After coaching many entrepreneurs, CEOs & high achievers over the last 10 years, something I’ve become attune to is how to integrate training consistently into busy lives. Below I share my top tips on balancing exercise & work to minimise the chance of a burnout, sickness or injury:
Look at intensity as a whole:
Try to view your workload, life commitments and training load as coming from the same bucket. So, if you´ve had a very stressful day at work it can be better to counter this with a lighter more aerobic run or yoga session than a hard HIIT session for example. Most people with full time jobs in our experience cannot absorb more than 2 truly high intensity workouts per week on a consistent basis so if you are doing 3-4 or more a week its likely to lead to burn out / injury or sickness.
Listen carefully to the body:
The fitter you get the more in tune with your body you will be and the clearer the feedback loop becomes. A simple scale of 1-10 assessing ´how do I actually feel´ can be very effective when making good choices as to whether you should rest up or get out the door. Below a 6 - its rest. 6-7 could be an idea to try 10min easy and see how you feel.
Use data, but with care!
Using metrics such as heart rate variability ´HRV´ and resting HR are great to monitor recovery, measure aerobic fitness and even mitigate against future illness. HRV shows you the balance between your sympathetic (stress response) system and parasympathetic (recovery response) system. If you see a downward trend in HRV its a good sign that your body is under more stress than it can recover from and maybe a forewarning of sickness. Resting HR (taken first thing in the morning) can be very effective at measuring your aerobic fitness (shown by a downward trend) and be an early warning sign you are lacking sleep, experiencing higher stress or even getting sick (with an upward trend).
Sleep - obviously!
The more training you do the more sleep you will need to recover. Whilst cutting sleep to cram in early workouts may work in the short term it will be met with an increase in sickness and injury in the medium to long run. Simple routines like going to bed at a regular time, ideally before 10pm so you don´t compromise deep sleep (10pm and 2am), finishing eating at least 2 hours before you go to sleep and setting up your environment so it's cool and dark will help with consistent sleep.
Col
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