From special diets to ice cold baths, we’ve all heard about the lengths a professional athlete will go to gain a competitive edge. Sure, building muscle, gaining speed and improving agility are beneficial ways to enhance your athletic performance.

But, to dominate on the field and in the gym, it takes a lot more than simply developing your body. Are you ready to take your performance to the next level? Here are 5 ways to train like a professional athlete:

1. Prioritize Compound Movements

When you use more muscles, you can gain more muscles. With compound movements such as squats, deadlifts, power cleans and overhead presses, you use multiple joints at once. Consequently, more muscles are used and this will help build your overall strength.

2. Work out your Brain

Pro athletes like Matt Ryan and Steph Curry train their brains to get a leg up on the competition. You may be wondering, however, how exactly do these pro athletes train their brains? They use a cognitive training tool that improves mental abilities that are critical to sports performance.

These abilities include awareness, attention and decision-making. They are beneficial for identifying key play opportunities, filtering out distractions, responding more quickly to plays and predicting your opponent’s moves. Fortunately, with NeuroTracker, you too can indulge in some cognitive training from the comfort of your own home.

3. Engage in some Jumping

Jumping is an exercise that can make your movements more explosive. Consequently, this could improve your overall sports performance. If you work on your jumping and landing mechanics, this could have a high carryover to multiple sports. Some of these sports include: basketball, badminton, soccer, volleyball and tennis. To train like a pro athlete, you can start by doing some squat jumps, box jumps and quick vertical jumps (spending as minimal time on the ground as possible).

4. Drink more Water

In order for your muscles to function optimally during training, it’s crucial to drink enough water. The sheets of connective tissue that attach and enclose your muscles are largely composed of water. So, if you get dehydrated, it can negatively impact your performance.

The sliding surfaces between these sheets of tissues and other structures become “glued” down. As a result, you may experience cramping while working out, which compromises your training session. For high-performance athletes, experts recommend multiplying your body weight times 0.6 to get the number of ounces you should drink each day.

5. Practice Active Recovery

When you have stiff, sore muscles, the last thing you feel like doing is working out. Experts say, however, that the worst thing you can do when you have over exhausted muscles, is to do nothing at all. Pro athletes engage in short, low-intensity workouts, to speed up recovery. Even small workouts such as walking, 15-minute dynamic warm ups and sled dragging variations can increase blood flow without causing soreness.

Sure, becoming a pro athlete requires hard work, dedication and sacrifice. At least now you know the ways you can take your training to the next level. So, ready to enhance your athletic performance?

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