October 3, 2023 • 17 mins
In this episode, Dr. Greg delves into the intrinsic relationship between enhancing mind body & emotional fitness levels and reducing fatigue, and how it serves as a cornerstone in determining one's overall performance. Drawing from the latest scientific research and his extensive knowledge in human physiology, Dr. Wells elucidates how small, incremental changes in your daily routine can significantly boost your energy levels and optimize performance.
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Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
Hi everyone. Welcome back to the podcast.
It's Doctor Greg, Great to see you, Great to speak to you,
great to talk to you. Obviously I can't see you, but I
am feeling your presence today and really excited to bring to
you a performance series. We're always trying to innovate
and iterate on the podcast. And this fall I really felt like
(00:20):
I wanted to dig in a little bit deeper to some of the topics
that have resonated deeply with all of you.
And I hear about this through comments on Instagram or emails
that get sent in and obviously the work that we're doing in
businesses and schools and my speeches.
People come up and ask questionsand a certain resonant themes
that come up. And what I've decided to do is
(00:41):
to put together a series of podcasts where we do a deep dive
on a topic that we're able then to share with all of you.
So today what I wanted to get into is the idea that fitness
minus fatigue equals performanceand do a deep dive on that such
that we can then, you know, comeup with as a community practices
(01:03):
that we can then install to elevate our health and our
wellbeing and our performance. Let me tell you a little bit
where this idea came from. There is a legend in in my
sport, in the sport of swimming,that's back in the late 60s.
There was a NCAA team getting ready for championship season
and their pool broke. So they could not train for the
(01:25):
two weeks leading into the main competition and they arrived at
the pool. They decided to go anyway.
They arrived at the pool and swim in two weeks and the
swimmers absolutely rocked it. They all went best times.
Performances went through the roof and nobody could figure out
what was going on because the idea was that you would train
really hard up until the last possible 2nd and then get into
(01:46):
the performance and do your very, very best.
These athletes took two weeks off and they did absolutely
phenomenal. What was discovered when people
began to look into it and began to do research on it, was what
emerged as the science of tapering.
And we discovered that when we rest, the body then adapts and
we get stronger, fitter, faster,and ultimately we're able to
(02:07):
perform at a higher level. The take away from that for all
of us is that when we do less, sometimes we can achieve more.
And obviously the science behindtapering exploded.
And this is now a common practice that is done in sports,
in almost every single sport, actually.
In the in the weeks to months leading into an Olympic Games,
(02:29):
you're actually training less than you have almost anytime in
the previous four years. You want no aches and pains, no
injuries, no fatigue and no stress such that when you arrive
at the performance you feel fantastic.
You can reach your true human performance.
Now, that might seem a little bit counterintuitive, the idea
being that you know you're goinginto a major competition.
(02:50):
Shouldn't I be practicing harderthan I've ever practiced before
in my life? The answer actually is no.
And there's a bit of science behind that, which I want to
share with you today. And the idea is simply is that
by strategically altering periods of intense training and
then deep rest, we can optimize your performance.
And the benefit is we also improve our health at the same
(03:11):
time, which is incredibly important and very, very
beneficial. So I've got 4 main ideas that
we're going to walk through today in order to be able to get
us across the finish line of understanding that.
The first major point is that fitness minus fatigue equals
performance. I'll get into that in a moment.
Second idea is that fitness and fatigue increase linearly, but
(03:31):
they decay exponentially. Third major piece of the puzzle
is that the difference between fitness and fatigue is what
elevates performance. And then the final piece of the
puzzle is that when we install deep breast practices,
strategically that is what elevates your performance.
And I'll explain the four by three matrix later on, but let's
dig into .1 and that is that fatigue minus fitness equals
(03:54):
performance. So let's explore that.
The first point is that trainingand fatigue improve our body,
our mind, our emotions and our spirit.
Now, all of this research that I'm talking about today was done
largely in terms of sports and largely in terms of physical
training. But when we explore this and
look into it a little bit more deeply, I believe that this
(04:15):
applies to not just our Physiology, but also to our
psychology, to our emotional state, and even to some extent
our spiritual practice as well. My spiritual practice is simply
community, connection and purpose and meaning.
