Business 5: Gain Resilience
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The knee joint feels the pain of the middle child. Stuck in the middle with nowhere to go. The ankle is planted firmly on the ground. Above, the hips carry all the excess weight, but without the strength to carry the heavy load something has to give, and it’s usually the knee.
Any athletic development program starts with a movement screen, an analysis of the athlete’s movement and posture. Overweight executives movement screens show striking similarities.
Almost all of them have tight hamstrings, gluteals, and hip flexors. The effects of day after day of meetings destroy the mobility of the executive. The worst of them can’t even lift their arms above their head or sit down in a chair without compromising the stability of their knees or lower back.
The rigid executive is not ready to lift weights, run, swim or cycle. Movements that are highly repetitive in nature or involve heavy loads are only going to worsen their condition.
This is a real danger because the executive who is doing it alone will see their inability to keep up and think, “I just have to try harder”.
Their solid work ethic drives them to push through often searing hot knee pain.
They ignore their limited range of movement and ignore the pain. Although they may appear to be doing everything right, living the mantra ‘just do it’, what they are actually doing is setting themselves up for further physical problems in the future.
WHAT TO DO?
Lose weight. If you are experiencing knee pain your primary strategy to reduce the force passing through your knee is to lose weight.
Matthew Williams of the Australian Physiotherapy Association explains, “reducing just five to ten percent of your body weight, together with an exercise program to strengthen the muscles around the knee can result in a 30 to 50 percent reduction in knee pain.”
No matter how strong you become, nothing will be able to protect you from the grind of excess body weight bearing down on your knee.
After addressing your weight the exercise prescription is a familiar one: Mobility — Stability — Conditioning — Skill.
This four-step process used to create an Executive Athlete is the same process used to rehabilitate an executive with knee pain.
MOBILITY
The quadriceps, hip flexors, groin (adductors) and ITB have grown rigid after years of restricted movement and place excessive force on the knee. To overcome the pain you must first overcome the body’s resistance to movement.
STABILITY
The first challenge is the simple act of standing on one leg. Traditional strength training movements are performed with two feet firmly on the ground. Yet when we walk or run each knee must work independently of each other.
Knee stability is first developed on one leg, with zero knee flexion — a straight leg. Progressively a coach will challenge the knee to create stability at 5 degrees knee flexion, 10 degrees, 15 degrees etc.
This is the process that I have used dozen’s of times with great success. Sports doctors who refer clients to me will tell executives ‘looking at your MRI you will not be able to squat with more than 30 degrees flexion without pain, but go see Jonathan and see what you can do.”
Slowly but surely I challenge the stability of the painful knee. Each session creeping just outside the limits of stability set in the previous session. Together we develop a path for knee flexion that relies heavily on the activation of the glutes.
Once this activation pattern becomes automatic you will achieve pain-free movement.
CONDITIONING
This phase in the program is when the executive begins to add more dynamic movement to their regime. They have the mobility and stability to squat without restriction and have rediscovered the joy of pain-free movement.
This is not a place for heroes. It’s the cowboys that injure themselves or those they are training. An injury is the very definition of backward progress. You need to aim for conditioning that will keep you on the training field not only today but tomorrow as well.
SKILL
This is the fun part. Now that you have solved your knee pain — what are you going to do differently? My clients have trekked all over the world and climbed the tallest of mountains after rehabilitating their knee. What will you do?
The answer to this question will become the reason why you are able to make a lifelong commitment to exercise, and it’s how you make exercise fun.
Knee pain is curable. Don’t accept that knee pain has simply become part of who you are. Too often I see executives who are rolling the dice with diet and exercise as a last resort to avoid another surgery.
By reducing your body weight and progressively challenging the stability of your knee a pain-free existence can be yours.
Any athletic development program starts with a movement screen, an analysis of the athlete’s movement and posture. Overweight executives movement screens show striking similarities.
Almost all of them have tight hamstrings, gluteals, and hip flexors. The effects of day after day of meetings destroy the mobility of the executive. The worst of them can’t even lift their arms above their head or sit down in a chair without compromising the stability of their knees or lower back.
The rigid executive is not ready to lift weights, run, swim or cycle. Movements that are highly repetitive in nature or involve heavy loads are only going to worsen their condition.
This is a real danger because the executive who is doing it alone will see their inability to keep up and think, “I just have to try harder”.
Their solid work ethic drives them to push through often searing hot knee pain.
They ignore their limited range of movement and ignore the pain. Although they may appear to be doing everything right, living the mantra ‘just do it’, what they are actually doing is setting themselves up for further physical problems in the future.
WHAT TO DO?
Lose weight. If you are experiencing knee pain your primary strategy to reduce the force passing through your knee is to lose weight.
