👋 Hey. Welcome to issue #186 of The Everyday Athlete Newsletter.
Here are my 3 favourite ideas, learns and resources to help you improve your performance this month (4 min read):
🧘 Stress is stealing your health (and how to fix it)
Your health is a tank.
Stress is water flowing in from two sources:
- External (Life - work, kids, deadlines)
- Internal (You - the decisions you make every day)
Some stress is good. We need it.
But too much, without enough draining out, and the tank overflows.
Overflow looks like:
- injury
- burnout
- sickness
- weight gain
- inconsistency
Most people try to avoid/manage stress.
That's part of it.
But the problem is threefold:
- 💦 too much unnecessary stress going in
- 📈 no fallback when life ramps up
- 📦 and a tank that never gets any bigger
This system works on all three.
Lever 1 — High-Leverage Health
Most of the stress people carry around their health is self-imposed.
Decision fatigue.
Jumping programs.
Second-guessing everything.
That constant noise is, itself, stress.
Delete it.
👉 Identify the 20% of actions that create 80% of your results. Build your baseline around those. Forget the rest.
(Sleep and recover. Train and move. Eat and hydrate.)
Lever 2 — Minimum Effective Standard
With a 7-week-old daughter in the cot, some days I have 45 minutes to train. Some days I have 2. Some nights I'm running on broken sleep and the last thing I wanna do is cook.
So I don't do the full version. I do the minimum.
Scaled-back sessions when time is scarce. Quality frozen meals ready to go.
👉 When uncontrollable stress rises, dial back the controllable tap.
This does 2 important things:
- it keeps momentum going
- and keeps your word to yourself
Lever 3 — Composure Training
Classic stress management says reduce and avoid.
👉 But you can build your capacity to handle more.
For me right now that looks like:
- cold showers in the morning
- hiit sessions where I'm watching and reframng my internal dialogue
- and, box breathing before bed to keep CO2 tolerance up (one of the best indicators of stress resilience there is)
Same stress. Bigger tank. Less overflow.
I just shot a new video breaking it all down in more depth. Here if you want it.
🏋️ This barbell velocity app helps you train smarter
This app tracks your bar speed in the gym.
It measures how fast the bar is moving on each rep, giving you real-time feedback on fatigue and load selection.
Known as Velocity Based Training.
We used expensive hardware to get this data when I was playing footy...
Now it's in our pocket.
Good for anyone who wants to get their strength programming dialled.
🥱 The science behind 3:30-itis (and the fix)
You start the day sharp.
Then it's 3pm. You're staring at an email like it's an IKEA manual for a skyscraper.
Here's why…
Researchers put people in brain scanners. Then watched what happened after sustained mental effort.
They found:
When fatigued, the brain doubles the perceived cost of every decision.
See, two brain regions (the prefrontal cortex and the insula) become increasingly active over time.
The prefrontal cortex is your brain's command centre for complex thinking and decisions. The insula calculates whether any given task is worth the effort.
➡️ The prefrontal cortex fatigues as the day goes on
➡️ So it has to work harder
➡️ Which sends a stronger signal to the insula
➡️ The insula reads that signal as effort
➡️ So it starts overestimating how hard everything is
We feel it as resistance. As not wanting to deal with something.
**Opens instagram**
This is why pushing through rarely works. And why another coffee isn’t the fix either.
What works is giving the prefrontal cortex a rest. Something that reduces the accumulated load enough to think clearly again.
- 🔥 Hot/cold exposure.
- 🌬️ Breathwork.
- 🏃 Exercise.
They pull our attention completely into the body. We can't think about the email inbox when we’re pushing it up on an assault bike or focusing on our breath.
The prefrontal cortex, which has been firing all day on decisions and complex thinking, gets a genuine break from that cognitive load.
And you come back sharper.
That's the 3pm problem. And it's more solvable than you’d think.
That's it!
Have a great weekend 🤙
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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