Yours could be different. Whatever is in your belief
system is all good. But point is that when we train,
when we practice, our body gets stronger, our mind gets more
(04:38):
resilient to, our emotions become more regulated, our
spirit becomes stronger and thatis reflected in improved mind,
body, emotion, spirit, fitness, which is your capacity expands.
When you do strength training, you get stronger.
When you do endurance training, your endurance, your resistance
to fatigue improves. When you build your mental
(05:00):
skills, you're better able to handle stress, etcetera,
etcetera, etcetera. That training results in an
improved fitness. But the challenges is that
training and practice also causefatigue.
And when we're tired, just imagine, right, you do a hard
workout, you're tired afterwards, you do a hard day at
work, you're fatigued afterwards, you go through
(05:20):
something that's emotionally stressful, you are emotionally
drained. And this is an experience that
we've all had. So when we train, when we
practice, that can, in addition to improving our fitness over
time, you do get stronger, fit or faster.
The counter to that is that you experience fatigue.
Now this fatigue is actually what stimulates us to get
(05:41):
stronger. But in the moment, your feelings
include a lack of motivation, decreased resilience, sometimes
poor interactions, maybe not making the best decision.
And in that moment your performance ability decreases to
do a hard workout right after the hard workout, you're not as
strong, you're not as fit, you're not as emotionally
(06:03):
regulated as you could be when you are fresh, for example at
the start of that workout. Now this fatigue can be caused
by a number of different factors.
It's can be caused by decreased oxygen levels.
It can be caused by using up allof your fuel, your nutrition.
It can be caused by an accumulation of waste products
inside the body, just like there's exhaust that leaves the
(06:24):
car when you are accelerating down the road.
If you don't have a electric car, that same thing happens
inside of our muscles inside of our brain tissues.
You also have something called the central Governor hypothesis.
Now this has not been completelyproven, but the idea simply is
that the brain notices information coming in from the
body in a feedback loop, and it then decreases the amount of
(06:47):
information going out of the brain in a feed forward loop to
make sure that the body and the brain never become exposed to a
situation where things may become unregulated.
For example, if your brain notices that your body is too
hot, it will decrease the information coming out of your
brain going to your muscles. That might make you slow down.
(07:08):
If you're out for a run in the heat, for example, just to make
sure that you don't overheat anddie, there can be a depletion of
neurotransmitters. These are the molecules that
move between neurons inside the brain and between neurons and
different tissues inside the body.
And when those get used up, you can experience fatigue.
If temperature increases, you can experience fatigue.
And obviously, if you're just simply not motivated, you're
(07:30):
tired as well. So there's a psychological
component to all of this. So ultimately, point being here
with everything I've said so faris that fatigue minus fitness
equals performance. We can build up our fitness
through training and practice, but that causes fatigue in lack
of motivation, resilience decreasing, our ability to
(07:52):
interact with others becoming problematic and our mindset
changing. When we build up our fitness,
which increases in a linear fashion, if we train
consistently over an extended period of time, that's
fantastic. You get fitter, you get
stronger, You get more resilient, more emotionally
regulated, fabulous. If you then stop training, if
(08:13):
you rest, your fitness will plateau for a little while and
then start decreasing very, veryslowly, but your fatigue will
decrease quickly. Both fitness and fatigue decay
decrease exponentially, but fatigue decreases much faster
(08:35):
than fitness does. So if we decrease our training,
our fitness and our fatigue decrease as well.
But they decrease at different rates.
Fatigue decreases faster. Therefore we can create a gap
between our mind, body, emotional spirit fitness and our
fatigue levels. And it is that difference
(08:57):
between fitness and fatigue thatenables performance.
So imagine this. You've built up your fitness
over time. Your performance capacity, mind,
body, motion, spirit increases. But you're tired, so you can't
access your true human potential.
You then rest for a period of time, minutes, hours, days,
(09:17):
weeks. That fatigue goes away, leaving
you with still world class fitness, world class just being
you better than you were before.And that gap between fitness and
fatigue is what enables that performance to occur in that
moment. And the bigger of a gap that we
can create between fitness and fatigue, that is what actually
(09:38):
creates that capacity to performat the highest possible level.
So we want to try to create as big of a gap as we possibly can
because that is what elevates our performance.
