The life of a college athlete

The podcast is called "The Life of a College Athlete" and aims to discuss the challenges faced by college athletes in managing their sports, education, and personal life. The guest, Julian Valterrez, a wrestler at North Central College, talks about the difficulties of weight cutting and time management during the season. He emphasizes the importance of eating clean, getting enough sleep, and setting good daily habits. Julian also shares the significance of time management in keeping up with schoolwork and maintaining good grades. He mentions using recovery techniques like foam rollers and ice baths to take care of his body. Julian suggests following motivational accounts on Instagram and practicing consistency and discipline. His advice for athletes struggling with time management is to write down tasks and use notes as a reference. Hi, my name is Joey Jens. The name of this podcast is The Life of a College Athlete. The purpose of this podcast is to talk with college athletes and discuss what they go through in their specific sports and how they are able to manage athletics, education, and just overall personal life. This is also to help give advice to people that do struggle with managing everything as an athlete. Today, my guest here is Julian Valterrez, and he's a wrestler here at North Central College. And the reason he's here today is to discuss as a wrestler what he goes through while being in one of the most demanding sports there is and how he manages his whole life around wrestling, school, and everything else. So, welcome here, Julian. If you want, you could talk about yourself and let the people know some information about you. Sounds good. So, hello, my name is Julian Valterrez once again. I'm a junior from North Central College, and I'm pursuing a major in business management, and I'm a wrestler right here, too. Alright, so I got some questions for you. First question, as a wrestler, what are the challenges you face during your season? The biggest challenges during the season while being in school is cutting weight because it leads to a lot of lack of focus and what they call, I say that time management is definitely really hard in this case because you tend to forget the things you gotta do, so. So, how are you able to manage school and personal life while you go through your season? Like, as a wrestler personally, you go through weight cutting, traveling, and just a lot of stress on your body. So, how do you deal with that personally? I see. So, the main thing that I do is eat clean meals every day, and the clean meals would be like chicken, broccoli, carrots, just all those healthy vegetables and protein, carbs, and fats you gotta get in on daily. The second thing is sleeping. Eight hours of sleep every day is really important. We do that just because our coaches tell us to do it, so it's really good to know that. And definitely set up good daily habits. I say the daily habits I do is what I just said before, and I also hang out with a bunch of wrestling team and stuff like that on the weekends and weekdays just to get my mind off of, what's it called, school and wrestling, and just focus on my personal life every day. So, as a wrestler, personally, I know it can be overwhelming with weight cutting and everything, and sometimes we skip over school and we just want to sleep or just put it on the side. So, how do you deal with keeping on top of homework and keeping good grades in the classroom? This is where time management plays a big factor. I say without time management, knowing how to manage your time and put it down in your notes of what you have for homework for the classes, I say that's the number one thing that has helped me a lot. Now, we just talked about what you do for wrestling and how you take care of stuff for school. How about your body? Do you do specific things in the day to take care of your body? Because I know that's a big thing. If you don't have a good, healthy mind and body, then school and everything else will fall apart. I see. I see. I say the biggest thing we do is definitely a recovery. We do the rollers, foam rollers. There's no more dead legs. It's this pressure boost that helps produce more blood flow so then the last acid gets out of your legs. Another thing would be doing ice baths. I think ice baths, I only did it once this year, but many of them will pay off later in the season. My next question is, do you think there are specific things you can do to make your life easier while wrestling and taking care of school? Like hanging out, like you said, with friends or family. Is there anything else you find helpful? I see. I see. I say I follow a lot of people on Instagram that have a lot of motivational speeches and reels that I just look at too, every day. That helps me a lot. Also, consistency and being disciplined. It's one of the biggest things you need in life just so you can succeed and make sure that you just got to stay on top of things. It's the same thing as for wrestling. If you want to wrestle good, you got to be consistent and be disciplined during the whole season. Now we talked about everything, about what you go through and what helps you. What advice would you give athletes who struggle with time management, just can't seem to process how to get stuff taken care of? I'd say at first start off with notes, post-it notes, or put it in your notes on your phone. The best thing I'd say is write it down just because you look back at it and you have everything written down in bullet points. It's the best thing ever. I'd say you should start like that. Well, that will conclude our podcast. Thank you Julian for being here today and talking about, as a wrestler, what you go through and how you manage your sports and education. Thank you very much. Thank you. Tune in next time when we chat with another athlete and how they seem to manage their athletics and education and personal life. Thank you.