💪 The everyday athlete newsletter #86

👋 Hey. Welcome to issue #86 of The Everyday Athlete Newsletter.

Here are my 3 favourite ideas, learns and resources to help you improve your performance this week (4 min read):

🥋 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 started when I was 6.

Because interoception is an unlock.

And we pick up so much more when we give intentional thought to this stuff.

P.s. The next level 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.

⚽️ Tweet: the Norway soccer experiment

Bryne is a small town of 12,000 people in Norway.

Researchers wanted to know why one of their grassroots soccer teams saw several players go pro and 35 of 40 players keep playing into adulthood.

This tweet breaks down why.

My highlights:

• ⚽️ Type of training: training from 6-11 years focused on individual skills, tactics were introduced at 11 years, position-specific skills were introduced at 15 years (this is supported by a heap of research on the negative impact of early specialisation in sport)
• 📆 Frequency of training: how often one trained was based on choice not talent
• 🔓 Access: a dome was built in the middle of the town and it was never locked, so they could play or practice whenever they wanted all year round
• 🤝 Fun: the head coach put people and enjoyment over outcomes, and as a result they loved their footy, playing whenever they could—weekends, 10-minute lunch breaks, etc.

In the end, they played all the time because they loved it. And the more they played, the better they got.

Some great lessons for any goals you're chasing.

🛌 Time in bed needed

Most people overestimate how much sleep they’re actually getting.

See, being in bed from 11–6 isn’t 7 hours sleep.

Because the average person is awake 10% of the night.

This 10% accounts for:

• ⏰ Latency: time getting to sleep
• 👀 Arousals: mini mid-night wake-ups between sleep cycles (mostly unconscious)

So being in bed 7 hours (for the average person) is more like 6.5 hours sleep.

A note to account for the 10%.

👋 Wanna solve your biggest health/performance struggle in 20 mins? Get your very own health and performance game plan (it's free and there's no strings attached). 5-star feedback so far. Learn more here.

That's it!

Have a great weekend 🤙

Matt

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The Everyday Athlete Newsletter is not a licensed health service and is not a substitute for professional health advice, treatment or assessment. The information given in this email is general in nature, written for a specific audience. If you’re struggling, please see a healthcare professional.