Matthew Williams of the Australian Physiotherapy Association explains, “reducing just five to ten percent of your body weight, together with an exercise program to strengthen the muscles around the knee can result in a 30 to 50 percent reduction in knee pain.”
No matter how strong you become, nothing will be able to protect you from the grind of excess body weight bearing down on your knee.
After addressing your weight the exercise prescription is a familiar one: Mobility — Stability — Conditioning — Skill.
This four-step process used to create an Executive Athlete is the same process used to rehabilitate an executive with knee pain.
MOBILITY
The quadriceps, hip flexors, groin (adductors) and ITB have grown rigid after years of restricted movement and place excessive force on the knee. To overcome the pain you must first overcome the body’s resistance to movement.
STABILITY
The first challenge is the simple act of standing on one leg. Traditional strength training movements are performed with two feet firmly on the ground. Yet when we walk or run each knee must work independently of each other.
Knee stability is first developed on one leg, with zero knee flexion — a straight leg. Progressively a coach will challenge the knee to create stability at 5 degrees knee flexion, 10 degrees, 15 degrees etc.
This is the process that I have used dozen’s of times with great success. Sports doctors who refer clients to me will tell executives ‘looking at your MRI you will not be able to squat with more than 30 degrees flexion without pain, but go see Jonathan and see what you can do.”
Slowly but surely I challenge the stability of the painful knee. Each session creeping just outside the limits of stability set in the previous session. Together we develop a path for knee flexion that relies heavily on the activation of the glutes.
Once this activation pattern becomes automatic you will achieve pain-free movement.
CONDITIONING
This phase in the program is when the executive begins to add more dynamic movement to their regime. They have the mobility and stability to squat without restriction and have rediscovered the joy of pain-free movement.
This is not a place for heroes. It’s the cowboys that injure themselves or those they are training. An injury is the very definition of backward progress. You need to aim for conditioning that will keep you on the training field not only today but tomorrow as well.
SKILL
This is the fun part. Now that you have solved your knee pain — what are you going to do differently? My clients have trekked all over the world and climbed the tallest of mountains after rehabilitating their knee. What will you do?
The answer to this question will become the reason why you are able to make a lifelong commitment to exercise, and it’s how you make exercise fun.
Knee pain is curable. Don’t accept that knee pain has simply become part of who you are. Too often I see executives who are rolling the dice with diet and exercise as a last resort to avoid another surgery.
By reducing your body weight and progressively challenging the stability of your knee a pain-free existence can be yours.
Tired but wired. The purgatory of being seriously fatigued but unable to go to sleep. This is the collateral damage of striving for high performance. The anxiety that comes with increasing levels of responsibility keeps the executive in this non-productive state. It’s assumed that more time at the job will equal more results, but in reality, are you working hard or making the job harder for yourself?
Problem-solving skills and creativity decrease dramatically when the executive is peering through the fog of fatigue.
When a leader is tired, they tend to think more pessimistically, and pessimistic leaders are rarely good ones. They drag others down to their way of thinking, and they play the blame game rather than seeking solutions.
They are more likely to shy away from even necessary risks, and they tend to communicate less.
The tired executive’s life can easily spiral out of control, as they are typically not good at asking for help. When they run out of energy, they not only run out of resilience but also curiosity, insightfulness and an ability to engage at a deeper level.
To balance work and rest effectively you will require mental compartmentalisation.
THE ABILITY TO FOCUS
The executive who has achieved mental compartmentalisation has also simplified their life. They think about work only when they are at work; their focus is devoted to their family when they are at home.
Mental compartmentalisation allows them to escape from their world into the quiet place in their mind — a place with no interrupting thoughts, of deep rest and uninterrupted sleep. This is their ‘nothing box’ and Executive Athletes can access this space at will.
This becomes especially important at bedtime. The more you reach for sleep, the further it moves away from your outstretched fingertips. Sleep is not a taking; it comes when you let go of being awake. To let go of being awake you first must find your nothing box.
HOW DO YOU ACHIEVE MENTAL COMPARTMENTALISATION?
What distracts us from the present is trying to preempt the future and over thinking its endless possibilities. It is challenging to stop asking ourselves ‘what if’ but the best way to create your future is to control the present.
When you redefine success as winning each and every individual moment you will achieve a new level of focus.
This is mental compartmentalisation. This is what it takes to push through the purgatory of being tired and wired and exist only in a highly productive state.
Problem-solving skills and creativity decrease dramatically when the executive is peering through the fog of fatigue.
When a leader is tired, they tend to think more pessimistically, and pessimistic leaders are rarely good ones. They drag others down to their way of thinking, and they play the blame game rather than seeking solutions.
They are more likely to shy away from even necessary risks, and they tend to communicate less.
