I was fortunate to hear one of our own champions, Casey Munro, speak about his experience recently at Melbourne IronMan, expressing a powerful message about mindset going into the race. Mindset is an incredibly important aspect of your preparation, as is your training, nutrition, and of course rest, whether you’re a professional athlete or a novice, to perform at your peak. Whoever you are in the spectrum of athletes, being your own home grown champion is your ultimate goal.

Your body has the ability to produce energy for endurance and speed with training, however, if there are body systems associated with increasing your energy that you haven’t accessed yet, would you be interested in making them function better?

Adrenal glands and hormones are responsible for producing DHEA for increased energy through its ability to naturally produce higher levels of testosterone, progesterone and oestrogen. Cortisol production through stress, injury, and lack of sleep will deplete your DHEA, causing an energy deficit short and long term.

Your liver is responsible for detoxification, glycogen storage, protein synthesis, and production of digestive enzymes. If your body is overburdened by toxicity through alcohol, chemical, or food intolerances, your liver is not able to deal with these functions, and fatigue, insomnia, poor digestion, and poor hormone production will occur, leading to a poorer performance and lack of energy.

Cellular function is paramount in energy production, where the mitochondria are the energy producing organelles of the body. Keeping your cells free of toxicity, free radical damage, and highly oxygenated will go a long way to optimising energy, not to mention specific high dose nutrients such as Ubiquinol ,that can increase that level further.

A clean diet, with the right balance of proteins, fats and carbohydrates, from food sources tolerated by your immune system, is incredibly important. Boosting your immune system, by reducing gut infections and colonizing beneficial bacteria will also improve nutrient absorption, increasing Iron and B12 levels, which will result in fatigue if levels are low.

There is so much you can do in your everyday life to optimise your performance,  including getting 8 hours of uninterrupted sleep, reducing stress, eating well tolerated foods based on high quality blood food allergy testing, reducing alcohol consumption and chemical exposure, and using nutrients to improve liver and cellular function. Blood testing for hormone and nutrient levels is also a wise decision. A comprehensive health check is not difficult and makes an incredible difference to not only your performance but to your everyday life. It’s all about Advanced Wellness and your individual needs.