48: What Does Recovery Really Mean?

And I think that's a real fear that we have in society and business is that we're always trying to do more and do more and do more. And then you're going to start to push a little harder, a little harder, a little harder, and your time is going to start to get a little bit more consistent, you're going to start to get a little bit worse.

Because in the business world that's ultimately what we want from employees is not only creativity but productivity. Those are the two most important things that you can get out of your team.

It doesn't mean that you're weak, this doesn't mean that you can't handle it. This doesn't mean that you're less of a man. Welcome to the Coach's Council podcast with Justin and Pradeep where the art and science of athletics and business come together to create real life quality application that creates life changing results through actionable takeaways. As we always say, nothing changes if nothing changes. So let's get started. Welcome back to another week of the Coaches Council with Justin and Pradeep. Pradeep, it's great to see you here and happy New Year.

Yeah, happy new Year, man. It's a brand new year. 2021 seems like, man, I still remember when I was in high school and I was like 1990 something. Now it's 2021. It's crazy how time flies.

It's wild how one year seemingly comes and goes and comes and goes and it's just like that analogy right when you're standing in the river and if you're not present where your feet are, time doesn't stop for anybody. I don't care if you're rich, poor, young, old man, woman, time just keeps moving. And the fact that we are in 2021 and I remember the turn of the century. I don't know who else remembers this, but where were you in 1999 that turned into year 2000? What were you doing on that Y2K? Do you remember that?

Actually, I don't. 1999 I was, yeah, so 99, I was in second year university. I'm just trying to think back now. Like, are you talking about the New Year's?

Yeah, the new year tipped over and everyone thought computers were gonna blow up.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, we were, we. I actually had a house party that year. So I remember that.

I still remember the lead up and it was one of those, the biggest stressors of our life because my father's in the tech space and so he had to his big thing for that whole eight months leading up to it was the computers are not going to know what year it is. Everything's going to get all screwed up because it's going. It's going to just show all zeros. And it's crazy to think that that was 21 years ago.

Moral of the story, it's nuts. Crazy.

But with that, heading into the new year, with everything that we've got going on, we always hear these New Year's resolutions. And people have been really reaching out to me lately, talking about what is recovery, what does it mean? We hear about it all the time in getting enough sleep, allowing your body to recover, allowing your mind to recover. This level of mindfulness. And the biggest question I've been getting asked is how much is it actually being focused on recovery and how much is it that's being said to be lazy or being that you're not working hard enough or that you're not doing enough? And I think that's a real fear that we have in society and business is that we're always trying to do more and do more and do more, but yet not focusing on that recovery aspect, but also because not knowing what it truly means. And so when we come and we ask about what is recovery, I'm curious as to what you think it is. I'm just from a sheer business standpoint. And so we can then kind of address it and talk about what it is and what it means from a more broad standpoint.

Yeah, I think some people can hear the word recovery, and it kind of seems like a negative, like, I don't need to recover. That's just kind of, you know, that's for the wusses. But I think it's important. I see recovery as a reset point. And ultimately that's what it is. Whether that's for your body, your mind, your emotional state, your spirit, or even for business, it's a point where you can actually reset yourself so you can spring forward again. And so in the business world, we do something similar. We call it the sprints. So you do business sprints, you go full force, whether it's a few months, and then you tell your organization to reset itself or it's a few years and the organization has to reset itself. We see this a lot with. With businesses that are growing rapidly. You might have a startup that just takes off, but at some point in time, you have to recover or reset from the growth or the time, the investment, all that energy that you've put into it. It's Just a healthy thing to do. Everybody has to do it. It's just a normal cycle of life. There's that period of moving forward fast and there's times where you got to slow down and recover. So for me it's an important part of growth, it's an important part of progress.

It's.

It should be built into every plan, whether it's a business plan or a personal plan. Is time to reset yourself.