The tired executive’s life can easily spiral out of control, as they are typically not good at asking for help. When they run out of energy, they not only run out of resilience but also curiosity, insightfulness and an ability to engage at a deeper level.
To balance work and rest effectively you will require mental compartmentalisation.
THE ABILITY TO FOCUS
The executive who has achieved mental compartmentalisation has also simplified their life. They think about work only when they are at work; their focus is devoted to their family when they are at home.
Mental compartmentalisation allows them to escape from their world into the quiet place in their mind — a place with no interrupting thoughts, of deep rest and uninterrupted sleep. This is their ‘nothing box’ and Executive Athletes can access this space at will.
This becomes especially important at bedtime. The more you reach for sleep, the further it moves away from your outstretched fingertips. Sleep is not a taking; it comes when you let go of being awake. To let go of being awake you first must find your nothing box.
HOW DO YOU ACHIEVE MENTAL COMPARTMENTALISATION?
What distracts us from the present is trying to preempt the future and over thinking its endless possibilities. It is challenging to stop asking ourselves ‘what if’ but the best way to create your future is to control the present.
When you redefine success as winning each and every individual moment you will achieve a new level of focus.
This is mental compartmentalisation. This is what it takes to push through the purgatory of being tired and wired and exist only in a highly productive state.
The following five simple rules were designed to give the executive a framework to create a calorie deficit without endless counting calories. This framework focuses on reducing caloric intake while at the same time replacing high-energy foods with low-energy foods so you will still feel satisfied at the end of the meal.
RULE 1: LIMIT ALCOHOL TO LESS THAN FIVE DRINKS PER WEEK
Alcohol disrupts your ability to feel full. If you ate an extra 400 calories in the middle of the afternoon, your brain would register the extra energy and you would not feel as hungry at your next meal. If the same 400 calories, however, were to come from alcohol, the brain would not register them in the same way.
You’re consuming calories but your brain isn’t counting them. With each drink, you become more susceptible to cravings and uncontrolled eating. This effect can last as long as six hours.
I suggest less than five alcoholic beverages per week, and this is being generous, but for good reason. Alcohol is an undeniably important part of our social lives; cutting it entirely out of our lives is not, for many, realistic. If the executive is not losing weight as fast as they would like, this is the first place a coach will look to reduce the number of calories and create a larger calorie deficit. Alcohol affects individuals differently according to their body size; so smaller individuals should be even stricter with alcohol.
RULE 2: EAT 4–5 SMALL MEALS PER DAY
It may seem a little counterintuitive that the second rule of fat loss is to eat more often. Eating small meals and more often are twin strategies and must be implemented at the same time. Increasing your meal frequency is a logistical problem that is exacerbated by back-to-back meetings. It requires you to devote a pre-determined amount of time — perhaps a little more than usual — to eating each day. The objective is to prevent the uncontrollable hunger created by low blood sugar. Eating in smaller portions and more frequently ensures that the executive doesn’t sacrifice anything in terms of mental alertness. It will also make sure that they aren’t exercising on a completely empty stomach.
RULE 3: ONLY EAT ENOUGH TO GET YOU TO YOUR NEXT MEAL
Portion size is about paying attention. Though it comes in the middle of this list, this is the most important and most frequently unobserved weight loss rule. A nutrition plan can have all the right foods at the right times, but if you’re eating more than you need to get to your next meal, you’ll get zero results. There are many scientific calculations to measure the correct portion size, but unless you invest the time to count the calories you consume the best and easiest method is your hunger. If you aren’t hungry when your next mealtime comes around, it’s not telling you that you can go longer between meals; it’s telling you that you ate too much.
Embrace hunger. It is a precursor to weight loss. Some executives may be entirely unused to this feeling.
RULE 4: EAT A SOURCE OF PROTEIN AT EVERY MEAL
All calories are not created equal. Protein — far more than carbohydrates, fat, and alcohol — is the macronutrient that alters the hormones that control appetite. Protein is what will make you feel full on the lowest number of calories. Consuming the right number of calories is achieved by mastering meal frequency and portion size; making sure that you’re getting the most out of these calories and keeping hunger at bay means prioritising protein.
RULE 5: EAT VEGETABLES AND/OR FRUIT AT EVERY MEAL
Dramatically reducing how much alcohol you drink will help you slash your caloric intake. Protein will give you that full feeling without the need to pile your plate high. Vegetables and fruit are the low-energy foods that will complete the picture. They should make up the largest part of your nutrition plan. The meals that the Executive Athlete eats are large, but they’re full of low-energy vegetables and fruit that create the calorie deficit that powers weight loss. Thanks to high levels of fibre, they’ll also maximise the feeling of satiety.
