It doesn’t matter if you’re just an online poker player or someone who regularly travels the circuit looking for the next great game, it’s incredible how your overall health can affect your game. We’re going to go over a few things every player can do to improve their attitude, sharpen their mental acuity, and improve their ability to play longer.

Exercise
If you raise your heart rate over 120 BPM for 30 minutes a day, four to five days a week, you’ll see almost immediate improvement in your stamina, alertness, ability to sleep well, physique (hell yeah!) and ability to focus. The last one in particular is important to poker players, as you can imagine. The only bad side is that you should make sure you’re healthy enough to begin a proper program. Take it slow if you’ve been hitting the tables too much!

Diet
OK, you need to eat some green vegetables and drink water. Right now, you should probably be doing that very thing. Yes, it sucks for the first couple of weeks, but replacing two or three of your meals each week with a big salad (and not one covered in blue cheese dressing) and cutting down all sodas (especially diet ones because they fool you into thinking you’re being healthy when you’re actually just drinking sweet chemicals in brown water.)

Graze
Speaking of, you need to eat more often. Five or six smaller snacks and meals are actually better for you than two big ones because your body doesn’t think it’s starving then. Get a real breakfast in you at 8, have a small snack around 10:30, then lunch at 1. In the afternoon, have a little snack at around 3:30 then a real dinner at 6:00 and a tiny low-carb snack before bed. That’s something every two and a half hours, but you can make it every three hours. Good snacks include low-calorie dried fruit and nuts, yoghurt, etc!
Take care of yourself and you’ll find yourself able to power your way through long events both online and off. Don’t be afraid to bring a snack with you to the tables if that’s how your schedule works. It’ll keep you sharper and give you something to do while waiting for your competition to fall.