If you can't have a glass of wine without "ruining three days of your life" (outside of substance abuse, of course), then how can you possibly market yourself as someone who is "optimized?" Whatever the hell that means, anyway. Everything in moderation. Love your take on this one, Brad.
Thanks, Justin. I think whenever anyone says they are optimized we ought to ask, optimized for what? Excellence almost always demands some level of flexibility and resilience.
Love it! And there's a parallel in football that maps.
A QB who refuses to throw unless his primary receiver is open won't last long. Instead he "checks down" and makes a short, safer-probability throw rather than taking a sack or forcing a contested throw.
When life covers your primary plan (the full gym session, the meal-prepped dinner, the perfect night's sleep) you don't just give up. You find the check down and keep driving forward. Your primary receiver is your ideal plan: 45 minutes of lifting, a full meal-prepped dinner, your planned 5-mile run, an optimal readiness score. The coverage is life: unexpected meetings, poor sleep, family emergencies, low energy.
The check down is the scaled-back but still productive alternative that keeps you moving forward. 15 minutes instead of 45. A decent meal instead of the planned one. A walk instead of the run. Not failure. A completed pass.
I've found in my 40+ years in fitness that the key is mostly check downs. It's mostly imperfect reps, decent-enough meals, and slightly tired training sessions. Because in reality, fitness is like walking up a down escalator. The moment you stop actively moving upward, you go back down.
Bad readiness scores, poor sleep scores, a couple of old fashioneds, none of that ruins anything. What ruins things is deciding that imperfect conditions are a reason to stop. That decision, made repeatedly, is the only thing that actually loses the game.
Love this metaphor. Especially because much like a good drive, a good life is often made up of a whole bunch of consistent check downs punctuated by some big plays.
As I was reading the start I immediately thought of the phrase “fear the golfer who hasn’t slept or is sick”
Glad to see you found the golf story! I have my own similar story, I pulled a literal all-nighter in high school and had a golf tournament at 9am. I played my Best round of the year to win the tournament.
I’m glad I didn’t have a bad sleep score or some metric to say it would be a bad day, cause all I knew was - let’s go play. No preconceived notions of how my performance would suffer that day.
Thanks for sharing, Philip. So many people have stories like that! Yes, obviously try to sleep well and control the controllables, but a lot of performance is a mystery and the worst thing you can do is create a self-fulfilling prophecy or fragility narrative.
This is fantastic Brad and reminds me of an eating disorder which was cited first in the past twenty years - effectively an obsession with eating ''clean" food.
Life is not optimal and we rarely stop to consider who is benefiting from this tracking fetishism we have fallen into ... Companies who sell us apps, devices and supplements.
I stopped wearing my smartwatch except for runs (and the night before so I could have a silent alarm) and it’s been weird, but good. I did it because whatever poor metrics were being displayed were stressing me out. It’s been an interesting test.
Good luck! I know many people who have run a similar experiment and never went back. At the end of the day, these are all tools, and we each need to figure out what works best for us.
These are the conversations we need to be having! Life is RARELY perfectly optimized but you have to show up and complete the tackle anyway. Adapt or die!!
I have a drink almost every evening, run on cofein and nicotine, working night shifts and I'm doing just all right. What keeps me optimized against this lunacy is a hard training though. Daily. Exercise is such an equalizer.
I'm not sure I have been optimized for a single day since my son was born 10.5 years ago. But I'm also the strongest I have ever been at 41 because I show up anyway. Good luck to Bartlett if a family is something he is hoping for in the future!
Tripping on the roots and stepping in the ruts of real life brings essential adjustments for building resilience beyond the missteps we all encounter. Optimism is my favorite metric for continuing on as a choice. The song to “Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and start all over again”🎶 comes to mind as a remedy beyond defeatism, especially announced by a measure of your deficit. To keep moving is a mindset beyond circumstances. The poem “Keep a’goin” comes to mind as well.
If you can't have a glass of wine without "ruining three days of your life" (outside of substance abuse, of course), then how can you possibly market yourself as someone who is "optimized?" Whatever the hell that means, anyway. Everything in moderation. Love your take on this one, Brad.
