There has never been another time like the Coronavirus Crisis in our recent history. The cancellations and postponements are new to everybody, even the adults and the professionals.
This brings with it a time that no other person who was at one point a high school athlete, has ever seen before. Careers have been cut short and playoff runs have been stopped dead in their tracks. Three week long spring breaks and potentially no more meets, matches, games, or possibly even school.
So what can a high school student athlete possibly do during this time? Please don’t waste this time! There are an incredible amount of opportunities for you to learn something, or grow in some way each and every day.
1) Get Quality Rest
When I say get quality rest, I do NOT mean be lazy and sleep all day, every day while school is out. Quality rest means that you are going to bed and waking up at reasonable times, and getting the amount of sleep that you need in between those times.
You won’t have any 6 AM workouts for a while, and you won’t be staying late at the school for a game that will make you stay up even later just to finish school work.
This means that you have a perfect opportunity to be in bed by 10 and asleep by 11, and wake up between 7-8:00. I would almost bet that if you are a high school athlete, on average you go to bed around midnight or 1 am, and wake up at 6 or 7 am. 5-6 hours is not enough sleep. Use these next few weeks to get a quality 7-8 hours a night.
2) Exercise Your Brain
Keep your mind sharp by continuing to challenge it over the course of your down time. Just like the muscles in your body, your mind needs to stay active and be put to work in order to get better.
There are a handful of ways to do this, but reading and writing are two of the best.
Pick some articles from the internet about a topic that interests you or that you know you want to learn more about. There won’t be very many sports on TV to watch either, so this will also work as a great way to pass time if you are bored.
Open up your backpack and go over some notes from your classes so that when you get back, you are ready to pick back up where the class left off.
3) Exercise Your Body
Now that we know how important it is to make sure our mind gets a good workout too, we can talk about getting our bodies a workout.
Your school weight room will most likely be closed, meaning you won’t have access to weights or other workout equipment. The good news is that there are plenty of ways to get exercise and stay active without a barbell and a squat rack.
Go outside and play some basketball, offer to walk dogs, go for jogs, or knock out some push ups and sit ups in the living room – your options are almost endless. If you are someone who says you want to play at the next level and be better than your peers, this is the time where you will actually become better (or worse) than your peers.
4) Good Hygiene
It might sound silly and I’ll admit, it kind of is that this even needs to be mentioned, but nothing bad has ever come from someone washing their hands or sanitizing a bit more often.
Whether you want to believe it or not, this virus is contagious and spreads quickly. It has been classified as a global pandemic and is impacting a lot of lives. It is important to protect yourself and your family during this time so please, stay clean.
5) ACT/SAT Prep
This ties in a little bit with #2, but it is more specific so I wanted to touch on it as well. If you are currently a 9th-11th grader, you will have chances in the future to take one or both of these standardized tests.
These two tests will have a large impact on your ability to get in to college and which ones you will or will not get accepted to. They are long, and they are difficult, so they require quite a bit of time and attention beforehand.
If you are out of school for another week or maybe even more, you really need to touch up on some standardized test prep at least for a couple of hours. It will all be worth it when you take it again next time and your score is a few points better, which essentially earns you money for college.
6) Talk to Coaches
Stay in touch with your high school coaches. Ask them what you can do to better yourself specifically for their team during this off period. It will be aching them while they aren’t able to be with you and be coaching you.
If you reach out to them and ask if there are any workouts or any drills you can be doing on your own, they will appreciate that and respect you more than you ever know. It will show them that it means something to you and that you are someone they can trust when times get tough.
Even if you are at home and no where near your coaches, there are still ways to hear from them and receive coaching.
7) Recruiting
If you are currently a Junior or maybe even a Sophomore, you might be starting to hear from some college coaches that are potentially interested in recruiting you or offering you a scholarship. Spring is a busy time for college coaches as that is when they are typically freed up to hit the road.
Due to current circumstances, I can almost guarantee that schools will keep coaches off of the road recruiting, meaning you might not get to see as many as you were hoping, or maybe none at all. This isn’t the end of the world.
Continue to use Twitter and other technology to contact college coaches and continue your recruiting. Ask for information on majors and campus life, get ahold of your GPA and test scores and be ready to communicate them as well.
