak spot in the injured muscle, tendon, or ligament. If too early or too heavy a load is applied to this scar tissue, injury is liable to recur.

Sports injuries may take so many different forms that it is impossible to create a standard protocol for their management. Certain guidelines for immediate treatment can, however, be drawn up.

– Listen to the injured athlete’s description of how the injury occurred and what symptoms are present.

– The injury should be examined in the light of the history. Is there any bleeding, swelling, an open wound, or any other abnormal sign?

– A simple functional assessment of the injured part should be made. Can the injured athlete carry out normal movements of the part (with or without a load) without pain?

– The area around the injury should be examined. Is there tenderness in soft tissues or bone? Can a defect be felt in any soft tissue?

If there is swelling and tenderness together with pain when movements are made or a load is applied, treatment should be started as follows.

Compression

A compression bandage is intended to provide counter-pressure to the bleeding developing within the injured area, so that the body’s own functions can take effect more easily. A compression bandage is an elastic bandage applied with careful tension. It should be applied as soon as possible. It is convenient to position an ice pack with the aid of an elastic bandage so that cooling and compression effects are achieved simultaneously. The compression bandage should be kept in position usually for another 2 days after cooling has ceased, provided the location and extent of the injury allow it.

Ice

When soft tissue injuries occur, the first priority is to attempt to stop the bleeding, since this results in swelling, pain, and tenderness. Therefore, in soft tissue injuries, reduce the extent of the bleeding by compression bandaging, rapid cooling, an elevated position of the injured limb, and rest. This enables the body's self healing mechanisms to take effect more easily. The use of ice on the injured body tissues brings about:

– a local pain-relieving effect which makes the injured athlete feel better and may encourage a return to sporting activity. Here trainers and coaches have a great responsibility: if an injury needs cooling it is probably of such severity that further exertion will only delay healing. Common sense should prevail;

– contraction of the blood vessels so that the blood flow is reduced in the injured area. The effect of the treatment is limited and does not really start for 15 minutes. Less swelling may occur and healing proceed more rapidly.

***Heat treatment should not be started until at least 48 hours after the injury has occurred. 

The same applies to massage.***

Ice is usually applied for 15–20 minutes per treatment and may be applied hourly for the first 24–72 hours after the injury. During each application of cold therapy, four progressive sensations will be experienced: cold, burning, aching, and numbness.

***Ice therapy has mainly a pain-inhibiting effect. Icing will therefore mask the real extent of the injury. There

is a great risk that an injury will get worse if the athlete resumes activity after cooling.***

Rest

It is generally true to say that an injured athlete should rest the injured part for 24–48 hours and that it should not be subjected to loading. It follows, therefore, that the athlete should be assisted from the scene of the injury and taken home or to a doctor, as soon as possible. Crutches are usually very helpful.

Elevation

When an injured part is elevated, its blood flow is reduced, and expelled blood is transported away from the site of injury more easily, thus reducing swelling. An injured leg that is elevated should be supported at an angle of more than 45° when the patient is lying supine. Four or five cushions or a stool placed under the leg will achieve this effect. In cases of extensive bleeding and swelling the injured part should be kept elevated for 24–48 hours if possible. Subsequently, it should be elevated whenever the opportunity arises.

Pain relief

Cooling, compression, and rest usually provide relief from pain in soft tissue injuries. Pain-relieving medication may be given if the examination is complete but should be avoided in the early stages as it can complicate further treatment if continued analysis and medical examination are required.

Injured athletes should seek a medical opinion within 24–48 hours in cases of:

– persistent symptoms arising from injuries to muscle, tendon, joint, or ligament;

– severe pain.

It is generally true to say that a doctor should be consulted if there is any uncertainty about the diagnosis, and thus the treatment, of any sports injury.

A medical opinion should be sought urgently in any of the following circumstances:

– unconsciousness or persistent headache, nausea, vomiting, or dizziness after a head injury;

– breathing difficulties after blows to the head, neck or chest;

– pains in the neck after impact, whether or not they extend to the arms;

– abdominal pain;

– blood in the urine;

– fracture or suspected fracture;

– severe joint or ligament injury;

– severe muscle or tendon injury;

– dislocation;

– severe eye injury;

– deep wound with bleeding;

– injuries with intense pain;

– any injury in which there is doubt about its severity, diagnosis or treatment.