Prepare to Energize

You think you can keep going and going and going, all day, every day. You must, in fact, lest your nemeses beat you to the boardroom. More coffee. Another take-away. You've gotta work late. More adrenaline.

Guess what: personal energy doesn't work like that. A man can't stay wired every second of the workday. His energy reserves are not limitless. He gets tired. He has to rest, recover, renew.

It's easy to see how important rest and recovery are for a tennis player or a rugby player. Athletes put so much effort into managing their energy levels - both physical and mental - because it's critical to their games. But it's no different for men who lace up work boots or button down their collars. Ordinary people achieve extraordinary things. It's a matter of summoning energy systematically.

You may have heard of Jim Loehr - he's a famous sports psychologist. Thirty years ago he began training professional athletes to improve their performance while under intense competitive stress. Working with tennis players at first, he studied their actions on the court. And he had a breakthrough. He discovered that the players who won matches were not necessarily the most skillful - but they did something different in the 16 to 20 seconds between points in a match. They relaxed. They’re focused. They summoned positive thoughts and emotions. They controlled their breathing and posture. And in the process, their heart rates dropped by as many as 20 beats per minute. In effect, they recovered their energy as they walked back to the baseline. Loehr began to see that a player's ‘up’ time was only as good as his downtime.

Eventually Loehr developed a training regimen that sought the right balance of stress and recovery. (Too much of the former and you overtrain; too much of the latter and you undertrain.) More than 200 world-class athletes have been through his centre.

Time for Balance

A dozen years ago, Loehr's centre began taking on its first corporate cases. A typical client was ‘Roger B’. A 42-year-old sales manager, he was on the road every morning by 6.30am. He skipped breakfast, ate lunch at his desk and lived on junk food and coffee. By 4pm, he was irritable and unfocused, so he ate a chocolate. He got home late, drank a martini, wolfed down a big dinner, responded to work-related email, and finally went to sleep at around l am. He never exercised. He was 10 kilograms overweight. His blood pressure and cholesterol levels were too high. He suffered from low energy, impatience and negativity. He lacked passion at work and at home.

Loehr fixed him. He put Roger on the same routines, the same rhythm of stress and recovery that he'd prescribe for any superstar athlete. Then he co-wrote a book for people like Roger, called ‘The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time - The Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal.’

Roger's story is in the book, along with those of other over-worked, unbalanced warriors of the corporate world. 'It’s a horrendous trap to be in,’ says Loehr. ‘But that's all they know.’ Roger's recovery began with the most fundamental source of fuel: physical strength. He would make time for workouts at 1 pm on Tuesdays and Fridays and at 10 on Saturday mornings.

He would eat a high-protein breakfast. He would leave work by 6.30pm.He would limit client dinners to two per week. Six months later, he returned to Loehr's centre for a check-up; he was 35 percent stronger, he felt more engaged at home and at work, and his cholesterol and body-fat numbers were lower.

Loehr's solutions are no deep, dark secret. Consider the guru's ‘10 Most Important Physical Energy Management Strategies’:

1. Go to bed early and wake up early. 2. Go to sleep and wake up: at the same times every day. 3. Eat five or six small meals per day. 4. Eat breakfast every day. 5. Eat a balanced, healthy diet. 6. Minimize simple sugars. 7. Drink at least eight glasses of water a day. 8. Take breaks every 90 minutes during work. 9. Get some kind of physical activity every day. 10. Do at least two cardiovascular interval workouts and two strength-training workouts a week.

Simple remedies, but they're anything but simple to incorporate into our daily lives. That's why we have to establish them as routines. It's the routines of an athlete that define his professionalism. Same with you corporate athletes out there. If it helps, think of routines as ‘positive energy rituals’.

Easy Solutions

Here are three stress controllers you can plug into your workday immediately:

Don't begin your day by putting out fires

Address at least one important, long-range challenge before logging on to read your email. You'll start your day one step ahead, rather than running around attending to other people's problems first.

Recover at your desk

So you can't escape the office? Sit quietly and do a little deep breathing at your desk. Breathe in to a count of three, out to a count of six. If deep breathing isn't your thing, read the sports page. You need to switch to some different activity that will turn off all the neurons you've been; overusing.

Use air travel to change channels

Make a habit of never working continuously on a plane. Fill flight time with recreational reading - and napping.

To Loehr, energy management will be to the twenty first century what time management was to the twentieth. You may have all your appointments entered into your PDA - but if you show up feeling lethargic, what good are you?

‘What people want from us is our energy,’ says Loehr. ‘And yet we don't harness it at all. We take it for granted.’ As a result, most of us are playing the game at half our mental potential. To see if you're among the under-achievers, ask yourself this question every six months: why the hell am I doing this? If you don't know the answer, you're operating without the most significant energy source of all time - the energy of the human spirit.

Sandra Prior runs her own bodybuilding website at http://bodybuild.rr.nu.

Related Articles - energizer, energy, limitless, rest, recover, athletes, Loehr, performance,

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