Now in sports, we see that because Olympians with the
highest level of fitness in the lowest level of fatigue perform
better. Research shows you can get a 2
(09:58):
to 4% improvement in performancecapacity in about 3 weeks using
this approach. That night not seem like very
much, but if you look at 2 to 4%difference between you and all
of your competition in a very tight field, that's the
difference between coming 20th and being on the podium.
So it's really important. We also see this for example in
(10:19):
teachers. A teacher who's rested can
better manage a student who is in crisis, right?
Like if that student walks in and the teachers in a good
place, that interaction has a chance of going well.
If the teacher is exhausted and the student is stressed, that is
probably not going to go in the right direction.
In business, this applies as well.
Leaders who are well rested and focused can deliver better
(10:40):
talks, better presentations, better leadership.
So this applies regardless of what the field is Music, drama,
it's all the same. This is super important for all
of us to consider because we're all faced with performance
opportunities in everything thatwe do.
Students write tests, teachers teach, business people do
(11:01):
presentations, athletes race like musicians perform.
It's all the same type of stuff.So the key for all of us then is
to install deep rest practices strategically, which thereby
elevates our performance. And I've got a thought for you
(11:22):
around the four by three matrix and it really revolves around
this. And I was trying to map out like
how do we do this. It became obvious to me that
there's sort of thresholds that make a difference and the
thresholds are three minutes, 3 hours, 3 days and three weeks.
There's quite a bit of research that shows that if we do a
(11:43):
physiological taper in our training for about 3 weeks, that
21 days seems to be an optimal amount of time to optimize human
performance. Is loads of research in the
sports world that shows that. I think that that applies to us
in other areas of our lives as well.
Three days is important because 72 hours is about the amount of
time that you can take off from training before your Physiology
(12:07):
begins to decline decay. But fatigue will decrease very
quickly. So that gap can be created in as
little as three days. 3 hours isinteresting because that would
be really just preparing for something that you need to do
during the course of the day to be absolutely world class on
that day. That works.
And then 3 minutes is enough forcomplete reset.
(12:28):
There's loads of research that shows that as little as 3
minutes rewires the brain, the neurons inside the brain, in
response to meditation, for example.
So that four by three matrix is easy to remember.
If you've got three weeks, that's great.
Three days that works, 3 hours that works, and three minutes
that works. But let's break that down into
certain things that you can do. Let's say that you are going
through your day and then all ofa sudden you realize, boom,
(12:49):
there's something I need to do at a high level.
I need to pull it together and get stuff done.
I've got just a few minutes to get myself ready.
You can do tactics like the following. 3 deep breaths right?
That 369 protocol. 3 seconds in,hold for six seconds. 9 seconds
out. Repeated cycles of breath work
(13:09):
for a few minutes will make a difference.
You can go for a quick walk. Movement for three minutes
sparks the brain and can help improve your mental performance.
You can drink some water, get hydrated, might even have some
caffeine. I don't know if it would hit
your brain in 3 minutes. Definitely would.
Within 30 minutes. There's another three for you
there, but some sort of hydration will help.
(13:31):
Music most songs around 3:00 to 5:00 minutes.
Listen to 1 great piece of musicin a completely focused way.
Get your mood elevated and then enter the performance.
Laughter and humor can shift your state as well.
And of course, bringing your attention into the present
moment through mindfulness can make a big difference also.
(13:52):
Then we move into three hours. That's meditation.
Taking a nap, going for a real walk, reading some material,
rehearsing the presentation, deep relaxation in whatever way
works for you. Like maybe actually going for a
massage. Gosh, imagine that and three
hours of completely disconnecting from the outside
(14:14):
world to enable you to get into a state where you have that
tight bubble of total focus which enables you then to do
what you need to do at the highest possible level. 3 hours
seems to be a beautiful amount of time to set us up, get
focused, decompress such that wecan reach our potential in a
short period of time. Now 3 days is where we really
(14:35):
begin to open up that differencebetween fatigue and fitness.
So this is something like takinga weekend off, social media,
detox for a few days, going on anews fast consuming no
information from the news cycle,changing locations.
Maybe you get out of the city and go away for a couple days up
to a cottage, or maybe even justgo to the local park on a
(14:58):
repeated basis for a few days. If you're in the city and you
can't leave anything that gets you into a state where you are
deeply focused on recovery and regeneration, the three day
weekend is magic for doing this.And then of course there's three
weeks. That's a real vacation.
