Let's Play with a Recovered Body

Isn't is incredible to play your sport when you physically feel 100%? 

When your body feels good, everything changes. You move better, react faster, and you're not thinking about pain, soreness, or fatigue--you're just playing. 

In this episode, Coach Jojo talks about how important it is to have a recovered body, a few ways of how to recover your body (nutrition, sleep, physical therapy), and the difference between sore vs. fatigued. 

But this episode isn't just about doing more recovery. It's about being intentional and actually learning about your body. Understanding how your body responds, what it needs, and even how your mind plays a role in how you feel and perform.

Not only is being recovered physically feel good, but it also helps with confidence. When your body feels strong and ready, you trust it more--and that trust shows up in how you play. 

Those bad practices where you feel like you've become a completely different, struggling player doesn't mean anything is wrong with your capabilities. It could just mean that your body isn't the same as it usually is when you're at your best. 

It's your job to understand and develop the knowledge of how your body and mind work because that's when you'll gain control. And when you have control over yourself, that is the best feeling in the world. 

Let's Play with a Recovered Body!

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Do you even realize how important it is to be aligned with your mind and your body? Yes, I'm a mindset coach and I do believe the quote that sports are 95% mental and 5% physical, but we can't play our sport without our body. So if our body is not recovered correctly, then we got a problem. I talk a little bit about on this podcast about how to recover your body correctly, but I also am very, very big on talking about the importance of recovering your body. Obviously, it's amazing when your body feels good and you're not feeling heavy or anything like that. But when your body is recovered and feeling good, that's when you could play your best. And when we are playing our best, that is when we're going to gain confidence. And that is where we're going to be a successful athlete. I have learned from so much experience of being an athlete in college at a very high level and having so many trainers of telling me what to do correctly, what to do properly. I am not a nutritionist, I am not a physical therapist, but I am somebody with a lot of knowledge on this subject. And of course, I have been trained to be a mindset coach. So I'm putting the two together, and this episode is something that you're going to want to listen to no matter what. If you are an athlete, you are going to want to listen to this episode. So let's get right into it. Athletes, let's talk about our bodies because this is not something that is really talked about with being an athlete. And coming from a mindset coach perspective, well, also coming from an athlete's perspective, where I used to be an athlete and the toll that I would take on my physical body was something that really got me down. And now being a mindset coach, I think that if you could use any tool to your advantage and have the knowledge to know anything to your advantage, then you should take it. What I mean by that is that if we have the knowledge to know how to recover our bodies when it feels like shit and when our bodies are fatigued, but we are able to know how to navigate, how to play well, even under those circumstances, then that is something that I wanted to take advantage of because it would be so frustrating for me when I would go into practice one day and I'd feel really good. And this is especially after an off day, right? I would have an off day the next day in practice. I would feel really good. I would practice really well. And then the next day, maybe my body didn't recover and I didn't play well, but I didn't know it was because of my body being fatigued or my body not recovering the way that I want it to. And I would just blame my mind and my ability in my sport to being a shit player, and that really got me down. That really struck my confidence levels. My first two years of college, I had no experience with eating healthy. I did not know how. I didn't know. I literally, this is how bad my nutrition was with knowing. And I was a freaking D1 athlete, okay? I didn't know that you were supposed to eat protein after a lift. And if you're somebody listening right now, maybe you're in high school and you were like me and you were not taught how to eat as an athlete. That is something maybe that's also shocking to you. But especially now, I could never even imagine not knowing that information. Unfortunately, I am not a nutritionist. I am just a mindset coach, but I am somebody that could give really good advice on how to eat because then I was able to come to my second school where they were really good about teaching about nutrition. And not only that, I was very curious because I had no idea that we had to eat. Us athletes had to eat literally so much better than the average person. And that's just a thing. You're burning so many calories. And not only are you just gonna, you know, stock up on calories like donuts and cake and whatever, you know, that you're eating greasy food like pizza, but you have to stock up on calories that are very nutritious and a lot of it, and knowing how to maybe eat more than you really want to, especially I was also somebody in college my first two years where I had a lot of anxiety. It was really hard for me to eat, like before practices, or if I knew practice was gonna be hard that day, or maybe sometimes if I knew that I was gonna play that game and I was just really nervous, I didn't eat a lot. Eating and filling your body with the foods that it needs to be filled with and nourished with is something that an athlete really needs to learn in order to recover their bodies. Another thing us athletes really need to know is the importance of stretching and the importance of rolling out, doing compression boots, doing ice baths. Um, I'm trying to think of all the things that I've done, like doing the beater gun. I call it a beater gun, but you guys call it something else, I think. At least my friends