The Science of Fitness Podcast
Welcome to the Science Of Fitness podcast where we aim to inspire you to live a healthier and more fulfilling life as we share evidence and anecdotes on all things health, fitness, performance, wellness and business.
Hosted by Kieran Maguire, Co-Owner and Director of Science Of Fitness with an Undergraduate degree in Exercise Science and Masters degree in High Performance, the podcast includes guests and friends of SOF from all walks of life sharing their knowledge and stories within their field of expertise.
Join us as we provide listeners with digestible and relatable educational tools and entertaining stories to inspire a healthier and more fulfilling life.
The Science of Fitness Podcast
EP 9 The Solo Series - The Five Pillars of Professional High Performance w/ Kieran Maguire
Explore the vital roles of endurance, resilience, and effective stress management with us as we guide you through optimizing your physical health. Discover how regular exercise, like simple morning walks, can elevate your metabolic health and energy levels, boosting both your productivity and overall well-being. We also touch on essential relaxation techniques and the importance of quality sleep to maintain your health in high-stress careers. Our detailed discussion offers an actionable roadmap for integrating physical wellness into your professional life, ensuring you don't just survive, but thrive in your career.
Welcome to the Science of Fitness podcast, where we aim to inspire you to live a healthier and more fulfilling life, as we share evidence and anecdotes on all things relating to health, fitness, performance, business and wellness. Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the Science of Fitness podcast and welcome back to the solo series. In today's episode, we're going to be talking about the five pillars of professional high performance and, in particular, in relation to the Elevate program we run here at Science of Fitness. But the principles discussed in this episode go out to every single one of you out there that are working at a high level as a professional and no, this is not limited to your professional athletes, those that need their body for their career as a sport. This is speaking to every single person out there that is actually working at some sort of level, that is trying to achieve or is working at a high level within a career of any kind. We are fortunate enough, as a business, to be working with some of the best professionals within Southeast Queensland, and what we've realized is their physical health has a important influence on the success of their career, and in today's episode, we're going to discuss the five pillars you should be considering if you're hoping to maximize your physical health so that it can actually maximize your performance in your career. Ultimately, the motto we drag to people we discuss with people that are working at a high level in their profession is don't let your career kill you Kill your career instead. And if you consider yourself as a high-performing professional, you need to be taking care of your physical health, your mental health and every other aspect of your life so that you can get a better performance when it comes to your career, every other aspect of your life so that you can get a better performance when it comes to your career. The five pillars we're going to discuss today and that really sit as the cornerstone of our Elevate program include injury prevention, robust training foundations, strength, physical and psychological components, endurance, physical and psychological components and neurological downregulation being able to bring the system down after all the stress that might be induced through training or through your career.
Speaker 1:Let's dive into the details. If we discuss injury prevention, physical and mental clarity are one and the same. Ultimately, if you are in pain, it's going to compromise your productivity and for those of you that have actually suffered from an injury, particularly those that suffer from chronic back pain, neck pain, migraines you will know that if you are in pain, your productivity at work is compromised, your mood and your performance in general is compromised, and so if you are trying to get more out of your career, if you are training and exercising to hopefully be healthier, you need to be prioritizing injury prevention. It is the biggest compromise that people see, or that we see that people make within our industry is they train and have the best intentions with their training to, you know, make them be healthier and hopefully perform a little bit better at their career, but ultimately they end up hurting themselves, which makes the whole process redundant.
Speaker 1:And when it comes to the actual burden on productivity, musculoskeletal injuries are the second biggest burden on the Australian from a disease perspective on the Australian economy, cancer and cancer-related issues being the first. Majority of the musculoskeletal injuries that cause a burden on productivity within organizations include back pain, neck, head and shoulder pain, and so if your exercise program makes your back pain worse or gives you more stress and pain in the neck and shoulders, it's probably not getting executed or designed to appropriately assist you. And the funny conundrum that most of us are dealing with when it comes to exercise is it can be the best or the worst thing for your injury. It can be the best or the worst thing for your injury. Sometimes, and quite often for a lot of people, they experience exercise as an exacerbation of their underlying issue, be it back pain, for example. And if they go and train they might be doing lifting weights or going running or whatever it might be. You're actually exacerbating the issue and causing more pain. So a lot of people stop exercising At the same time leaning on the literature, and if you speak to any decent physiotherapist, they will say exercise-based solutions, exercise rehabilitation provides the best outcomes for people in pain. So where do we get it wrong? Why, on one end of the spectrum, people end up hurting themselves when they exercise more, and then, on the other end of the spectrum, we use exercise as a mechanism of injury rehabilitation.
