The 3 rules of successful athletes

My wise swimming coach is full of much wisdom which he offers up from time to time, in particular when you’re facing a challenging situation. One nugget of wisdom is the 3 rules of being a successful athlete. Here they are:

1. Don’t get sick.
2. Don’t get injured.
3. Don’t break rule 1 and 2.

Pretty simple, really. Just remember and follow the 3 rules.

Part of our coach’s style is to leave you to figure out the rest of the details, to read between the lines and interpret how these rules actually apply. The devil is in the detail and these rules are no different. At face value they seem to skip the most important part of being / becoming a successful athlete, which is how to train. However, these rules are all about training...let me explain.

In essence, the rules are saying you can do anything you want in training and racing and inevitably you’ll improve and become a better athlete, just as long as you don't get sick or injured (or both). The problem is that when most people do go out and train and race as much as they want, they almost inevitably do end up sick or injured (or both).

Training is a repeating cycle of training and recovering, which eventually leads to improvement. They need to work together, and need to be in balance so that you do, indeed, improve. Training is a form of stress on your body which takes energy to perform, and it's easy to think that you have separate buckets of energy for different activities, for example, a bucket of swimming energy, bike energy, work energy and so on. However, this is incorrect that it takes experience to realise that everything you do dips into the same bucket.

But when the bucket gets empty and you keep going back for more is when you're most likely to run into health issues. So it takes even more experience to learn about and understand your body enough to know how much energy you can use up - and how to use it up (ie, training) - in order to get the necessary training benefit while keeping your health and welfare in control.

The topic of how to best use your energy to train in the most effective way is beyond the scope of this article, but suffice to say that in general, the more training you can do the more you will improve...just don't break the 3 rules!!

It's worth emphasising the strain that living takes on your body and the amount of stress you experience. This goes beyond your training load, and includes your whole life and all that it encompasses. It is critical to factor this into your balance of training and make adjustments as necessary...it's the sum of all the components of training and living that's important. Remaining healthy should be the number one priority for you each day.

So with those 3 rules in mind, go out and live...and train...and race hard and fast, and enjoy every moment of it!!