Findings from Sport Science
In the old days, athletes and coaches believed that the only way to enhance athlete performance was to work harder and longer, improve their technique, and compete more often to get mentally tougher. As a result of these pressures, athletes — very much like workers today — over-trained and burned out, sustaining injuries that shortened their careers. Responding to the issues of athletic overtraining, burnout, injury and so on, a field of study called sport science emerged in the former Soviet Union and Eastern block countries during the 1950s.
Sport science combined the disciplines of exercise physiology, nutrition, psychology, biomechanics, motor learning, and sports medicine. The principles of sport science have resulted in an incredible progression in athletic performance during the last 40 years. Athletes, as a whole, are typically bigger, faster, stronger, more powerful, and more emotionally resilient. They eat better and understand how to recapture energy quickly in order to perform well the next day. The progress in sport science has been founded on three important discoveries that we believe are relevant to businesses and workers today:
Multidimensional
Sport science takes a multidimensional approach to performance. That is, it assumes that for performance to improve, humans have had to make improvements in four dimensions — not just the physical dimension, but also in the emotional, mental and the spiritual dimension which is focused on your mission and/ or purpose in life. By increasing their capacity in all four realms, athletes learn how to train, prepare and perform more effectively. On an emotional level, they learn techniques to increase resiliency and how to access opportunistic emotions (a sense of challenge, optimism, and so on), to fend off negative, performance-clouding emotions (impatience, frustration, fear, defensiveness, and so on). Mentally, athletes and teams have learned to increase focus and to manage their time as a tool to effectively manage their energy. And, spiritually, they have learned how to develop a sense of personal, team and organizational mission.
Recovery
Sport science also helps athletes and teams build recovery mechanisms into their lives in each of the four dimensions. By recovery, we are referring to the recapture of energy. For most of the last century, fitness levels were determined by how quickly one’s heart rate could recover from a bout of exercise. The research literature brims with evidence explaining the importance of recovery to the performance equation. If you are an athlete and you exercise a muscle today, you should not stress it again for at least 48 hours. The muscle needs the recovery time for growth to occur. This is because everything about life has rhythms or “oscillations”, as we call them. Everything about a human being oscillates rhythmically up and down: sleep cycles, blood glucose levels, EKGs from the heart, EEGs from the brain, and EMGs from the muscles all oscillate and are measured accordingly. A lack of oscillation, or linearity, as it is known, is completely dysfunctional for individuals, teams and organizations.
To illustrate the role of oscillation, consider the work of renowned performance psychologist Jim Loehr, who studied the in-between point time of the world’s best tennis players. The heart rates of world-class tennis players rise to anywhere from 170 to over 200 beats per minute and they have 20 seconds to recover in between the points. Additionally, other studies have determined that, during an entire tennis match, a player actually “plays” tennis just 35 percent of the time. That means that 65 percent of the time the player is not hitting tennis balls, but is resting in between points and games. How do great tennis players use their small “recovery” times in a “productive” way? Loehr found that after every point ended, they went through four stages: 1) A positive physical response (to imagine the correction of an error); 2) A relaxation/recovery phase (for the physical, emotional, and mental recapture of energy); 3) A preparation phase (to mentally prepare for what is about to happen); and 4) A stage of pre-performance rituals (where they put themselves in a state of multidimensional readiness for the next point).
Periodization
One of the more unique findings in sport performance has to do with “periodization,” or the long-term and short-term work/rest ratio. Periodization allows an athlete to endure grueling training and competitive schedules. Seasonal sports such as track and field have utilized periodization of training for years. By altering the activity as well as the volume, intensity, and frequency of training according to the sport’s season, athletes can peak physiologically and psychologically for their respective sport. At an individual level, a ranked tennis player or golfer, who must play throughout the year, uses a periodization schedule created around his or her specific needs and tournament dates. Tennis players, for example, want to peak at the four Grand Slam tournaments and the year-ending Masters event. They continually train based on work/rest ratios to peak at these events. By contrast, the coaches and leaders of a World Cup Soccer team want their team to perform at the highest level possible during the World Cup. They must monitor the team’s work/rest ratios so the team can peak during the qualification round, have rest periods, prepare for each big event as it comes and then peak again during the World Cup rounds.
Macro-and-Microcycles
Additionally, periodization involves multi-dimensional training at two levels: macrocycles and microcycles. A macrocycle is a long-range plan assisting individuals and teams in preparing for the big events, while a microcycle can be very short term (a day’s plan, for example). In either area, the goal revolves around work-rest ratios to maximize performance in the most effective way. Can you imagine the results if business professionals and teams learned to work this way?
Lessons for Business
What can business leaders derive from the world of sport science? And how can they apply this knowledge to raise their employees’ creativity, focus, engagement, and overall performance leading to enhanced business performance. Clearly, the challenges facing world-class athletes and corporate athletes are very similar. Both live in a world of brutal competition and accountability. Numbers drive everything; last year’s records become this year’s baselines, and individuals must top themselves annually. Every moment requires sustained attention. Like athletes, workers — especially knowledge workers — need to fuel their bodies and brains adequately, train for emotional resilience, and improve their mental toughness.
Jack Groppel is the Vice President of Applied Science & Performance Training, Wellness & Prevention, Inc., a Johnson & Johnson company, and Co-Founder of the Human Performance Institute®. He is an internationally recognized authority and pioneer in the science of human performance, and an expert in fitness and nutrition.