That's something you might be able to do in the summer, maybe
over the December holidays, perhaps over March break.
(15:18):
And of course 3 weeks is ideal, but one week would work, Two
weeks would work too. This is a case where you could
read a book, practice Nature Medicine on a repeated basis,
Completely change your daily practices to completely rest,
refocus, and recharge, to quote the title of a book by that same
name. So there you have it.
(15:39):
That's the idea that I wanted toget across to you today.
Ultimately, the core message from today is that by
strategically alternating periods of consistent training
with deep rest, we can optimize our performance and we can
improve our health at the same time, because all of those ideas
that I just shared with you, notonly do they help you to perform
(16:01):
better, but they improve your mental and emotional health as
well. So my call to action for you
today out of this first of our performance series of podcasts
is to take four steps in mind. The first step is to make a list
of the key things that you need to do at a high level.
What is it that you care about the most?
(16:22):
Then for each of those items, consider what training and
practice you need to do to get better at those things.
We then train and practice consistently over an extended
period of time to build our capacities in those areas.
And then when you notice that there's a performance
opportunity with regards to those things, we strategically
(16:45):
rest in that four by three matrix.
Remember the four by three matrix is 3 minutes, 3 hours, 3
days and three weeks. And you just take whatever time
you have available to rest, recover, regenerate and
supercharge your performance. So that's it.
That's the fitness minus fatigueequals performance concept.
(17:06):
I hope that that helps you to doless in order to achieve more.
And remember, by strategically alternating periods of intense
training and deep rest, performance can be optimized and
health can be improved concurrently.
Let me know what you think of this new format, let me know if
this was helpful, let me know your questions and let me know
(17:27):
how you are applying this because ultimately this is just
a practice. The first time that you do this,
it'll feel really, really weird.Second time, like okay, maybe
this work maybe didn't. Third time you'll start to
refine your protocols and then at the 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, and
then ultimately anytime beyond that, this will become a core
practice that you can use to take your life to another level.
All right, that's it for this week, everyone.
(17:48):
Hope you're having a great time.Enjoy yourself, Stay healthy,
love the people around you. Get out there and let me know
how this worked. All the best and we'll see you
in the next podcast.
Hi everyone. Welcome back to the podcast.
It's Doctor Greg, Great to see you, Great to speak to you,
great to talk to you. Obviously I can't see you, but I
am feeling your presence today and really excited to bring to
you a performance series. We're always trying to innovate
and iterate on the podcast. And this fall I really felt like
(00:20):
I wanted to dig in a little bit deeper to some of the topics
that have resonated deeply with all of you.
And I hear about this through comments on Instagram or emails
that get sent in and obviously the work that we're doing in
businesses and schools and my speeches.
People come up and ask questionsand a certain resonant themes
that come up. And what I've decided to do is
(00:41):
to put together a series of podcasts where we do a deep dive
on a topic that we're able then to share with all of you.
So today what I wanted to get into is the idea that fitness
minus fatigue equals performanceand do a deep dive on that such
that we can then, you know, comeup with as a community practices
(01:03):
that we can then install to elevate our health and our
wellbeing and our performance. Let me tell you a little bit
where this idea came from. There is a legend in in my
sport, in the sport of swimming,that's back in the late 60s.
There was a NCAA team getting ready for championship season
and their pool broke. So they could not train for the
(01:25):
two weeks leading into the main competition and they arrived at
the pool. They decided to go anyway.
They arrived at the pool and swim in two weeks and the
swimmers absolutely rocked it. They all went best times.
Performances went through the roof and nobody could figure out
what was going on because the idea was that you would train
really hard up until the last possible 2nd and then get into
(01:46):
the performance and do your very, very best.
These athletes took two weeks off and they did absolutely
phenomenal. What was discovered when people
began to look into it and began to do research on it, was what
emerged as the science of tapering.
And we discovered that when we rest, the body then adapts and
we get stronger, fitter, faster,and ultimately we're able to
(02:07):
perform at a higher level. The take away from that for all
of us is that when we do less, sometimes we can achieve more.
And obviously the science behindtapering exploded.
