Pablo Villa is a professional mountain runner and shares in this testimonial his personal experience around rest and its role in sporting performance. Connected to sport since childhood through his family’s influence — to whom he pays a heartfelt tribute — he recounts his career in benchmark long-distance trail events, such as the Travesera de los Picos de Europa or the TDS at Mont Blanc, races that can exceed twenty hours of effort and demand extreme preparation.
He explains that, for him, mindset is decisive in an endurance athlete, and that within his integral self-care he places rest, nutrition and training as fundamental pillars. He recounts that he began paying particular attention to rest after working with a psychologist on managing anxiety and pre-competition nerves, work through which his sleep improved notably.
It was in that context that he came across non-invasive neuromodulation. The professional working with him explains that, after very intense efforts, athletes are left overstimulated and struggle to sleep, and that without rest there is no recovery. Pablo describes how, by resting better, he trains and assimilates better, which allows him to perform more. He concludes by defining success as giving one hundred per cent in what depends on oneself, preparing every day in order to arrive in the best possible condition at the moment of competing.