never know when I reference the beater gun. What is it called? The the whatever the therma gun is. And of course, all of these techniques are very opinionated. Like some people say, I've had a trainer in high school say that he doesn't think the Theragun works very well because it's something that could just get your muscles pumped up, but it's not really a recovery thing. I've also heard that ice baths are actually really not good for women and are hormones. So technically, even if it's helping your legs recover, it doesn't really help your mood and help the way that actually your nervous system is recovering, which is so stupid. I say stupid because I had to take ice baths after every single practice I had at my first school. And just to think that if that's true, that ice baths are bad for women, then I really was just messing up my nervous system. And ice baths are not even comfortable, they're obviously pretty painful the first minute you're in there. And again, I'm not a nutritionist, I'm not a physical therapist. I'm just saying things off of my experience and what I have done in order to have a better recovered body and to be more in tune with my body. And this helped me become a more successful athlete and a more confident athlete. Something else that's very, very important. There are so many things. We have such a freaking long list to how to be a successful athlete. I swear. It is a full-time fucking job. But something else that's very important is sleep. My goodness. I learned so many things my going into college. College really humbled me, let's just say that. But I really, even though I didn't know about nutrition at my first school and I had to learn that at my second school, I did understand um the techniques that I had to use, like rolling out and stretching and knowing how to recover my body in that way. But something that I also didn't know was the importance of sleep my first two years. And then I got into a really good bedtime routine when I got to my second school, and maybe that's because I had less anxiety. But that shit helped me so much. That is the most important thing on your list. Like, forget anything else if you want to. Like, if you're not gonna do anything else, make sure your sleep schedule is very, very consistent and you're getting enough sleep. But I really am not coming on here to try to tell you how to recover. I obviously can do that just from my experience, like I've been saying. I really want to convince you of why it is so important to recover, besides the fact that we are going to feel good and that recovering our bodies when it feels well rested feels very good and it makes us play the way that we want to play. But some of us don't really realize that. And I say that because this is not a subject that I've talked about with clients, right? But this is something that I dealt with. And I want to, some of a lot of my podcasts are, you know, some of them are based off of what I talk about with my clients, but some of them are based on what I've experienced and what I would have wanted to know. And now I do know, and I'm here to share that experience with you guys. And I'm also here as a mindset coach now. I've trained to be a mindset coach, and I have all the tools for you guys. And so this is something that I really want to talk about and something that's really important. And I really am going to try to convince you guys of recovering your body because it's something that I have to convince you of, I think, because it is a full-time job. First off, I really do want to be clear about knowing whether or not you're tired to the point where you feel fatigued and your body really cannot function the way that it's supposed to function or usually functions, versus you being tired just because you're tired and just because you're sick of this shit. And maybe because you know, you've been doing this for the whole week and you just want an off day. There is a huge difference. When I was at my second school, we had amazing weight trainers. They actually cared about what we had to say. They would listen, they would ask questions like, Hey, do you guys want to go harder this today, or do you guys want to kind of be laid back? They would be, they would treat us like adults, and it was truly amazing. So we had this mat that we had to jump on three times a week, sometimes just twice a week. The mat would determine whether or not your legs and body was fatigued that week. For those confused of how it would work, because I was very confused at first. I was like, there's no way that we jump on this mat and you know if I'm fatigued or not. But you would, and this would take a couple weeks for the data to come through. So we can only use it after I think like three weeks of jumping. But you would do a jump and it would track how high you were jumping, and then you do another jump just to make sure, you know, you're giving it you're all. You have to on the mat though, you had to jump as high as you possibly could that day because that was the only way that you were going to see if your body, you know, was a little heavy that week, or you, like I said, like fatigued. So the thing with this mat was that if you were somebody that was not mentally tough, I'm just gonna say that. And you felt tired in your mind, you just thought, like, I'm tired today, I just know I'm not gonna jump that high, like I know I'm fatigued. Some people on my team would not jump as high just to say that they're fatigued and they need to cut their lift in half. Because that was that was what I was saying earlier is that they treated us like adults. If we were fatigued that week and it showed up on the iPad, is what we used. If it showed up on the iPad like that, they would scale the stuff that we needed to do in order to make sure that we had a good recovery for the rest of the week. There were definitely days that I got into that weight session room and I'm like, I don't want to fucking be here. I'm so fucking tired right now, and I'm gonna jump on this mat and I'm not gonna jump that high. But the thing is, is that I'm very like, I was so into everything. I was into, you know, metrics on my body. I wish that I had my whoop earlier. Like now I have a whoop after basketball. I'm like, really? I could have