Speaker 1:Well, in our opinion, it all comes down to the details of your execution and, quite frankly, the health and fitness industry has not spent enough time developing high quality practitioners that have an understanding of how to execute movements correctly to mitigate risk that ultimately mitigates injury. I'll say that again the health and fitness industry has not prioritized enough education and quality assurance of practitioners to be able to mitigate risk associated with exercise and injury. Now, if you find yourself a practitioner, an exercise physiologist, maybe a strength and conditioning coach that is of really high quality, you'll realize they do not demand better performance or heavier lifting or faster outcomes. They prioritize execution of movement. 80% of the value of any exercise lives in the last 20% of mechanical detail, particularly when it comes to strength training. If you are not prioritizing proper mechanics, proper technique, proper form, all you're doing is increasing the risk of potentially exacerbating an underlying mechanical deficit or issue or injury. And so my suggestion to people when it comes to training and using exercise as a means to improve their professional performance, you need to prioritize injury prevention and finding practitioners that do so.
Speaker 1:Now the conundrum comes if it's too injury prevention and too risk adverse, you're not actually going to get fitter and stronger Again. Having a practitioner that understands the thresholds of how hard to push, when to push and then when to pull back, actually adds layers and details and value into your health journey. And the big thing that people forget is this isn't an eight-week challenge. This should not be a 12-week. Do your best and then you're fine. This is a cornerstone of high performance and if you hope to have a long, prosperous career for 20, 30, 40 plus years. You need to understand that your physical health is coming along with you whether you like it or not, and if you are suffering from back pain frequently through those periods, it's going to hinder your productivity, and so our suggestion is learning how to train safely, learning how to train properly and prioritizing proper movement and technique to get on top of injuries so that they don't hinder your professional performance.
Speaker 1:On to the next layer, a robust foundation, and this sort of coincides with the initial point in that first pillar that I spoke about. When it comes to injury prevention, if you think of a good building, any decent building with high structural integrity has a really strong and solid foundation. We should consider our movement, our training and our high performance, our professional performance, of the same thing. We need to lay a solid foundation before we try and build a structure. For example, if you're signed up for a half marathon or any sort of recreational exercise but you don't have a really solid foundation in terms of training, your body won't be able to handle the deliberate stress that's coming your way with regard to that training. If we think of elite athletes, they spend a lot of their time physically preparing themselves for the stress that is their training, and then their performance, their game day type performances, and it should be no different for these professionals.
Speaker 1:Listening to this, you need to consider that physical foundation, that robustness, the ability to handle stress, a cornerstone and a priority of your exercise regime, so that you can lean in when it is required, out of your career, out of your body and out of your training so that, ultimately, you don't break. And so, first and foremost, we want to set pillar one is get on top of the niggles and injuries so that they're at bay. And then point number two, pillar number two is then building a robust foundation so that those niggles and injuries don't even exist and you're not going to bring to light any new ones in an attempt to keep yourself healthy, in an attempt to actually be more productive and perform better in your profession Once you find yourself a practitioner that knows what they're doing. In a line with point number one, the next priority should be for you to build a body that does not get hurt. There is a big difference between a body that falls and grazes hands or bruises knees and a body that breaks a wrist or fractures a patella or causes a significant injury. One is a two, maybe three-week turnaround, a bit of bruising and damage to the skin. Another is a full-blown visit to the hospital, days or weeks off work and then a whole rehab process washing up behind you. And so the more robust your body is thanks to the exercise training regime that you're doing, the more you can handle incidental stresses, be it stumbling and falling over, be it a quick sort of fun run within the organization, or be it an 80, 90 hour work week where you find yourself stuck in the chair and not able to train or exercise your normal routine. And that happens to all professionals. The stress and the high workloads ebb and flow and you need to prioritize your training so that you can handle those high stress periods from a physical perspective and then, when you come out of them, your body is still robust and strong enough to get back into your normal routine. No-transcript.
