The Couch

As an athlete, I train hard. Actually, I train very hard. So most people are surprised when they discover that I spend many hours a day on my living room couch watching TV, responding to emails, or surfing the internet. I am not alone in my apparent “couch potato” status. If you were to tour athlete rooms at the Olympic Training Center, you would find athletes lounging around any time they are not training. So why are the world’s greatest athletes spending so much time doing nothing?

When an athlete trains, they are actually tearing apart their body. During a workout, muscles are torn apart, energy is depleted, and the body is put through substantial trauma. But the human body is an incredible machine and responds by rebuilding and regenerating stronger than before. It is this constant process of tearing down and rebuilding that makes an athlete’s body strong and capable of doing amazing things.

So the process of going to practice is actually damaging to the body but the process of recovering after a workout is where you improve. After practice, when you rest and recover, your muscles rebuild and your body stores energy at higher levels than before the workout. This is fairly counter intuitive for most people as they assume you get stronger during the workout. Elite athletes are well familiar with this phenomenon and therefore take extreme care to recover as hard as they train.

So that is why most of our Olympic Team, myself included, will be spending their summer on the couch, playing xbox, or reading a book!