The 49ers arrived a week before the game taking the traditional acclimatization path. The Rams are planning to arrive just 24 hours before the game, staying on west coast time. We’ve got traditional approach versus a smash and grab that hasn’t really been done at this level with this long of a flight.

As an exercise physiologist who went deep on this years ago in deciding how to help prepare for athletes for far off Olympics and World Championships, let’s unpack the science and see who’s got it right.

The Science:

When it comes to travel, there’s a number of issues that can impact performance.

1. Time Change

The most obvious and studied one. We have a circadian rhythm that helps keep us awake when we’re supposed to be and fall asleep when we’re not. Hormones like cortisol and melatonin, along with our core body temperature all follow a natural rhythm. This rhythm is one reason why elite athletes tend to perform better in the afternoon or evening than first thing in the morning (though research shows you can adapt to it and perform just as well in the morning by training in the morning). Here’s a brief overview of that data:

When it comes to impact of traveling, most of the research in American sports shows a very small shift when teams travel eastward. While some research from global sports, like tennis show impacts on sleep but no significant impact on performance.

Here’s what the two strategies look like in terms of hormone release and body rhythm:

The 49ers get full adaptation. Their bodies will adjust. The rule of thumb is that you can adjust at roughly two hours/day traveling westward and one hour/day eastward. They’ll be going westward on the way there, trying to delay their clock 7 hours, which is in their favor. It’s much easier going west than east. It’s important to note this is a very rough rule of thumb and there is wide individual variability.

But it’s not all doom and gloom for the Rams. They are banking on the NFL’s scheduling to help them. The game is at 10:35am local time, which is 5:35pm west coast time. They’re betting that by staying on the same time zone, they’ll perform at their best.

It sounds crazy, but in track and field the 1996 Olympic champion in the 110m hurdles, Allen Johnson did this. When he went to Europe to compete, he stayed on US east coast time, routinely going to bed at 4am local time. It worked out okay for him I’d say…

The Rams essentially did that last year when they competed in Europe. But a 7 hour flight to Europe is a lot different than a 16 hour one to Australia. So while time zone shifts are normally what we worry about here, I don’t think it’ll be the main factor.

Advantage: Kind of a toss up, believe it or not. One is adapting. The other is still competing at a normal time for their body.

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2. Sleep Disruption

Another piece connected to the time change is the disruption in sleep. Again, not rocket science, when we don’t sleep well, our performance and recovery can be impaired.

This doesn’t mean you’re doomed if you have a bad nights sleep, just ask all the runners with the pre-marathon jitters who can’t fall asleep and still perform well. One nights sleep is generally compensated for and not a huge deal. But it does mean the deck gets slightly stacked against you.

The 49ers minimize this. They’ll be well adjusted and sleeping well. The Rams are banking on being able to sleep on the plane. Now, I’m sure they have the state of the art plane beds, but still sleeping on a plane is not easy. It’s not as comfortable, you’re breathing in air that’s the equivalent of 6-7k feet altitude, you’re likely dehydrated, and the lighting/routine/etc. are all thrown off. Even in hotel rooms, we have the “first night effect” where we tend to get worse sleep in a new place because part of our brain is awake looking for danger. (It was to keep us safe on the savanna back in the day…). That’s compounded on the flight.

For instance, for soccer teams traveling from Australia to Brazil to play in the World Cup, their sleep on long flights was significantly less than they normally get (5.9 hours on average (4.8–7.0).

Advantage: 49ers by far. Sleeping on a plane is always going to be tougher.

3. Travel Fatigue:

What the Rams are fighting isn’t really circadian shifts, it’s the fatigue of travel.

It’s spending 16 hours breathing air that’s the equivalent of 6-7k feet altitude which will drop their blood oxygenation down from 98 to 91-94. While sleeping, it could drop even more. (And if we’re being honest, in heavy lineman who are going to be more likely to have even mild sleep apnea, this could be a bigger concern). In general, it’s a small, but significant effect that I’ve tested on myself and elite runners, and that we have data on. It’s having less than ideal sleep.

It’s the impact it has on hydration, and more importantly fluid loss. In the plane, humidity is typically very low, so we have more respiratory water loss. But it’s a minor amount in the grand scheme of things that can be compensated for. But more so, it’s that we have a fluid redistribution. Our plasma volume declines, some research showing by as much as 9% for a 10 hour flight. What does this mean? Think of plasma volume as helping your blood be more like water and less like sludge. The higher the plasma volume, the more quickly the ‘freeways’ move. Other research shows that we have increased edema in our legs, with one study on a simulated long haul flight showing the lower leg volume increasing by about 145ml.

It also shifts your resting muscle tension. In running, we refer to this as how much pop you have in your legs. When you’ve sat or even lied down on a plane for 16 hours, your legs get stiff. Their resting muscle tension has adapted, so that you’re no longer in a position to have that nice springy reactive stride. Anyone who has gone on even a 3-4 hour flight and then gone straight to the track or cross country course for a shakeout run knows this well. For explosive sports, it’s an even bigger deal.

If you look at the research, the first 24-48 hours is when most of the reported symptoms of travel fatigue are the worst. Most of the data shows that it causes acute shifts in anaerobic power, strength, and reaction time. We don’t have perfect data, as it’s hard to study. And it’s not like you have a universal decline in all athletic abilities. Some drop, others maintain, and still others you can compensate for with caffeine, adrenaline, etc. It’s why the research is messy, with some showing no decline in 30m sprint post travel to others showing a drop in power and explosiveness.

But as someone who’s traveled to Europe to compete, gone to New Zealand and ran the same day I got there, and spent a considerable amount of time talking to experts for how to compete at Olympic and World champs based on this stuff… it is not easy to get off the plane and compete.

Advantage: 49ers. This is the main issue the Rams face.

4. The Lasting Impact

While we’ve considered the impact on this current game, what about coming back home? The Rams and 49ers play another game 10-11 days later. This is where the Rams plan makes a lot of sense. They travel back after the game and don’t have to adjust their circadian rhythm again. Both teams will face a steep cost from travel fatigue, but the Rams don’t also have to adapt again. Now, there’s plenty of time before the next game to do so, so I don’t think lingering fatigue will be the issue. But the 49ers will lose more practice time under rested conditions on the back end.

Advantage: Rams

So what?

The 49ers took the safer and more traditional route. Get there in plenty of time, adapt, and give it your all. They are trading potential adjustment on the back end after the game. They also have the option of partial adaptation instead of full to smooth that out and even help performance. Think of it as: instead of adjusting so that you sleep from 11pm to 7am, you adjust to go to bed at 9pm and wake at 5am. You’ve adjusted 5 hours instead of 7, which puts the game at a normal NFL mid-day kickoff, and lessens the recovery on the back end.

The Rams took the riskier strategy, partially influenced by their success in doing something similar in London last year. But this isn’t London, and even then they had a 5 hour shift because they practiced on the east coast. Their real upside is not having to adjust their circadian rhythm twice within a week and a two week period.

The Rams want essentially no shift or adaptation. The worst place they can be is partially adapting, while carrying a sleep debt. So they need the blackout curtains, lights, and whatever else they need to keep on the same time zone.

It’s theoretically possible. And I have no doubt an NFL team will go all out to do so. But it’s a risky move. Hopefully, they talked to track star Allen Johnson.

-Steve Magness
P.S. I tried something new here. Article + Video breakdown. Did you like having both? Let me know.

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It’s easy to rail against the craziness of youth sports parents. I’ve done so in the past, and a lot of it is deserved. But in a strange way, given our current climate, parents are making the rational decision to go hard into youth sports.

That doesn’t mean it’s the best decision or an ideal situation. But what I hope to show is that when we treat the youth sports issue like it’s just parental delusion—some crazy parents living through their child, convinced that their kid will get the athletic scholarship or the NIL deal—we make it impossible to change the system. While parent craziness is real and certainly plays a role, it misses the larger point for most adults faced with the youth sport predicament.

While some parents may be buying athletic development, a large number are buying something much deeper: hope with a dash of reality. They’re paying for the last unmediated, communal, high-stakes hour in their week.

The benefits of youth sports are real. The problem is the cheap version that we all grew up with, that supplied all of these in spades, was taken apart by people who profit from the expensive path.

And that’s exactly why, as outlined in recent articles in New York magazine and The New York Times, private equity is taking over youth sports. It’s a $40 billion dollar industry and they realize that hope, belonging, and the need to feel like your Saturday counted is inelastic. It’s the last thing a parent stops paying for. They’re buying mattering, and it’s recession-proof.

Parents Aren’t Buying Development:

We frequently talk about the screen problem for kids, and it’s a legitimate concern. Here’s a brief glimpse of some of the survey data:

• 40% of two-year-olds now have their own tablet.

• Daily screen media for 2-to-4-year-olds: 2:07

• Daily screen media for 5-to-8-year-olds: 3:28

For older kids, it’s even worse. One survey found that 50.4% of teens report 4+ hours a day of non-school screen time. And according to the Pew teen social media surveys, the percentage of teens “almost constantly online” has moved from 24% in 2015 to 40% in 2025.

In many senses, parents are choosing a youth-sports-filled life over a screen-filled one. They’re trading YouTube, video games, and even social media for being outdoors with others. Not entirely, of course. But they know that when little Suzy or Johnny is at practice or playing games all weekend, they won’t be on screens.

It’s what makes youth sports fantastic. It’s an increasingly rare moment where they are without screens, doing something active, with other kids. And even after the games, it’s off to the playground or the pizza place, living like it’s 1995 again. That’s a worthy trade-off, even if you have to deal with the time or financial commitments.

And that’s the entire point. We know the benefits are real. But the price to do so has grown and grown, even though everything I just described is right there for the taking on a Tuesday night rec league for sixty bucks. None of it requires a travel team, three coaches, and a hotel a five hour drive away.

We pay because the sixty dollar version is disappearing. No, not everywhere. Just in enough places where options feel limited, especially the older we get.

That explains why parents sign kids up to play sports. But it doesn’t help us understand why parents tolerate the cost, travel and chaos that is modern youth sports. For that, we’ve got to turn the spotlight on ourselves.

What Youth Sports Gives Parents

The same pull that make youth sports important for kids, are right there for us adults too. Less talked about is that adults suffer from that same screen-filled life. And they use youth sports as an antidote for it.

The world around most of us adults pushes us to be alone and numb. Our leisure time has moved from active doing to more passive watching and consuming. During our breaks, or when we’re standing in line, we pick up our phone to deal with that slight sense of unease or boredom. We’ve trained ourselves to use devices as a pacifier. No need to feel any uncomfortable feelings, just numb it away.

And when we do scroll, we’re met with a feed that begs us to care about everything. Cat videos, someone dying, political nonsense, and on and on our feed goes. So in the end, our brain’s rational decision is to numb itself, instead of feeling the herky-jerky back and forth between watching a cute animal video and a drone killing someone in a war.

When we stop feeling much, we reach for those small moments that make us have some sort of emotional reaction. The trolls online are a perfect example. They get their “fix” from stoking outrage in the comments section. They don’t feel anything in the rest of their life, so being the reply guy will have to do.

