The Strong Body Dashboard: How to Use Data to Build a Body That Carries You Through Hard Times #687

When life gets hard, most people sacrifice the one thing they need most, their body. Sleep drops. Training stops. The habits that kept them going disappear overnight. In this episode, I share the nine-month period where I did exactly that, moved back from playing elite rugby in France, didn't know what I was doing with my life, and numbed it all with parties and alcohol instead of doing the work. I also break down the Strong Body Dashboard: the simple tracking system I use with every client to make sure your body stays strong enough to carry you through the hard times.

You'll learn:
- Why your body is the vehicle and your mind is the driver|
- The exact moment I hit rock bottom, and the 16-week challenge that changed everything
- Why having an "excuse" to protect your health is actually a superpower
- The Strong Body Dashboard: Sleep, Recovery, and Strain
- Why WHOOP data makes better decisions possible (and which wearable to use)
- The training template I recommend for anyone without a specific event goal
- How Lachie and his wife kept training 12 weeks postpartum, and why it mattered

If this hits a nerve, the next step is the Life Performance Scorecard. It's a free five-minute assessment that shows you exactly where you're winning, where you're leaking energy, and what to fix next across Strong Body, Calm Mind, Clear Purpose, and Confident Life

Transcript

Lachlan Stuart 0:00

Why your body is the first thing that gets neglected when things get hard and why that is backwards. I'm going to talk to you about that today. Let's jump into it. A few years ago I moved back from playing an elite level of rugby over in France. And when I landed back, I didn't know what I was going to do with my life. And it's a very overwhelming feeling, especially when you're like 23. You don't have that much life experience. But it's a pattern that I see

Return Home And The Downward Spiral

Lachlan Stuart 0:24

play out for a lot of people, and maybe you've experienced this as well. When I moved back though, my mates were finishing their trades, finishing their university degrees, or that was really settled in their careers. I felt like they were a couple of years ahead of me. And I started having these thoughts, Lockie, how are you actually going to be successful? How are you going to put food on the table? Where does your life go from here? And that was a hard thing to deal with. That was a hard thing to comprehend. And man, it was overwhelming. And I had an opportunity where I could have like dealt with it, which makes it sounds like the logical thing. But what I actually did was I just tried to numb it. I didn't want to answer those questions. They felt too hard in the moment. And what the ripple effect of that was started partying more, started drinking more from multiple days a week. And because of that, I wasn't looking after my body. I'd stopped training, I'd train a couple of times a week rather than daily. I wasn't looking after my mind and my body. And what I realized was that your body is the vehicle. Everything in my life was falling off a cliff at that time compared to where it had been. I was feeling and experiencing mood swings. The way that I felt in my body, I just felt sluggish all the time. When I'd walk past the mirror, I wasn't proud of what I saw back in the mirror. So I just kept this negative feedback loop. And maybe you have experienced something like that as well in your own life where when the pressure mounts or things get hard, the first thing you sacrifice is the things that make your body a better vehicle, right? To drive you through the challenging times, to drive you through the hard times. And maybe you're feeling low energy, maybe you have low self-esteem, maybe you feel sluggish, maybe you're noticing mood swings, maybe you just don't feel like you can keep up with the day-to-day life. And it's why I designed the strong body dashboard, which I'll talk to you about in a moment. But from my own life, as I got myself out of this challenging period, the first thing that got me back on track was looking after my body. So that whole and I call it self-destructive. As I look back on my life, I'm like, dude, you were just a young kid, you didn't really have right support around you to help navigate that, which is what I hope this episode does for you. And so instead of understanding it's just part of life, challenges come, challenges go, you thought it was the end of the fucking world. I got through