Speaker 1:The third point comes to strength, and this is both physical strength and psychological strength, and it's the third pillar on top of a system that has prioritized getting on top of niggles and injuries, so injury prevention. A system that is robust, so that it is strong and can handle inevitable stresses, a system that is strong is the next priority, and the concept of being strong has evolved. A strong system is versatile. It can handle most things. It's not the traditional big biceps look at my muscles, I'm so strong. It is a system that can handle even more stresses. It's a system that is versatile and can adapt and when we consider our training, we need to be able to lean on those solid foundations developed through a good, robust system of training to then develop our strength.
Speaker 1:The beauty about strength is that it coincides, both physically and psychologically. And good strength training improves your movement capacity, it improves your ability to tolerate load, it improves that whole robustness foundation that we spoke about. So, again, they sort of complement each other, pillar on pillar, and the stronger you are, the more robust your system is. So it sort of coincides More strength equals more injury prevention, equals a more productive system, ultimately equals more injury prevention, equals a more productive system. Ultimately, incidentally, when it comes to your career, those stresses, the strength to be able to handle the said stresses of your career again, be it long hours in a chair, be it tough meetings and tough conversations, the body has to be able to be strong enough and versatile enough to handle the existing stresses when they come at the system, and so being able to build a system that is strong enough to work through and be versatile and handle different stresses is the next priority.
Speaker 1:Ultimately, when it comes to your training, the practitioners you're working with, or your programming, should be utilizing periodization. They should be using a science-based plan on increasing stress and then decreasing it and gradually, incrementally giving your body a general adaptation to stress. And in the exercise science world, we use the word periodization and it's a fancy word for plan and in doing so, you're gradually loading and unloading your system to get stronger over time. It is as simple as that and it's been used for decades within the high performance world. The same thing should be used within the high performance professional world. For those of us that are stuck in desks, for those that are stuck behind operating tables and for those of us that are working long, hard hours, we need to lean on our exercise regime to increase stress, decrease, increase a bit more decrease, increase a little bit more decrease and ultimately, our stress and strength threshold gets higher and higher and higher as our body, our brain, our nervous system adapts to that work that happens in the gym and in your exercise program. Coincidentally, it's going to wash up and have an effect on your ability to work and perform and ultimately it's time we start applying high performance and sport science principles to the corporate performance that most of us are working in.
Speaker 1:From there we look at endurance and resilience and this is both metabolic and health endurance from a health perspective and then also considering your endurability as a professional to handle the hard work. The ability to endure is critical in any high-performing career. Endurance is something that needs to be trained. What you may have handled and thought was hard at the start of your career has certainly evolved to what you're able to handle and work through now. The same thing applies with your exercise regime.
Speaker 1:If you haven't run or done any endurance-based work, it might sound terribly intimidating to do 15, 20, 30 minutes of continuous exercise on one machine or running or whatever it might be. But gradually, as you do that more and more and more, your ability to handle it will get better and better and better. You stretch yourself out to 60 minutes unbroken of endurance work. Suddenly a 15 minute bout sounds like a piece of cake. Yet at one stage on your journey you would have found that stressful. You would have found that difficult. You would have found that quite frightening to do. Having physical endurance is a critical component of being more energetic and able to turn up and be productive again and again and again and again. And there's a biochemical profile that goes with this and I'll quickly touch on it so that you can understand it and you can probably relate to this when it comes to exercise in any form. But I'll stick on endurance particularly.
