🏃‍♀️Catching up with TCU football, NFL combine, + more

What’s up y’all? Cici here.

Welcome back to More Her Speed, a weekly no-BS newsletter all about women in coaching.

A LOT on my Plate

Week 2 of combine prep is now in the books and I can actually take a breath, literally.

I didn’t realize what my days looked like and how much I had on my plate until Les told me at 5 pm one today to write down everything I needed to do from that moment until 8 am the next day.

I filled up two pages.

To get personal again, I’ve added a lot of responsibilities and pieces to my job description as our schedule picks up and just last week I actually incorporated a few things that helped me manage my stress.

First things first, working out always makes me feel 100x times better than whatever is going on around me.

But when I thought about it, that was something that also elevated my heart rate, and I needed to find other outlets to bring it down.

I took an ice bath for 3 days straight last week and felt completely different.

I manually and intentionally raised my heart rate to acknowledge, expose, and adapt. It changed the way my nervous system reacted and responded to stress.

I also made it a point to actually breathe. It sounds silly, but we don't think about breathing, and when we don't think about it we forget to do it.

So when I actively told myself to breathe when I got stressed out or felt overwhelmed, the changes were almost instantaneous.

Now I'm not saying everyone needs to go out and submerge themselves in 40 degree water and try to breathe through their nose only, but I'm saying find outlets- manage your sympathetic state and try to control it. 

TCU Football 

One other dope thing that happened last week was getting to sit down on a podcast with Les and TCU Coach Kyle Bolton.

That game might not have been the best of circumstances, but their success this year is.

We talked about all things speed, but he also mentioned a book that he and some other coaches on the staff have read and incorporate pieces of it into their program. 

The book is called “Breathe: The New Science of a Lost Art” by James Nestor.

He goes into detail down to how breathing can change our facial structure and efficiency of structures in our face.

He backs all his claims with studies and research, but provides historical data and statistics about how much our lives and our nervous system can change if we breathe correctly. 

In all of my workouts last week I tried to only breathe through my nose and though I might’ve felt like I was going to lose my life, I couldn’t believe how I felt afterwards.

Adding this specific rhetoric for breathing with tempos was a complete game changer. 

You can run from hard sh** as long as you want, but running toward it to face it makes a better person out of you.

Quote of the Week

“Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.” 

-Robert Kennedy

Appreciate y’all,

Cici

See you again next week!

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