Normalizing Rest

Hat tip to Mario Fraioli for the idea for this post. He discusses “the importance of making time for quiet, creating space for ourselves, and slowing down in both running and in life” in a recent episode of The Morning Shakeout Podcast (with guest Simon Freeman). Please listen to the episode, but maybe finish reading this blog post first.

I am sure you have read or heard about the growth equation. If not, I recommend the book “Peak Performance” by Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness to you. One of the fundamental takeaways is this:

The brightest minds spend their time either pursuing their activity with ferocious intensity, or engaging in complete restoration and recover. (p32)

This should certainly be true for athletes. Yet, if you are remotely active on any social platform and engage with other athletes, you will get the impression that everyone is hustling all the time. Head over to Strava (and while you are there, leave me a follow) and scroll down the activity feed. Everyone is hustling, nobody seems to take rest days. Or do they? It's hard to tell, because rest days are not an activity by any social network's means. How often do you see an Instagram story where an athlete you follow posts a coffee mug and spells out “Rest Day”? Exactly.

Of course, rest days happen. Anything else would be unsustainable. And if you look closely on any athlete's Strava profile and pay attention to the dates of their activities, you will notice that, very likely, there is a rest day hidden somewhere, maybe (hopefully!) even on a regular basis.

Push and Pause

Mario and Simon are not alone. The other day, Viktor Nyblom wrote about “making space for pause”. He draws a nice connection between sports and business.

Just like you need to pause for breaths, your muscles need time to recover between sets. The same goes for your team.

The challenge isn't usually about pushing harder. Most teams I work with are already pushing plenty hard. The real challenge is pausing often enough and for an appropriate length.

Granted, in the business world the hustle doesn't usually get manifested on social platforms (or maybe it does, with Github's contribution streak?). The same principal applies. If your manager or anyone in your team brags about “all-nighters”, “weekend shifts”, and “vacation bans”, they are doing it wrong.

So, what now?

We're starting a movement

For sports, we can act on it. Here's the deal: we (so far: Mario and I) are going to explicitly post rest days to Strava like so. The goal is to normalize rest and show our fellow athletes that we embrace off days. Perhaps, if enough people join, we can even get Strava to implement this as a native feature, instead of having to manually post a 00:00:00 minutes activity. In any case, let's show the world that those rest days are an important part of every athlete's life. I would rather not imagine how someone who's new to the sport (be it running or cycling or cross-fit or …) tries to make sense of the hustle they see on these platforms. But if they come across Mario's or my Strava profile in the future, I hope that they realize that they, too, ought to take entire days off.