Warning - This Will Seem "Out There"

Cycles of Life
Yesterday my intellectual cycle was way down according to my biorhythms. Those are the types of days you put your car keys in the refrigerator, or go to a big meet without your field bag, or to the gym this morning without my ankle weights. My physical and emotional were both peaking which explains feeling good and not being overly stressed that I would take only one jump. Though I don’t pay too much attention to this anymore, there was a time I was deeply into it and with great success.

After my senior year of college and my 2nd national championship, I was asked to give a lecture to a coaches association about application of biorhythms to athletic training. This theory says your physical cycle is 23 days, emotional is 28 (moon cycles/women periods) and the intellectual is 33. So when your body is consistently trashed it will go down, next it will agitate the emotions and finally the brain will give up trying to reason with the physical exhaustion, emotional frustration and the declining reasoning ability. Half of the cycle is above the "critical line" and half is below in the recharge. These are graphed in sine waves and you can see yours online by Googling "free biorhythm calculators". These cycles begin the day you are born and intersect each other in different patterns throughout life.

So is this hocus pocus, horoscope or just another crutch? Beginning in my junior year of college I began to assert that I would not accept a bad day just because my biorhythms said it should be. I would look ahead and label my training days with an "I" for intensity or a "Q" for quality so that I could get the most out of each day. Gradually I began having very good performances on what theoretically should have been a bad day. As my good days got better, my low days became consistently even with what used to be a good day.

Let’s take it a step further. I started studying dreams and working with a sports psychologist at the university who would hypnotize me and a discus thrower. We were asked to keep a dream journal where we woke up and immediately wrote what we had dreamed. We went over this with the psychologist and the hypnosis session addressed these issues.

The psychologist loved what I had done with biorhythms so he suggested that we try to use the same approach to make us mentally stronger. The result was he could take us under deep hypnosis and condition us to be highly focused even when our intellectual or emotional cycles were crashing. It got so far that we, as a team, could even influence what dreams we had. So we applied our technical goals through this process and then actually saw ourselves successfully complete perfect attempts both under hypnosis and in our dreams. Cool!!

Long story short, I knew as good as I felt yesterday, and as calm as I was, that my physical and emotional were peaking at the same time that my intellectual was crashing. Had I taken a few seconds to look this up I would have taken a little more care in my preparation for packing for the meet. If I see my physical would be down I would give myself a little more rest, and if my emotional was crashing I would take a little more time and make sure I diffused any distractions.
OR, I could just say, "I just had a bad day", except that I would know differently. Have a wonderful Monday! Bubba