Choosing Change Through Body Challenges

Lachlan Stuart 2:48

that nine-month period and I found myself at a crossroads, right? A fork in the road. Option A for me was I keep doing what I was doing and I didn't like that. I didn't like how I felt, I didn't like how I thought, I didn't like the results that I was getting in my life. Or I had another choice where I was like, I just do something completely different. And I started committing to these 16-week body transformation challenges. Now I was never a bodybuilder or anything like that. The reason why it appealed to me was because it would be something that I could focus on getting myself back in shape. I had purpose, which was just making sure I followed the program and getting myself as fit as possible. And the underlying thing that I didn't realize came from that was I had an excuse. And I know we say excuses are bad, but there's a point in life I think where when you lack self-esteem or you don't have the confidence to enforce boundaries or stand up for yourself, you need to have excuses to do the things you don't want to do. Just like we do have excuses to do the things we know we should be doing. So when people would ask me to come out and party or go for a couple of beers, it was so easy for me to turn them and say, hey, I can't at the moment, you know, I'm nine weeks into this body transformation challenge, there's a reward at the end of it, and I just really want to give myself the best chance to do that. And I did that for around seven different challenges. And during that seven different challenges, not only did I still have the purpose and focus, but who I became changed. I started seeing value in exercising, I started noticing my mood became more controlled. I started being very proud of what I saw in the mirror, and that then rippled into all other areas of my life. You tell me this. If you walk into a room and you know you've been doing the work and you're comfortable in your body, you feel strong, you look good, you're not gonna walk in slouched over and not feel like you deserve to be there. That is why it's such an important thing that whenever people dealing with hardship or adversity or hard things, they sacrifice their health. I'm like, no, no, no, no. You need your health and your body more than ever because it is gonna carry you through this tough time. If you don't have a strong body through a tough time, you will fall and crumble a lot sooner.

Building The Strong Body Dashboard

Lachlan Stuart 4:48

So the strong body dashboard, I started thinking, well, how do I quantify this? Because not everyone wants to be an athlete. And this isn't about being an athlete. This is about looking at a few simple markers that you can track that are going to help you understand what that looks like for you. And so, pillar one and the core four that I work with with my clients and we're about to launch in a group program is strong body. And a strong body for me and what helps me achieve my objectives may be different to you. And the cool thing about that is it's like awesome. Well, you get to decide what a strong body looks like in this season, meaning like this period right now, because that may be different for when you're you know 10 years down the track, and so you're in constant control, but it also means you need to constantly be tracking it and going, is who I am right now, or is how my body's moving right now allowing me to reach my full capacity in other areas? And it's a yes or no answer. And if it's a yes, keep doing what you're doing. If it's a no, let's start digging a little bit deeper and find out what you need to improve. But for me, I get all of my clients to use a whoop. And if you use a whoop, you know what it's all about. But the great thing about a whoop is it gives you the data and it's not so much, you know, wearables, it's debatable how accurate they are, it's more the awareness because the more you understand certain things and how they deliver outcomes in your life, you can do more of the things that are beneficial and less of the things that aren't, right? And there's a couple of things that we track, and I'll give it very simply we track sleep. Sleep is going to be the most important. It's the time where you get to recover, it's where you build the armor, build the bigger defenses to deal with the stresses that life throws at you both physically and both mentally. And when you get the WIP data, there's a lot of stuff we can look at there. And so all of my clients, we just look at where they're at. So we get a baseline, and I would recommend you do this as well. So if you wear it for a month without changing anything, it's going to show you where you're at, what your average sleep is, and overall what your average recovery is and what your average strain is. Then when you look at that, you go, okay, do I need to improve those? What is something that is realistic that I could improve over a four, eight, six week, uh, four, eight, twelve-week period? And then we just set numbers. So for me, this year, last year it was getting my recovery average up to 75%. This year it's getting it up to 78%. I'm not trying to go to 100, that's not realistic, but I'm just trying to improve it overall because then I start thinking, okay, what are the things that influence my recovery? And once again, the WHOOP teaches you that, or if you're working with me, we go through things there that will help you do that. But when you feel more recovered, and from my experience, I make better decisions. I feel a lot happier. My mood doesn't swing as much. I don't feel sore and stiff. And because of that, then I feel like I can achieve more because I'm not worrying about the aches, the bad thoughts. I'm thinking about the good thoughts, I'm thinking about how free and how strong I feel. So that's a great thing there. We then look at strain. Strain is obviously the stress you're putting your body under. And the cool thing about the WHOP, you wear it all day, so it takes into account whether you're having a good sleep, it takes into account work stresses, it takes into account physical activity stress, and then it gives you a score at the end of the day. And the benefit of that is it can help you see whether you're doing enough to continue to grow your stress capacity, and a lot of people aren't very sedentary lifestyle, very lazy lifestyles. And so we can do programming around that. Once again, we do for our clients because I do believe that the body is the vehicle, the mind is the driver, and if we can get your body strong, we can then grow. And we're just constantly getting feedback on those scores there to help know whether the physical plan that we have for you is working, or if it's beneficial for you, or we need to make some tweaks, and over time you're going to continue to learn and grow. And that's one of the cool things about the Strong Body Dashboard. We use data, we use programming, and then we use obviously personal feedback around how you're feeling to continue to give that. And I know that if you can continue to improve your strong body score, which is the cumulative score of those things that we're tracking and measuring, it's going to then help you have a calmer mind, help you get clearer on your purpose and feel like you can achieve more, and also develop that confident life, which is proof that you are doing what you said you would do to deliver a great life. So those ones to repeat is your sleep, your recovery, and your strain. And within each one, you can get as detailed as you want, or you can just use some snapshots, snapshots, depending on how much or how yeah, how much you want to see, or how little you want to see. Everyone's different there, but that's where you get to personalize it to yourself. So if you aren't having something to track, you're always going off feeling, and sometimes, or a lot of the time, there are very variables that influence how we feel that aren't aligned with what the data is telling us. So I think it's very important to look at that. What else do I want to say here? That is about that. And so if you're interested in learning more, you've got two options. One, just go buy yourself a whoop or some form of wearable. I personally like Whoop, I think the dashboard's phenomenal. But you could use a you know Apple Watch, you could use an Aura ring, you could use Fitbit, it doesn't matter. Just get something that gives you a little bit of data to show you how your body is moved. And then when you come back to you're going through hard times, that's when you know I just need to hold the routine that I have around developing my strong body and looking after my body during this period because as the pressure comes on and as it wears down my mind, I need to know that my body is strong enough to push me through this. And if there ever comes a breaking point where you can't keep up with it, which I've experienced and I'm sure you have as well, when you get through that, which I know you will, you then get to go, okay, here's some feedback from that. What do I need to train?

