REACH PEAK PERFORMANCE
with your AI powered Health Coach.
Mental fitness in competitive sports
“Mental fitness plays an increasingly important role in competitive sports, especially for future generations. While football has come close to its physical limits in recent years, there is still huge untapped potential on the mental level. As a professional athlete you want to achieve and maintain a top fitness level, especially when competing in various competitions with 3 matchdays per week. ONVY helped me to optimize my load management, support injury prevention and also improve my mental fitness. Especially in times of high stress it helps a lot to stay in balance both physically and mentally so you can perform at your best and demonstrate leadership for others.”
Rani Khedira - Football professional
WHY ATHLETES ARE THE PERFECT MODEL FOR STRESS MANAGEMENT
Many assume professional athletes live glamorous lives alongside their substantial earnings and celebrity lifestyles while fulfilling the job they love most. But, behind the scenes, professional athletes suffer hardships too. In addition to their exhausting training schedule, athletes deal with high public expectations causing stress from late-night games, travel and being separated from loved ones. As a result of this added pressure, adrenaline and cortisol are naturally released in times of stress. Though, endurance training positively alters the autonomic nervous system's balance. Therefore, the parasympathetic nervous system can remain more dominant. Unfortunately, athletes also use caffeinated stimulants pre-game, stimulating the sympathetic nervous system even further, making it harder to activate their parasympathetic nervous system (rest and digest) post-match. Ironically, we thought athletes should push to be more "fight or flight"? Sure, when it's training time. But they remain in fight or flight all day facing the above. In addition, late meals after football games further strain their system, instead of the body focusing on recovery for the next day. Digestion slows down at night, and once we consume food right before bed, energy is drawn from other organs to help us digest food, negatively impacting our sleep quality, recovery and resistance to stress. Interestingly, late dinners demonstrate a more destructive influence on postprandial serum glucose profiles the following morning. Regular meal timing is critical for our health. (Study)
So athletes need to maximize training and recovery by tracking data to take advantage of both states, the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. This is essential to getting quality sleep, efficient recovery, slowing heart rate, decreasing blood pressure, stable blood sugar level, stimulating digestion, relaxing muscles and increasing energy storage.
ONVY is a private health management platform enabling you to unleash your full potential
ONVY empowers you to maintain peak performance and ideal mental fitness through a deeper understanding of your daily habits and their impact on your performance.
Identify and end unhealthy patterns that keep you from reaching your highest potential
“With ONVY I can see all my relevant health stats at a glance. Thanks to their predictive insights, I've been able to optimize my sleep and recovery cycles during competitive periods. They have shown me how all areas of physical and mental health are interconnected and even opened up new ways to improve my mental fitness.”
Andreas Voglsammer - Union Berlin
“I started working with ONVY after I suffered a complicated knee injury which was a critical point in my career. The ONVY dashboards helped me to optimally control my load management on a daily basis. Tracking my health data helped me to understand when it’s time to do more and when is the right time to recover”
Quirin Moll - Football professional
"ONVY has helped me to understand the impact of my habits on my biomarkers and performance. I was able to identify unhealthy patterns and replace them with healthy routines to optimize recovery cycles and improve my mental fitness with a personalized and data-driven approach.“
Moritz Leitner - German Bundesliga and Cup Winner, Champions League finalist
Performance optimization
There is a fine line between pushing your limits and overtraining or injury. The key is to balance your physical and mental strain with proper recovery cycles on a daily basis.
Our physical and mental performance depends on our ability to establish balance in our lives. If we’re balanced, we’re able to move easily between states of arousal and regeneration – or activity and rest.
The ONVY AI Health Coach helps you to optimally balance physical and mental strain on a data-driven basis so you can reach and maintain peak performance.
Activity
Recovery
Stress
Mindfulness
You can learn to manage stress like an athlete
Top-level athletes seem to manage to avoid chronic stress and maintain an exceptional level of physical and mental health. So what is their secret?
Athlete’s have a remarkable resilience to ongoing life challenges and chronic stress for a number of reasons. When it comes to managing physical stress - diet and exercise naturally play a role. An athletes nutritional intake is designed to promote recovery, reduce inflammation and provide energy. That is why they consume the best foods and limit their intake of caffeine and alcohol.
To soothe tired muscles, athletes follow stretching routines and get regular massages and they also follow relaxation protocols.
Meditation, mindfulness based interventions and breathing exercises are used to calm their nerves and boost their concentration.
Basically athletes are like a well-oiled machine where all the component parts work together harmoniously to keep the engine running. It is no surprise they have longer lifespans and less risk of diseases.
Getting a deeper understanding of their own system enabled by wearable technology in order to improve their recovery & sleep, support injury prevention and optimally steer load management on a personalized basis has been an additional game changer over the last decade.
Adding mental fitness as a secret sauce to this data-driven approach feels like complementing the final and so fundamental puzzle piece to this holistic way of self optimization.