Our lives are totally run off habits.

Think about it… just about everything you do is because you have a habit of doing it.

You basically form a routine with your habits and you get stressed out with any deviation off that routine.

With that being said, developing healthy habits is crucial for an athlete and anybody thats wants to have a meaningful and active lifestyle.

The following is a quick list of healthy habits that are critical and probably easiest and best developed at a young age…

1- Eat Veggies- Im guilty on this one I really didn’t like them growing up and didn’t begin to make sure I was eating enough of them until I learned how they would benefit my body from a performance, aesthetics, and longevity prospective. My general rule of thumb is to have some green and colorful veggies at every meal… Developing this habit a young age will pay off big time for a lifetime.

2- Get quality sleep– It’s hard to get teenagers to actually sleep at normal times however, the research is clear that the vast majority of us get the deepest and most meaningful sleep between 10pm and 2am. Not all sleep is equal as we go into different levels of sleep throughout the night so sleeping 8 hours from 1 am to 9am is not the same as sleeping 8 hours from 10pm to 6am. Get your athletes sleeping at decent hours and watch performance improve.

3- Not eating processed food (crap)- Experts can argue all day about nutrition but the ONLY thing everybody agrees on is that process food is the devil. You are what you eat and It will kill you from the inside out. Man made oils, added sugar, chemicals, preservatives, dyes.. the list goes on… It is quick and easy but as athletes we all know quick and easy never works. If you can get your young athletes to learn to avoid this stuff you will be setting them up for a lifetime of health. Plus… who is going to more injury prone? An athlete thats connective tissue is built of a processed food diet or an athlete that eats whole, fresh, nutritious foods?

4- Don’t Quit- Work ethic, commitment, and a never quit attitude can be learned. I talk about this a lot but too many athletes quit something for the wrong reasons. Now, Im not saying young kids should do thing that they don’t enjoy but quitting mid-season over playing time or a teams record is only teaching them to be losers. To have success at anything in life its going to take some commitment and some balls to stay with it when it’s not going great. We constantly talk about being committed to putting in consistent, hard-ass work.

5- Be Active– This is a spot that many fail. Most adults are totally sedentary and now so are most kids and teens. Even the athletes we train. Too many of them spend time playing their sport but then spend entire days laying around being entirely sedentary. The problem with this, is that when they are done competing they are now totally sedentary. It only takes a few months to a few years for them to look like they never even played sports! Finding physical things they like to do beyond the sport they play and just being active in general is a habit that will serve them for a lifetime.

The earlier the better. It will be very hard to get a handle on this stuff the older we get. Again, these things aren’t rocket science but if you can master these 5 things you will be set up for better performance, less injuries, more happiness, and better health over a lifetime.