I love a couple of the key words that you were talking about there. Cycle, plan, reset. Because that's really what recovery is all about. And on the physical side we think about it all the time as okay, well I don't want to go to the gym every day of the week because I need to allow my body to reset or I'm not going to do these, I'm not going to go. If you take that movie, God, I can't remember what it is. It's not 40 year old virgin, it's something like that. But she goes, I need to go to brain camp because to really try to challenge her mind. But she's not going to. You're not going to go to brain camp every day because again you're just going to become physically exhausted and physically and mentally fatigued. And so you need to go in cycles. And when we were programming for when I was with the Docs in Anaheim or when I was at Miami and we were creating macro cycles, we would create a plan for the year where you would really push in the off season you'd tax guys a little bit more because you didn't need to perform for games. You could again scale yourself up and once it came time for games, you would go through this undulating cycle where there would be higher times of training and lesser times of training to allow for the body to recover and adapt and, and ultimately super compensate. And that is the idea behind recovery is you are then getting the benefits of all the work that you've thus already put in and you thus super compensate to be able to come back bigger, faster, stronger, more knowledgeable. And I don't think people are understanding the whole concept of recovery enough and just seeing it in a continual rat race. And you end up being that marathon runner at the end of the race, just barely straggling by where you've just been on this constant wheel where you haven't allowed yourself that time to super compensate and take advantage of all the work that you've already done.

Yeah, I think that's important. I'm actually fascinated by the planning part that you're talking about for athletes, because I think that's super cool. And I didn't realize that you tax them more on the off season. But that kind of makes sense because they aren't playing games. So that's very interesting. I think if we all did this a little bit better in terms of planning, it'd be a lot more effective for us, because once you can plan it, you can actually say, oh, okay, I'm gonna spend more time here in my business, and then relax more. I think people tend to do that in their minds, but they don't do it enough, actually, on paper. And I think that's a big important factor. I see this a lot with people is you'll ask them something like, yeah, yeah, I do that. Okay, so can you show me the plan for that? And they don't have a plan. It's just all up in their minds. And in my. From my perspective, if it's just in your mind, it's not there. It's just one of those things because you're not actually committed to it. You're not really focused on doing that. Just your question is actually really important because if we're talking to people out there, high performers, I think the term recovery is what might throw a lot of people off, because, again, recovery kind of points out that, you know, what you may not be, or how do I put it? You need the time off. You might be weak at this point. Right. I think that is, for a lot of people, hard to admit, to bring themselves to move forward. So how do you work with athletes who say, I just don't need that time. I just keep pushing me. I need to keep going. I'm assuming you come across those types of people.

Totally. And the people that you start finding that quite often are your very obsessive athletes. You're ones that are, like, feeling they're always needing to prove themselves, always needing to level themselves up. And we see the same thing on the entrepreneurial side when working with the executives and those that we work with, those guys that are just feeling like they're constantly having to level up, wanting to constantly get better, they don't see recovery as a part of that equation. It's, I need to always be doing something where the big thing that happens is. This is why we use data to reinforce this concept is I want everybody to think back to a time where you went and you ran a mile. This is the. This is the best universal example I can give you. So, Pradeep, if I told you I want you to Go run a mile today. And I want you to run a mile every single day for the next two months. Just one mile. What do you think would happen to your mile time over the course of that two months?

Well, you know what, here's just from my experience in working out, here's what I noticed, that it'll get better and better and then it'll get worse. Like, I don't know what it is, but I don't know if I'm just bored with it or if it's not a challenge anymore, but I need it to change. Like I need to do something different.

