Concepts - Edwards Performance

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Concepts | Performance Through Health

When I started working with high performers in the business world, a theme very quickly emerged. Top performers in fields from medicine to finance and law, had achieved their success at the expense of their physical health. Years of long hours and bad habits had indeed produced career rewards, but health had been sacrificed and the impact was being felt. This impact on health was now coming full circle to impair performance, motivation and longevity of both career and life. I am often part of the individual’s attempts to recover the health and wellbeing lost on the road to success.

This relationship, of performance at the expense of health, leading to compromised performance was obvious to me, and seemed inevitable. But for the clients, (at least when they were making those choices) it never occurred to them.

As I began working with these high performers, improving the way they ate, slept, improved their fitness, and made them cognizant of how to deal with stress, their energy, drive, and ultimately their performance began to return to peak levels.

It became a core philosophy of mine, that health drives performance. As such, it should be seen as an asset to protect and value. Health is a core component of peak performance, not a disposable resource to be wasted in the pursuit of success.

Great health leads to higher productivity, longer careers and a happier overall life. As such we should value, protect, and tend to our wellbeing, in the full knowledge that it will repay us in droves, both during our careers and long after they have ended via retirement.

Performance Through Health has been a core tenet in our work with CEO’s, athletes, and organisations. Its impacts are positive and significant in terms of productivity and performance. Avoiding the serious negative consequences of the ‘performance at the expense of health’ philosophy that it replaces.

We use the Five Arenas Of Physical Health model as a foundation for our work with individuals, teams and organisations.

Links

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Concept Overview | The five arenas of physical health

The choices we make today in each of these arenas determines, to large extent, the quality of life we get to enjoy in the future, and the level at which we are able to perform in the here and now. Our behaviour in each of these arenas nudges the trajectory of our health in either more favorable, or more deleterious directions. The cumulative effect of the thousands of choices we make each day in these areas adds up to a significant impact on our physical health and performance in years to come.

Each of these “arenas” is non-negotiable. Every one of us must engage each day in a lifestyle that includes each of these factors. Everyone must sleep, eat, and navigate their environment. Each of us is exposed to stressors, and has a degree if fitness. These interconnected and interdependent arenas of life are ever present. Regardless of how much conscious effort you put into each, your choices and behaviours are having an impact on your health and performance now and into the future.

We believe that deliberately curating your way of life in each of these five arenas is well worth the effort. The health of our physical body impacts the quality of our doing in all areas, and for all those who rely on us. Trying to be at ones best in a state of poor health is an uphill struggle. When a person’s way of life produces a fit, healthy, resilient state, performance is facilitated.

We call this state thriving.

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Food

1. Food

Most people know that what we eat is a huge component of a healthy lifestyle and a determining factor in our wellbeing. Unfortunately, out of all the arenas of physical health nutrition is troubled by the most disinformation and myths. We must wade through muddy water to get a simple answer to the question “what should I eat”? This leads to many people being either bought into a dogma around food. Maybe they’re vegan, paleo, Keto, or in some other zealous camp. What we aim to do here is to provide clarity over the nutritional landscape through a principled approach.

Instead of bombarding you with rigid rule and dogmatic beliefs around what to eat, we aim to provide a framework of principles that you can use to navigate everyday life as it relates to food.

We do not require you to be a nutritional saint, subscribe to borderline religious adherence to fixed rules, or to abstain from anything fully. We aim to provide a way of eating that produces a healthy body and a physique that reflects that, but that can be used in normal life, and a wide array of situations. This system is the WHOLE approach. A group of five principles that allow you to follow any “diet” you wish, from plan based to carnivore. These are the foundational principles of a healthy diet.

These principles are:

Whole foods 90% of the time

Hunger determines intake

Only meals, no snacks

Limit liquid calories

Everything in moderation

Learn more by reading the full WHOLE document.

Fitness

2. Fitness

Fitness is a profoundly important area to maintain if you care about your quality or length of life. Fitness encompasses multiple aspects including mobility, strength, and cardio respiratory fitness. These aspects combine to have an impact of almost every bodily system. Your musculoskeletal system, cardiovascular system, metabolism, immune system and even your brain are stimulated and strengthened by fitness training.

Strength training maintains and strengthen our joints, bones, muscles, connective tissues and even protects our brains from cognitive decline. Mobility training preserves our ability to move, operate in a brand array of positions, and prevents degradation of our joints and spine. Cardio respiratory fitness protects our cardiovascular system, including our heart and arteries.