The antidote to that? Doing things that make you feel something by being actively engaged in the world. It’s why former athletes, even those who made enough money to last a lifetime, take up high school coaching for that little bit of vicarious feeling of what it was like to set foot on the field. It’s why musicians tour long after their popularity fades, and writers keep on writing once the sales figures have plummeted. It’s why Hall of Famer Jaromir Jagr may have finally played his last professional hockey game… at the age of 54.

We all need things that make us feel alive.

The basketball court provides a place where parents are engaged, in the present moment, and actually feeling feelings instead of numbing them away. The same thing it does for our kids, it does for us. We may not be in the actual game, but for those engaged parents on the sideline, it provides this glimmer of feeling something. It’s a real game that you’re invested in, with an actual outcome on the line, that you’re going to feel after the game. In a world starved of significance and meaning, youth sports provides some.

For two hours, people aren’t scrolling through separate realities. They are part of the same event. It sounds strange to say, but it’s one of the few places where everyone occupies the same shared reality. Durkheim called these experiences the collective effervescence. Essentially the difference between being in the stadium and streaming the game. Research tells us these moments of shared attention are processed deeper and felt more intensely, than if we were there alone.

The Mobile Neighborhood

It’s not just feeling alive for adults, it’s also doing so with other people. Consider the following:

• Time spent alone rose from 285 minutes a day in 2003 to 333 in 2020.

• Time with friends fell from 60 minutes to 20.

• Time spent at home rose 99 minutes a day between 2003 and 2022. The largest increase, +124 minutes, was among 15-to-34-year-olds.

• The number of people with no close friends has gone from 3% in 1990 to 12% in 2021.

• And men with six or more close friends: 55% (1990) → 27% (2021).

In 1982, Ray Oldenburg and Dennis Brissett called it the decline of third places. The first place was our home. The second was our work. And the third was the informal public places where we gathered and had serendipitous interactions. It’s the coffee shops, bars, parks, diners, churches, bowling alleys, and barbershops. They were the settings in which connection happened. A repeated, low-stakes opportunity to see the same people. Over time those small conversations turned into bigger ones, and soon you had friends you could trust. It’s the 1980s TV show Cheers.

And we’ve seen most of these disappear or become a minimal part of life. As I outlined in a recent piece, we took away all of the friction that forced engagement with other people.

Our kids’ soccer field is one of the few third places left. For a few hours on Saturday, you get to live like it’s 1995 again. You’re surrounded by other adults with a shared interest in the same team. It’s the perfect place to make friends. While we may not talk to our actual neighbors anymore, researchers have described travel teams as a “mobile neighborhood.” And increasingly, parents get a sense of community, identity, and meaning out of their youth sports tribe.

Parents aren’t just living through their kid’s sporting success, they’re using their kid’s sports to satisfy basic psychological needs that we once took for granted: a sense of community, feeling emotions, being present, and a sense of identity.

In 2015, a group of researchers went all in on following a small group of families across 15 months of youth sports activities. They had over 110 hours of direct observation across practices and games, over 40 hours of interviews, and dozens upon dozens of journal entries that parents kept. The title gives away a bit of what happened: “Early Socialization of Parents Through Organized Youth Sport.”

They found that parents developed a new self-concept as “sport parents.” They gained a new identity from being heavily involved. And that sense of self came with a community, or in our language, a third place. Parents described feeling connected to the other parents, as they had a built-in shared interest that occurred at a regular time. As one parent said, “It’s been a nice change… it’s given us something to do, as well as to identify with.” They experienced vicarious emotion. The excitement and anxiety of watching their kid compete was right there, and sometimes overwhelming. As one parent reported before a game, “I’m hoping that [my daughter] does well, probably more so than I did when I was competing. I definitely think there’s more anxiety as a parent.” It’s that vicarious emotion that makes us feel alive.

And lastly, it brought with it something else. An important piece of the puzzle which, as we’ll soon learn, drives much of the youth sports direction we now see: social comparison. Parents started to evaluate their own involvement against what other parents were doing. Their norms and expectations shifted based on what everyone else was doing.

It’s all right there: community, identity, and a place to feel alive.

Is it any wonder why parents spend thousands of dollars and make it where their weekends are spent at a Holiday Inn Express in the middle of nowhere? It’s providing the exact ingredients for living a fulfilling life that we stole from both kids and adults. The kids are getting screen free activity. We’re getting a social group. With a downside that’s seldom talked about, but occasionally rears it’s ugly head. The kid can’t quit her 10U volleyball team without the parents losing their social world.

Maybe a little of that anger from parents saying, “you can’t be a quitter!” is actually the fear of losing their community.

The youth-sports industry doesn’t have to invent the benefits for both our kids and ourselves. It only has to attach two additional forces to them: hope and fear.

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The Exploitation of Hope and Fear

If we look at surveys, most parents don’t sign their kids up because they want to be a crazy parent on the sideline with a delusion of a future pro career. The delusional are the outliers, most people are in line with the statistics. Most sign their kids up (and continue paying) for youth sports because of the perceived benefits to their child: teamwork, fitness, friends, confidence, time away from screens, character, learning to win and lose, and so much more. Just about every parent has a few of those in mind when they begin the journey with their kids.

But as they get on that conveyor belt, especially one that is funded by keeping parents on it, they get sold something else:

• Hope: Maybe my child has something. Maybe this could lead somewhere.

• Fear: What if everyone else is doing more? What if my child falls behind? What if I am the reason they never find out how good they could have been?

We get enticed by all of the stories of little Johnny or Suzy going from runt to playing at Texas A&M. We see the list of players from the same youth club we’re in who actually made it. We hear the coaches praise our kids, and even sell us on what the future may look like. They create just enough possibility. Sometimes it’s for big money in the pros, other times a college scholarship, or still others just a chance to make that high school team so that little Johnny can have something to do in school. It’s that “maybe…” that grows in the parent’s head. It’s the possibility that your child might have a better future that is at the heart of it all.

It’s no different than hearing your child qualifies for the “Gifted and Talented” program. Are you going to say no? Of course not. Except here, the GT program requires you pouring money and time into a seemingly bottomless pit, instead of a few extra GT projects scattered throughout the school year.

No one wants to be the parent who kills their child’s dream. So they keep it alive… even if deep down they know the chances may be slim to none.

All of this is made worse because we live in the age of comparison. We look around and see Jimmy’s parents getting them private lessons, joining the travel team, and think, “My son’s just as good as theirs…” Which then spirals into… “Doesn’t my child deserve the same opportunity…” The comparison drives us insane. And it’s made 100 times worse because it’s not just the kids down the street we’re comparing to, it’s everyone in the entire freaking world.

The feed has changed what “normal” parenting looks like, convincing a generation that normal is a level of extraordinary commitment. It’s why recent researcher show that both moms and dads spend more time with their kids than any modern generation, and yet still feel overwhelming anxiety that they aren’t doing enough.

A recent study found that perceived world threats and upward social comparison on social media were associated with parental anxiety and overprotective parenting. And the youth sports industrial complex hijacks this, playing off that anxiety, and giving us a supposed solution for it… paying them more money. It creates that lingering “what if…” and attacks the heart of “what would a good parent do?”

That’s why private equity is buying up youth sports. Who wants to be the bad parent? Who wants to destroy their kid’s dream? Who wants to take away the one place where adults can find community and kids can be without screens?

And our kids end up feeling that anxiety. Sometimes it’s the parent who spends the car ride home thinking they are offering constructive feedback, when all that child hears is that my dad or mom only cares about how I perform. Other times, it’s seeing your parents spend all that money on your coaches, training, and travel, and then expecting a payoff. Some parents vocalize this payoff, telling their child they need an athletic scholarship. While other well-meaning folks send the same message in a subtler, almost imperceptible way. Researchers found that greater family financial investment is associated with greater perceived parental pressure and lower enjoyment and commitment among children.

Even when parents are trying to do the right thing, children often feel the weight of the investment and expectations. At that point, the problem is no longer a collection of overzealous parents. It becomes a collective-action trap: each family makes an understandable choice, and together those choices gradually eliminate the sane alternative.

The Collective-Action Trap

Most parents don’t want to hire three different coaches and travel to 15 different tournaments in the summer. But our expectations have shifted so far that it’s both normal and often the only viable option. We’ve decimated the cheap options. And we made it hard to make high school teams thanks to giant behemoths of high schools so that we can have more talent to excel at football. The end result is a bunch of kids who never have a shot at even making the high school team, unless they’re very talented or went all in like every other parent in their neighborhood did. Or alternatively, they go the rec league route and look around at 10 and see that there’s no one left on the recreational ballfields to play.

If everyone else is jumping off the bridge, we just do it. Saying “no” seems nearly impossible in many social groups. Or it’s literally the only option. Each parent may be making an individually understandable decision. They weigh the trade-offs and say the screen-free time is worth the potential burnout. And the only way to keep doing that at 8, 9, 10, or what have you, with his friends, is to sign up for the travel team. In many ways, it’s the rational choice.

But collectively, those decisions destroy the affordable, sane alternative. Which is what private equity is counting on with youth sports. It’s right there in the data. When 400+ people active in youth sports investment were surveyed, 61% said recession resilience is what drove their conviction in youth sports as a valuable asset.

What’s recession resilience? Knowing that parents and kids both need what youth sports provides. That people will pay a lot of money for not only the hope of their child’s future, but also the screen-free time, community, and identity that the rest of the modern world has slowly taken away. The product they’re trying to sell isn’t the community or team you’re a part of. It’s the Holiday Inn Express you stay in for the full weekend tournament that doesn’t allow you to video your kids because they offer a subscription service for it.

Of course, there’s an alternative.

Rebuilding the Sane Alternative

Everything good that we want—screen free, active engagement, community, character— comes from the local rec league. It’s the magic of youth sport. You don’t need the fancy stuff to play the game at that level. But we’ve been put in a place where that no longer feels like a choice. That’s intentional. The single conveyor belt with no alternative, the utilizing our parenting fears and the dreams of our kids against us is intentional. It’s what makes it recession proof.

But even if travel leagues are the only option, we can take collective action. Put guardrails on how many travel tournaments we go to. Limit practice time to a reasonable amount, not making winning the 8U championship the be all end all, making a decision with as many parents as you can muster to keep the local teams and competitions afloat.

And perhaps adults need something else, too. While youth sports teams are wonderful places to connect with other parents, if it’s the only third place in your life, if it’s the only thing that makes you feel alive, then every game will carry too much weight. And most of that will be pushed right onto your kid, whether you mean to or not. Find your own third places, and take on meaningful challenges on your own accord that make you feel alive. Your kids will thank you for it later.

Youth sports should add something meaningful to a family’s life. It shouldn’t be the only meaningful thing in it.

-Steve Magness

What can you do as a parent to help your individual child? I covered that in a prior post here. I also created a youth sports guide for parents for free.. You can access it here.

Thanks so much for reading my work. If you enjoyed it consider sharing it with others. The only way quality work spreads is if you help out.

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In many ways, coaches are a dying breed. No, the profession isn’t going away. It’s that, in a world filled with specialists, coaches are among the last of the master generalists. We have to wear dozens of hats to do the job well: teacher, counselor, therapist, biomechanist, physiologist, and trainer.

