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How To Improve Reaction Time And Win For Good!
Learning how to improve reaction time is the best thing you can do right now for your functionality and physical fitness. There are plenty of situations where simply being able to act quicker can make great differences especially if you are a sport’s person.
Whether you wish to be a tennis ace or a great goalie, the best advice is to improve your reaction time by practicing a lot. There are many things you can do to improve your reaction time, but you should know what it really means before proceeding.
Here is a complete guide on how to improve reaction time. Once you try all the things mentioned in this article on how to improve reaction time and what reaction time is, you will be pleased with the results you get.
What is reaction time?
Reaction time is entirety one of the most underestimated elements of individual accomplishment and performance. While many people believe they know exactly what it refers to, their interpretation of reflex and reaction time is technically inaccurate.
Whether you are an established athlete, sportsman, or someone who remains sitting in a room all day, response or reaction time performs a vital role in every individual thing that you explore. Typically, reaction time is how quickly one responds to external provocations or stimuli.
Your nervous system and brain dictate your entire body. Every effort you make and the actions you take first have to go into your brain ere your body can ever begin moving.
Assume it as a network or electronic device like a computer. Whenever the body encounters an external stimulus, electrical signals are transferred to the brain to be further processed.
This outside stimulus does not require to be something major. It could simply be radiant light hitting the eyes or someone just touching you on the shoulder. Whatever the problem may be, your sensations are aroused or stimulated immediately.
Those sensory receptors later send out electrical stimuli to the brain so that it may determine how you want to return to the situation or external stimuli. Then, the brain transmits those signals to your central and peripheral nervous systems for it to travel to the other parts of the body that require it to move.
The outcome is a bodily response to the outside stimulus. It seems simple enough, but it is a complicated process that occurs within a fraction of a second.
Now that you understand what reaction time is, you must be looking for ways on how to improve reaction time. Let’s see what is reaction time so important that one needs to improve it by constant effort.
Why is reaction time so important?
As mentioned earlier, reaction time is astonishingly significant for your daily life. It helps keep you secure and guarantees that the body is prepared to take action whenever it requires it to.
Recollect about all of the exercises and activities you have done that rely upon immediate reaction rates to execute successfully. Driving is one such activity. When any car abruptly pulls out in face of you, immediate reaction time will indicate the dispute between staying harmless or getting toward an accident.
The same thing goes for mere falls. When you fall or slide, the brain must react immediately to the visible stimulation so that it could tell you to use your hands to catch yourself. Even standing displayed to blinding light depends on quick reaction times to block any long-term injury to your vision!
Do not confuse reaction time with your reflexes. While reflexes and reaction times are designed in the same way to work to keep you protected, there is an individual key distinction. Reflexes are your automatic movements to external stimuli. Meanwhile, your reaction time refers to deliberate movements that you consciously make.
Reflexes are not influenced too much by your lifestyle decisions or mental courage. They are constantly there controlling behind the scenes to evade harm whether you are paying awareness to your surroundings or not.
That is not the situation with reaction times. Sadly, your capacity to react immediately can fade over time. Your brain normally gets more delayed as you age due to degeneration and impairment. Poor fitness and lifestyle options can intensify the problem as well.
Let’s see how to improve reaction time so that you can protect yourself and improve your lifestyle as needed.
How To Improve Reaction Time
There are many different ways of using which one can improve their reaction time if they are looking at how to improve reaction time. Strengthening the connection between your brain and body will certainly make a noticeable difference in your ability to respond to your surroundings.
Physical responses will appear quicker than ever once you can eliminate that brief moment of “buffering” in between the response.
here are various techniques you can use and learn how to improve reaction time. All these are worth trying, you can also pick your favorite and practice them.
1. Train any specific action or movement
You might have seen athletes playing or performing their particular exercise. You may have noticed they keep performing the same drills again and again, what could be the possible reason behind this?
There is no better method to speed up your response or reaction time than to train your body physically to perform the reaction you want. When you complete and practice those exercises or workouts daily, you are simply charging and firing up your central nervous system just like you would do if you were responding to any external stimulus naturally.
This particular habit creates a connection between your body and brain. The more you are training specific movements, the stronger your connection becomes over time. This is the reason imitating or mimicking movements is an important part of training in athletics.
Having all these connections reinforced, trained, and established ensures that electrical signals travel even more quickly through your body and reach the brain for action.
There are different ways one can train them but it depends upon the sports you like. Sprinters oftentimes improve their reaction time by stimulating the starting sound of bell or gunshots. In such competitions, every second plays an important role.
Those who are good at contact sports like rugby or football often go for plyometric workouts. These are highly explosive moves that need as much muscle force as possible by a person in a split second. Some good examples include lateral hops and jump squats.
Ultimately, the most desirable workout to improve your reaction time should be the one that mimics the movements you are looking to speed up.
2. Do Not Lose Your Calm
On another side of the spectrum, you can also learn how to improve reaction time by simply learning how to stay calm and keep your cool. Oftentimes, the biggest reaction time spoilers are distractions between the games.
Athletes who have to hear tons of fans screaming their names or players moving around them need to hone their target to make sure that they are reacting quickly to the events in their games. One more example you can sue is a driver. Drivers must stay calm and free of all distractions on the roads so that they can react well to any hazard that comes in their way.
There is a powerful link between reaction times and meditations which not everyone follows unless they are professionals. Several studies have determined that having the ability to keep calm strengthens the brain and increases the reaction time thus generating a great response to an external sudden stimulus.
