Move Freely: Ways to Boost Your Athletic Potential

If you’re into muscle-building, sports, or just casual fitness, you may be wondering how to boost your performance. You know that by boosting such, you’d be able to achieve your personal goals more effectively. Luckily, performance is as flexible as the human body, but easier— and more therapeutic— in how to achieve such flexibility (as opposed to, let’s say, attempting to make legs more flexible through painful splits). Below are three key therapies researchers have found to help you up your athletic performance.

Yoga and its effect on sports performance.

In order to figure out if yoga benefits athletes, researchers divided college ball players into two groups. Soccer players were categorized into the yoga group, whereas baseball players were categorized into the non-yoga group. Each group were to train within a sports training program for 10 weeks. The yoga group, however, had an addition to their training; this being yoga sessions two times a week. Measurements of flexibility and balance were then taken and analyzed through statistical methods. It was found that the yoga group had significant gains in both balance and flexibility. This led the researchers to conclude that through increasing one’s balance and flexibility through yoga, performance in sports is therefore increased as well.[1]

Halotherapy and its implicit effect on physical performance.

To see if halotherapy had any effect on performances of young students, researchers separated students into two groups; those who’d be observed doing physical education in a halochamber-like environment, and those who’d be observed doing physical education in a regular open-air environment. After taking some biometric measurements of the students to be used for determination of physical developments, students were observed two times a week for any such developments. It was concluded that salt aerosol had helped the students (of both sexes, with a higher rate of females) develop better morpho-structural and functional characteristics, as well as stray away from catching sicknesses; thus implicitly affecting their physical performances.[2]

Massage and its effect on martial arts performance.

Knowing that massage may affect performance in a positive manner, researchers sought to understand how the duration of massage brought about these benefits. For the study to be undertaken, 12 healthy muay thai athletes, with at least two years of training under their belt, were chosen. These individuals then were made to do five minutes of aerobic jogging. Afterwards, the massages followed. Using the same masseur for consistency, the athletes were given four different durations of Swedish massage; one for zero minutes (no massage), one for five minutes, one for 10 minutes, and one for 15 minutes. Counter movement jump, squat jump, sit and reach flexibility then were measured following each duration given. These were given in three trials, with the best of the three scores of each and every person being chosen for statistical analysis. The results showed that the muay thai athletes performed best after the fiver minute massage duration. [3]

Sources:

1.  Polsgrove, M. J., Eggleston, B. M., & Lockyer, R. J. (2016). Impact of 10-weeks of yoga practice on flexibility and balance of college athletes. International journal of yoga, 9(1), 27–34.

2. Antonovici, M.O., Sandu, C.I., Sandu, E.I.G, Stingu, C.C., and Dimitriu, S. (2021). Efficiency of Halotherapy in Improving Human Performance in Gymnasium Students. Acta Geobalcanica, 7(4), 167-173.

3. Bayer, R., Eken, Ö. (2021). The acute effect of different massage durations on squat jump, countermovement jump and flexibility performance in muay thai athletes. Physical education of students, 25(6):353-8.

Article by: Jonathan A. Watson