WHAT TO DO ABOUT CARBS?
How you answer this question will depend a great deal on your genetic makeup. The genetic hand you’ve been dealt might make this seem unfair, but it won’t stand between you and losing 20kg unless you let it. Your genetics, metabolism and dieting history all play a part in how your body responds to changes in your nutrition and physical activity.
What will determine whether or not carbohydrate-rich foods are included in an executive’s nutrition plan are the total calories that are required to create the energy deficit for weight loss. If the executive doesn’t get hungry and doesn’t metabolise carbohydrates well, it’s often possible to get all of their carbohydrate needs from fruit and vegetables.
Everyone’s body responds to diet changes and exercises differently. The only way to find out what the right balance of carbohydrates and proteins is for you is to track your weight loss results and keep a food diary.
RULE 1: LIMIT ALCOHOL TO LESS THAN FIVE DRINKS PER WEEK
Alcohol disrupts your ability to feel full. If you ate an extra 400 calories in the middle of the afternoon, your brain would register the extra energy and you would not feel as hungry at your next meal. If the same 400 calories, however, were to come from alcohol, the brain would not register them in the same way.
You’re consuming calories but your brain isn’t counting them. With each drink, you become more susceptible to cravings and uncontrolled eating. This effect can last as long as six hours.
I suggest less than five alcoholic beverages per week, and this is being generous, but for good reason. Alcohol is an undeniably important part of our social lives; cutting it entirely out of our lives is not, for many, realistic. If the executive is not losing weight as fast as they would like, this is the first place a coach will look to reduce the number of calories and create a larger calorie deficit. Alcohol affects individuals differently according to their body size; so smaller individuals should be even stricter with alcohol.
RULE 2: EAT 4–5 SMALL MEALS PER DAY
It may seem a little counterintuitive that the second rule of fat loss is to eat more often. Eating small meals and more often are twin strategies and must be implemented at the same time. Increasing your meal frequency is a logistical problem that is exacerbated by back-to-back meetings. It requires you to devote a pre-determined amount of time — perhaps a little more than usual — to eating each day. The objective is to prevent the uncontrollable hunger created by low blood sugar. Eating in smaller portions and more frequently ensures that the executive doesn’t sacrifice anything in terms of mental alertness. It will also make sure that they aren’t exercising on a completely empty stomach.
RULE 3: ONLY EAT ENOUGH TO GET YOU TO YOUR NEXT MEAL
Portion size is about paying attention. Though it comes in the middle of this list, this is the most important and most frequently unobserved weight loss rule. A nutrition plan can have all the right foods at the right times, but if you’re eating more than you need to get to your next meal, you’ll get zero results. There are many scientific calculations to measure the correct portion size, but unless you invest the time to count the calories you consume the best and easiest method is your hunger. If you aren’t hungry when your next mealtime comes around, it’s not telling you that you can go longer between meals; it’s telling you that you ate too much.
Embrace hunger. It is a precursor to weight loss. Some executives may be entirely unused to this feeling.
RULE 4: EAT A SOURCE OF PROTEIN AT EVERY MEAL
All calories are not created equal. Protein — far more than carbohydrates, fat, and alcohol — is the macronutrient that alters the hormones that control appetite. Protein is what will make you feel full on the lowest number of calories. Consuming the right number of calories is achieved by mastering meal frequency and portion size; making sure that you’re getting the most out of these calories and keeping hunger at bay means prioritising protein.
RULE 5: EAT VEGETABLES AND/OR FRUIT AT EVERY MEAL
Dramatically reducing how much alcohol you drink will help you slash your caloric intake. Protein will give you that full feeling without the need to pile your plate high. Vegetables and fruit are the low-energy foods that will complete the picture. They should make up the largest part of your nutrition plan. The meals that the Executive Athlete eats are large, but they’re full of low-energy vegetables and fruit that create the calorie deficit that powers weight loss. Thanks to high levels of fibre, they’ll also maximise the feeling of satiety.
WHAT TO DO ABOUT CARBS?
How you answer this question will depend a great deal on your genetic makeup. The genetic hand you’ve been dealt might make this seem unfair, but it won’t stand between you and losing 20kg unless you let it. Your genetics, metabolism and dieting history all play a part in how your body responds to changes in your nutrition and physical activity.
What will determine whether or not carbohydrate-rich foods are included in an executive’s nutrition plan are the total calories that are required to create the energy deficit for weight loss. If the executive doesn’t get hungry and doesn’t metabolise carbohydrates well, it’s often possible to get all of their carbohydrate needs from fruit and vegetables.
Everyone’s body responds to diet changes and exercises differently. The only way to find out what the right balance of carbohydrates and proteins is for you is to track your weight loss results and keep a food diary.
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