And yet coach education tends to focus on strategy or workouts, even though anyone who has spent time coaching knows it’s about the human element: convincing the person sitting across from you to dare to step into the arena, risk being exposed, and come face to face with their potential. In a time when everything is curated and filtered, and we don’t dare risk failure in a public setting because we could be transformed into a meme, coaching is one of the last places where we confront actual reality—or at least get people to try to.

Coaching is about developing the person across from you. Not merely the musician, runner, or soccer player—the PERSON sitting across from you. We help shape their relationship to success and failure, to their own potential, and to the work itself for the rest of their life.

If you don’t believe me, trust this duo: Sir Roger Bannister and his coach, Franz Stampfl:

“Franz is not the kind of coach who, Svengali-like, wishes to turn the athlete into a machine, working to his dictation. We shared a common view of athletics as a means of ‘re-creation’ of each individual, as a result of the liberation of the latent power within him. Franz was like an artist who could see character fulfilment in human struggle and achievement.”

Coaching is a heavy and often underappreciated burden—and a skill that we mostly have to figure out on the fly. So, with that understanding, I wanted to provide a leg up: to give any coach, whether in athletics or elsewhere, my cheat-sheet guide to coaching the whole person.

What follows are 27 lessons for coaching the whole person.

I. What a Coach Is

1. Become a Way-Shower

A coach is a way-shower. They’re someone who has been down the road and points to the next foothold, then steps back and lets the climber climb.

“My job was to make everyone understand that the impossible was possible. That’s the difference between leadership and management.” —Sir Alex Ferguson

Help people see and realize a new self and a new potential.

2. Be the Thermostat

The thermometer reads the room. The thermostat sets the temperature you want others to feel.

They pick up and catch your vibes. But it’s more than that: your job is to provide the counterbalance—to offer perspective when they think this is the biggest moment in the world and help them lock in when they underestimate an opponent.

When they are frantic, be calm. When they are flat, bring intensity.

3. Define Success Together

Too often, we either assume what success means for the other person or provide a slogan that has little meaning behind it. We say “process over outcomes” because we heard Nick Saban say it.

Define what success means, and make sure it’s not just the result. A good coach gives multiple paths to ‘success.’

Ask: How do they define a good performance? What do you value and expect from them? Where do those definitions agree or conflict? What process, risk, behavior, and result will count today?

II. Coach the Person

4. The Human Comes First

Coaching is about developing the person across from you. Whether you coach high school athletes or professionals, your job is to develop them holistically. Of course success matters, but if all they are left with is a few trophies, you’ve failed. As one of my coaching mentors put it, “It’s about the weddings you get invited to a decade from now.”

Listen to the coach of 800-meter track sensation Audrey Werro: “My philosophy is really to work on the development of the athlete. The medal is ultimately only the fruit of that development. I have a holistic vision of the athlete. Sport is a means to develop harmoniously.”

Performance is important, but it is downstream of the person you help someone become.

“Helping players be more successful on the court and more successful in their life go hand in hand.” —Tara VanDerveer

5. Care

If you don’t have buy-in, even the perfect workout schedule or tactics will fail. All anyone wants is to know that someone gives a damn about them. Especially younger athletes. They want someone who cares about them as a person, not someone who will use them to help land the next job.

In a transactional world, we’ve forgotten this. As the old saying goes, “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.”

6. Hold Standards Plus Care

We need both standards and care. It’s what decades of parenting and coaching research tell us. High demand without warmth leads to poor behavior and lower levels of resilience. Warmth without demand produces directionless folks.

We need both.

It’s about sending a message: here are the expectations, but I won’t abandon you while you learn to meet them.

7. Coach Toward Independence, Not Dependence

Coaching is about making your own job kind of obsolete. Good coaches foster independence. We should be working toward having the athlete become self-sufficient, with our role gradually shifting toward course-correcting the ship as it goes.

Dependence can seem like an easier path for a coach. It makes them feel powerful, that an athlete needs them to succeed. That’s your ego talking, and it creates a fragile bond that will backfire. It’s the same as parenting: you want to prepare them to do it on their own.

Teach them the tools, let them mess up, be there to help them learn and grow. And over time, gradually lengthen the leash to give them the chance to see that they’re capable of more.

8. Belonging Beats Fitting In

Make people feel they belong, are heard, are significant, and have a path to get better. We thrive when the environment around us tells us that we belong here. Too often, we settle for the social media version: fitting in. It’s the junior high kid changing who they are just to be a part of the group.

It doesn’t mean everyone has to be best friends or that the environment has to be some kumbaya fantasy. It means giving people enough security to contribute as themselves.

III. Read the Athlete

9. Listen to Both Kinds of Feedback

Athletes provide two kinds of feedback: automatic and deliberate behavior. Automatic behavior includes posture, body language, and other outward cues that occur without conscious control. Deliberate behavior is consciously regulated; it reflects what the athlete wants to project.

When the messages conflict: an athlete may say they feel great and can do another repetition while their posture slumps and their mechanics begin to fail. Understanding what both sides are telling you is essential to knowing when and how to adjust.

It is when the athlete deviates from their norm that we should raise a red flag. A sudden change in personality might be an early indicator of overtraining. A change in posture during the warm-up might signal a need for recovery that even the latest monitoring gadget cannot detect.

10. Start With the Story in Their Head

A therapist and social worker once told me, “It doesn’t matter if it is right or wrong. If they believe it is right, then it is right. The story in their head is all that matters.” His point was that, as humans, our need to make sense of the world and have a consistent narrative about who we are and what we believe is so strong that right and wrong don’t matter. The narrative does.

Step one is to understand the internal story the athlete is telling. Ignore what they should think or believe and begin with what they actually think.

When we look at changing behavior, we often assume facts will alter people’s decisions. They rarely do. How do they see themselves? How do they see you? How do they interpret what is happening? Only once you understand how they see the world can you attempt to adjust that view.

Right or wrong, the athlete’s internal narrative is the one driving the bus. Start there.

11. Understand Motivation Before You Push

We use motivation as a kind of catch-all term. If someone doesn’t seem to give any effort, we say they have no drive. But that’s a gross simplification.

What do they care about? What gets them fired up? Who creates pressure around them? Do they have support? How do they define success and failure?

Too often, we write off a kid as unmotivated, without understanding that maybe their parents have instilled a fear of failure so strong in them that the rational choice is just not to try so they don’t risk failure.

First understand. Then start to shift.

12. Learn Their Stress Pattern

Some athletes do better when challenged. I had one athlete who requested that I cuss them out and put them down a bit when they were struggling. Others need calm and comfort. They need to feel supported no matter what, so that they can take that risk. We all handle stress and challenges differently. It’s right there in the science: we call them “individual zones of optimal functioning.”

The coach’s job is to help the athlete find the state that allows them to meet this moment.

13. Treat Potential as an Open Question

Be careful with labels. Athletes will hold whatever ceiling you put on them. It’s the classic research in schools, when kids are labeled gifted or not so bright, teachers treat them differently, and then grades follow the label.

Categorization is natural. But when it comes to potential, be careful about labeling potential too soon. We’re awful at predicting potential—just look at the NFL draft. Your job is to give them as many opportunities as possible to develop and grow that potential. No one knows how good someone will be. The only way to find out is to put in the work for a long time and see what happens.

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IV. Design Practice That Teaches

14. Hypothesize, Test, Reflect, Repeat

Coaching is like a mini-science experiment. You have an idea what you think a workout plan or instruction will do, then you try it out, observe the results, and then adjust.

We need each part of that process. And to understand each athlete is a new mini experiment that we’ve got figure out.

15. Train the Individual, Not the System

The game’s demands matter, but they only become useful when combined with the characteristics of the athlete in front of you.

In order to determine what each athlete needs, assess the physical, biomechanical, emotional, and psychological components. Look at strengths and weaknesses. What kinds of workouts does the athlete naturally handle well? What fuels the athlete’s drive? What excites them? Do they have the focus and patience required by the event, or do they function better with short-lived aggression?

The danger comes when the model becomes more important than the athlete standing in front of you.

16. Let the Athlete Struggle Enough to Learn

It’s tempting to step in and give the solution right away when you see someone struggle. But in doing so, it impairs learning.

Research on students found that if a teacher stepped in too soon, when they initially struggled, kids didn’t learn as much as when the teacher let them struggle for a bit. We need to wrestle with the problem, that’s where learning occurs.

It’s the same with coaching. Resist that temptation to step in early. The body and mind need enough stress to be embarrassed into adaptation. Put the athlete in a position where the system has to figure something out.

17. Design the Environment

The most disciplined performers aren’t grinding harder than the rest of us. They’ve made the right thing the obvious thing. Our environment impacts us more than we like to admit. If you live near trails, it’s easier to get out the door and run. If everyone around you is putting in 10 miles a day, that volume becomes normal instead of insane.

Be aware of what your environment is inviting. For example, if everyone’s on their phones at dinner, you’ve designed the wrong environment for connecting.

Make it easy and normal to do the hard and right thing. And have fun while doing it.

18. Take the Complex and Make It Simple

It’s a common saying that people who truly understand a concept take it from a complex form and make it simpler. Charlatans who want to appear like they understand, do the opposite, complexifying concepts.

Complexity creates a mask where we can hide our true understanding. Olympic gold medalist Frank Shorter has gone as far as proclaiming that training became complex once doping proliferated. Coaches and athletes needed a story to explain the massive increases in performance. So they used complex training regimes with a dash of science to paint the picture.

As coaches, it’s our job to always work towards breaking down concepts into usable forms. If we complexify, we lose applicability.

Make complex ideas simple. Going from complex to simple may make the work look less sophisticated to the untrained eye, but we want to back up our actions, not merely look good.

Expertise is not displaying everything you know. It is knowing what matters now and what can be ignored.

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V. Prepare for Competition

19. Free Them Up to Perform

Ninety percent of coaching is helping people get out of their own way, letting them explore their potential instead of self-sabotaging.

We’ve got to give people permission to risk it. To try and fail. So much of our modern society (and psychology) pushes us to live in protection mode. We don’t want to feel embarrassed or exposed if we fall short. Especially now that everything is public.

So free them up. Redefine success. Give them permission to fail spectacularly. Figure out how to give them permission to risk, and convince them that they belong at the next level.

20. Teach Athletes to Zoom

When fear and anxiety rise before competition, zooming out can help the athlete see the entire forest. The moment might feel like life or death, but in the grand scheme of things it is a sporting event. The athlete has a future regardless of the result. Zooming out creates perspective and helps control emotion.

During the race, when the legs and lungs begin to burn, the wide view can become overwhelming. The athlete can zoom in: make it to the next marker, or focus only on what the arms and legs need to do in the next stride. Breaking the race into manageable pieces keeps doubt from expanding to fill the whole event.

This ability can be trained. We enhance it by practicing shifts in mindset and view—by practicing self-awareness and perspective before the athlete needs the skill under pressure.

Zoom out to restore perspective. Zoom in to find the next marker, action, cue, or decision.

VI. Build the Culture

21. Make Sure Your Actions Match Your Words

How many times have you heard someone talk about “process, process, process,” only for the first thing out of their mouth after the race to be a celebration of the outcome? Now, there’s nothing wrong with talking about wins or PRs or outcomes. But, too often what we preach doesn’t match the actions we take.

