Rest Those Weary Bones

Lebron James is one of the greatest basketball players of all time. He has won 4 NBA championships, 4 NBA MVP awards, 4 Finals MVP awards, 3 All-Star MVP awards, and 2 Olympic gold medals. He has won and achieved a lot. Forbes has quoted his net worth to be a billion dollars, and he spends $1.5 million on recovery

He works extremely hard, pushing his body to the limit. He is trying to not only maximise his potential as an athlete but also his longevity as an athlete. Rest and recovery factor heavily into his workout routine.

He includes stretching, flexibility, meditation and even hyperbaric chambers into his recovery protocols. He loves when his rest days fall on Sundays because he can just do “absolutely nothing” and watch football all day.

So if one of the greatest modern athletes is prioritising and spending a lot of money on rest, what does that tell you about how important rest is? Maybe you should be resting more?

The Stress/Rest Cycle

Many people focus on the stress part. Working out is a stress, this could be lifting weights, running, swimming, cycling, yoga, etc. Any activity that accumulates over time on the body.

It could be a lack of sleep, bad nutrition, work problems, relationship issues, sickness, learning or studying something new, or financial challenges. Any number of factors could be contributing to stress in your life.

Stress is not a bad thing in itself. You need stress to cause changes. The muscle fibres breaking during your workout grow back stronger if they are given a chance to rest. And that is the key part there: REST.

Running coach Guy Avery would say – Optimal Stress plus Optimal Rest = Optimal Progress.

The Point is Improvement

Whenever you stress the system you should be planning for an improvement in your performance down the road. To achieve that performance increase you need to allow the system to rest.

One, if not the best tool for rest is getting great sleep.

Lebron James tries to get 12 hours of sleep a day. Not all sleep is equal, and the total hours don’t translate into the quality of sleep.

Sleep not only helps your body recover, but it also helps you learn. It also helps improve recall and memory retention by 20 – 40%.

Even in the first century AD, people were aware of the benefit from sleeping – Rhetorician Quintilian stated, “It is a curious fact, of which the reason is not obvious, that the interval of a single night will greatly increase the strength of the memory.”

The Modern World of Work

There is a huge problem of burnout at work. This isn’t a problem of too much work, but too little recovery.

Tired employees are inefficient employees, you want your team, be it sports or business, to be productive and if they are tired you are better off letting them rest than work.

You have a big project, you are asked to work late, work more intensely, then you smash yourself to deliver the project. Do you get time off to compensate for the extra work you did? Of course not, you are back the next day to your already demanding work schedule.

Or, your work fires some people and then now you have to do the work of 2 people.

Do these situations sound like they are setting you up to improve and succeed or are they just asking you to work till you drop?

What can you do?

You might not be shocked to find out that in the land of high-performance sports, rest days or even rest weeks have been part of the process for years. In a world where you are trying to get the very best out of yourself, you are encouraged to rest, and sometimes just downright forced to.

Compare that to the office environment where the phrase high performance and high performing teams is thrown around and then the complete opposite of high performance is asked of you.

If you are a manager, founder, owner, or leader, do you want the best for your employees? If so, let them rest.

They work really hard, go above and beyond, and then give them a day or two off.

Do you want the people you work with to be high performing? If so, are you setting up an environment for this to happen?