And this is now a common practice that is done in sports,
in almost every single sport, actually.
In the in the weeks to months leading into an Olympic Games,
(02:29):
you're actually training less than you have almost anytime in
the previous four years. You want no aches and pains, no
injuries, no fatigue and no stress such that when you arrive
at the performance you feel fantastic.
You can reach your true human performance.
Now, that might seem a little bit counterintuitive, the idea
being that you know you're goinginto a major competition.
(02:50):
Shouldn't I be practicing harderthan I've ever practiced before
in my life? The answer actually is no.
And there's a bit of science behind that, which I want to
share with you today. And the idea is simply is that
by strategically altering periods of intense training and
then deep rest, we can optimize your performance.
And the benefit is we also improve our health at the same
(03:11):
time, which is incredibly important and very, very
beneficial. So I've got 4 main ideas that
we're going to walk through today in order to be able to get
us across the finish line of understanding that.
The first major point is that fitness minus fatigue equals
performance. I'll get into that in a moment.
Second idea is that fitness and fatigue increase linearly, but
(03:31):
they decay exponentially. Third major piece of the puzzle
is that the difference between fitness and fatigue is what
elevates performance. And then the final piece of the
puzzle is that when we install deep breast practices,
strategically that is what elevates your performance.
And I'll explain the four by three matrix later on, but let's
dig into .1 and that is that fatigue minus fitness equals
(03:54):
performance. So let's explore that.
The first point is that trainingand fatigue improve our body,
our mind, our emotions and our spirit.
Now, all of this research that I'm talking about today was done
largely in terms of sports and largely in terms of physical
training. But when we explore this and
look into it a little bit more deeply, I believe that this
(04:15):
applies to not just our Physiology, but also to our
psychology, to our emotional state, and even to some extent
our spiritual practice as well. My spiritual practice is simply
community, connection and purpose and meaning.
Yours could be different. Whatever is in your belief
system is all good. But point is that when we train,
when we practice, our body gets stronger, our mind gets more
(04:38):
resilient to, our emotions become more regulated, our
spirit becomes stronger and thatis reflected in improved mind,
body, emotion, spirit, fitness, which is your capacity expands.
When you do strength training, you get stronger.
When you do endurance training, your endurance, your resistance
to fatigue improves. When you build your mental
(05:00):
skills, you're better able to handle stress, etcetera,
etcetera, etcetera. That training results in an
improved fitness. But the challenges is that
training and practice also causefatigue.
And when we're tired, just imagine, right, you do a hard
workout, you're tired afterwards, you do a hard day at
work, you're fatigued afterwards, you go through
(05:20):
something that's emotionally stressful, you are emotionally
drained. And this is an experience that
we've all had. So when we train, when we
practice, that can, in addition to improving our fitness over
time, you do get stronger, fit or faster.
The counter to that is that you experience fatigue.
Now this fatigue is actually what stimulates us to get
(05:41):
stronger. But in the moment, your feelings
include a lack of motivation, decreased resilience, sometimes
poor interactions, maybe not making the best decision.
And in that moment your performance ability decreases to
do a hard workout right after the hard workout, you're not as
strong, you're not as fit, you're not as emotionally
(06:03):
regulated as you could be when you are fresh, for example at
the start of that workout. Now this fatigue can be caused
by a number of different factors.
It's can be caused by decreased oxygen levels.
It can be caused by using up allof your fuel, your nutrition.
It can be caused by an accumulation of waste products
inside the body, just like there's exhaust that leaves the
(06:24):
car when you are accelerating down the road.
If you don't have a electric car, that same thing happens
inside of our muscles inside of our brain tissues.
You also have something called the central Governor hypothesis.
Now this has not been completelyproven, but the idea simply is
that the brain notices information coming in from the
body in a feedback loop, and it then decreases the amount of
(06:47):
information going out of the brain in a feed forward loop to
make sure that the body and the brain never become exposed to a
situation where things may become unregulated.
For example, if your brain notices that your body is too
hot, it will decrease the information coming out of your
brain going to your muscles. That might make you slow down.
(07:08):
If you're out for a run in the heat, for example, just to make
sure that you don't overheat anddie, there can be a depletion of
neurotransmitters. These are the molecules that
move between neurons inside the brain and between neurons and
different tissues inside the body.