used that so much. I'm just so interested in everything like that. So I definitely would be tired and I'd go in there and I'd give it my all. And here's the craziest thing there would be those days where I was really tired. I would jump, my body, not tired. My body would not show that it was fatigued or heavy. And I literally could not even, I'm like, how is that possible? I feel so tired right now, yet my body is actually like good to go. Like I could lift heavy today. And that's exactly what the weight trainers would explain to us. Like, yes, like you could go, but your mind is probably just there's a difference between your mind and your body a lot of the time. And that's why it's so important to get in sync with both of those things. And that's exactly why I say a sport is 95% mental and 5% physical. I mean, a lot of people say that. I'm just saying that I agree with that quote. Because even though those days where I walk in and I'm so tired, it doesn't mean that my body's not tired. That doesn't mean that my body's fatigued, and that's the difference that I'm trying to tell you guys today. There are going to be so many days in season, so many days in preseason, I would say those are the hardest practices ever, or preseason practices. But that is exactly the point where you're going to learn mental toughness, and that's exactly how you are going to learn to push yourself is through pushing your mind when it's tired, not your body. Your body could probably still be a little bit tired, but your mind makes it think that way a lot of the time. You know what's funny too is that there would be some days where I didn't feel super fatigued. Like I knew I was kind of tired, but I would get on the mat and I would jump and I would see my numbers, and I'd be like, How I'm like, yeah, okay, I'm a little tired, but how is that lower than my regular average score? So you're probably sitting here thinking, okay, Coach Jojo, how do I know whether or not my body's fatigued versus when I'm just complaining about being tired or not having the mental toughness to know the difference between the two because I don't have a mat to jump on. I don't have an iPad where these numbers are gonna show up. I totally get that, but it wasn't even the experience of having a mat assessment done to me that made me realize when my body was fatigued and when it wasn't. It was me actually becoming self-aware about being in tune with my body and my mind. That's all that really did for me. Because there would be a week where we wouldn't jump and I would have to be like, okay, wait, even without the jumps, how is my body feeling today? And like I would ask myself questions on my own. It just made me realize how my body was feeling more so than you know, before I was taking these tests, before I even cared about whether or not am I tired or am I fatigued? So maybe you're listening to this podcast right now, and this is your realization to tune in with your body. Something else that I will say is that there is a difference between every single person. Like we all have different bodies and we all move differently. Like, genetics could play a role in that. There are certain people that I have played with where they could just run off of nothing. They could just go for four hours a day, like they could get extra work in and they're never gonna get tired. I don't have those genetics, and that's okay. And that's not me being a victim and complaining. That's just me realizing, okay, that's my body, and I need to understand my body in order for me to know how to recover it, in order for me to know how to function with it and how to be an athlete with it. But when we start comparing ourselves to other players and we say, well, they could run today. Why can't I run today? You have a different body, and also not only that, you're probably doing other things. Maybe you worked harder and a few more drills than they worked harder in, you know, or maybe they did work harder in drills and you didn't, and you don't understand why you're not recovering. And this is exactly everything that we need to ask ourselves. I've been really seeing a lot of TikToks, and I know it's kind of stupid when people are like, Oh, I saw this on TikTok and whatever, but honestly, those are there are so many educated people on TikTok, and this is the way that we're connecting these days. So I saw this one TikTok, and of course, I'm on my mindset coach page, so I'm scrolling on there. So, of course, I see a lot of mindset stuff on there, and there's just so many people on there that talk about how to connect with your brain and just to understand your brain. I think that obviously that's what I coach and that's what I preach to you guys is that we have to understand how our brain works. It's the same thing of like knowing how to be coached. Some people like to be yelled at. I was that type of player. I like to be yelled at in practice, and that's probably kind of weird, but that's just how I worked, and that's kind of it. It showed that I like to be yelled at because that's how I get myself motivated inside my head, which I have healed from that. I don't think that's a good mindset to be in. And it's also the same thing as like some people don't like to be yelled at. Some people in their head, they treat themselves very maybe a lot more kind than other people that like to be yelled at. So it's the same thing, like with your mind. You have to know what your mind likes, and you have to know the same thing with your body. You have to know how much you could push your body in order for it to continue working. So, what I'm trying to say too is that your body is going to feel different than another person's fatigue. Like your fatigue, like at least for me, I have worked on my body so much knowing whether or not I'm just mentally tired and think that I can't push myself even though I can, compared to when my body is so heavy. I think that is a really good word to use when thinking of fatigued. If your legs, I always compare it to my legs because I feel like our legs are our motor. We use them more than anything else in our sport. If my legs feel heavy, I can't pick them up. That is when I know I'm pretty fatigued. But if I know that my legs are just burning in practice and I'm