Training Template And Using Wearables

Lachlan Stuart 10:38

And one little thing I'll leave you with for anyone that I'm working with that doesn't have a specific training goal, whether they're training for let's say a marathon or they're training for Olympic lifting or at a specific event, the way that I would structure your programming is this two aerobic sessions like zone two, which means basically you might be jogging or on the bike or some form of cardio activity where you can hold a conversation. Low intensity, it's great. Then I'd look at something that's high intensity, one that I've been really loving at the moment, and I think it's just so time efficient, is Norwegian four by four, so it's four minutes on and then three to four minutes off. So obviously you're working at a higher capacity in that period, but it doesn't take that long. Short session, easy to do, and then two strength sessions. I personally do full body. Some people might do actually, that's a lie. At the moment, I'm doing leg specific for my goals, but for the general general punter, full body twice a week, that's all it needs to be. And I know that we've linked that to the data that we collect on the WHOOP, and you can see your numbers are improving. And so that's what I would do. Once again, if you don't want to work with me or you don't want to be part of the program, I would look at something like that. Or if you're working with a trainer, have a chat to them and see what they think's best for you. Everyone's different. You will then be able to get feedback to go, this is working for me or this is not. And that's one of the great things about taking agency for your life and taking ownership is you use the data, you'll find out what's working, you'll find out what isn't, and you just double down on that. So it's not because we're trying to get you to be an athlete. I just want you to become someone who shows up for themselves even when the times are tough, even when the pressure's hard. So don't sacrifice that. Keep it in the schedule, have the conversations with those who matter to let them know, hey, I have to duck out during this period. And one final story.

New Parenthood Without Dropping Health

Lachlan Stuart 12:26

We've just had our first son about 12 weeks ago. And it's an I would say it's a hard period because there's so much change and there's a lot of variables around how the baby's feeling, when it wants to be fed, whether it sleeps well or not, how many times at night you're getting up. And that can influence whether you're training straight away or the intensity that you can train with, how you feel at work, whether you feel foggy, all of those sorts of things. And I am so proud of myself that I didn't sacrifice my training, neither did my wife. Obviously, she had a recovery period, but she still managed to go for walks and do the things that were important to her because we both understand the importance of allowing each other to be as strong as we can, to be the best parents that we can, and to still do the things outside of our career that we need to be doing. So remember that you don't need to be an athlete. I do love the athlete mindset because when I think of myself as an athlete, I do what an athlete would do, which is sleep, recover, train to build my capacity to deal with the stresses of life. Question I want to leave you with is what does that look like for you? My name's Lachlan Stewart. Thank you guys for listening. Once again, your support is awesome. We're getting more reviews on the podcast and the YouTube. Appreciate you all being here. We'll see you next week.