8) Eat Right
More time on your hands, will mean that you have more time with your hands. Use them to cook some healthier meals at the house. If your parents have been to the grocery store and were able to get some food, give them a break and take over cooking.
It is a skill that will come in handy when you get to college and once you are done, so you might as well start learning. Cooking will also get you healthier and cleaner meals than eating out at a restaurant will.
Take control of your diet and give your body the fuel it needs. Pop tarts, pizza rolls, and sour gummy worms are not what you want to fuel your body with. If you expect it to do great things for you in sports, you need to treat it and fuel it right outside of sports.
The best way to handle things during the Coronavirus Crisis is quite simple – stay calm, use spare time wisely, and continue to improve yourself day by day. Find new things to learn and new stuff to do.
If you enjoyed this or took anything away from it I would really appreciate a share however you prefer. I made this free because I know a lot of people need to hear this stuff, so please get it to whoever you think may need it!
It might take you some time to figure out what methods and systems work best for you, and that is perfectly fine.
What isn’t perfectly fine however, is giving up after trying only a handful of things.
The beauty is in the process. While it may not seem like it, you have time to figure it out. Regardless of how you old you are, your drive to improve and find what works for you should never diminish.
I’m thankful every day for the time I have ahead of me to figure out what Skyler should be doing. I have time to try, and fail.
As do you, regardless of your age. Because the amount of years you may or may not have left is not what I mean when I say time. I mean you have plenty of tries.
It’s like you are playing a baseball game and you are up to bat – but you will never strike out!
Swing as many times as you want. Try and hit the curve ball in the dirt. Take a hack at the high and inside fastball. You might not always hit the ball, but guess what? Here comes another pitch. Here comes another day.
Whether you know baseball or not is not the point, but I will mention that of all the professional baseball players who have hit hundreds and hundreds of home runs in their careers, some were better than others at hitting curve balls for home runs, and some were better at hitting fastballs for home runs.
(That was a long sentence, and I apologize for that) ^
But just because your neighbor wakes up and goes for a run every morning, that doesn’t mean you have to be the person who gets up while it is still dark out to go for a jog.
You can be the one who finds time over a lunch break.
You can be the one who can get the most effective workout after work.
And it isn’t just exercise.
Just always keep in mind, different stokes for different folks.
I (think) I am finally finding out what works best for me, and it isn’t what works best for my friends. And that is awesome to me.
Take your time and try a bunch of different methods. Different diets, different workouts, different morning routines, all of it. Move things around and test it all out, you will eventually find out what works best.
A good way to do this, but you have to be careful, is to let yourself idle for a short moment.
Do nothing and be nothing, and find out what comes naturally for you.
I took a step back for a moment to find out what I naturally do, and I have found out that it is a task for me to get up and eat breakfast every day. So what works best? Intermittent fasting. I skip breakfast and don’t eat until a little after lunch, and then I eat big for just a few hours of the day.
Enough about me though, this isn’t what this is about.
This is about YOU.
Do YOU. Find out what works best and roll with it!
I have a bad habit of always wanting to wait until things are just right, or expecting that circumstances will change when there is some type of external change.
Deep down I know that no situation will be perfect, and no timing will be excellent, until you make it that way.
It is up to you and only you to make your life what you want it to be.
A bigger paycheck won’t do it for you.
A new boss won’t do it for you.
The only way things will ever be perfect, is if you strive to make them perfect. And in order to do that, damn near every day needs to be perfect.
Fine tune the little things because there really is no truer statement than this –
How you do the small things, is how you do all things.
Anonymous
And when you let small habits slip, or let bad habits creep in to your life, you notice the changes begin to happen on a larger scale.
You notice that all of a sudden, you’ve packed on an extra 10-15 pounds.
Or you notice that all of a sudden, it has been 3 months since you have seen the inside of a gym.
It is estimated that all of us have a group between 5-10 habits that we perform the exact same way, every single day.
These may range from how you brush your teeth, which phone your pocket sits in, to which route you take to work.
But when one of these things changes, it can throw a wrench in our day to day lives.
When one of these habits change for the worse, or even worse – you develop a new bad habit – there is a domino effect that essentially turns in to you not believing in yourself anymore.
