The mental states of sandboarding

Happy Sunday!

Welcome back to Sandboarding Nation! I will start off by saying that I have an easier way to get to this blog, the link you should put in now is 'www.sandboarding-nation.com' hopefully this will make it easier to get to the blog! This week we will all be focusing on the mental states you need to be in and how your mental attitudes and habits can help you excel and go further in recreational and/or professional sandboarding, plus some tips on how you can improve your well being to be suited to sandboard. I want to make a disclaimer that I am not a qualified specialist for Sport, Health, Psychology or Medical Studies therefore this is just advice and not professional assistance, now there are 2 attitudes which are 'Mental' and 'Physical', the physical section will be coming next week.

Mental

In this section I'll be giving you some tips on how can be better mentally before and during sandboarding.

Sleep

To get started you need a good amount of sleep, now there are multiple opinions and debates on how many hours of sleep you should be getting but with my research, I have discovered that the most widely accepted answer is 7.5 or 8 hours per night. A website called sleepyti.me can effectively measure your average sleep cycles and tell you when the best time is to wake up or to go to sleep in order to wake up feeling fresh and energised. One 'sleep cycle' typically lasts 90 minutes and 5 or 6 cycles per night is generally considered to be a 'good night's sleep'; waking up in the middle of a sleep cycle and not after one has finished is the number one reason why people tend to be groggy when they wake up from sleep. 5 sleep cycles are good because there are usually 90 minutes in a sleep cycle and 90 times 5 is 450, convert 450 minutes into hours gives you an answer of 7.5; if you add another sleep cycle you'll have to work out 90 times 6 which is 540 or in simple terms, 9 hours.

Water (H2O intake)

In relation to sleep, you need a high intake of water as sandboarding is mostly done in dry & arid sandy areas, feeling parched whilst sandboarding is never good as you can get dehydrated really quickly in conditions when sandboarding and if you don't have a supply of water with you, you would lose money due to the corporate boss that is known as bottled water. There are also many theories and answers about how much water you should be drinking every day but I have found an online calculator www.camelbak.com/hydrationcalculator which figures out how much water you should have and the benefit of this is that many factors are considered such as urine colour, gender, weight, height and sweat content. Personally, for every hour of sandboarding on a typical hot summers day in the UK, I would usually consume about 1 litre of water.

Diet

Obviously a balanced diet is essential for good performance; However, a good intake a vitamins and minerals are required for you to be just a tad better at the sport and get yourself an 'edge'. Vitamin B12 helps form red blood cells, helps improve your metabolism and can maintain the performance of your central nervous system. Vitamin D is also essential as this helps the body absorb Calcium which helps maintain and build strong bones and for the benefit of this list I would include Vitamin A as this can help sight, teeth, tissue and skin; this can help for sandboarding as this may assist you in getting through the harsh conditions this sport has to offer!

Meditation and Relaxation

This is a key, fundamental principle and very important reason why this blog post exists right now. Being relaxed and calm can help very much in sandboarding due to multiple reasons, the first reason is that meditation can improve your concentration so you have less time to focus on little things and hopefully perform better sliding down the sand dune, the second reason is that there are multiple health benefits of meditation the most notable being that anxiety is reduced significantly which for sandboarding would be really useful, especially in a highly competitive and risky situation. If you have a perception that meditation is only for religious people, then you're wrong; Meditation and multiple styles of relaxation help us discover what goes on around us and in our minds. I would personally recommend at least 45 minutes of meditation a week. This is optional but Yoga would be beneficial too as this links in with meditation and the discipline is linked in with extended fitness too, but I will talk more about Yoga in the next post.


That is this week 'Mental states' post over and done with, I intend to make this a 2 part post with the 'Physical states' coming next week. So please join me same time, same place next week for the 'Physical states of sandboarding', before I go this week I will put up a poll asking 'What colour should I spray paint stripes on my board?' and I await your advisory opinions since I'm incredibly indecisive. Take care of yourself.