Fitness Academy - Peak Performance: Secrets from the New Science of Athletic Performance and High Successful Habits: How Extraordinary People Become That Way

When it comes to working out, you have to find your Goldilocks weight. Your Goldilocks weight is an amount that you can manage that will leave your exhausted and fatigued but not injured by the time youre done with your workout. Lifting every day multiple times a day without much rest in between will burn you out. The key to strengthening your physical, cognitive, or emotional growth is balancing the right amount of stress with the right amount of rest. Periodization PERIODIZATION, IN EXERCISE science, is a cycle of stress and rest. The stress in this sense is a stimulus such as lifting a heavy weight. In order to improve, isolate the muscle or capability you want to grow, and then stress it, then rest and recover, allowing for adaptation to occur. Stress the muscle or capability a bit more than you did the last time you have trained. The training of world-class athletes alternates between hard and easy days on a smaller scale. On a larger one, great athletes often follow a hard month of training with an easy week. They intentionally design their seasons to include only a few peak events that are followed by periods of physical and psychological restoration. The key is finding a stress-rest balance. Those who face too much stress but do not have enough rest get hurt and burn out while those with too much rest but not enough stress become complacent and plateau. Sustainable Performance WHAT ALLOWED MULTI awarded runner Deena Kastor to run so fast and so far for the past 25 years is how she recovers: the 10 to 12 hours of sleep she gets each night, her meticulous approach to diet, and her weekly massage and stretching sessions.

The improvements Kastor has experienced over the last several years came from outside her training environment and her recovery methods. During work- outs, your body is stressed and soft tissues are broken down. What you do to re- cover in between workouts is how you really gain the strength to keep going. Stress demands rest, and rest supports stress. She knows how much stress she can tolerate and how much rest she requires.

All the Best Follow Stress and Rest KASTORS ROUTINE IS echoed by Stephen Seilers research. When he first arrived in Norway, he noticed that world-class cross-country skiers were stopping before hills and then slowly walking up. He wondered why some of the best endurance athletes on the planet had such easy training routines. He studied the training for elite athletes in cycling, skiing, running, and swimming. He discovered that their training routines were quite similar. They alternated between periods when they did intense training and easier training and recovery.

They did not adhere to the no pain, no gain model/mindset. Intellectual and Creative Development MIHALY CSIKSZENTMIHALYI, Ph.D., is a pioneer in the field of positive psychology and in his study on creativity he interviewed groundbreaking inventors, innovative artists, Nobel Prize-winning scientists, and Pulitzer Prize-winning writers.

He was able to document a common process across almost all great intellectuals and creative performers, regardless of their field:

Immersion: total engagement in their work with deep, unremitting focus.

Incubation: a period of rest and recovery when they are not at all thinking

about their work.

Insight: the occurrence of aha or eureka moments the emergence of new ideas and growth in their thinking. Turns out that artists and athletes have more similarities in their routines than we thought. It shows that our muscles and minds are more alike than we might think. Just as our muscles deplete and run out of energy, our minds do, too. Mind as a Muscle ROY BAUMEISTER, PH.D., a social psychologist, was interested in understanding the limits of our willpower so he conducted a research which consisted of two phases. In the first phase, participants entered a room that smelled like cookies. Half of the participants were allowed to eat the cookies while the others werent and were given radishes to eat instead. After the two groups finished eating, all participants were asked to solve a seemingly solvable, but actually unsolvable problem. Those who ate cookies persisted longer and attempted to solve the problem more than those who ate radishes.