Importance of Physical Activity for Poker Players

Do you exercise enough?

Whether or not you are a professional poker player, it’s really important to know that physical activity or exercise can improve your health and reduce the risk of developing several health conditions like diabetes, cancer and cardiovascular diseases. Physical activity and exercise can have immediate and long-term health benefits. A minimum of thirty minutes a day can allow you to enjoy these benefits.

The main problem of poker players and the lack of their physical activity is that they can play when they want, quit working day when they want and get up whenever they feel like it. If you, as a poker player, don’t have your own exercise schedule, you are probably faced with the pain in the back, headache and neck pain.

Poker involves sitting for long periods of time and casino environment is full of unhealthy temptation. The risk of diabetes, heart disease and cancer becomes higher as you spend more and more time sitting, Poker players are among the unhealthiest people in the world and this probably contributes greatly to the overall bad reputation for poker.

If you pay attention to the most successful poker players and their lifestyle, you won’t see a big number of them who look unhealthy or overweight, the reason being they’ve started taking fitness and nutrition very seriously. The great example of changing life, both physically and mentally, is Eugene Katchalov, Team Poker Stars Pro, who lost 63 pounds in 14 months.

When reflecting on his incredible 14 month transformation, Katchalov indicates “nutrition and exercise were both equally responsible” for amazing 63 – pound weight loss. Now, when he is at the poker table, he feels like he has much more concentration, much more energy and just feels healthier and more mentally aware.

Yoga and meditation

When you sync your movement with your breathe your mind begins to slow down and you feel more peaceful than you did before you began your practice.

Meditation, like poker, requires patience, relentless focus, presence and time.

For example, you play online poker and you play about 4 tables and hundreds of hands per hour. It is not a rare situation that you lose a lot of hands in a short time and then your emotions rise and shut some of your thought processes. Whether you play poker for fun or professionally, it could be very stressful.

There are numerous bad beats, you often lose too much money and it is sometimes very hard to still be stable and play good poker. If you decided to play poker long-term, maybe it’s good for your game to start with some physical activities. You may try with the meditation and yoga fifteen or thirty minutes before you start playing. Yoga and meditation can help you increase mental control, help you increase awareness or recognize problems you are facing. It can also help you make faster decisions and keep your mind clear of distractions.

Of course, there are some limitations to meditation. Most significantly that it often won’t resolve underlying reasons causing specific mental game problems. Meditation can help you manage the problem, but can’t eliminate it forever.

Meditation can help you to soothe the mind in stressful situations and it has also been directly linked to improving rapid memory recall. Clearing your mind through introspection before a big game or even during breaks in lengthy tournaments can be the key to preventing unintended poker tells on your part.

The power of positive thinking and calculating pot odds and expected values are important things for poker players. Meditation is known to be a great way to strengthen the thought processes and it also falls in line with the concept of the power of positive thinking.

Yoga is activity that anyone can do, it makes you look better and feel better and it is available everywhere. Just like poker! It is very similar to poker because it takes lot of patience, just as you wait and wait for significant hand to make an all in move when the time is right, in yoga too it’s all about the waiting game.

Yoga can be painful just like poker, but you can meet some great women and handsome men through it too. It is good for your mind and body, just like poker is, based on the body/mind connection. Yoga definitely helps you to know your own limits.

Successful poker players advice:

- Organize your free time for walking, running or any fitness activity 30 minutes before you sit down to play

- Take small amount of time to meditate and clear your head - this will help you to make the best decisions in the game at hand.

- Like you have discipline to play poker whole day, you must be disciplined to have daily physical activity to minimize stress

- Healthy diet is very important for poker players

- Sleep enough and sleep well – Grinding 18 hours a day and sleeping 6 will actually affect your performance negatively