tired, I'm just like, oh my God, how much more of this drill am I gonna have to do? How much more running? And if I just feel a burn, I don't count that as fatigued. And again, that's just me because I have worked with my body so much, I have become aware of my body so much that I know that I could push myself through a burning sensation rather than a heavy feeling of sensations. And again, that could be a different word for you guys. That could be a different type of feeling and sensation for you guys. That's what I want you to do, though. I want you to ask yourself these questions. I want you to become so aware of your body in practice and in games and how to navigate with these sensations. When I made this shift, and of course it was, it was coming to my second school and using the mat and realizing that oh shit, there's a difference between feeling heavy and feeling tired and feeling mentally tired, whatever, blah, blah, blah, everything I've been saying. I gave myself grace. What I mean by that is that I was able to start to evaluate myself in practices. If I had a bad practice, maybe I had a bad shooting practice, I could be like, okay, wait, were my legs just tired today? Like, there was nothing wrong with my mind. Like I was there, I was working hard, but like maybe I was just a little sluggish today, and that's the reason why I didn't play well in practice. What I usually used to do is get so hard on myself and just bash myself for having a bad practice, and I didn't understand. And when I didn't understand myself, that was the most frustrating feeling in the world. So, like when I would have a bad practice after having, you know, maybe three good practices in a row, or maybe not even three, maybe just one practice, I'd be like, why am I having this bad practice? Like, I'm a good player. Like, what's happening to me? But then when I was able to not just tie myself with basketball, because that's a sport that I played, right? Not just saying that, oh, I am just here to shoot an orange ball into a hoop. And you know what I'm trying to say, like whatever you're doing in your sport, you're not just there to have so much fun. Unfortunately, right? We we are there to have a lot of fun. But the thing is, is that you have to after practice, after a game, you have to be stretching, you have to be rolling out, you have to be eating well, you have to make sure that you're still on a really good sleep schedule, you have to be so disciplined with so many other things. And when I realize that it is a full-time job and I had to accept that, that is something that we do have to accept because we just want to be an athlete, like I'm saying. We just want to go out there, we just want to shoot some hoops or whatever it is in your sport. And we don't really want to think about everything else, but you have to accept it. You have to bring in all of this and embrace it and know that it is going, you need it on your side. You need to have a relationship with each category. And that is something that I really have found to be why I was so successful in to being an athlete because I was so disciplined with everything outside of my sport. Like, yes, I was disciplined in practice, I worked very hard in practice, but what am I doing outside of practice? How am I helping myself and setting myself up for the next practice and the next game? I just think that, of course, I am a mindset coach and I speak about the mind so much. I think that the mind is so much of our sport, like literally 95% of our sport. The 5% that I talk about and that other people talk about is literally just because you need a body to do a sport. You need a body to shoot a basketball or whatever it is, kick a soccer ball. But it's all up in your head. But also with that physical body that you have, that 5% there, you do need to treat it well and you need to make sure that it's ready and you need to make sure that yes, your mind and body are aligned at the same time. If you do these things, you will be a more consistent player. And if we're being more consistent, if we can get consistency before confidence, that's actually going to make us have confidence. That's a great path to take. This will probably also help people who spiral pretty quickly. If you do have a bad practice and you really didn't want to have a bad practice and it's really taking a toll on you, then you could really reflect on it and you could be like, Hey, wait, let's ask questions about my body. Like, let's see how I'm really feeling and seeing if this is a reason why I'm playing so bad. And just know that that that one practice doesn't define who you are as a player. It really could show you so many other signs, like, hey, did I need to stretch yesterday or did I need to eat better yesterday? And then when we get to the point where we're so we're in so much control that we are so aligned with our bodies and our mind, we're not gonna spiral. And then what if you're not spiraling, then you're not losing confidence, you're actually gaining confidence. So just know that recovering your body and making sure that you're treating it correctly and you're disciplined to a routine will literally help your confidence levels and will help you be a more successful athlete. If you guys have any questions about nutrition, about how to recover correctly or anything like that, how to get on a good routine. I do have an episode actually that's called Let's Play with Goals. Um, I have an episode that's called Let's Play to Be Motivated. But those are very surface level, it doesn't really touch exactly on this subject. And if you guys want to talk about this with me, I do offer one-on-one coaching and we could so set up a call just for a consultation. It's free. So please just contact me. My all of my information is down in the description. But also, if you're a coach listening to this, I do do team coaching and I love to do team coaching. I love to do one-on-one coaching. I love all coaching. So please sign up for something with me. But that is all that I have for you guys today. Thank you so much for listening. Thank yourself for listening. I'm so proud of you guys, as always. Let's play to be confident, let's play to be consistent, let's play to love our game, and let's play with a recovered body.