👋 Hey.
Welcome to issue #24 of The Everyday Athlete Newsletter. Thanks for being here.
Here are my 3 favourite ideas, learns and resources to help you improve your performance this week (3.5 min read):
☝️ Quick one first. Here’s the correct link to the Navy SEAL mindset tweet from last week’s newsletter. Thanks to everyone who pointed it out.
🔖 The habit formula
However we define success, it’s achieved through our habits.
As James Clear puts it:
“What we repeatedly do, each and every day, ultimately forms the results we enjoy and the goals we achieve.”
So to get where we wanna go, we’ve either gotta start better habits or flick bad ones.
How?
Here are James Clear's 4 science-based pillars to starting a new habit (or flicking a bad one). It’s gotta be:
- 🚨 Obvious (or obscure)
- 😃 Enjoyable (or miserable)
- ✅ Easy (or hard)
- 🥇 Rewarding (unrewarding)
Let’s dive into each (with 3 examples – morning hydration, less social media before bed and stretching):
1. 🚨 Obvious
Humans are forgetful. We need to be reminded.
Use alarms and visual triggers.
- Morning water: Put a glass out on the kitchen table the night before
- Less social media before bed: Charge phone in another room overnight
- Stretching: Set a daily stretch reminder on your phone
2. 😃 Enjoyable
We’ve gotta like it.
Tie it to (or replace it with) something you like doing.
Or if there’s more than one way to do it, choose the most enjoyable.
- Morning water: Pick your poison – ice/lemon/lime/still/sparkling
- Less social media before bed: Swap phone on the bedside table with a good book
- Stretching: Save your favourite song for stretch time. Play it loud
3. ✅ Easy
We’re wired to take the path of least resistance. If there’s too much friction, it’s not happening.
Reduce friction with the 2-minute rule – a smaller version of your habit that doesn't feel like a hurdle. Once we're nailing the 2-min version, add to it.
Or pick the right time and place that makes it easy.
- Morning water: Cut up lemons on a Sunday so they're ready to squeeze
- Less social media before bed: Install the One Sec app to add friction
- Stretching: Do it right after training. 1 stretch, 1 minute, get outta there
4. 🥇 Rewarding
What gets rewarded gets repeated.
A habit tracker is a good example. Because seeing progress is rewarding. The dopamine release motivates us to improve.
- Morning water: Coffee only after your done
- Less social media before bed: Track and check usage after dinner. Aim for less over time
- Stretching: Put a calendar on your wall. Cross off the days you stretch. Never miss 2 days in a row
Alright. So if our habit is obvious, enjoyable, easy and rewarding, we’re more likely to do it consistently.
And each time we do, it becomes more and more part of who we are. Our identity starts to shift. Becoming the type of person who does this thing.
And that's how we truly make it stick.
🪨 The pain cave
Courtney Dauwalter is an American ultra-marathon runner.
But she doesn’t just run them. She wins them.
She used to view pain in training and competition as something to avoid for as long as possible. And when it comes, just survive.
Then she flipped the story.
Now she tells herself it's somewhere she wants to go. She celebrates it. Because that’s where the work actually happens.
She literally pictures herself in a cave. Chiselling away at the rock. Making her pain cave bigger.
“Our minds are so powerful, even just changing the storyline makes it a whole different game.”
A powerful tool for when the going gets tough.
(Listen to more from Courtney here)
🥱 Training after a bad night's sleep
Sleep is a superpower.
The negative effects of consistently under-sleeping are dramatic.
But what if we usually sleep well? And get a bad night every so often.
Do we skip training the next day? Or push through?
A recently published systematic and meta-analytical review looked at just that:
The effects of acute sleep loss (less than 6 hours in one night) on speed, strength, power endurance, etc.
They found:
- 📉 Acute sleep loss impacted physical performance by -7.5%
- 🌙 Performance got worse later in the day
So, what to do if you get a bad night’s sleep:
- ⏰ Train in the morning rather than the evening
- 😴 If you’re training in the arvo/evening, try get a 30 min nap in before
- 🚶 Decrease the intensity (how hard you work, weight, speed, etc) – you’ll still get recovery and neural benefits
Otherwise, you could feed the fatigue and risk injury.
That's it!
Have a great weekend 🤙
Matt
P.s.
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