We can’t talk about team culture and then excuse the kid who violates all the rules because they’re a good athlete. People want to know what to expect. They thrive on consistency in message and action. Make sure your actions match your words.

If you talk about process and only celebrate outcomes, the brain hears the second message.

22. Give the Team a Shared Purpose

Having a strong purpose acts as a turbo boost.

Whether that purpose comes from God, family, playing for your teammates, or a mission that holds deep importance, when our pursuits match with our purpose, we persist for much longer. Research shows that purpose and persistence are linked in the classroom, workplace, and athletics.

When we have a purpose, we are able not only to endure and persist but also to provide a beacon that reminds us of what’s important and to make the right decision at the right moment.

Create a goal bigger than any one person and make every role’s contribution clear.

23. Use the Power of Peers

Let’s be honest. Sometimes they’ll tune you out. They’ve heard your spiel so many times that you become the parent they stop listening to. This is why a great team culture is so important. They’ll turn to their peers when they aren’t listening to you.

It’s why research tends to show that captains have a large impact on team performance.

VII. Coach the Long Game

24. Plant Seeds You’ll Never See Grow

You’ll give the same lesson dozens of times. You’ll say it over and over, trying to get through to that athlete, but it just seems like it’s not getting through. Then, a decade later, you get the message from that former athlete, “I get it. That lesson really helped.”

You never know when something sinks in. Sometimes it takes hours, other times weeks or months. And still other, decades.

That’s what the work is about. You never know when something will connect and sink in. Your job is to keep planting seeds, in as many different ways as possible, then water them. Understand that some may take years to grow.

25. Keep the Ego Coach Quiet

“Leadership is not about forcing your will on others. It’s about mastering the art of letting go.” —Phil Jackson

The cleanest articulation of the get-out-of-the-way principle from a coach with eleven rings to back it up.

The athlete makes the coach, not the other way around.

You’ve got to keep your ego in check. When it comes to athletics, talent matters. As coaches, it’s our job to nurture and allow that potential to show itself. Without talent, no matter how good a coach you are, you aren’t turning that athlete into a world-beater.

When we think we have the answers and that our coaching made all the difference, that mindset sends the signal that we have it figured out. Our minds accept closure, and we drop out of learning mode. Our ego prevents us from learning.

Give credit, share control, and let the athlete own the work.

26. Stay in Learning Mode

Once you have the answers, you stop learning. Closure shuts the brain off. It’s why success is the most dangerous moment in your coaching career: that’s when you stop searching.

Stay open-minded. Find peers to bounce ideas off of. Challenge your ideas regularly. Block off time for reflection and an end-of-year review.

And always remember: you can love an idea, just don’t marry it. Don’t become the kind of coach who is so wedded to one way that they stop seeing the game clearly.

Write it all down in a notebook. Over time, this creates a simple documentation of the coaching journey and the lessons learned each year. Reflection prevents us from falling into mindless default-mode coaching and workout creation.

27. Be Yourself and Go All the Way

Be yourself. Don’t cosplay another coach. The Bobby Knight clones don’t last. Pop is unrecreatable. All the strength coaches who adopt the same voice—well, most don’t pan out. Loud, quiet, thoughtful, outgoing, introverted—we’ve had great coaches with so many different makeups.

Be authentic. Figure out what works for you.

—

A coach is one of the most important jobs you can have. You wear many hats, but perhaps the most important one is role model. You get to shape the hearts and minds of kids and adults. Helping to show them what’s possible, how to handle failure, and to step forward and risk falling short. If we do the job well, they leave us not merely better performers, but more capable people.

—Steve Magness

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I can’t stop thinking about this quote from Dolly Parton. It’s so simple, yet underneath it provides for a way of living life, which defined Dolly, and may be one of the reasons she was universally loved.

The quote contains two key ideas. We have to discover what matters to us. But discovery isn’t enough. We then have to enact it—deliberately and repeatedly—until our values become a way of living.

There’s not much more important from a psychological standpoint than your sense of self. Yet, too often, we think of our identity as something deep within us, that we introspect our way to. And sure, there’s some truth to that. But in doing so, we miss out on the other half of the equation, the one Parton so succinctly tells us about, “do it on purpose.”

We don’t merely discover the self, we act our way into it. We have to practice it, over and over again.

It’s in one of my favorite sayings I learned from podcaster “Mood Follows Action.” Or in other popular pithy sayings: confidence needs evidence, character follows repetition.

All of these get at the same phenomenon. They also have scientific validity, while tracing their roots much farther back than Dolly Parton.

The Power of Acting First

Behavioral activation is the essence of Roll’s “Mood follows action,” and it’s frequently utilized to treat depression. Instead of waiting to feel motivated to get going, you take a step forward, hoping to drag your motivation with you. In therapy, this often means scheduling small activities that align with your values. And it works well, one randomized trial for adults with major depression found that it performed comparably to medication.

The non-therapy version of this is the runner’s creed of “just get out the door.” Every runner knows the hardest step is often the first one. But once you get going, the momentum builds and you get the run in. So instead of trying to get motivated, you make it easier to take that first step.

But behavioral activation is on the small scale. What Parton was talking about was identity, a much bolder idea than simply changing how you feel. Aristotle gave us the theory long ago. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle argued that character is formulated through actions, “Men become builders by building and lyreplayers by playing the lyre; so too we become just by doing just acts.”

Modern research largely confirms his hypotheses. No, it’s not that introspection for clarity on who you are is useless. Our brain works in both directions. We are an actor, thinker, and observer. But too often, we try to think first, and discount acting.

On a larger scale, according to Daryl Bem’s self-perception theory, we infer who we are and what we believe by observing what we do. We take an action, we observe it, and what we see becomes evidence of who we are. Over time, we construct a story around whatever it is we’ve seen ourselves do.

“I’m kind…because I routinely go out of my way to help others…”

“I’m tough…because I’ve witnessed myself work through the pain cave…”

“I’m disciplined…because I sit down at my desk to write nearly every day…”

Psychologist Timothy Wilson has a slightly different name for the same phenomenon, “Do Good, Be Good.” When we volunteer at a soup kitchen, it changes our inner story. We start to see ourselves as an altruistic person. Classic studies on kids found that when they were encouraged to donate winnings from playing a game to charity, they ended up donating more money and sharing more with other kids. But crucially, this effect dissipated when they thought they were donating because it’s what an adult expected they should do.

In other words, it’s not just acting a certain way that does it. It’s the story we attach to it. I call this the youth sports phenomenon. Kids stop seeing themselves as baseball players, runners, or athletes because they come to realize that mom or dad are forcing them to do it. We see the same thing with activities like reading or volunteering. If you’re being forced, you ingrain “Dad made me do it,” not “I care about reading or helping others.”

Millennia ago, Aristotle issued a similar warning. “First he must act with knowledge; secondly he must deliberately choose the act, and choose it for its own sake….“

And once again, modern science backs him, largely showing that if we want behavior to shape our identity, we need:

• The action is freely chosen.

• There is no obvious external explanation, such as pressure or a large reward.

• The person connects the behavior to something about themselves.

• The behavior is repeated.

• The identity is reinforced across more than one situation.

But can we really shift who we are?

The pushback on this is often, I get it on a small scale. But can it really make that big of a difference. A few recent studies put it to the test. In one 15-week study, participants identified personality traits that they wanted to develop and then were given some behavioral challenges that matched what someone high in that trait would do.

For example, if you wanted to be more extroverted, you’d be challenged to say hello to a random stranger at the coffee shop. Or if you wanted more conscientiousness, you’d be challenged to work for 30 minutes without looking at your phone. And over the course of the study, those who completed a large number of these challenges saw the greatest changes, particularly in extraversion, conscientiousness, and emotional stability.

The key part was actually doing the challenges. If you said you were going to try them, but didn’t follow through, no shift occurred. Or if you repeatedly tried the challenges and failed at them, you didn’t see a change. Those who figured out how to take small, trait-consistent actions reported changes in their personality.

Now, it’s important to note that it was a small shift in the levels of these traits. It wasn’t that someone deeply introverted suddenly became the life of the party. And a recent review had similar findings, small changes with interventions that focused on repeated behavior. But it helps back up Aristotle’s contention.

We become what we consistently do.

Dolly Being Dolly

The point of Parton’s wisdom isn’t to fake your way through life or to aim to transform yourself into someone new simply to fit in or benefit from it. She said, “Find out who you are and do it on purpose.”

It’s a dual-process. The acting is only part of the equation. It’s figuring out what matters to you, what values you hold, and then making sure your actions align with them…over and over and over.

She’s warning us about the pull of status and fame. That we imperceptibly shift away from what we once held dear, as we take actions that start revealing and prioritizing something else.

That consistency may help explain why in an age where tribalism reigns and division is the norm, Dolly Parton somehow transcended it all. Seriously, we have data on this. Four months ago, in a UMASS poll, she had a +65 net favorability rating. She was the only person tested whom majorities of Democrats, Republicans, and independents all viewed favorably.

She’d figured out how to have a clear, distinct public identity, but one where her values were remarkably stable. She didn’t ask people to believe a carefully constructed identity. Over decades, she supplied the evidence for.

Parton could have succumbed to the trappings of fame. She could have lost her roots. She could have stopped standing up and doing what she thought was right, especially when it potentially cost her sales and fans.

Yet, there she was throughout her life, sending books to millions of kids, funding vaccine research, paying families struck by disasters, helping increase graduation rates in her home county, supporting marriage equality, relishing her Appalachian roots, removing “Dixie” from an attraction, and writing songs about sexism, poverty, pregnancy, judgment, and working-class exploitation.

But Parton just kept acting in alignment with her values. She was the rare star who put doing above signalling. “It’s always nice to be recognized for what you do, although that’s not why you do it.” Instead of sending signals to a particular tribe, she led with human values. She told us as much, “I try to get into the human element of it.”

Dolly Parton might just be the perfect case study for Aristotle. And we can see it right there in her songs. In 2023, researchers analyzed 247 of her songs written between 1967 and 2020. They then compared them against every top-10 country and pop hit of the last fifty years.

Her lyrics scored highest in positive language. Maybe, not too much of a surprise there. But they also scored highest in negative language.

She tackled the hard stuff: poverty, heartbreak, betrayal, unplanned pregnancy, social injustice, suicide, and the death of a child. But she did so with just enough positivity to lift you up. Again, it’s in the data. Her songs used more language of “elevation” than either comparison group. Meaning, she had more lyrics that were about feeling moved, uplifted, or inspired by goodness.

And across her entire career, the positive tone never changed. The levels of awe, gratitude, elevation, and hope were stable for decades. Meanwhile over that same time frame both country and pop hits saw a decline in positivity.

She spent fifty years writing about poverty, heartbreak, and loss, and somehow left people feeling lifted by it. By looking straight at the thing and refusing to let it be the end of the story.

She found out who she was, and did it on purpose.

—Steve Magness

Thanks so much for reading my work. If you enjoyed it consider sharing it with others. The only way quality work spreads is if you help out.

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Applying this in Your Life

1. Identify what matters.

What are your values? Go through a values checklist and identify what resonates. Or think about someone in your life that you admire, what qualities do they have that you want to embody.

Write down a handful of values.