High levels of fitness protect against more than 40 medical conditions, decrease risk of dying from any cause, and preserves our ability to perform physically and mentally into our later decades, prolonging quality of life and even independence. Fitness has even been shown to be more important for our metabolic health than diet, and a stronger predictor of risk of death than obesity.

Benefits are not limited to fitness fanatics. Moving from the least fit quintile of the population to the second least fit quintile confers a 40% drop in all cause mortality. With a further 30% drop for each additional quintile a person progresses through.

We have multiple resources to help you get started on improving your fitness. Please see links below.

Sleep

3. Sleep

Sleep is the elixir of wellbeing. The single most regenerative thing our brain and body can do is to sleep. Sleep deprivation, even mildly (less than6h per night) leads to reductions in performance, health and longevity that could cost us dearly.

Physical performance in hindered through increased in RPE, drops in reaction time, decision making, and pain tolerance, and many other factors. Emotional stability is diminished through increased threat perception, reactivity, and emotional control. Work performance is reduced through a tendency to select easy tasks over hard ones, and an increase in time to completion for most tasks. Learning is compromised by lower working memory, memory consolidation and focus. Metabolism is negatively impacted through reduced glucose disposal and insulin sensitivity. Even sexual performance is diminished and for men, testosterone production is lowered and even testicle size may wither.

Sacrificing sleep quantity or quality for productivity is a false economy. Even if more time is spent on task thanks to late nights and early starts, the reduced per hour productivity as a result of poor sleep is yield lowered overall results. Furthermore, a persons lifespan and risk of health issues increases with each hour of nightly sleep that is lost. For someone to thrive and be at their best, sleep is an integral piece of the puzzle.

Read more in our sleep guide, or buy the book why we sleep by Mathew Walker, (recommended reading, no financial affiliation).

Resilience

4. Resilience

Stressors are inevitable in life. Some stress is even good for us, augmenting our performance and making us stronger. But chronic stress, accelerates ageing and negatively impacts our mental and physical health in myriad ways.

The objective amount of stress we experience is a factor, of course, in the extent of the damage. But our reaction and response to those stressors is by far the more significant factor. Hence, it is our resilience to the stress life throws at us that truly counts.

Resilience, however, is a much misunderstood quality. Resilience is not something we either are or are not. Nor is it a state that can be built in response to a stressor. Rather, resilience is a state we achieve through our daily lifestyle choices and habits. Resilience is a practice, one that we must cultivate not only in response to challenge, but primitively, and perennially.

Seeing resilience as a practice allows us to exact agency over our readiness for stress and challenge. Certain lifestyle choices build our resilience, and move us towards a high capacity for performance and challenges. But other choices diminish our capacity, and leave us vulnerable to the strain and stress that will inevitably appear at one point.

To thrive we must be resilient, to be resilient we must tend to our resilience, even when times are good. Read our full guide The Practice of Resilience here

Environment

5. Environment

Our environment has a huge impact on our physical health. Chemical, physical, and social elements in our environment can have positive and negative impacts on our wellbeing and performance. We bathe in our environment each day, often oblivious to the ills that may be impacting us, sometimes we are all too aware.

Chemical: Our chemical environments are made up of the air we breath, water we drink, food we eat, and cosmetics use. Pesticides, plastics, estrogenics and solvents are among the assaults we must navigate in our chemical environments. Sun cream, moisturiser, food packaging and even tap water are common sources of chemicals that have strong and negative impacts on our health. As I write this, just yesterday a report has been released showing large and accelerating decline in average sperm count globally, as a direct result of estrogenics in our environment, and the effect is generational.

Physical: Light and dark, warm, cold, urban, rural, wild, ventilated or not. Our physical environment interacts with our bodies directly and indirectly and has a significant role to play in our health and performance. For example, being in a busy urban environment surpasses the parasympathetic nervous system and increase the time we spend in a stress state. Whereas forests and natural spaces activate our PNS and stimulate recovery, diminishing stress. Artificial light is another example of an element of our physical environment that impacts a multitude of factors from sleep to concentration. Sometimes we can leverage these elements to our advantage, sometimes we are unwittingly affected by them.

Social: We all live in a social environment. Family, work, friends, leisure, all make up our social surroundings. These can be toxic, negatively impacting our wellbeing and performance, or they can be positive, augmenting both.

Curating our environments to eliminate toxic elements, build in shields and increase the presence of positive elements can have a profound impact on our health. Of each of the five arenas of physical health, this is the least appreciated by most.