👋 Hey. Welcome to issue #122 of The Everyday Athlete Newsletter.
To wrap up 2024, I went through each newsletter from this year and will share some of my favourites over the next couple weeks. Here are this weeks (5 min read):
Building recovery into the day
I tend to try optimise every minute of my weekdays.
If I'm not being productive it's a waste of time.
If I'm not working, I’m listening to podcasts—on breaks, at lunch, on walks.
It means my entire day is spent exciting the nervous system.
And I found, about once a week, I'd be up in the middle of the night. Mind racing. Tossing and turning.
I never thought the two would be related. Turns out they are.
So I started building recovery into my day—as simple as making most of my breaks tech-free.
But it could also look like doing a few minutes of:
Down-reg breathing- Yoga nidra
Quick lie down with binaural beats
A walk outside without the phone
By just reducing stimulus throughout the day, I've slashed these middle-of-the-night wake-ups, seem to be way better at dealing with stressors, and counter-intuitively more productive.
Food for thought.
Breathe slow
Why are we told to slow our breathing in sports and exercise?
Don’t we want more oxygen coming in?
Turns out, there’s actually two reasons why slowing our breathing improves our performance...
1. 
Nervous system
Fast breathing activates our sympathetic (fight or flight) nervous system.
This is normal and natural when we exercise. We need a certain amount of sympathetic drive to have the energy and mental sharpness to perform.
But too much and we get over aroused. This can kill our ability to focus, make good decisions, and control our excitement.
Slowing our breathing helps balance our nervous system. So we're better at making the right decisions under pressure in a game, executing on skills under fatigue or staying in control of our race strategy.
2. 
The Bohr Effect
The more we breathe, the more carbon dioxide we get rid of.
Good, right? CO2 is a waste product isn’t it? Not so fast…
See, oxygen gets transported around the body by a protein in our red blood cells called haemoglobin. It carries oxygen to our brain and organs. To our working muscles and tissues.
But for oxygen to be offloaded at these sites, carbon dioxide has to be present.
Without it, oxygen can’t unbind from haemoglobin. And our organs and tissues don’t get the oxygen they need.
We can think of haemoglobin as a train and oxygen as the passengers.
The passengers (oxygen) get on the train (haemoglobin) at the first stop (lungs).
The train (haemoglobin) then takes the passengers (oxygen) to all the different stops in the body—our brain and organs, our working muscles and tissues.
But the doors of the train don’t open by themselves at each stop. We need carbon dioxide there to open them for us.
So when we over-breathe and lower our carbon dioxide levels, we’re limiting how much oxygen gets absorbed by our working muscles and organs.
Decreased performance.
How do we slow our breathing?
- 👃 Breathing through our noses for as long as possible during exercise
- 🧘 Being more conscious of slowing our breathing during rests
It'll mean we're sharper sharper mentally.
And so we've got more oxygen getting delivered where it's needed most.
Slow you're breathing. Accelerate your performance.
Train your coach
The year is 500 A.D. You’re sailing through the Pacific with your tribe. And—this may surprise you—the skipper has his nuts out, resting on the canoe floor.
See our Polynesian ancestors used their senses—sight, touch, smell—to help them navigate (their balls supposedly allowed them to detect the direction of the waves—now I read this on the internet, so it must be true...
But the point is, today we’re a long way from that.
And you might be thinking, “We don’t need to be. We have Google maps”.
But I’m not talking about navigating.
I’m talking about our internal body awareness. How in touch we are with our senses and our bodies. Things like our heart rate, breathing, muscle fatigue, thirst, posture, energy…
It's known as interoception.
And the better our interoception, the better our physical performance:
We can better give our bodies what they need: Push it up? Or do we need some downward-facing dog? 10 minutes? Or 100?
Improved technique, efficiency and performance: better at adjusting our swimming stroke, our rowing stroke, our running gait, our position on the bike, our lifting technique... (strong link to Junk Metres from newsletter #83)
Less injury: the better we can differentiate between good and bad pain, imbalances, and different signals
Improved mental performance: research suggests interoception might activate motor areas of the brain that get it firing
Muscle growth: focusing on the muscles we're working when lifting weights can help recruit more nerve fibres leading to more muscle growth (known as the mind-muscle connection)
Interoception is like an internal coach, giving us real-time data on our bodies’ state so we can perform at our best.
And as everyday athletes, we can count ourselves lucky.
Because the answer to building interoception is experience. All our sport, exercise and physical activity since we were born develops our internal body awareness.
So most of us have a pretty decent internal coach.
But if you want to get a better coach and upgrade your internal body awareness...
The answer to accelerating interoception is writing. Simple as a few notes on your phone or in a journal about how you were feeling during the session.
What felt good? What felt off? What was your attitude to the session? What to work on for next.
This check-in, which I now also do in the morning around sleep, energy and mood, is something I wish I was taught to do when I was 6.
Because interoception is an unlock.
And we pick up and remember so much more when we're intentional about reviewing this stuff.
P.s. The answer to amplifying interception is "mining your journal". A term coined by renowned strength coach Dan John. Every week or month, look back at your training notes. It helps connect the dots.
That's it!
Have a great break 🤙
Matt
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The Everyday Athlete Newsletter is not a licensed health service nor a substitute for professional health advice, treatment or assessment. The information shared in this email is general and written for a specific audience. If you’re struggling, please see a healthcare professional.
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