Are You a Sedan or a Race Car?

Joel Younkins

Physical Preparation Coach

With POWER comes RESPONSIBILITY

We (I) started watching Formula 1 Drive to Survive on Netflix. It's a really good show, especially to see insights on how elite athletes and teams operate at the highest level...Lots of pressure and expectations are put on themselves and the others around them!

But with watching this show, it made me think of a comparison often made in the Sports Performance world...

Are you a sedan or are you a race car???

You see, sedan cars that you see everyday driving to work, to the  grocery store, and to JYT, these cars operate on a low performance level. They're fast enough to do the speed limit, to get from Point A to Point B, and they're usually meant to be pretty comfortable to be in.

They also can still be driven for many miles on bad tires, bad alignments, past due oil changes, etc and you probably wouldn't notice much difference in the cars performance while driving it...And this is totally fine, at least until your mechanic gets mad at you!

But, on the flipside of this, a race car like a Formula 1 car, would maybe end a drivers life if they took the car on the track with bad tires, bad alignment, and old oil in the engine.

The Formula 1 ("race car") car demands much more attention to detail. And to be honest, they are way more high maintenance than the sedan car in order to perform at what it's meant to do.

So this is the part where we spin the conversation back to humans and performance.

You may have started out your training journey (athlete or not) as a sedan. But as you've morphed yourself into the high performing race car, you need to pay attention to the little details more carefully. The days of getting very little sleep, living on poor nutrition, and not factoring rest into your training can wreck havoc on you and worst case scenario can lead to injury or illness. 

Sometimes training hard gets a bad rap because of people not realizing, you can't be a race car living like a sedan.

When a "race car" gets a tweak from training hard.

People may say something like this...

"Ahh see you shouldn't have been pushing yourself that hard, that's what happens."

No, maybe they just need to dial in life outside of training or training in general because now they have such higher outputs compared to a non trained individual (a "sedan").

And what really happens, is that person is performing some AWESOME THINGS that most people can't do without hard work! There's a reason we think race cars are amazing vs sedans being a normal car. Race cars are built with may more work and detail while a sedan is built on an assembly line in no time. Doesn't make one overall better than the other, but there's differences.

But let's not forget the sedan comparison from earlier...How many people do you think are walking around with issues in their bodies, but they never push themselves hard enough to even find out how jacked up they actually are? Lets not forget that problems are still problems until they become symptomatic. 

So anyways, think about where you are on the spectrum from sedan to race car. The further you slide the needle towards race car, the more responsibility the athlete AND COACH have in order to harness that power and make sure everything is ON TRACK for that person to continue to operate at their full potential! 

With Power Comes Responsibility