2. Turn the value into an action.

With your values, think of a small, deliberate action that someone with that value would do.

Instead of “Be social,” say “Every day on my commute home I’m going to call a friend I haven’t talked to in a while.”

3. Make the action small and freely chosen.

The key is to make it align and make it repeatable. It needs to be a challenge, but something that you can manage. And it’s got be something that you choose to do. You can’t outsource this.

4. Repeat

Make it like brushing your teeth or going for the run. It’s consistent nature that creates the transformation

5. Ingrain the Right Story

It’s not all action turns into story. Our interpretation and contextualization plays a role. We all know the person who suffers a loss or setback and it becomes an attack on their sense of self. And the person who fails, but somehow takes it as information instead of a verdict on who they are. Especially after setbacks, craft a good story. One that is authentic and true, but gives you somewhere to go in the future.

If you want to keep the conversation going, I’m active on the following social media platforms:

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My Books: Do Hard Things and Win the Inside Game

There are no phones, no performative playing for the camera to try to go viral, no random dances, just lots of awkward and silly faces. There are kids conversing in the hallways at their lockers, killing time talking before class starts. People are present. Sometimes a little bored. But they are there in the same room as everyone else.

There’s a bit of nostalgia pulling on us here. And surely those rose-tinted glasses colors our thinking. But there’s also something far deeper. A realization that you’re looking at one of the last times we were all immersed in the same reality, allowed to experience and live life instead of perform at it, or be a passive consumer of it.

We’ve traded something real for a filtered version of it. And I’d argue we’re paying a steep price. But let’s put down the glasses and look at the story the data tells.

From Local to Global and Outside to Inside

It just so happens to be that the American time use survey started in the early 2000s, where researchers assessed how we live our days in all of its glory and mundanity.

Consider the following:

• Time spent alone has jumped from ~5 hours a day to 7 from 2003 to 2024.

• Time spent at home: 7.7 to 9.1 hours.

• Socializing and communicating has dropped 24% overall

• For young people, it’s plummeted from an average of 60 minutes a day to just 35.

• Share of people who socialized at all during a given day dropped to 30%.

• Reading for personal entertainment is down 35%

• The share of Americans reading 5 minutes or less per day is 84%

• TV use is flat, but computer and video game use is up, and of course phone use has skyrocketed.

In short, we spend more time alone, in our houses, looking at screens. This isn’t news to anyone reading this. You’re doing so alone, on your phone or computer, most likely.

But the shifting world has led to two things that have had a striking impact, and that we haven’t found a solution to yet:

1. We’ve moved from local to global.

2. We removed the constraints that naturally made us engage with the world and others.

A Local Society vs. A Global One.

Those videos of high school in the 2000s give us a glimpse into how our environment was set up for much of modernity. It was local. Yes, every high school had similarities, just like every workplace did and we could satirize them in movies like Office Space. But they represented their own local community.

You found your place in that environment and were forced to learn how to engage with it. That meant seeing if you belonged on the track or football team, dance or theater, math club or band. Your relationships, drama, mentorship and more importantly comparison points were all real and right in front of you.

This is how we evolved to live, in local communities where it was much easier to find a place where we belong, are good at something, can contribute, and feel significant. That’s easier to do in a community of hundreds or thousands. Not so easy to do when your comparison has shifted to the entire freaking world.

As we’ve moved to less socialization, more time spent at home, alone, and on our tech, all of that pushes us to see the world through a global lens. We no longer ask am I the fastest kid on the block, we see that some 8 year old somewhere would smoke us. We no longer ask for advice from the handyman down the street or that old lady who can cook, we go search for the perfect answer online via the latest mommy influencer.

We fool ourselves into thinking that having more answers makes us happier and healthier. It doesn't. It mostly makes us miserable.

When researchers studied over 100,000 teens across 26 countries they found that when faced with a strong academic comparison, an individuals self-concept drops. Your sense of yourself comes from your reference group. We were meant to compare. It’s just in 2003, that initial reference group was a pond. And now, it’s the ocean for everyone.

That’s not to say we want to be the big fish in the little pond forever. It’s just that for most of life, we had a scaffolding mechanism. You compared locally and gradually expanded that as you showed your stuff. You were the school champion, district champion, state champion, and on and on. Now, we’ve thrown everyone, adults and kids, into a giant ocean and said good luck.

And to make things worse, you used to be able to fail in private, or at least in a pond so small no one cared. You had the freedom to make mistakes, learn from them, and grow. History is littered with teenagers doing absolutely idiotic things and then growing into functional adults. Yet, now, the dumb things you would have said to your friends in generations past are now preserved on social media, to haunt or at least embarrass you years later.

And it’s not just that, the public nature of it all is what causes pressure and choking. In a study looking at sports, it wasn’t money or increasing the incentives that caused athletes to choke, it was being watched. Choking is a self-presentation problem.

Which is why practice largely occurs in private or among trusted teammates. We need to struggle and potentially fail in private or small groups because the struggle is what eventually leads to growth. Instead, if we’re always on a stage, always feel like we’re in public, we never get to the point of struggle that leads to growth. Which is why so many of us adopt a performative sense of living or working, instead of being. The performance protects us in a world where everything is in front of a crowd.

We’ve made failure more costly.

Is it any wonder why people increasingly feel insignificant and without meaning? We’ve rigged the game.

We Removed the Constraints that Kept us Sane

If you wanted to talk to your friends, ask someone out, or plan anything, you had to pick up the phone at home, call someone, know that their parents were going to answer, fumble through an awkward exchange with them, and then talk to them. You were forced to work through some initial discomfort.

If you had a problem with someone at track practice or school, you couldn’t text or DM them. You had to talk to them face to face and work it out.

And in between classes, or waiting in line during your lunch break at work, you had nothing to pull out and distract yourself with. You had to either sit with the boredom or engage with others around you.

The constraints we once had pushed us out of the house or into conversation. They made it hard to hide away and nudged us towards talking or doing things with other people because there was no way around it. Those constraints were helping us live an active life.

This isn’t to be all doomer. Of course, the convenience of being able to text your friends whenever, or finding the answer to just about any issue online, can be beneficial. But, when we remove all the friction, a life of ease becomes a kind of default state that we have to overcome.

It’s no different from why exercise was largely popularized. For most of humanity, exercise wasn’t a thing. Why? Because we spent our days doing physical labor, walking for miles, lifting heavy objects, and so forth. You didn’t need to exercise, living life took care of it. But then, we removed the friction of life. And if you didn’t replace that with exercise, well, you were screwed.

It’s much the same here. We removed all of the friction and constraints that used to push us to go live and engage with real people in the real world.

So What Do We Do?

1. Train Your Mental Muscle

In 2020, psychologist had 200 people reconnect with an old friend, except they split the group between doing so on e-mail or phone. Over 2/3rd preferred to do it over e-mail, even though they thought phone would be better, because they thought e-mail would remove the awkwardness.

They were right and wrong. Right that the phone call produced significantly higher bonding. And wrong that there would be any awkwardness. They reported feeling the same level of awkwardness either way. The feeling they feared was misplaced.

It’s similar to exercise, from the outside looking in, it seems like it must suck. But anyone who’s ever run, cycled, or swum knows that you strangely look forward to the effort. You learn to love it. And research backs this up.

Too often, we fear the feeling, even though that fear is overblown. Knowing this helps, but more so it’s building the mental muscle to get used to it.

There’s a reason why many young people hate phone calls, they never had to develop the mental muscle of having no other option. Think of your discomfort tolerance like a muscle. Train it up. Even with small bites of work.

2. Bring Back Local

Your sense of self is derived from your reference group. We can either have that foisted upon us and get stuck comparing to the mom, dad, athlete who seems to have it all together always on Instagram. Or we can define it with something real.

It’s not just that our reference group is global, it’s that it’s filtered into the best parts, leaving out all the messy parts. Go local. Find a mentor, a training group, a community gym, a baking class, a writer’s group.

We can’t escape comparison. It’s in our nature, but we can make it against real people, with all their foibles intact.

And once you go local, try to make an impact there. Instead of striving to be the influencer online, try to be the person your neighborhood calls for advice on plumbing or training or baking or whatever it is you’re good at.

3. Bring Back Constraints

Whenever we talk about topics like this, it’s easy to blame it all on the phones. And they certainly play a role. But more so, I want you to think about how to build your environment so it nudges you towards doing the hard or meaningful thing. Or at least getting out of the house.

Again, think about it with exercise. People who work out consistently don’t have some insane willpower. They set their life up to where it nudges them out the door. They join a running club so their teammates hold them accountable. They find trails or paths nearby so they can run from their front door. They lay out their gym clothes the night before or leave a packed bag in the front seat of their car.

They engineer their life to make it slightly easier to do. We need to take the same approach to our lives. Something I’ve been doing more often is whenever I’m alone in my car driving somewhere, I call someone I haven’t talked to in a while. I just go through my contacts and dial until someone answers. It’s become a hard-set rule. Off to the grocery store or pick up dinner? Call someone, even if it’s just for 10 minutes.

We need to build in constraints that push us to communicate and engage. And as an introvert science nerd who'd rather just read a book, I don't find this easy. But we’ve removed the in-between times when this used to naturally occur. The waiting for food, standing in lines, killing time between classes. We can see it right there in those nostalgic videos of 2000s high school. We removed everything that pushes us to be in the room with someone else.

So pick up the phone and make the call. Rig your environment to make it where you have to engage. Change your comparison point to real people living instead of filtered people cosplaying. That’s the antidote.

-Steve

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My Books: Do Hard Things and Win the Inside Game

“Everyone wants to be the best. But very few people are willing to do what it actually takes…You have to fall in love with the boredom. You have to fall in love with the repetition. If you can find joy in the mundane work that no one else sees, the lights will eventually shine on you.”

NBA legend Kobe Bryant was explaining what it actually takes. And decades before he offered up embracing the boring as the key, a sociologist who spent years embedded with Olympic swimmers came to the exact same conclusion. Except he took it one step further.

In the 1980s, sociologist Daniel Chambliss went to the best swimming club in America and sat down and observed. He wanted to see the difference between the age-group, club, and elite swimmers who were training there.

As one of the coaches, Mark Schubert, put it when coaches and athletes would arrive at the club, “They all have to come to Mecca, and see what we do. They think we have some big secret.” Instead, within an hour they were bored. Looking at their watches. Waiting for the revelation that never came.

Chambliss noted that the top athletes’ approach to the sport was entirely different. As he wrote: “What others see as boring… they find peaceful, even meditative, often challenging, or therapeutic.” He concluded that “Excellence is mundane.” What the best of the best did was figure out how to do all the boring, repetitive work that made a difference for a long time. Or as one of the central figures in his study, Mary Meagher, a three-time Olympic gold medalist, said “People don’t know how ordinary success is.”

But he didn’t just stop at they get used to the boring stuff. The swimmers he observed took staring at a line for hours and made it interesting. They looked forward to the repetition, it became a kind of challenge to master. At a certain point the thing stops being boring.

It’s Not About Boredom. It’s Meaning.

How could you not get bored looking at a line or shooting the same shot a hundred times? It seems unthinkable. Of course it’s boring. How could it not be? Well, science explains it.

