The Big 3

In my eyes the BIG 3 are things that you need to be focusing on no matter your goal or what your trying to achieve in life.

If your goal is to lose weight, bulk/gain weight, perform at work, perform with your given sport, rehab an injury. It doesn’t matter what your doing, these 3 things need to be high on your priority list.

My BIG 3 are; Sleep, Nutrition and Hydration.

You hear about many people who claim that they don’t sleep and that they are able to get so much more done in the day. Or that grinding through life is the only way to be successful. 

I’m sorry but this is completely wrong!! 

I don’t care who you are but you need to SLEEP a good quantity and quality of sleep to function correctly. This will be different for everyone but there is not one person out there who can function without/minimal sleep. If you have an acute loss in sleep (Less than 6 hours sleep over a 24 hour period) then you will have roughly a 0.4% decrease in performance for every hour spent awake following. So for example you go to sleep at midnight and you wake up at 5.30am (5.30 hours) to go to the gym before work. By 6.30am your performance will be 0.4% lower than when you go up. By the time you get to work at 9.30am you will have a 1.6% decrease in total performance and by 5.30pm (Finishing work) you will have a 4.8% decrease in performance.

Everyone should get told how important NUTRITION is, so it’s fairly self explanatory to why you need to always be working on that. The biggest thing I always approach is that you need to always be eating a wide range of foods, every single nutrient is vital for human health. This is my simple view on the different nutrients that we get from food; Carbohydrates are needed for energy, Protein for building muscle and Fats for hormones and enzyme production. Understanding this is important and why I never understand why people cut out certain nutrients in an attempt to lose weight and/or feel better. 

The last one of my BIG 3 is HYDRATION. To me it is a no brainer, the human body is made up of 60% water. Your brain is 75% water. Blood is 83% water. Heart is 79% water. But I always find that people don’t drink enough water and are often chronically dehydrated. It just doesn’t make any sense, our body is built of so much water so why aren’t we drinking enough water? When it comes to water intake I always recommend drinking between 2-3L each day, which should be drunk over the course of the day not in one sitting.

In order to achieve any goal we have we need to make sure that we are consistent with the BIG 3!! These 3 areas are the basic building blocks for everything we do or want to do in life, if we have a decrease in any of these 3 areas for long period of time our health with be significantly affected. If we have a decrease over a short period of time then our performance will be affected.

So if you want to able to perform at a high level and live a healthy life then we need to focussing on the BIG 3; SLEEP, NUTRITION & HYDRATION.