And when those get used up, you can experience fatigue.
If temperature increases, you can experience fatigue.
And obviously, if you're just simply not motivated, you're
(07:30):
tired as well. So there's a psychological
component to all of this. So ultimately, point being here
with everything I've said so faris that fatigue minus fitness
equals performance. We can build up our fitness
through training and practice, but that causes fatigue in lack
of motivation, resilience decreasing, our ability to
(07:52):
interact with others becoming problematic and our mindset
changing. When we build up our fitness,
which increases in a linear fashion, if we train
consistently over an extended period of time, that's
fantastic. You get fitter, you get
stronger, You get more resilient, more emotionally
regulated, fabulous. If you then stop training, if
(08:13):
you rest, your fitness will plateau for a little while and
then start decreasing very, veryslowly, but your fatigue will
decrease quickly. Both fitness and fatigue decay
decrease exponentially, but fatigue decreases much faster
(08:35):
than fitness does. So if we decrease our training,
our fitness and our fatigue decrease as well.
But they decrease at different rates.
Fatigue decreases faster. Therefore we can create a gap
between our mind, body, emotional spirit fitness and our
fatigue levels. And it is that difference
(08:57):
between fitness and fatigue thatenables performance.
So imagine this. You've built up your fitness
over time. Your performance capacity, mind,
body, motion, spirit increases. But you're tired, so you can't
access your true human potential.
You then rest for a period of time, minutes, hours, days,
(09:17):
weeks. That fatigue goes away, leaving
you with still world class fitness, world class just being
you better than you were before.And that gap between fitness and
fatigue is what enables that performance to occur in that
moment. And the bigger of a gap that we
can create between fitness and fatigue, that is what actually
(09:38):
creates that capacity to performat the highest possible level.
So we want to try to create as big of a gap as we possibly can
because that is what elevates our performance.
Now in sports, we see that because Olympians with the
highest level of fitness in the lowest level of fatigue perform
better. Research shows you can get a 2
(09:58):
to 4% improvement in performancecapacity in about 3 weeks using
this approach. That night not seem like very
much, but if you look at 2 to 4%difference between you and all
of your competition in a very tight field, that's the
difference between coming 20th and being on the podium.
So it's really important. We also see this for example in
(10:19):
teachers. A teacher who's rested can
better manage a student who is in crisis, right?
Like if that student walks in and the teachers in a good
place, that interaction has a chance of going well.
If the teacher is exhausted and the student is stressed, that is
probably not going to go in the right direction.
In business, this applies as well.
Leaders who are well rested and focused can deliver better
(10:40):
talks, better presentations, better leadership.
So this applies regardless of what the field is Music, drama,
it's all the same. This is super important for all
of us to consider because we're all faced with performance
opportunities in everything thatwe do.
Students write tests, teachers teach, business people do
(11:01):
presentations, athletes race like musicians perform.
It's all the same type of stuff.So the key for all of us then is
to install deep rest practices strategically, which thereby
elevates our performance. And I've got a thought for you
(11:22):
around the four by three matrix and it really revolves around
this. And I was trying to map out like
how do we do this. It became obvious to me that
there's sort of thresholds that make a difference and the
thresholds are three minutes, 3 hours, 3 days and three weeks.
There's quite a bit of research that shows that if we do a
(11:43):
physiological taper in our training for about 3 weeks, that
21 days seems to be an optimal amount of time to optimize human
performance. Is loads of research in the
sports world that shows that. I think that that applies to us
in other areas of our lives as well.
Three days is important because 72 hours is about the amount of
time that you can take off from training before your Physiology
(12:07):
begins to decline decay. But fatigue will decrease very
quickly. So that gap can be created in as
little as three days. 3 hours isinteresting because that would
be really just preparing for something that you need to do
during the course of the day to be absolutely world class on
that day. That works.
And then 3 minutes is enough forcomplete reset.
(12:28):
There's loads of research that shows that as little as 3
minutes rewires the brain, the neurons inside the brain, in
response to meditation, for example.
So that four by three matrix is easy to remember.
If you've got three weeks, that's great.
Three days that works, 3 hours that works, and three minutes
that works. But let's break that down into
certain things that you can do. Let's say that you are going
through your day and then all ofa sudden you realize, boom,
(12:49):
there's something I need to do at a high level.