Speaker 1:We create a wash up of metabolic byproducts and that happens during the bout of exercise, be it sitting on a bike, be it going for a run or a brisk walk. Those metabolic byproducts stimulate a whole bunch of energetic pathways with which we grab more oxygen from every breath that we take. We drag it into our blood and then into our cells and we use that oxygen to create more energy, given the requirement, thanks to that exercise, that exercise bout. By doing so, that oxygen increase doesn't just happen in the exercise bout, it continues to happen throughout the day because that metabolic furnace that you've now got going through an early period of the day through some sort of aerobic work keeps burning, even though you might be sitting down at the desk for the rest of the day, you're going to be burning more energy for the rest of that day and, as a result, pulling more oxygen in to the areas we need oxygen to go the muscles, your organs, your brain.
Speaker 1:And, when you think about it, those of you that work with people that do a lot of endurance-based training the cyclists and the runners and the triathletes in the office. They just seem to have an abundance of energy, and that abundance of energy comes from this chemical profile. That happens because most of the time they're going to be getting their training done in the morning and they're going to have that metabolic wash-up that ultimately means more oxygen to the places in our body. We want them to go so that we can be clearer in our thought, we can be more productive in our work. Want them to go so that we can be clearer in our thought, we can be more productive in our work. And so our recommendation to anyone that works in with our programs is try and get some sort of physical, endurance-based activity done in the mornings, and be it a simple 5, 10, 15-minute walk, be it sitting and doing a bout on any endurance cardio piece of equipment. It just kicks the system into action and leaves you feeling more energized through the day.
Speaker 1:Inversely, if we don't create those metabolic byproducts, the transfer of oxygen to the cells again muscles, organs, tissues in the brain isn't quite as efficient, and so, as a result, you might feel a little bit more lethargic and it sort of seems counterintuitive. I want to reserve my energy and not waste it on exercise. Actually, by burning energy on exercise, you've got to kickstart the whole energy system and in doing so, be more productive as a professional. A fitter system has more access to energy and results in more time, effective and efficient outputs, both physically and cognitively. It's something worth considering all the time. If you're sitting at the desk feeling a little bit lethargic and a little bit tired, get up and move your body. Go out for a walk, stand up, make the next phone call, whatever it might be, and then sit down and work. You'll kick yourself out of that lethargic sort of state very quickly thanks to just the typical actions that happen biochemically in the body. The final pillar for the five-step process for professional high performance is neurological down regulation.
Speaker 1:I've touched on the word stress a couple of times in this podcast, and stress is not a bad thing. We all need to realize this. Stress is inevitable. The stress someone in the third world experiences is going to be a different sort of mechanism of causing stress than someone in the first world. However, the biochemical processes are identically the same or very, very similar. It happens in the central part of our nervous system. In our brain, we release a whole bunch of hormones to deal with that stressful outcome or moment, and then we metabolically have a reaction.
Speaker 1:Now, if your career is high stress, if you're put in situations where the stress is high be it in sales, be it in the law, be it in executive management positions there are going to be moments where stress increases, and that's a good thing. Your ability to tolerate stress is what determines your success in your career. And the most important thing we need to realize when we do get put into stressful states is that we need to come out of them. And that is where everybody finds themselves stuck is. The nervous system winds up into its stress state, into a sympathetic fight or flight state, be it in a meeting, in a conversation, stuck in traffic, whatever it might be. We need to be able to pull our nervous system from that stress state out, calm it down, and we need to be able to pull our nervous system out of that stress state, settle it down, and the more skilled as a professional you can be to do that, the better you're going to be ultimately from a health perspective, from a productivity perspective and from a sort of professional relationship perspective, because you're not going to feel so jacked up and wired the entire time you're at work and then completely burn out and crash. It gives you a sustainable management strategy.