That’s because we fundamentally misunderstand boredom. In 2012, researchers ran a series of studies to figure out what made boredom boredom. They came away with two main contributors to boredom: feeling unchallenged and judging the situation and your actions to be meaningless.

We all just assume that what makes something boring is the repetitiveness. But that’s not what the research says at all. It’s about doing an activity that feels pointless and doesn’t lead anywhere.

This is the same experience every high school cross country coach faces. When a young runner starts out, of course running a ton of loops around a park or on the track is boring. It sucks. But you don’t say, “okay, let’s make it fun and quit running and instead play games every practice.” Because what every coach knows is if they can get that kid to stick around, eventually they’ll get hooked. The workouts start to have meaning. The summer miles have a purpose. It might start small with helping you improve your performance, but over time it grows into a part of you. You find yourself out on those runs, and start to weirdly look forward to the swirl of fatigue.

And that’s precisely what research shows. While we tend to think of effort as something hard and unpleasant, work by Michael Inzlicht and colleagues found that effort can become rewarding in its own right. They called it the effort paradox, “Not only can the same outcomes be more rewarding if we apply more (not less) effort, sometimes we select options precisely because they require effort.”

The discipline and grind folks on social media try to convince us that it’s all about tolerating discomfort or making sure your discipline can withstand the suffering, but that’s not what actual people in the arena experience at all. Effort becomes the reward itself. It stops being a cost.

It’s why just about every elite performer I’ve worked with doesn’t see the hard work as a “sacrifice.” They fall in love with and enjoy the process, even the boring and really freaking hard parts. It’s what Bryant told us. Fellow basketball superstar Steph Curry has talked about it, “It always became just a joy of finding ways to get better. Every day I was just exploring, trying stuff...I was always curious about how can I get better the next session?”

And it’s precisely what Chambliss found with the Olympic swimmers: “It is incorrect to believe that top athletes suffer great sacrifices to achieve their goals. Often, they don’t see what they do as sacrificial at all. They like it.”

To paraphrase Shrek, what seems boring at first is an illusion. It’s because you haven’t put in the work to peel back the layers of the onion and see that the mundane is actually quite interesting.

From Boring to Fascinating.

There’s a story in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance where the main character is teaching a student how to write an essay and she’s stuck. She is eager to do well but just can’t figure it out. So the teacher tells her to narrow down the topic, to make it about the town they’re in, and then when that doesn’t work, the street they’re on, and then finally: "Narrow it down to the front of one building on the main street of Bozeman. The Opera House. Start with the upper left-hand brick."

She came back the next class with a 5,000-word essay. "I sat in the hamburger stand across the street, and started writing about the first brick, and the second brick, and then by the third brick it all started to come and I couldn't stop."

Pirsig’s point was that the brick was always interesting. She just hadn’t really seen it, spent time observing it. Rarely do we take the time to investigate something and see it fully and clearly.

Even a brick can be fascinating if we give it our full attention. Interest is about being engaged with the world. Whatever we give attention gains in value.

In 2006, two researchers gave us a model for how interests develop. They found that interest has four phases: triggered situational → maintained situational → emerging individual → well-developed individual interest.

We often treat our passions as something we have or we don’t. Either it initially grabs our attention and we fall in love with it or we don’t and move on. But that’s not how passion works. It develops with time and care. Which is precisely what the interest model gets at: we need to spend time seeing if the thing catches fire. As their model shows, the later stages need more stored knowledge, value, and self-generated curiosity. In other words, we’ve got to have the foundation and see that this thing matters to us, before we start to see it as a passion.

That’s the whole point. No one thinks that running endless laps around a track is interesting the first time they do it. Nope, it’s boring. Mind numbingly so. But the more time you do it, the more layers you pull back. You start to see the nuance of performance. You start to feel and slice and dice apart the variations of effort or discomfort that you’re experiencing. While from the outside it might seem like every rep is the same, you learn to experience that every run or repeat brings something interesting and a bit different.

We need to spend enough time staring at the brick to see that it really does have value. Most of us never get to that stage because we dismiss it from the get-go. “How in the world could that be interesting?” And if we go look at that brick long enough, we frame it as a test of suffering.

So what?

Excellence is boring. But in the most interesting way possible. It’s staying with that run, swim, or sentence long enough so that you appreciate its nuance. You stay with it like a craftsman making his 10,000th piece of the same pottery, realizing that while it may be the same cup to others, each one presents its own challenge and tells a different story.

It sounds absurd. How can staring at a black line, doing 40x400m repeats, working on the same paragraph over and over, not be boring? But the answer to that question is the key to excellence in just about anything.

It’s the answer that John L. Parker conveyed to us 50 years ago in his cult classic Once a Runner, that was based on his time training with Olympians like Frank Shorter:

“What was the secret, they wanted to know; in a thousand different ways they wanted to know The Secret. And not one of them was prepared, truly prepared, to believe that it had not so much to do with chemicals and zippy mental tricks as with that most unprofound and sometimes heart-rending process of removing, molecule by molecule, the very tough rubber that comprised the bottoms of his training shoes. The Trial of Miles; Miles of Trials.”

Kobe said fall in love with the boredom. The people who get there stopped calling it boring a long time ago. The trial of miles was fascinating to them. Even if it didn’t look like it from the outside.

-Steve Magness

Thanks so much for reading my work. If you enjoyed it consider sharing it with others. The only way quality work spreads is if you help out.

Second, consider subscribing. You’ll get a free weekly newsletter on a topic about mental or physical performance and what genuine excellence is all about.

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My Books: Do Hard Things and Win the Inside Game

When parents lose their minds in youth sports, we often ascribe it to the parent living vicariously through their kid, trying to gain status through their child’s performance or to relive their glory days. While that’s certainly a driver, it is not the only one. What if another big reason youth sports has become such a circus for adults is because so many adults are numbed out in their daily lives, and their kid’s baseball game is one of the last places they feel fully invested and alive?

What follows is an extreme illustration, but I think it contains more than a kernel of truth.

Many of us are stuck in jobs we don’t love while being told that the only place we can achieve or obtain status is through our careers. We work hard, chasing the external items—a bigger house, a fancier car, a nicer suit—that are supposed to fulfill us, but always leave us wanting. To recover from a long day at work full of meetings, distractions, and manufactured stress, we head home and veg out on screens. We absorb momentary hits of dopamine as we scroll, hoping it will quell our anxiety or existential distress. At worst, we move from one shallow and distracted form of leisure to the next, as if we are floating through our lives like characters in the movie WALL-E.

The Western world’s health crisis shows we’re moving our bodies less than ever before. We’ve engineered effortful physical activity out of our lives. At the same time, the epidemic of loneliness shows we are disconnected from others. We’ve streamlined the connection to a point where it’s no longer genuine. We have a pseudo-connection instead of the real thing. In short, we live in a world that is increasingly numbed out, void of opportunities for presence, connection, and aliveness.

So, for that brief moment in the stands at the baseball diamond or rec center, watching our nine-year-old play sports makes us feel something. We let go of our device, give our full attention to what is unfolding in front of us, experience actual adrenaline, and remember what it’s like to feel alive. This doesn’t just apply to youth sports. Former professional athletes experience something similar when they retire. They’ve spent a lifetime under the spotlight, in a career full of objective results, intense feelings, and emotions. And then it ends. The high is gone. Despite making tens of millions of dollars, many ex-professional athletes suffer from anxiety, depression, substance use disorders, or gambling addictions. These are all predictable responses to a shift from peak-aliveness to a less invigorating existence.

You also see this with how many former professional athletes get into coaching or commentating. It’s not often about status—many of these former players coach in the high school ranks or announce at division three games. And former pros rarely need the money, but as I experience from my journey of being a D-1 athlete to coaching, the closest you get to that feeling of lacing up the spikes yourself is to coach someone else to do it. Coaching makes you feel alive.

In a world that numbs us out and pushes us towards distraction and avoidance, sports are a place to still feel something. We’re forced to be in the present, to reckon with the stakes of having a concrete outcome in an activity we care about, to experience pain, fatigue, and discomfort, and be rewarded with the satisfaction of overcoming them. We used to have these experiences more frequently in our daily lives. We didn’t have phones and devices to distract us. We were active participants. Now, we’re passive participants. Many watch sports instead of playing them, and most of us only half-watch, as we are scrolling on another screen while the game is being played. We observe others baking, gardening, or reading on TikTok instead of doing these things ourselves. Too often, our jobs lack tangible end products through which we can evidently see our contributions.

In an ​analysis​ of how young adults spend their time compared to 2010, researchers found that time spent in nearly every activity we rate as being meaningful has declined. Meanwhile, we’ve seen an increase in time spent doing activities that are low in meaningfulness, such as video games and social media. Additionally, activities we do alone have increased, while those we do with others have declined.

One of the downsides of our digitally dominated world is that it is harder for us to feel significant and truly connected. As the media researcher Sherry Turkle puts it, we are “alone together.”

The antidote is to do real things, in the real world, and with real people.

The renowned mythologist Joseph Campbell once said, “People say that what we’re all seeking is meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.”

But we’ve engineered a world where it’s hard to take Campbell’s advice. The same reason parents lose their minds on the sidelines in youth sports is the reason so many people seem to enjoy screaming at others on social media. For a brief moment, ‘owning’ or trolling someone on the internet makes you feel something deeply, even if it brings about negative emotions; the ability to elicit emotion is a powerful tool to harbor.

It also explains why everyone on social media is jumping into cold plunges. It’s not really to help boost metabolism, activate brown fat, or whatever other pseudo-scientific explanation is given. It’s because it makes people who are chronically addicted to the internet or living a life highlighted by despondency, feel something again! And there is merit to that. But ideally, we develop sources of aliveness that are richer, more textured, and more meaningful than sitting in cold water. Here are five principles to help:

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1. More active doing, less passive consuming. (Preferably with friends.)

We need more playing sports instead of consuming them. We need more hobbies and crafts instead of watching others do them on YouTube. And when you do watch events like sports, documentaries, or dramas, try to leave the second screen behind so you can be more present for what is in front of you.

2. Train for something. Embrace discomfort.

There’s nothing like training physically to remind you that you’re alive. You either lift the weight or you don’t. You experience fatigue and must navigate it. You’re inundated with a cacophony of inner sensations and feelings that rarely greet you in the modern world.

Often, we seek out the path of least resistance. That’s a one way ticket to the numbness we described. When we tell our brain to prioritize avoidance as a strategy over and over, eventually it gets the picture.

Choosing hard things is what trains our inner alarm to handle the load. This could be by taking up a sport, or a challenging craft, or just doing the small things that you’ve been avoiding, like that difficult conversation. Anything that sends the signal that you can handle and engage with discomfort.

3. Create something real. Be a craftsperson.

Build something. Take up woodworking, gardening, or stained glass. We used to have hobbies that resulted in the creation of something concrete, where you can see the end result and understand the progress that was made along the way. Building and creating grounds us in the real world. It’s why training for a marathon or deadlift isn’t too dissimilar from building a table or tending a garden.

4. Learn to listen to your inner state

A part of the numbness comes from ignoring or turning off our interoception, or the ability to read our inner signals. It’s the runner who never learned how to listen to their body because they always run with music or a podcast and over rely on their GPS watch.

