Identify the Constraints on Your Health and Performance.

It is widely recognized concept that an athlete’s skill, talent, and expertise will often cause them to be limited in one or two specific areas. A great NFL lineman is often limited in speed and agility. A great NBA point guard is often limited in size and overall strength. Even in MMA, a great wrestler often does not have the best boxing and a great Muay Thai fighter may not have the best grappling.

This is the beauty of sports like mma and jiu jitsu. They expose weaknesses and untruths. MMA will reveal the training constraints of each fighter that steps inside the cage. Maybe a fighter struggles to defend take downs. Once that constraint is exposed, that fighter cannot progress to a higher level of performance until they address the constraint. It doesn’t matter how good of a boxer you are. If you can’t defend a takedown, every fighter they face will prey on that weakness until it is fixed. The same principle applies inside the body. Right now, inside of you and inside of every person, there is a biological constraint that is diminishing your health and performance.

Maybe it’s a magnesium deficiency that is giving you chronic fatigue.

Or maybe consuming too many processed carbs is causing high blood sugar and neuropathy.

Or maybe an unhealthy lifestyle, chronic stress or even a poor sleep is causing low levels of hormones.

Identifying the constraint inside your biological systems is the first step in making progress towards a higher level of health and performance.

If that same MMA fighter who is a great boxer but has no takedown defense, then trains takedown defense consistently for 3 months. Suddenly their performance skyrockets because they have removed the constraint on their fight performance and now their boxing can be highly more effective. Their opponent, now fears getting sprawled on and smashed, giving the boxer better distance and angles to throw punches. The same principle again applies to inside the body. If you are able to identify that your chronic fatigue and muscle soreness could be from a magnesium deficiency rather than from over training, then after adjusting your diet, you would be able to return to maximum effort training, allowing your body to capture more of the adaptations of your training sessions.

In order to identify the constraint of your personal health and performance you must look for biomarkers inside the body. Blood work, urine analysis, saliva, hair, and stool samples all give us a window into the systems, structures, and organs that make up the inner biological systems of your body. These systems are what keep us alive and give us energy. They carry oxygen and fuel throughout the body. They search for waste products and toxins and sweep them out of the body. They even produce the hormones that make us feel confident and motivated, and they can also produce the hormones and metabolites that make us feel sluggish and anxious.

In healthy people there are millions of beneficial bacteria living in the gut and intestines. These microbes live eat insoluble plant fiber that your body can’t break down and they even secrete enzymes, vitamins and nutrients back into your bloodstream. However, stress, poor diet and drugs and alcohol can all lead to an unhealthy change in your gut microbiota.

Instead of secreting vitamins and nutrients into your blood, unhealthy bacteria secrete stress and hunger hormones into the bloodstream causing you to consume more of the sugars that they feed on. After they consume the sugars in your gut, they then secrete more stress and hunger hormones back into the blood causing you to continue the cycle. This causes systemic inflammation, eventually leading to further health problems.

This is just one of the reasons why fiber is such an important part of a healthy diet. The EatWater Diet considers fiber to be a Macronutrient, and I program it into my client daily Macros. A ratio of 30grams of Fiber/100grams of Protein is a benchmark that I shoot for daily, and I recommend this same ratio to all of my clients. It doesn’t matter if you are a professional MMA fighter or a stay at home mom. You need to understand the importance of fiber and treat it like the Macronutrient that it is.

So if you are an MMA fighter with great boxing, but no take down defense, go practice take down defense until you can’t get taken down. Only then can you level up as a fighter. Also get your bloodwork analyzed by an expert to gain a greater understanding of your inner health constraints that may be holding back your training and adaptations.

If you are ANYONE looking to identify your own health and performance constraints. Go get your blood analyzed. Meet with an expert to review your results, and then practice healthy behaviors until they are a habit. This is how you can identify your personal health constraints and take back ownership of your own health and performance.

Email admin@eatwaterfitness.com if you are interested in finding out more about affordable Bloodwork and Lab Analysis and ask me about my partnership with Ulta Labs.