So it's, so it's very. I love that. I love what you said. Because that's exactly what you'll find. You'll continually get better until that plateau starts to happen. So you'll increase that time. That time will get so much better at a very steep interval. So you might go from 12 minutes to 11 minutes, 11 minutes to 9:39, 30 to 9 minutes, 9 minutes to 8:45. And that increment of time that you're getting better is slowly going to decrease to the point of which you're running Constant Miles at 8 minutes and 37 seconds. Maybe that's what. You just can't break that. That's just what you're running them at. And you're pushing yourself as hard as you can. And then you're going to start to push a little harder, a little harder, a little harder, and your time is going to start to get a little bit inconsistent. You're going to start to get a little bit worse. You might be at 858, 52, 853, because you're not allowing yourself that time off to allow for a greater stimulus. So the stimulus that we need to place on you needs to be greater. So we're going to have to start running intervals. We're going to have to start having you run uphill, we're going to have to start having you do maybe 15 seconds on, 15 second off type things where this is going to challenge your body a lot harder. But because we're challenging your body in a lot harder way to continue to improve, we have to have that recovery time to allow the stimulus to actually create the benefits. Otherwise it's just continual wear and tear at the body. And so think about this. The more stimulus you put on, think of a glass of water. If we turned a tap on and had a glass of water there, and the glass slowly started to fill up and fill up and fill up. Well, now we Start drilling holes in the bottom. And that's the work that we're doing. The more holes that are in the glass, the more we need to turn the water on to continue to rise in order to meet the amount of water that's going out. Well, if we don't hit enough stimulus, there's not going to be any water left in the cup. And that's where we are always left is. We're always left going, I'm here, my physical body is here, I'm here to work. I want to do more, but my body's not able to do it or my mind's not able to do it. And thus, when we just recover, we take one day, we take two days, we take three days and just completely shut off or along the way take incremental strategies to do so, focusing on our sleep, focusing on our mindfulness meditation, things that completely block us out and put us in that parasympathetic state or that rest and digest state. All of a sudden those holes start to get clogged up and the water fills up in that cup much, much quicker. And the stimulus, thus we can utilize a lot better.

So for someone like that, they're going into the stage of plateau, at what point do you suggest that they go through that rest period? Is it right before the plateau? Is it during the plateau? Is there a certain period in the plateau that you would suggest for someone like if we were taking a look at it from an athlete's perspective?

Yeah, I mean, ideally you have, you start going through this recovery process even before the plateau, so you eliminate the plateau. So you're really never even seeing that. And that's where we start to be able to continue to add stimulus, recover super compensate, come back better than we were before, add a hard stimulus, recover super compensate, come back a little bit better than before. And thus the stimulus that you're adding can be that much harder, can be that much more advanced, can be that much more intense. Thus we get a greater workload done. And if we bring it back over into that business side, it's the exact same thing that you were talking about at the beginning, where you're trying to challenge your team to work really hard for a month, or really hard for two months, or really hard for six months. But we're not going to be able to work really hard for those six months all the way through. There's going to have to be undulating times of work to rest ratios and time off and ways in which we completely shut off. If you gave yourself a Computer programmer and said, hey, I want you to build this app in 6 months. You need to work non stop 16 hour days for 6 months. I guarantee you the quality of his work over those six months is slowly going to go down because of the fatigue that's there. Versus if you said, hey, I need you to give me your absolute best undivided attention, focus for six hours a day for six days and then you can take that seventh day off just for these six months to push. I guarantee you the quality of work you'd get would be incrementally bigger because he'd also be learning things along the way and would have more white space to be able to create and think about a better way to do so.

Yeah, and that's when things start to fall through the cracks. People start making mistakes and it costs even more and even more time and effort to actually make up for those mistakes. So it's better to do it right the first time. And we see that a lot is just. And most organizations are understaffed compared to overstaffed or they're overstaffed in areas where they, you know, they, they don't necessarily need to be overstaffed in or they're understaffed in areas where they shouldn't be understaffed. Like it's just they got the mixed bag in terms of the optimal performance. But I don't know if very few or very many people actually go in and measure aside from you in terms of the sleep, the data and all that kind of stuff. In terms of how people are feeling or being taxed. I think the approach that you take is actually very important because if more employers paid attention to that and actually invested in that, they'd get a lot more productivity. Because in the business world that's ultimately what we want from employees is not only creativity but productivity. Those are the two most important things that you can get out of your team. And you're not going to get that unless they're actually performing at their best and they have the recovery or the reset, you can say, or the energy that they need to. So I think ultimately at the end of the day, as business people, whether it's business people or your athletes or whoever it is, having people on our team who are rested fully, you can say full of energy is important to get the results that we're looking for.