Because now that you have a habit you don’t like – you aren’t performing as well as you used to be.
Because you aren’t performing as well as you used to be – your belief in yourself begins to diminish.
The tipping point comes right here.
You have arrived at the figurative ‘fork in the road.’
Your bad habits can stay with you, and make you a new version of you – a worse one.
Or you can kick those habits in the ass and never see them again, creating a better you.
The most important step in this process is realizing that you are at a fork!
Praise God that there are different actions you can take. If you have this realization you will literally consciously make changes to be better, or consciously choose to continue to get worse and worse.
Nobody in their right mind would choose to continue becoming worse – would they?
Wrong.
Why?
Getting worse is EASY.
Getting better is HARD.
Getting fat and unhealthy is EASY.
Losing weight and getting in shape is HARD.
You will NEVER receive a reward without first going through something and achieving what you set out to achieve.
There truly is no such thing as a free lunch.
You will not get an amazing life if you don’t work your ass off through a hard time.
People who retire at the age of 35 with $100,000,000 in the bank did not achieve that by doing things that were easy.
People who are still working to pay rent and buy groceries at age 70 are in that position most likely because they wanted the easy road earlier in their lives. They wanted to stay at the job that didn’t pay very well but was easy. They wanted to watch TV and eat shitty food every day because it was easy.
Staying up a little bit later to learn something about your business you run is not easy.
Waking up early to work out because you won’t have time that day is not easy.
But things like this, the not easy things, are what will guide you to the life that you envision for yourself.
The life you envision is not sitting on a couch watching Netflix and eating McDonald’s – so why is that what you do??
You will get out what you put in! Putting that in will only get you that result in the long run.
However, the good GREAT news is that you are in the drivers seat!
You control where the car goes and how fast it goes. You control whether you change the oil and put air in the tires or if you want to ride on flats and damage your rims.
Nobody controls your life the way that you think they do.
The only person who controls your life is YOU. Corny yes – true yes.
If you consistently wake up on time, prepare yourself for the day, stay on task and complete everything you set out to complete, fuel your body the correct way, nourish your mind with positivity and productivity, give and receive the utmost amount of love as humanly possible, you will have an incredible life.
Just as soon as you began to feel your life dip down in to a slump, it can be revived! You know this because you have felt it. You have literally done it.
You know for a fact that it is as easy as taking things one day at a time – getting out of the rut and on to the right path – for you to be where you want to be again.
Don’t be ashamed of your progress either.
Don’t give a damn about other people.
Don’t care so much about broadcasting everything.
It may seem like creating a social media brand and this and that is a great way to go, but dammit; wait until you are already somebody worth branding!
Blah blah blah self worth. I’m not shit right now – I know this.
I want to be the shit though??? So I will be. But I need to stop pretending I am, until I really am.
I will write another post – probably on the other account – about how I will know when I am the shit.
I’ve been reading a book lately, appropriately titled Copycats. I’m sure you have no idea where my inspiration for this post came from…
It is written by Oded Shenkar, and speaks heavily on how imitators actually become some of the best innovators in the world when it comes to business.
I am reading it for the business aim that it takes, but these ideas can be implemented in multiple aspects of our lives.
We have all heard of Boeing, correct? If you’ve ever flown out of a public airport, there is a 99% chance you have flown in a Boeing engineered airplane.
One of, if not the biggest, powerhouses in the commercial aviation industry, had nothing to do with the invention of the commercial airliner.
Comet, an airline company that was dominating the market in the 1950’s, suffered a few crashes in too small a period of time, and the Boeing President at the time saw an opportunity.
Bill Allen saw one of the Comet models at the Farnbourough Air Show and immediately saw an opportunity to take the mold of what has already been created, and simply add a few tweaks to improve it.
This realization probably saved Boeing millions and millions of dollars in R&D.
Now, enough business talk. How does this apply to you?
Because odds are, you aren’t the best in the world at what you are doing.
Don’t be upset at hearing that though, I’m not trying to dishearten you, that is just a simple fact.
You should actually be thrilled about this, it means people have paved the way before you and you can catch up, or even pass them!