We are masters at suppressing our inner world. Just look at what we’ve done with boredom. Instead of sitting with that experience, we grab for our phone at the first hint of the feeling.

Sit with your feelings. Whether it’s on a run, walk, or just sitting waiting for your food to arrive.

It’s the foundation for understanding what truly makes you feel engaged versus what provides a fleeting distraction.

5. Prioritize your basic psychological needs.

We need to find ways to attain significance, direction, and connection in the real world. Sometimes work does the job, but not always. In a world that has moved from local to global, it’s easy to get stuck in the comparison game, which will make you feel worthless and like you’re falling short, regardless of how great your life is. The antidote is to go in the other direction—to be aware globally, but to ensure you are also engaging locally. It’s better to be known in your community than it is to be a celebrity on the internet.

Try to make a difference. Not in the I’m going to change the world kind of way, but in how it’s been for nearly all of humankind. I’m going to make a difference for my family or local community. Giving back, helping others, realizing that the world doesn’t revolve around us is often the antidote to the numbness that stalks us.

– Steve Magness

Exercise is the number one thing you can do to improve your long-term physical and cognitive health. The physical benefits are well documented, but it also comes with an array of cognitive benefits as well. It improves focus, creativity, problem-solving, emotion regulation, stress tolerance.

If exercise could be turned into a drug, it would be a trillion dollar blockbuster.

Which begs the question: what is the best exercise routine to follow?

While maximizing performance in a specific sport requires complexity and nuance, when it comes to health, longevity, and performance outside of sport, the best way to exercise is actually pretty simple. This may come as a surprise if you spend time in the health and wellness social media or podcast world. Look around and you’ll see references to various protocols containing all sorts of acronyms (HIIT, SIIT, LT, VO2max). Some are better than others, but everywhere you look it seems like someone is giving you a complicated mess of a program: do this, do that…until that goes out of fashion and it’s time to do this again. And around and around you go.

If I wanted to complicate exercise, I certainly could. I can get into the weeds and talk complexity with the best of them. And there’s a time and place for that if we’re talking about going from a 4:01 miler to a 3:59. The edges of your performance requires nuance. If anyone wants to have an argument on fitness acronyms, I am here for it.

But at the end of the day, for the vast majority of folks, they don’t need a fancy protocol that feels cool to talk about. So if you care about health and longevity, and aren’t trying to qualify for the Boston Marathon or hit a 1500 pound powerlifting total, what actually matters?

Here’s my keep it simple principles of exercise for health, longevity, and all-around life performance:

1. Do something long and easy three or more days per week:

How long? Shoot for a minimum of 30 minutes, but if you can build that up to 60 minutes, great! Why 30 minutes? Anything is better than nothing, but if you look at a long history of research from mice to humans on aerobic adaptations, 30 minutes is where you start to get the biggest gains, and taking that up to 60 minutes continues to accrue substantial benefits. There are still benefits to going longer than 60 minutes, especially if you enjoy what you’re doing, but the returns diminish once you hit the hour mark.

What type of exercise? Whatever you enjoy and can stick to consistently. Running, cycling, ellipticaling, rucking, ski-erging, swimming. Pick something you like doing and do that.

How hard? This should be easy. You should be able to have a conversation, with just the slightest hint of needing to catch air. If you can’t maintain a conversation, you’re going too hard; slow down.

Also: don’t lose your mind trying to stay in “zone 2.” The truth is that zones are a mostly arbitrary dividing point and are meant to help researchers categorize training. They aren’t laws. If you are feeling good on a certain day, it’s fine to go a touch harder. If you feel like trash, there is nothing wrong with slowing down. The whole point of easy training is accumulate enough volume where you can do it again and again, for weeks and months on end.

Why three or more days per week? It’s a reasonable amount where you get most of the benefits for mental, physical, and cognitive health. If you enjoy it, do it more!

2. Strength train two days a week for 30 minutes or more:

What kind? Think compound movements that utilize lots of muscles. Squats, lunges, push ups, pull ups, wall sits, step ups, kettlebell swings. What you target depends on your goals. But for general health and overall life performance, you get nearly all of the benefits from compound movements.

If you are time crunched, you can work through a circuit where you alternate muscle groups with short breaks in between (e.g., squats to push ups to lunges to pull ups). As these circuits become easier, add some weight. You can use dumbbells, a weight vest (which can double for rucking), or a backpack filled with books. Get creative and think progressive overload (gradually adding stimulus as you improve).

Sets and reps? There are dozens of set and rep schemes out there. Some push more towards growing muscle size, others toward speed and power. But for general health, you don’t need to get lost in the details. The basic gist is that with whatever strength routine you use, you should have a few reps in the tank when you finish. You are looking for a moderate, doable challenge. If you’re older, throw in some balance and stability work in a brief warmup.

Sustainability beats perfection any day of the week.

3. One day per week, go (kind of) hard.

What does “hard” consist of? Usually harder sessions are done with interval training. But here’s the beauty…there is no magical interval training. You can do short and fast, longer and a bit slower, with long rest or short rest, jogging or standing. Every interval workout has a slightly different stimulus, but for health the most important thing is that you do something somewhat hard. Don’t listen to anyone who tells you that there is a special interval training workout that is the best. That’s a lie. We have 120 years of training history that shows we can attain similar benefits with a variety of intervals. It’s all about how you manipulate the variables (intensity, duration, and recovery)

How hard? About a 7 or 8 out of 10. Or feel like you could do 1 or 2 more intervals. You aren’t lying down on the track, gasping for air, feeling like you are going to throw up. The reality is, if you were training for performance, you would only very rarely go to this place anyways. If you are training for health, you benefit most from going hard, but not so hard that you are completely spent.

Start simple and easy: The reality is this. The hard and higher intensity work is the icing on the cake. In fact, research and training history tells us that intense work gives us more benefit if it’s preceded by building an aerobic base. Why? That aerobic foundation allows you to handle, absorb, and bounce back from the intensity. Without it, you’re just surviving, and not adapting well. If you are a true beginner, spend a lot of time doing the easy work, and then slowly introduce some intensity. Start by adding in anywhere between 4 and 10 fifteen second pickups to an otherwise easy workout, taking as much rest as you want between each burst of effort. The purpose isn’t fatigue. It’s to get your body and mind used to going a bit faster. These are a great transition workout to intensity.

Vary it up: Go short and fast one week (e.g., 8 x 30 seconds quite hard with a super easy recovery); longer and slower the next (4 x 5 minutes with 3 minutes rest at a pace you could sustain for 45 minutes); and in between the next (e.g, 6 x 2 minutes with 2 minutes rest at a pace you could sustain for 20 minutes). Use hills, the track, the road, an assault bike, a treadmill, whatever. Varying things up changes the stimulus. It allows you to run up and down the gamut of intensities, which does a better job of making sure you are getting a wide variety of adaptations across muscle fiber types. This is advantageous versus sticking to the same supposed “optimal” interval training workout every week.

Why one day a week? If you are training for performance, say to run your best 10k, you’d do more volume and have two hard workouts a week. The increase in volume (and aerobic fitness that comes with it) allows you to handle and bounce back from more hard workouts. Even if you are training at an elite level, seldom would you have three hard workouts per week. So once a week is a good happy medium. It’s a level most people can handle, without overwhelming the system. If someone tells you to go hard three or more days per week, you shouldn’t listen to them. Yes, that’s a bit harsh, but it’s also the truth.

And… that’s it. If you want to train for health, the above will get you 95 percent of the way there. If you have more time, feel free to add more easy bouts of exercise, or occasionally do another hard workout. But if we’re talking about what it takes to get the vast majority of the benefits for living a longer and healthier life, the above makes the program. If you want to qualify for Boston or hit a big time deadlift PR, it’s going to take more focused and specific work. But that’s not what this post is about. Now, let’s briefly talk about a few other important concepts for building a consistent exercise habit.

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1. Stress + Rest = Growth. Don’t stack intensity!

A few months ago, I listened to a podcast that described a program for novices that went: tempo run, interval run, fartlek run in back to back to back days. For the uninitiated, that’s three hard or moderately hard workouts in a row. Don’t do that. Even if you are elite. It’s dumb. Listen, more than 60 years ago, legendary coach Bill Bowerman coined the Hard-Easy principle, which essentially says after you do a hard workout you need one (or more) easy days to balance things out. Follow that principle. Doing back to back hard workouts, especially for non-elites, is a recipe for disaster. Your favorite podcaster who tells you otherwise is either way outside of their expertise; has no idea what “hard” actually means; using steroids; or some combination of the three.

2. Don’t go there until you need to go there.

Progress gradually. Don’t jump from a 30-minute run to a 60-minute run. Don’t try 400m repeats in 90 seconds until you’ve successfully done them in 92 seconds. Gradual progression over the long haul is the name of the game.

3. Consistency over intensity. Don’t be an Instagram hero.

The most important piece of your exercise program is that you stick to it for a long time. Don’t try to be the workout hero who smashes a hard workout, but then takes a week off.

The easiest thing to do with exercise is create fatigue. But that’s not what you’re after. You are trying to gently embarrass the body so that it adapts. For the vast majority of folks, and especially those who aren’t trying to maximize performance, embarrassing the body doesn’t mean going anywhere near all-out, lying on the track, writhing in pain. That’s humiliating the body. And even in elite training, such efforts are incredibly rare.

Other ways to foster consistency:

• If you can, exercise with other people. It’s easier (and more fun) with others, so join a run club, local gym, or rucking group.

• Don’t overdo it. Don’t go “all out.” Don’t do dumb things. Injury is often the death knell to any consistent exercise program. You can’t avoid injuries altogether, but you can minimize them by following a smart, logical training plan.

• Make it simpler to move. Can you go for a run or walk near your home? Is there a nice park nearby? Is your gym on the drive home from work? Do you have a strength routine you can do in your hotel room when traveling? Make it easier to get something in, now matter where you are.

4. Think years, not days.

When legendary marathon runner Frank Shorter was asked about his training, he said (and we’re paraphrasing): two hard workouts, a long run, and as much mileage as you can handle. Repeat for years. The last part is the key. You want an exercise program that is sustainable.

5. If you want to move from health and longevity to something more performance based, get a coach!

There are a number of wonderful coaches out there in all sports. Find one that fits with your goals, and preferably someone with a history of coaching experience in that sport or activity.

-Steve

P.S. If you want to help me out with some research, fill out this survey on coaching and reaching your potential. It’s about the best practices and your experiences with either coaching or being coached, regardless of the domain.

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​Instagram: ​Steve Magness​

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My Books: Do Hard Things and Win the Inside Game

Some of us on social media, others as our workplace or even AI monitors us. It’s now normal to be constantly judged, evaluated, and scored.

The obvious one is social media, where we create an image to get likes, shares, and follows. From youth sports to video games, concerts, parties, and just everyday life, so much of it is captured. Which means so much of it is performative.

But it’s not just kids or games, it’s in the very work that we do.

In the workplace, keyboard tracking, screen monitoring, and even AI-based camera systems have skyrocketed in the last few years. Industry estimates in 2022 suggested that 78% of companies used monitoring tools, with 45% tracking keystrokes. In some professions, workers have much of their day videoed and then broken down by AI. All in the name of performance and optimization.