You're exactly right. And so often in the business world, what are we looking for or how are we trying to get the best out of our employees? We're trying to rah Rah. Challenge them. Say I need more from you, I need better, I need you to push harder. And so we're always just asking for more and more and more and more, when in actuality 90% of the time it's not about challenging them to just give you more. Especially in the high performing sector, we're not talking about people that are unmotivated or people that are just dragging in every aspect of their life, but the people that are really true high performers that are trying to grind it out, business people that are, that have small businesses, that have teams, that are on the executive staff of multiple corporations, that are truly trying to level up and ingrain high hard quality habits. It's not that they need to do more, it's that in some cases they need to do less. And you need to allow yourself to recover. And this doesn't mean that like you said, I know this is a big thing that goes on in people's minds. This doesn't mean that you're weak, this doesn't mean that you can't handle it. This doesn't mean that you're less of a man. What it means is that you're aware enough, you're astute enough, and that you're responsible enough to take the time necessary to do the appropriate measures to increase the that level of creativity, increase that level of clarity, increase that level of energy so that you can come back and actually own the responsibility that you have to be the high performer that you are to take your organization, your team to that next level that they all truly do deserve.

Yeah. I think it, just to sum it up on that perspective, I think when we take a look at the creativity and productivity and performance, it comes in cycles, it's not a straight line and it can't go on forever. I think people need to understand that and be aware of that because what that old saying, right, what goes up does come down eventually. And. But when it comes down, you could do it at a calculated or in a calculated way and fashion so that when things do come down or performance comes down, that it's done purposefully so the performance comes up that much greater based on what you're talking about.

Exactly. It's exactly. It is. There's this. It's like the stock market. You're always going to have your ups and downs, but it's always on an upward trajectory. And if you're planning these and you're putting them in place, you no longer have to look after what we call in the sports world this functional versus non functional Overreaching. So functional overreaching is when you're pushing yourself for a certain period of time, you're adding more weight to the bar, you're sprinting at a elevated speed for a certain period of time, and you're doing it for maybe a couple weeks, maybe a couple months in your training sessions. And thus it's functional under overreaching. You're pushing your body further than what it's capable of doing for a short period of time so that then you can back off, give yourself the rest needed so that you can supercompensate and be that much better because you've placed a higher stimulus there. We can do the same thing in work where we ask our team to, you know what? This is the holiday push. We can make a boatload of money in the next two weeks, in the next three weeks, if we really push and implement this really, really well. Going to ask for a longer period of time, but then after that we're going to give you a week where we're going to back off and make sure that again, give you more holiday time, whatever it may be, to again come back and be better for us at that next time, versus non functional overreaching where it's just constant and just there is, it's relentless, there is no break in sight. And all of a sudden what starts to happen is that speed that you're working at starts to empty the tank. And it doesn't allow you to be as productive, it doesn't allow you to be as clear, it doesn't allow you to be as efficient with everything you're doing. And you actually end up hurting the team, those around you, your company, and most importantly yourself in the process. Because long term, it's going to lead to not only burnout, but also poor performance and then increased errors. And you know what the cost of all those things are to your company in the long term?

Yeah, I couldn't have said it better. Ultimately, be purposeful with the performance and the rest period.

And when we're talking about rest period, it's not so much about, okay, I'm going to come home, I'm going to sit down, I'm going to watch Netflix all day. It's about doing things that are purposeful, that allow your mind to relax, allow to get out of the rise and grind of your day to day and allow yourself to truly find some level of reprieve. And that could be for some people, completely different than others. Some it may be going skiing or spending more time working out or going for runs or spending time with friends or family, or potentially sleeping, taking naps in the middle of the day, meditating, getting on a better journaling routine, getting on a better mindfulness routine. Maybe it's adding in some type of cold water immersion with a soft tissue therapy work that you're getting done. Something that is actually purposeful for getting that energy back to a higher state. And in a future episode, we're going to really talk about the difference in sympathetic parasympathetic nervous systems, HRV and what it all means from a data standpoint to this. But as we start looking at like the purpose of what rest means, it's not laziness. It's not, we're just going to post up on the coach, eat Doritos and say, oh, I got the day off, or oh, I don't have to work today. I'm just going to literally kick up and be a potato. But rather doing so in a purposeful way so that we allow that super compensation to happen. It's just like with the athletes, we wouldn't let them, oh, yeah, it's your day off and it's no longer burgers and fries and McDonald's and milkshakes and Netflix on the couch all day. No, it's gonna go get massages, gonna sit in the Normatec boots for a while, gonna go get some electric stim, gonna take a hot tub, gonna focus on the hydration, focus on the high quality habits that are there anyways. But just take out the stressful stimulus that's been really holding us down for so long that when we come back, we are just rear in to go. It's like, it's like a dog in a dog fight. I hate this example, but you don't want to just let the dogs just go at it on a consistent basis. You want them to be ready to go, like rearing to go, like running out of the kennel. Same thing with the horse races. The horses in there, they're like, in there, they're ready to go. They want to go like, let me go, open it up. But after a while, if you just continue to run them, they get in there, it's just like, oh, the door's open. All right, I guess I'm starting this race. You're never going to win a race like that. And that's the same thing in business. You got to allow yourself the time to push. Then you got to allow that time to recover.