Look at someone who is one of the best in the world at what you are doing. Use all of the resources you can, and try your best to pick them apart. Watch them work and study their finished products as much as you possibly can. Find out what they do really well, and find out what they do poorly.
The latter is the most important part.
If you can take someone who is the best at what you both are doing and dissect their strategies and techniques with the intent of making sure that YOU perfect THEIR drawbacks, you are already ahead.
They have spent years and years of work and practice to get to where they are right now. They have made mistake after mistake and potentially lost money, friends, family, the list goes on and on.
There is innovation, imitation, and imovation.
Be an imovator.
Mix the two worlds of imitating and innovating.
Use paths already walked before you, and find out how to walk that same path more effectively and productively.
In order for the people around you to expect very highly of you, first you must give them a reason to expect greatness. You have to exude that you can handle anything and you must boast a confidence in yourself that worries everyone around you none.
Come out of the gate hot.
Attack everything full speed and don’t back down,
Talk a big game, but humbly.
Don’t necessarily claim that you can do everything, but when things are presented to you, shrug them off because you know that nothing is too big for you. You’re going to achieve every thing that is put in front of you.
But when you surround yourself with people who expect a great amount form you, you then begin to do the same. The people around you trust you, and it becomes a responsibility of yours to earn the right to keep that trust.
You want to be trusted because when others trust you, you are given more freedom.
When you are given more freedom, you are exposed to more opportunities to learn new things.
When you are exposed to more opportunities to learn new things, you learn new things.
When you learn new things, you get better.
When you get better, at literally whatever it is, you make more money.
Is there anything in the world that the person who is the best at it, isn’t making the most money in that field, or close to it?
I don’t think there is.
So surround yourself with people who expect the world of you, because you then will expect the world of yourself. When you expect the world, you go make it yours.
Thanks.
Continue reading for a bonus section.
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Speaking of the world. I hope that you all can take a moment to rethink where you really are.
This is me simply extending a very rational suggestion to you, that you research flat earth.
Do a simple google search and watch some videos, read some articles, with a completely open mind.
Just question it a little bit, see where it takes you.
I’m not going to try and convince you, I’m not even saying I am convinced. I can only tell you that I have researched it, and it is very interesting to me. Most of the ideas are very valid and intriguing.
That is all. But I want you to know that you have to get this image out of your head.
This is unrealistic and not at all what the flat earth community claims the earth really is.
Thanks again. Good luck with your research, enjoy.
We all have experienced the back and forth relationship between pushing and pulling in our lives at some point.
When we want a girl, she doesn’t want us back. Then when we don’t want her anymore, she seems to want us.
When you are going out of your way to find a certain pair of shoes in your house you might have no idea where they are, but the next day when you have totally forgot about your search, they pop up right in front of you.
As many of you know I, along with two business partners, have purchased an online exercise supplement company called New Dimension Supplement Club.
In the process of our takeover there has been a lot of new stuff put on my plate that I have had no prior experience with. In these situations I tend to do pretty well and that is partly why I was excited to take the leap and begin this venture.
The more time goes by, the more tasks I have to complete, the deeper I get in to the world of e-commerce, the less I find out I know.
It has been taking a pretty good toll on me and I have been getting a little bit more upset than I probably should. After hours and hours of clicking yourself in circles and accomplishing nothing, sometimes I need to step away.
I take the stress off of myself by disconnecting from my desire to obtain a true understanding. When I completely clear myself of the stress, somehow, I suddenly know exactly what I need to do.
If I call it a night and go to bed, I often times wake up in the morning and get back on the computer to work again and magically click all of the right buttons and end up in the ever elusive locations I needed and stressed about just the night before.
I’m realizing that when I am stressed and upset about something, my energy I put out isn’t the energy I need to bring good in to my life. My vibration is too worried about what I can’t find, what I don’t know, that what I need to find is struggling to appear in front of me.
It can be easy to sit and sulk in our negativity, but stepping back and removing ourselves from the situation and from the negativity can give us the refreshing energy we need to obtain what we originally needed.
What I want you to take away from this is to not fight stress. It is okay to step back, press pause for a second, clear your head and your energy, and get after it again.
You will find that the silence and ease of your break will open up your vibrations to what you’ve been looking for the whole time.