Speaker 1:Ultimately, what goes up must come down, and the biggest issue caused by a high-performing career is the mismanagement of stress, the inability to come down from the stress that your career might be causing. If you've watched any sort of team sport recently, you'll notice a lot of the players in between moments within a game. Be it a point is scored in some way, the group will get together, they'll take two or three big inhales and long exhales and they'll do a couple of reps of that. What that is is just a deliberate stress management strategy. It helps their central nervous system calm down, slows their heart rate down slightly, slows their respiration down, obviously, and in doing so it just lets them clearly think about the next phase in that competitive moment. The same tool can be used in your career Next time you're going into a meeting that you're a little bit stressed or anxious about, or you're doing work that you find is winding you up, take a moment, have an inhale for two seconds and exhale for three seconds and repeat that five times or three times. Even Just slowing your breathing down takes that nervous system and calms it down. It slows your heart rate and it allows you to use the superpowers that make you good at your career much easier, those superpowers being the frontal lobe and being the cognitive parts of your brain rather than the primitive, reactive parts of your brain. So if you find yourself getting wound up, having, you know, conflict and stressful sort of conversations and not really getting outcomes, you need to be able to manage your nervous system so that you can actually get much more productive, outcome-based situations and conversations and meetings.
Speaker 1:As a professional, learning how to quickly and effectively down-regulate your nervous system is the best tool you can learn to improve your capacity for stress as a professional, and those are sort of micro within working hours examples. And then there is leaning on mechanisms to down-regulate as a professional when your day finishes. Sleep should be your number one priority if you are a high working professional, a professional that's actually doing some serious load of work in your career, because often time is of the essence and you might only give yourself seven, six hours to have a restful sleep. Well, the better and more efficient your sleep is, the better you're going to be performing the next day, and so being able to calm your nervous system down is critical. Leaning on alcohol or any degree of pharmacology we now know is only a short-term fix and is actually causes a negative spiral when it comes to calming down your nervous system. Alcohol and a couple of the neurosuppressants that are available are down regulatory, but they are pharmacologically induced and so once you come down and come out from that come down or that chemical induced state, your nervous system wants to wind back up. That chemical induced state your nervous system wants to wind back up. You have the ability to control your nervous system and your neural state independently.
Speaker 1:I just spoke about a couple of breathing strategies and breath work. Stretching, sauna, just taking a few moments to slow down your nervous system is all it takes. You do not need pharmacological intervention to slow down your heart rate. You do not need pharmacological intervention to slow down your heart rate. You do not need pharmacological intervention to slow down your respiration rate. You need a bit of conscious control. 30 seconds, 60 seconds, 5 minutes, whatever you're prepared to commit to bring that nervous system down. Lengthening out your exhale is the simplest way you can do that.
Speaker 1:In for three, out for five, and just simply a couple of reps of that is all you need so before you go to bed, if you struggle to fall asleep at night because your brain starts thinking about work, sit on the couch, don't sit in your bed. Sit on the floor. Three breaths in for three, out for five, and then go to bed, watch your nervous system calm down. Add on more and more repetitions, take five, 10, 15 minutes and do some breath work deliberately. You'll notice your whole nervous system calms down and you're able to fall asleep really easily. Because, quite frankly, if you've been pushing the threshold all day in that sort of stress in and out sort of stress states, when your body feels it's time to calm down and relax, it'll want to switch off and bang. You'll pass out.
Speaker 1:Most of us tend to find ourselves in front of the television after dinner and the nervous system calms down.
Speaker 1:Turn the television off, sit, concentrate, downregulate your nervous system and go to bed and have a productive sleep, it'll be the best thing you can do for your professional performance, your mood will improve, your productivity will improve and your entire enjoyment of your career the next day will be better. And so those are five really easy to do, really accessible pillars, and they should be the filter that you're applying on your physical and professional health, because, ultimately, you only have one vessel with which you can actually perform, and that is your body, and your mind and your body are not two separate entities. You need to have as healthy a body as possible to maximize your performance as a professional in your career. As I started the episode with, and I'll finish it with do not let your career kill you. Use your physical health to kill your career instead. Thanks for listening to today's episode. For more regular insights into SOF, be sure to check us out on Instagram or Facebook or visit our website at scienceoffitnesscomau. Once again, we thank you for tuning in to the Science of Fitness podcast.