Monday, August 07, 2006

Dance, Dance, Revolution

This last weekend I played a little bit of a tournament (just the Sunday), and I saw and had the time to analyze the impact of the party. Before I get into this discussion, let me state that I love to dance and party. I, however, will try to stay neutral in this analysis.

Lets first look at the pros and cons of partying on a Friday or Saturday night. On the pro side, dancing loosens the body, team bonding, partying is lots of fun, chance to meet other ultimate folks, see another city, and you ussually have a late night snack. On the con side, any sort of hangover reduces athletic performance, loss of recovery sleep, and costs money.

The neccessary conditions for a good ultimate morning are the following:
1. Wakeup early enough to prepare, get some food, get to the fields for warmup.
2. Wakeup with a relatively clear mind.
3. Have a solid warmup.

Many people will argue that you need a good nights rest. I don't believe this is true in many cases, and the average person can get away with one or two nights of minimal rest and perform at close to peak.

In my opinion, number 3 is the most important condition to have a successful morning game and day. Wether this means you go to bed early or late after partying if 3 can be satisfied then things will go reasonably well. This coincides with the general belief that you need to start warming up an hour before game time.

A coach/captain needs to enforce morning rules this with a team and accordingly make punishments and rewards depending on how a team achieves these goals. One of my captains use to say, "We're all adults. Do what you want tonight, but make sure you come out in the morning ready to play."

PJ

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

Apparently hitting the end of a sleep cycle (80-100 min per) when you wake up is more of a factor in alertness than total rest - whatever your internal sleep rhythm is on, make sure you sleep for some multiple of that time period eg. if your body works on 100 min cycles, go to bed 100, 200, 300, 400, etc. minutes before the alarm goes off.

Plusses - if you miss the beginning of a cycle, you just earned yourself 90 more minutes of partying

Minuses - this kind of logic leads to more all-nighters than the ideal.


I'm not sure the effects beer and/or poutine have on biorhythms, so proceed with caution

-Yeo