Thanks, Justin. I think whenever anyone says they are optimized we ought to ask, optimized for what? Excellence almost always demands some level of flexibility and resilience.
Love it! And there's a parallel in football that maps.
A QB who refuses to throw unless his primary receiver is open won't last long. Instead he "checks down" and makes a short, safer-probability throw rather than taking a sack or forcing a contested throw.
When life covers your primary plan (the full gym session, the meal-prepped dinner, the perfect night's sleep) you don't just give up. You find the check down and keep driving forward. Your primary receiver is your ideal plan: 45 minutes of lifting, a full meal-prepped dinner, your planned 5-mile run, an optimal readiness score. The coverage is life: unexpected meetings, poor sleep, family emergencies, low energy.
The check down is the scaled-back but still productive alternative that keeps you moving forward. 15 minutes instead of 45. A decent meal instead of the planned one. A walk instead of the run. Not failure. A completed pass.
I've found in my 40+ years in fitness that the key is mostly check downs. It's mostly imperfect reps, decent-enough meals, and slightly tired training sessions. Because in reality, fitness is like walking up a down escalator. The moment you stop actively moving upward, you go back down.
Bad readiness scores, poor sleep scores, a couple of old fashioneds, none of that ruins anything. What ruins things is deciding that imperfect conditions are a reason to stop. That decision, made repeatedly, is the only thing that actually loses the game.
Love this metaphor. Especially because much like a good drive, a good life is often made up of a whole bunch of consistent check downs punctuated by some big plays.
As I was reading the start I immediately thought of the phrase “fear the golfer who hasn’t slept or is sick”
Glad to see you found the golf story! I have my own similar story, I pulled a literal all-nighter in high school and had a golf tournament at 9am. I played my Best round of the year to win the tournament.
I’m glad I didn’t have a bad sleep score or some metric to say it would be a bad day, cause all I knew was - let’s go play. No preconceived notions of how my performance would suffer that day.
Great article, Brad!
Thanks for sharing, Philip. So many people have stories like that! Yes, obviously try to sleep well and control the controllables, but a lot of performance is a mystery and the worst thing you can do is create a self-fulfilling prophecy or fragility narrative.
I resonate with so much of this piece as a human, but also as a teacher. I keep showing up, doing my best.
This is precisely why I got rid of my whoop.
This is fantastic Brad and reminds me of an eating disorder which was cited first in the past twenty years - effectively an obsession with eating ''clean" food.
Life is not optimal and we rarely stop to consider who is benefiting from this tracking fetishism we have fallen into ... Companies who sell us apps, devices and supplements.
Keep the main things the main things. Don't major in the minors.
I stopped wearing my smartwatch except for runs (and the night before so I could have a silent alarm) and it’s been weird, but good. I did it because whatever poor metrics were being displayed were stressing me out. It’s been an interesting test.
Good luck! I know many people who have run a similar experiment and never went back. At the end of the day, these are all tools, and we each need to figure out what works best for us.
These are the conversations we need to be having! Life is RARELY perfectly optimized but you have to show up and complete the tackle anyway. Adapt or die!!
Yes, essentially this! Performance isn't about control it's about being able to be in the moment with ruggedness and flexibility.
I have a drink almost every evening, run on cofein and nicotine, working night shifts and I'm doing just all right. What keeps me optimized against this lunacy is a hard training though. Daily. Exercise is such an equalizer.
I'm not sure I have been optimized for a single day since my son was born 10.5 years ago. But I'm also the strongest I have ever been at 41 because I show up anyway. Good luck to Bartlett if a family is something he is hoping for in the future!
Tripping on the roots and stepping in the ruts of real life brings essential adjustments for building resilience beyond the missteps we all encounter. Optimism is my favorite metric for continuing on as a choice. The song to “Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and start all over again”🎶 comes to mind as a remedy beyond defeatism, especially announced by a measure of your deficit. To keep moving is a mindset beyond circumstances. The poem “Keep a’goin” comes to mind as well.