The start of the new year is the most popular time for people to improve themselves, especially in health and athletics. But it takes more than a month or two of dedication to entirely change yourself–you have to reframe your habits daily.
Bobby O’Brien is a Strength and Conditioning Teacher at SHS who prioritizes teaching healthy athletic habits through his classes.
“That’s kind of what we build the class around, is the consistency of habits. So taking the strength class is really nice because it’s built into your day, so it’s just part of your routine. That’s what training and habits should be,” O’Brien said.
Carter Sullivan is a senior at SHS who takes Strength & Conditioning.
“It makes me more disciplined, especially with sports, because it’s somewhere you can work hard, and turn those hard work and habits into practice, which help you with games and to become a better athlete,” Sullivan said.
Although, at times, students can feel pressure to outperform their peers in class, building habits should be centered around a mindset of achieving personal goals.
“Without healthy habits, you’re not even close to reaching your potential, and that’s really all that it’s about. It’s not about being the same as or better than anybody else,” O’Brien said.
Another student, junior Geovanni Stacci, commented on how taking strength class helped him improve his individual habits.
“Before I didn’t really work out, but after I started taking strength classes I started being more active,” Stacci said.
Student-athletes face high pressure to perform well while balancing the pressures of school life. Maintaining a healthy sleep schedule can be difficult for teenagers, though that’s a key habit to maximize athleticism and health.
“I would move ‘sleeping habits’ into healthy athletic habits. So for a student-athlete who’s practicing, training and competing on a regular basis, their body is still growing, still changing, but it’s also easy to recover from all the work,” O’Brien said.
Most students also think of stretching as a ‘healthy’ athletic habit, although whether that’s an effective habit is still up for debate.
“I think stretching is a little overrated. That’s from an athletic perspective. Stretching is best done for a purpose, and the most functional purpose for stretching is to reestablish muscle length after it’s been shortened. […] So stretching before exercise has been proven to actually have a negative impact on dynamic performance because you’re stretching cold muscles, and the forcible lengthening of a cold muscle is a really good way to hurt yourself,” O’Brien said.
The strength and PE classes at SHS have warm-ups before their exercises, but these include moving without stretching and then utilizing stretches as a cooldown. Stretching for flexibility rather than athletic purposes is different, but ultimately has the same science behind it.
“Flexibility is about strength, so training through big ranges of motion is the best way to improve flexibility because strong muscles are flexible muscles, weak muscles are tight and stiff,” O’Brien said.
Another big component of athletic habits is the diet that an athlete chooses to follow. However, for those in high school, it may not be entirely their choice.
“Most high school kids are not really responsible for the majority of their diet. They’re going home, and they’re eating whatever their families make, and I respect that tremendously. So we don’t really talk a lot about macronutrients in class because the last thing that I want is for a family to feel like I’m telling them that they should be doing something that they can’t or don’t prefer,” O’Brien says.
However, when student-athletes can decide their diet, there are still some general rules they should follow.
“When high school athletes get an opportunity to make their own nutritional decisions, they make very poor ones. Generally speaking, I see a lot of kids that come in that didn’t wake up early enough to eat breakfast, so they grab a bag of Cheetos out of the vending machines, and that’s breakfast,” O’Brien said.
Although many high school students don’t have the time or ability to monitor their nutrition, that’s a habit that most people develop as they age.
“Eating like an athlete means that everything you put in your body, you know what the purpose is, and most high school kids don’t think about it like that, but that’s a process of becoming more mature and healthier,” O’Brien said.
Anyone has the opportunity to better themselves and their habits during the new year or any other time.
“If you have the goal of being the best athlete you can be, or the best student you can be, or the best musician you can be, the path to getting there is to create habits that help you improve. […] Habits make you who you are. Habits are your lifestyle,” O’Brien said.