Yeah, that motivation and drive can, can be fielding at times when people start to feel that you can see the energy start to dwindle. And then, and then again people start making mistakes. You don't get the productivity, you're not making the money that you're making. And then people wonder, okay, maybe our strategy isn't working properly, maybe we made a mistake in something else. But ultimately, if you take a look at performance of any organization from a business standpoint, it comes down to the people. It's not the technology, it's not the other stuff. It's the people within your organization that truly create the benefits. And so if you treat your people well, you'll make the benefit, you'll reap the benefits from the profit perspective and revenues.

I love that you brought up that because it starts to question yourself in terms of your tactics and your strategy. Because I've never thought about it that way, but it's so true. Is the first thing that we start to see when things start to dwindle down is are we not doing enough? Is something missing? Do we need to add something in? And it's the same thing again, I'll bring it always back to sports. But it's the same thing of when a coach goes, we're on a three game losing streak. Do we have to practice more? Do we have to practice more? Do we have to do more of these things? Do we have to change up our breakout or change up our systems? No. Stick to your process. Stick to what's tried, trusted and true. Stick to what you know works. Keep learning. But allow yourself to have that little bit of recovery. Allow yourself to back the foot off the pedal a little bit. Not back the foot off the pedal when you're working, but back the foot off the pedal off. The constant stimulus of go, go, go. And put a hard line in the sand to what is work and what is rest. And once we allow ourselves to truly rest and truly recover, it's amazing what happens when we need to put the foot on the cast again and really, truly go.

And it makes you evaluate the things that or the activities that you're doing as well. Because we have so many activities in our daily lives from a personal and business standpoint that when we are forced to say, okay, we have to eliminate or remove some of these activities to go through that recovery period, then we actually start to evaluate them and say, is this actually worth it? Was this period of time that I spent doing this in my business or this, my personal life, is it actually gaining any benefit or providing any benefit for me? And a lot of the times it's not. So sometimes you know, my grandfather used to say this, the simpler life you live, the. The more fulfilled you be and the more and the happier you'll be. I didn't realize until later on in life, I'm like, yeah, he was pretty right on that. Because more complex we make things, the tougher it is.

You're completely right. It's more things to sort out. It's more things that place on the mind, it takes us from that parasympathetic state into that sympathetic state, which is that more fight flight area. Because there's more things going on in our mind, it's harder for us to settle down and truly feel like we're doing what is necessary. And if we can allow ourselves to find that rhythm in life where we can find that undulating pattern that, hey, it's push time. Hey, now it's recovery time. And if we can truly get consistent and truly get comfortable with what that is, then it's going to be so much easier to get uncomfortable when it's really time to push.

Yeah, I think you nailed it, man.

So for everybody out there who's heading into 2021, really on a gung ho, ready to change their lives, ready to change their business, I challenge you, and I implore you to look at the rhythm in which you're operating with. What are we doing that's sustainable? What are we doing that you can make sure that you're pushing not just into January 2021, but into June, August, September, November 2021 with the same vigor and same gusto that you're head year with. And it can only happen if you're focused on that rest and recovery and knowing that there's a time to push, there's a time to work, but there's also a time to rest and a time to recover. And if we can place it the right way, if we can design it the right way, and we can be aware of it in the correct way, the work that you're going to do is going to be that much more purposeful, that much more effective, and the rest of the is going to be that much more meaningful. So with that, stay hungry, stay humble, and we'll see you next week.