Midnight in Sebastopol

Why rest and recovery make good athletes and better workers

In weightlifting, muscle growth is spurred by stress.

The gist is simple: work out hard. Then, like bees to pollen, anabolic hormones are bound to receptors. New proteins and filament are ready to make muscle fibers bigger and stronger. Holistically, your performance is on the brink of spiking and improving.

All you need to do is stop and rest.

Muscles and hormones adapt to stress, but they only adapt when given a chance to recover. It’s called “functional overreach”. You train, and the stress from training breaks your muscles down. When that stress is removed, protein-muscle synthesis causes muscles cells to build back stronger than they previously were.

In other words: stress + recovery = a stronger person.

The plight of the worker bee is a lot like the plight of an uninformed athlete: we think more work and more volume yields better results. In the short run, this might be true. But in the long run, we’re only as strong as our adaptations. The amount we allow ourselves to rest, to de-load, to recover, correlates with our long-run performance 1:1.

I’m writing these thoughts at midnight in Sebastopol, sitting upright in a queen-sized bed in a tiny countryside AirBnB. It’s dark outside, and the WiFi sucks. Distractions are uniquely hard to find.

I wrote last week about the frenetic pace of post-MBA work. Toss in a business venture I’m trying to create, and I rarely find myself sitting idly. My days are filled with work and volume. I hate sitting idle. Time is precious.

But as I learn the science of athletic performance, I can’t help but feel the barbs and jabs of my own hypocrisy. Athletes improve when they apply a stimulus and allow an adaptation to take hold. So, too, goes knowledge work. Work without rest ultimately results in poor performance, far below your standards.

So pull the plug and turn off your computer. Sleep a full eight hours. Drink a glass of water and read a book.

Your body, your work, and your employer will thank you for it. You’ll be stronger tomorrow.