So, you want to be an esports player. You’re an avid gamer, rushing home to play after every day of school. In your free time, you find yourself daydreaming about esports competitions and the matches you’re about to play. Playing video games all day sounds like a dream come true.
Before pursuing a career in esports, it’s important to ensure that the lifestyle works for you. Being a professional gamer is hard work, and requires a copious amount of discipline and effort.
Professional esports is so much more than playing video games. In order to succeed at a competitive level, players must ensure that they are performing to the best of their ability every single day.
See what the day-to-day life of a professional esports player looks like:
Practice Makes Perfect
Being a professional esports player requires tons and tons of practice. For nearly 8 hours each day, professional players practice at their game of choice over and over. This practice, which includes both solo and team play, consists of playing the game, running drills, and streaming.
When players go pro, esports becomes a true full-time job. When selecting a game to focus on, players should make sure that they’re prepared to eat, sleep, and breathe the game. They’ll need to play it multiple times a day, every day to ensure victory. According to Esports Legendary, most pro players adhere to this schedule 6 days a week, with one day off to rest.
Good Sleep
As a professional esports player, taking care of your body is incredibly important. Players that want to perform at their peak potential need to be well-rested before matches and practice. Getting 8 hours of sleep each night is incredibly important - it helps improve one’s ability to make quick decisions and improves memory! A split second decision can change the entire outcome of a competition, and esports players must be able to quickly process and remember positions of other players throughout the match. Feeling well-rested can make the difference between a win and a loss.
Good Nutrition
In addition to sleep, players must ensure that their bodies are being properly fueled. Professional players take special care to ensure that their diets support their minds and bodies. That means that players make time for 3 square meals a day - even when marathoning games.
Maintaining a well balanced diet supports a player’s immune system, and helps keep their mood up. With focus on this every day, players can spend more time playing and practicing, and less time feeling ill, sluggish, or grumpy.
Staying well-hydrated is equally, if not more, important. Drinking enough water can help improve concentration and overall mood! A hydrated professional player is a player that both pays better attention to the game and a player that becomes less frustrated during matches.
Exercise
With any career that requires sitting at a computer, exercise can make a huge improvement on overall health and wellbeing. Sitting all day can have a wide variety of bad health effects. It’s important that esports players work to mitigate these effects with mindful efforts.
For the average person, at least 30 daily minutes of exercise is recommended. For esports athletes, we recommend about an hour each day. Getting enough cardio in for the day doesn’t only help prevent negative health effects, it also improves mental processing speeds and stress management ability - two incredibly important factors for a competing athlete.
Additionally, it’s important for gamers to counteract the toll that gaming can have on their bodies. Stretches and exercises that improve wrist health, posture, and back health are incredibly important! After every match, esports players should take a moment to correct their posture, stretch out their back and neck, and roll their wrists.
Adulting
Between all the gaming and self care, professional players have to make time to run errands and take care of their chores. Until esports players reach the top of the top, they still need to be responsible for keeping their fridge stocked, house or apartment clean, and their mail sorted.
Esports gaming isn’t quite all glitz and glamor. Even the pros have to occasionally purchase groceries, do their taxes, and wait in line at the DMV. No matter the career, these sorts of tasks will always be a necessity. A successful esports player makes sure they leave time for those adult tasks in their schedules, especially when they’re making enough to make a profession out of gaming!
Keeping a support group and a good attitude
With any highly competitive career, making time for seeing family and friends can vastly improve quality of life. Esports gaming is no exception to this rule. Spending time with loved ones can reduce stress, improve physical health, and improve overall mental health! Once esports players take care of their practice, self care, and other responsibilities, activities with others is a go-to to keep up their morale.
Self care as a professional esports player is incredibly important. Gamers that wish to go pro should first discover ways that they can regulate their emotions. By engaging in hobbies that make them happy, practicing gratitude, and working on being more mindful, they’ll have a better chance of enjoying themselves while competing and, thus, winning games!
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Tournament Days
All the daily preparation and training leads to the main event as an esports player: tournaments. These competitions are where players apply all their skills and hard work - a win can help fund their team for months!
As teams compete through the brackets of a tournament, it may appear that each team has a considerable amount of down time, but those precious moments away from the competition are spent practicing, running last minute drills, and warming up for the match. Of course, breaks are built into those schedules to help support players, but the hours (and sometimes days) spent at a tournament are crunch time.
In addition to practice and competition, players may be interviewed by news organizations and shoutcasters. They may also have time to make connections with other players and even network to find new sponsors! During competitions, the most successful players put emphasis on being social and “selling” their brand. It’s a great opportunity to meet new people and establish connections with potential sponsors.
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Set your students up for success.
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