One Hundred Units Of Energy
How Everything Affects Performance
Imagine for a moment that you have one hundred “units” of energy to give each day. You use this energy for work around the house, for thinking through complex issues, for dealing with tough emotional situations, and for all the fun stuff, too—climbing and training and skiing and hiking.
Energy expenditure doesn’t work exactly this way, but it’s worth considering in this way, especially when we start to go flat. Over the years, I’ve run into so many athletes that were “getting it all right” but still not progressing. On digging into their previous weeks of training a bit more, though, something always crops up. Bad sleep. A crumbling relationship. Money problems.
Other times, it’s additional training. I remember at one point writing a nonlinear program for a climber, which involve three days of hard training plus a climbing day at the crag on the weekends. He made no progress, and so we scheduled a review meeting. It turns out he had decided to also do a hangboard protocol from The Rock Climber’s Training Manual at the same time since he “needed more finger work.” It reminded me of the old Dan John quip, “I was on a diet, but I was always hungry. So now I’m on two diets.”
Too often, people see the path to athletic success as work. Just do more, and surely you’ll get fit. If I am getting tired at the end of a run, the solution must be more running. If my strength is not where I want it to be, another day in the gym has to be the solution. Although there is a possibility that these solutions are correct, I find, more and more, that people are not showing up to the training in a trainable state. In short, they are showing up pre-fatigued, sometimes from all the other workouts they are doing, sometimes from doing a crap job with managing stress, and sometimes from terrible recovery practices.
This is why I like to imagine these hundred units of energy. If I am sick that week, guess what? Some of my hundred units get spent on recovering. And the week after, when I am compelled to “make up” some training? Still just those 100 units to play with.
Sick kid, yard work, fight with partner, late night Friday, pick-up basketball game, early alarm, skipped breakfast, big project at work, anxiety about money…
Everything eats into that 100 units.
And yet our ego tells us we are different. For us, just trying a little harder will surely work. For us, work stress has nothing to do with physical output. For us, stress helps us focus.
Athletes hate when I say this, but if you’re not getting stronger, your strength program is not working. Same goes for endurance or flexibility or dealing with fear. If it’s not getting better, you need to go back and look at where your planning is flawed.
Are you recovering enough between sessions to allow the body to improve, or are you tired enough that you just get back to baseline each time?
Are you training at a level where you can add load, or distance, or speed, or duration to a session, progressively, over 4-6 weeks? Or are you, instead, going hard from session one, and basically just doing the same thing over and over for ten sessions?
Do you end up skipping or shortening sessions toward to end of the week because you’re tired?
The point here, longwinded as it may be, is that you can only put so much on the output side of the scale in hopes of improving. If you truly want to do more, to add more to your hundred units, the focus has to be on the other side. Input.
There are a thousand “recovery” tools from massage, to supplements, to crazy woo-woo crap, to dipping yourself in hot water or cold water or whatever. Although there are a few of these interventions that might have some effect, the only two that really matter are eating and sleeping.
For athletes serious about recovery, getting high levels of a variety of nutrients is essential. Trying to limit calories or drop weight while you are also trying to increase your capacity for work is an exercise in frustration and never, ever, ever pays out.
I think sleep is something that we continue to get wrong. It’s such a habitual thing, and we have a lifestyle built around our sleep and wake times. Taking care to eliminate things that affect your sleep negatively, as well as doing things that enhance the quality of your sleep, is a big job, but it might be the best thing you can do for your health and fitness over the long term.
The final thing I am going to say on this is that you can also look at trying to improve the quality of what you are doing with your 100 units of energy. Instead of just filling it with junk work, do higher skill training. Focus a lot of energy on performing the parts of your sport correctly, rather than just trying to exhaust yourself doing them badly.
There should be a reason for every exercise we do. There should be a clear goal with each training session. Targeting specific adaptations in our fitness is the only viable long-term driver of improved performance. It’s almost never about just doing more stuff.