Hit a plateau in peak performance?
For sports athletes who aspire to excel at the highest level, performance is always imperative. You may be a tennis or soccer player looking to enhance your power and flexibility. A shot put or discus thrower would be looking for more strength. For long distance swimmers or runners, it would be increasing your stamina and to overcome that “brick wall” to last a longer mile. Whether your goal is for power, strength or endurance, generally, once you’ve reached peak performance, a plateau sets in and you find it impossible to raise the bar any further. But what if you could change the game?
Take Your Performance To A New Level
If you have not heard about Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) and its ability to help you overcome that plateau, then you had better re-evaluate your sporting lives right now. In modern sports today, more teams and individuals across categories have been incorporating TCM as an essential part of their training regimes. In particular, acupuncture has increasingly documented as proven to help athletes prevent and recover from injuries and fatigue, and even go a step further to enhance their performance – to enable them to go beyond their physical abilities to achieve a higher level of performance which they were not able to before.
Reaching A New Peak
A plateau occurs when the body had gotten accustomed to the grills of your drills and adapted to the stress it goes through. Acupuncture can raise your peak level and enhance sports performance in various ways, including:
Muscular Strength
Studies have shown, acupuncture has been proven to enable a dramatic increase in muscle activation. It can also increase blood supply to the target muscle regions, eliminating the need for a traditional “warm-up” session, and boost energy stores in those muscles to enable the body to overcome the performance plateau.
Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness (DOMS)
A term most top level athletes is familiar with, DOMS refers to the stiffness and soreness felt in the muscles after a high intensity training session. Fatigue builds up and inflammation occurs, along with microscopic tears in the muscles. Acupuncture can boost recovery time by reducing the effects of DOMS. For example, what would have required a week to repair now only requires 3 days. With acupuncture, the athlete can return to training sooner than expected, and the increased training frequency can enable the body to shatter the performance plateau.
Flexibility
Some sports are performed at a high intensity level. Sporting injuries may occur, especially in the joints. Acupuncture can help increase joint flexibility and prevent joint injuries if administered on the weak joint before training.
Nutrition
For those who desire to achieve peak performance, getting proper nutrition Is a must, with its significant role in muscle building. Through a TCM diagnostic, a TCM physician can identify any digestive issues and prescribe the right treatment. Herbal medicine and acupuncture can be administered together to ensure better absorption of essential nutrients to drive the body across the performance plateau.