Meditation is all about increasing awareness and staying calm. You must work hard to pay attention to your breathing rate and what your body is doing or how it is positioned.
Give mediation a try and see how it helps to improve the reaction time. Not only reaction time, but it also has tons of other benefits too. Learning how to stay poised and calm will make a great difference in your body’s reactions to visual and audible stimulations.
3. Stay hydrated
Learning how to improve reaction time and avoiding water? not possible. Many of you might not know this but your brain can shrink when you are dehydrated like cells of your body. The brain is made of water predominantly, so lack of hydration or being dehydrated will certainly affect your reaction time.
How can your brain fire off great responses when it is simply struggling to remain healthy and hydrated? Proper hydration is essential to improve your health overall, with your brain being no exception. Many studies have shown that there is a link between dehydration and poor cognitive performance.
To avoid issues with your response time, keep your brain in a good shape and consume water constantly throughout the day. Just keep a bottle with you. Experts believe that one should consume 2 liters of water every day to remain hydrated completely.
However, that is only the minimum. Water has many important roles for your body not just reaction time. You will see a boost in overall performance and health once you start focusing on your water intake and perform meditation.
4. Get enough sleep
getting nearly 8 hours of sleep every single day helps you stay healthy. Sadly, many of us have busy schedules which might make it a little hard but what has to be done to keep your body and mind healthy should be prioritized.
many times you might have stayed up all night to prepare for a presentation or an exam and the next day there are high chances your reaction time was extremely poor.
There is a reason why many loved ones ask us to stop working when we are immensely tired. This is because our brain needs precious hours of sleep so that it functions well once we wake up.
You can assume your brain to be a computer. Like computers, it keeps running 24 hours called circadian rhythms, this is a cycle that puts the brain into different states of function. When you are not sleeping, the brain works like a temporary hard drive. All your day-to-day events are stored in it. When you go to sleep, all this information will be stored in long-term memory thus relaxing your brain.
If this does not happen, you are going to experience extreme performance issues and data buffering like a filled hard drive. Got the point?
You can learn how to improve reaction time drastically by getting a great sleep for 7 to 9 hours, It is simple and you will be surprised how effective your reaction time gets when you wake up feeling all rejuvenated and refreshed.
5. Fuel your body properly
It might sound surprising but your diet also affects your reaction time. The food you eat to provide energy or fuel to your body is used by all the organs to stay healthy and steady in reactions too.
This also includes your brain not only other organs. Many food items tend to show noticeable effects of the reaction time. One of the most common food items we talking about is soda or coffee. These drinks are highly caffeinated. Heavily caffeinated drinks improve energy levels by stimulating your brain in several different ways.
Generally, when you visit dieticians and doctors, they will ask you not to consume such drinks because they have sugar and caffeine. Indeed, having such food items is not great for your health but caffeine is not the issue here. Caffeine is fine when taken in moderate amounts. However, using it in high amounts may affect your health. You can get it from all-natural sources like tea for preparing all the benefits without the risk of sugary treats.
When you intake caffeine, adrenaline hormone is released within your body. This makes your blood pump and affects the oxygen inside your brain. Due to this, you will feel highly alert Your reaction time will boost highly. Also, know that this boost will not be permanent.
If you want to feed something for the long term, you can simply start working on your diet now and introduce different essential nutrients. Add antioxidants to your diet as they are known to defend your brain. They contain polyphenols which might be good for your brain to prevent stress.
Antioxidants are also capable of fighting signs of aging. This also includes degeneration. Another great nutrient to include in your diet is Vitamin K. Eat food like kale, spinach, and broccoli to improve the function of your brain overall.
These changes to your diet can have great effects on your reaction time and eventually, you will learn how to improve reaction time.
6. Cognitive training exercises
One of the best ways to enhance your reaction time is to perform cognitive exercises. These workouts are targeting specifically your brain rather than working on the muscles in your body.
Cognitive training is a new concept relatively that has made news in the sports world recently. The biggest athletes all over the glove include cognitive training exercises in their workout regimen.
There are different forms of this. However, the purposes served by all are quite the same. Essentially, you will be exposed to audible and visual stimulants to know how quickly you respond to them. It is just like playing a game is quite addicting once you are in. The impact cognitive training has is extremely outstanding.
It is mostly about strengthening and establishing neural pathways. By forcing the brain to respond quickly to stimulus, you create new pleural pathways that your brain later uses to communicate with the central nervous system improving your reaction time.
The more training you provide, the stranger and shorter these paths become. Your brain gets extra comfortable in shooting signals through effective pathways which results in faster reaction times.
Now that you know how to improve reaction time, here are a few factors that affect the reaction time.
Factors affection the reaction time
Take note of these factors:
- Age: As you age, your reaction time will also slow down because of the loss of neurons gradually especially when the task is more complex.
- Hydration: Just a few hours without will slow down your reaction time.
- Blood alcohol content: Alcohol can reduce the reaction time significantly making your brain slightly foggy.
- Fitness: Getting your workouts done regularly is also linked to faster reaction time.
Final Thoughts
Increasing the reaction time or learning ways on how to improve reaction time is incredibly important whether you are a sports person or not. It brings a lot of benefits to daily life that you cannot undervalue.
This was everything about how to improve reaction time and do well in all the fields even if you are not an athlete by profession.