I need to pull it together and get stuff done.
I've got just a few minutes to get myself ready.
You can do tactics like the following. 3 deep breaths right?
That 369 protocol. 3 seconds in,hold for six seconds. 9 seconds
out. Repeated cycles of breath work
(13:09):
for a few minutes will make a difference.
You can go for a quick walk. Movement for three minutes
sparks the brain and can help improve your mental performance.
You can drink some water, get hydrated, might even have some
caffeine. I don't know if it would hit
your brain in 3 minutes. Definitely would.
Within 30 minutes. There's another three for you
there, but some sort of hydration will help.
(13:31):
Music most songs around 3:00 to 5:00 minutes.
Listen to 1 great piece of musicin a completely focused way.
Get your mood elevated and then enter the performance.
Laughter and humor can shift your state as well.
And of course, bringing your attention into the present
moment through mindfulness can make a big difference also.
(13:52):
Then we move into three hours. That's meditation.
Taking a nap, going for a real walk, reading some material,
rehearsing the presentation, deep relaxation in whatever way
works for you. Like maybe actually going for a
massage. Gosh, imagine that and three
hours of completely disconnecting from the outside
(14:14):
world to enable you to get into a state where you have that
tight bubble of total focus which enables you then to do
what you need to do at the highest possible level. 3 hours
seems to be a beautiful amount of time to set us up, get
focused, decompress such that wecan reach our potential in a
short period of time. Now 3 days is where we really
(14:35):
begin to open up that differencebetween fatigue and fitness.
So this is something like takinga weekend off, social media,
detox for a few days, going on anews fast consuming no
information from the news cycle,changing locations.
Maybe you get out of the city and go away for a couple days up
to a cottage, or maybe even justgo to the local park on a
(14:58):
repeated basis for a few days. If you're in the city and you
can't leave anything that gets you into a state where you are
deeply focused on recovery and regeneration, the three day
weekend is magic for doing this.And then of course there's three
weeks. That's a real vacation.
That's something you might be able to do in the summer, maybe
over the December holidays, perhaps over March break.
(15:18):
And of course 3 weeks is ideal, but one week would work, Two
weeks would work too. This is a case where you could
read a book, practice Nature Medicine on a repeated basis,
Completely change your daily practices to completely rest,
refocus, and recharge, to quote the title of a book by that same
name. So there you have it.
(15:39):
That's the idea that I wanted toget across to you today.
Ultimately, the core message from today is that by
strategically alternating periods of consistent training
with deep rest, we can optimize our performance and we can
improve our health at the same time, because all of those ideas
that I just shared with you, notonly do they help you to perform
(16:01):
better, but they improve your mental and emotional health as
well. So my call to action for you
today out of this first of our performance series of podcasts
is to take four steps in mind. The first step is to make a list
of the key things that you need to do at a high level.
What is it that you care about the most?
(16:22):
Then for each of those items, consider what training and
practice you need to do to get better at those things.
We then train and practice consistently over an extended
period of time to build our capacities in those areas.
And then when you notice that there's a performance
opportunity with regards to those things, we strategically
(16:45):
rest in that four by three matrix.
Remember the four by three matrix is 3 minutes, 3 hours, 3
days and three weeks. And you just take whatever time
you have available to rest, recover, regenerate and
supercharge your performance. So that's it.
That's the fitness minus fatigueequals performance concept.
(17:06):
I hope that that helps you to doless in order to achieve more.
And remember, by strategically alternating periods of intense
training and deep rest, performance can be optimized and
health can be improved concurrently.
Let me know what you think of this new format, let me know if
this was helpful, let me know your questions and let me know
(17:27):
how you are applying this because ultimately this is just
a practice. The first time that you do this,
it'll feel really, really weird.Second time, like okay, maybe
this work maybe didn't. Third time you'll start to
refine your protocols and then at the 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, and
then ultimately anytime beyond that, this will become a core
practice that you can use to take your life to another level.
All right, that's it for this week, everyone.
(17:48):
Hope you're having a great time.Enjoy yourself, Stay healthy,
love the people around you. Get out there and let me know
how this worked. All the best and we'll see you
in the next podcast.
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