6 Reasons Your Athletic Performance May Be Lagging

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6 Reasons Your Athletic Performance May Be Lagging

Wednesday, 29 July 2009 08:19

Your oomph, your zoom, your zip, the spring in your step, the get-up-and-go in your giddy-up: Whatever you call it, if you exercise long (and hard) enough, you may risk losing it at some point, feeling stale or tired during workouts, and seeing your race times get slower and slower. That kind of performance decline has a variety of possible explanations, most temporary and fixable but some more serious. Here"s a field guide to what might be keeping you from doing your best.

* Lack of sleep. The cause of a bad workout week might be as simple as not getting enough shut-eye. Sleep is sometimes called a legal performance aid because of its ability to promote recovery from workouts—key for endurance--or power-based sports, such as running, biking, or weightlifting. Research also suggests sleep helps embed a task or skill, which is important for athletes in precision sports, including swimming and basketball. Small studies conducted at Stanford University indicate that swimmers, basketball players, and members of the tennis team all improved on measures of performance after increasing their sleep time to 10 hours a night for several weeks. Try to follow their lead and see if you bounce back.
* Nutrition. It"s important to make sure your overall caloric intake matches your activity level. Newbies often overestimate how much they are working out and discover the hard way that they can"t eat whatever they want just because they"re training for a sprint triathlon, says Patrick Valentine, an endurance sports coach with Carmichael Training Systems, an online coaching company.

* Life stress. A running coach asked me several years ago, when I told him I didn"t feel on my game, if there was anything else going on in my life that might be considered a major stress. You mean, I said, like my parents" recent separation? Um, yes! Sure, you can relieve stress through exercise, but as I found out on the track, its effects can also put the kibosh on performance gains. Give yourself a break and realize it may not be the best time to aim for a personal best if you"re grieving a loss, just got laid off, or are experiencing some other traumatic event. Go back to working out for fun for a while.

* Exercise-induced asthma. Seems odd that fatigue or underperformance would be a symptom of asthma, but it happens. A significant number of college athletes, and as many as half of elite athletes, depending on the sport, experience exercise-induced asthma.

Too much training. "Unexplained underperformance syndrome" is a diagnosis by exclusion, one that doctors arrive it if fatigue or poor performance can"t be explained by medical or other factors. Besides feeling tired, a sufferer may experience a depressed mood, altered sleep pattern and appetite, and often a series of colds or other bugs. It seems to be sparked by insufficient recovery from exercise rather than simple overtraining, says Carl Foster, an exercise and sports scientist who directs the Human Performance Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin-LaCrosse.

* More serious medical issues. The inability to complete a workout that was previously a piece of cake might be rooted in a medical problem such as an underactive thyroid gland, anemia, or depression. And William O. Roberts, an internist at the University of Minnesota who researches athletic health issues, says that even if there"s no pain or pressure in the chest, a consistent loss of steam may signal cardiovascular disease, particularly in athletes over 35.

To read the entire article:
http://health.usnews.com/blogs/on-fitness/2009/07/24/6-reasons-your-athletic-performance-may-be-lagging.html

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