How absurd has it gotten? Hospice chaplains are being tracked and given “productivity points.” It led one chaplain to ask: “Do I see the patients who earn the points or do I see the patients who really need to be seen?”

We live in a world where there’s always an observer, and we’re often scored.

George Orwell feared that the government would install cameras everywhere to track us. That’s happened to some degree. But more than that, we installed our own and called it content.

There’s a steep cost to always being on stage. One that hits not only our stress levels and performance, but also our ethics, our morality, and our ability to figure out who in the world we are.

The Front and the Backstage

“All the world is not, of course, a stage, but the crucial ways in which it isn't are not easy to specify."

In his 1959 book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Erving Goffman gave us the analogy of the theater for how we live our social lives. There’s a front stage, where we perform for an audience. It’s polished and narrow, shaped with that audience in mind. And there’s a backstage, where we drop the act, step out of character, recover, and prepare.

Goffman argued that we need the separation. The backstage isn’t where we hide. It’s where honesty and grounding become possible. It’s where we hear from our fellow performers and our coaches. Where we try, and sometimes fail at, different versions of the act.

I’d take it a step further: the backstage is where sanity and growth live.

The Costs

What do we give up by living on the fronstage? Well, for starters, we tend to actually perform worse. And feel stressed out while doing it. But more so, it shifts our ethics, behaviors, and even identity.

Performance

We’ve known for a long time that an audience enhances performance on simple, well-practiced tasks and impairs it on complex or still-being-learned ones. A meta-analysis of 241 studies confirmed the pattern. Being watched sharpens what’s already ingrained and degrades what you’re still figuring out.

The camera is an externalized self-consciousness machine. It pulls us out of the moment and gets us thinking about who’s watching and how we look doing it. It’s why an audience sits at the core of choking in sport. The stress pushes us to self-monitor, and the skill falls off a cliff.

It isn’t just physical or cognitive performance that goes. A series of studies found that surveillance alone, with no judgment attached afterward, lowered creativity in both children and adults. You don’t have to grade someone to shrink their thinking. Watching is enough.

In a 2012 study, researchers put this to the test inside the world’s second-largest phone factory. Over five months, assembly lines with a curtain hung between workers and observers were 10–15% more productive than lines in full view.

The reason why? When visible, workers performed the procedure exactly as written. When they weren't being watched, they used the tricks they'd picked up to speed the process along. Accountability never went anywhere — output was still measured the entire time. What the curtain removed was the audience.

In other words, surveillance had been producing better theater, not better work.

Ethics, morality, and learning

The pitch for surveillance is that it keeps people honest. The data says the opposite. A recent study found that monitored employees were more likely to cheat on tests, steal equipment, and deliberately slow down than unmonitored ones.

And the reason gets at why it’s so corrosive. Surveillance reduced people’s sense of agency. They’d turned over control, which let them outsource their responsibility along with it. The person watching is responsible now. If they don’t catch me taking this, that’s on them.

Pair that with Amy Edmondson’s work on psychological safety and you can see how bad this gets. Edmondson originally found that better hospital teams seemed to make more errors. Except there was a twist. They weren’t making more. They were admitting more instead of hiding them.

The admitting is what matters. Better teams feel safe enough to own the mistake, which is what lets the team learn. When we hide mistakes, we never get to the learning part. Every error a camera catches is an error that stops being volunteered.

Identity

It isn’t just that we have no time to rest and recover backstage. It’s that we have nowhere to develop a sense of self.

Identity is a sense-making expedition. We dabble, explore, take wrong turns, and backtrack, all to figure out what we like, what we value, and where we belong. Traditionally most of that happens backstage, with small tests of stepping out front to try something before retreating behind the curtain to make sense of it and decide whether it’s the right stage at all. And backstage, the guidance comes from parents, friends, and coaches, people more likely to have our best interests at heart.

Now we hand that power to whoever is watching. It’s the audience capture phenomenon, where the performer gradually becomes whatever the audience rewards. We outsource our sense of self to the applause, the likes, the comments. Or, at work, we follow whatever the algorithm or the productivity score rewards, instead of what actually works or what the human being sitting in front of us needs.

And it’s not only who we’re becoming that takes the hit. The self collapses into a single character.

We lose the nuance and messiness that makes us who we are. Normally we have a number of different selves, all equally authentic. We bring a different part of us to being a mother, colleague, friend, and so forth. To put it simply, we’re a different self at church than when we watch the football game with our friends after. And that’s normal.

Remove the wall and we flatten into the safest possible version. When researchers studied how people behaved on social media, they found people gravitating toward a lowest-common-denominator performance. They called it context collapse. We self-censor toward an imagined audience that lacks all complexity. And we lose the context switching that used to tell us who to be and how to act.

Stress and burnout

We’ve already run the pilot study for the always-on-stage life: Twitch streamers. People financially incentivized to live in front of a camera. Fame and money are the prize, and they come with a bill.

In a 2023 study, 53% described pressure to remain “always on” and to present a cheerful front. One went further, describing the pressure “to not be a human being and just be an entertainer.” Other streamers describe it as “broadcasting as a character.”

Your sense of self gets captured and controlled. And even if you’re aware of it, it’s hard to step back because increasingly your value and financial status is dependent on performing. It’s why researchers report streamers feeling terrified of vacations or taking time off because someone else will be streaming, and they might lose relevance, views, and subscribers.

Which is part of why a 2024 study of full-time livestreamers found over 30% met the diagnostic threshold for burnout, and 67% reported high stress.

Streamers are the extreme case. They perform nonstop, carry their end of a parasocial relationship that depends on them showing up as a specific character, get scored in real time on how well they play the role, and watch their financial stability track that score. Detaching becomes nearly impossible when identity, community, and income are all tied to the same performance.

Most of us aren’t Twitch streamers. But increasingly, professions look more like that than like the artist working away in a studio, presenting only when the work is ready. And I don’t think we’ve reckoned with what shrinking the backstage costs us.

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But what about sports teams?

The analogy usually used to justify all this is the sports team. Teams watch their game and practice tape, replaying it to sharpen technique. That’s all true. But the comparison misses several things.

First, teams perform in front of others, so preparing for an audience is part of the job.And that comes with a performance cost. It’s why Shaq was actually a decent free throw shooter in practice but awful during games. Or even why a good three point shooter will make something like 85-95% uncontested shots in practice. Of course, performing can raise your game too. But performing on stage comes with a performance cost that is seldom thought about

Second, teams don’t record everything. They record a finite amount of deliberate practice and track some numbers in the weight room. What can be tracked is often negotiated in a collective bargaining agreement. There are deliberate breaks and stretches of downtime that take them off the stage entirely. An athlete knows the drill will be filmed. They don’t expect every step, decision, and coffee break to be logged.

Third, sports have a nearly endless supply of talent lining up. Everyone wants to make the team, and at the top they’re paid millions to be there. That isn’t most professions. Burn out your best people and the drop-off is severe. Sports teams are also forced to think seriously about breaks, downtime, and recovery. Something knowledge work is abysmal at.

And it only works with a good coach, one who’s built enough trust that critique lands as help rather than threat. A coach who empowers instead of stripping agency.

So the sports analogy teaches a more useful lesson than “use game tape everywhere.” The arena is bounded. Practice is closed. The film session ends. And the coach has to earn the trust that turns critique into learning. Observation works when it’s deliberate, transparent, and paired with an environment built for growth.

The Dark Version

In 1961, Goffman took a dark step towards what we see today with his book Asylums. He defined asylums as places where all spheres of life happen in one place, under one authority, on a schedule, under constant observation. He wasn’t thinking about living in a world with constant cameras, but the prisons, asylums, and similarly controlled institutions that were present in his time.

He went so far as to say that the end result of living in a place where there is no backstage to take the costume off is the "mortification of the self." The only institutions humans ever built without a backstage were the ones designed to break people.

Modern surveillance isn’t an asylum. But Goffman’s underlying point holds. When one authority reaches into every sphere, the separate roles and private spaces collapse into each other. We need places where we can detach, recover, experiment and fail without the audience watching. We need boundaries, to reestablish the barrier between the front and backstage.

We know this in our own lives. We all felt it when work went virtual and the commute became a walk upstairs to the spare bedroom. We feel it with a phone that keeps work on call around the clock. Without separation between work and life, burnout creeps in.

It’s even more pressing when it comes to the front and backstage of our self. We need different rooms for our identity, spaces to dabble and potentially fail, context that helps us develop various parts of ourself, and a place where we can let our guard down and recharge.

When we’re always being watched, when we’re always in character, we miss out on the very substance that builds a complex, well-functioning human being. We default to the lowest common dominator, instead of learning and growing.

And when everything around says we don’t measure up, don’t belong, and are constantly judged, our brain acts accordingly. We live in survival mode, and fear takes over. Brains in permanent judgment and survival mode don’t explore, don’t create, don’t tell the truth about errors, and slowly swap the craft for the performance of the craft. The surveillance of everything sticks us in a shallow, protective state.

This isn’t a treatise about never observing performance or never tracking anything. Instead, it’s a call to put more thought and care into what we’re doing. We need boundaries and agency. Instead, we’ve slow walked our way into an environment that destroys each.

-Steve

The state of reading is depressing.

Consider the following:

• Less than 50% of US adults read a book of any kind in 2022.

• Share of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day: 28% (2004) → 16% (2023).

• The share of 13-year-olds who “rarely or never” read for fun: 8% in 1984 → 31% in 2023.

• Only 35% of 2024 high-school seniors were “proficient” at analyzing complex themes.

These all came from a recent piece in The Atlantic on the end of reading by Rose Horowitch. And if you want to feel even more depressed, consider this line from Leah Price, a historian of reading at Rutgers: “(Reading) is becoming a kind of niche hobby, like stamp collecting or growing orchids.”

There’s no sugarcoating it. If you’re a lover of reading, it’s grim out there. It’s easy to turn articles like this into high-brow think pieces lamenting the decline of something we care a lot about. But I’d like to do something a bit different and more hopeful.

You see, I wasn’t a reader growing up. I resisted every attempt, choosing to read the CliffsNotes, watch the movie, or even read the children’s picture-book version of any book I was assigned in school. In my high school days, I’m pretty sure Huck Finn was the only assigned book I finished.

But somehow, I turned into a reader and writer. And on the other side, my wife was an avid reader who spent a number of years as an elementary school teacher and then literacy specialist. So between the two of us, we’ve got both sides covered.

Instead of lamenting why so few people read books or longform pieces anymore, let’s cover what to do about it. First, the problem.

Where We Went Wrong

This is our obesity epidemic moment. In short, over the past 40 years, we flooded the market with candy and processed foods, while at the same time eliminating green spaces, parks, and bike- or pedestrian-friendly areas. We reduced recess and PE time, made sports pay-to-play, and stuck kids in front of screens and phones to make sure they didn’t move. In sum, we made comfort easy, and rigged the environment against eating real food or moving much at all.

We did the same with reading. We rigged the environment, changed how we teach it, and we stripped out the choice and joy.

We don’t do anything deeply anymore. We live in a world of skimming that resembles knowledge the same way our franken-foods resemble the real variety.

TikTok, Instagram, Twitter — all of them teach us to skim, looking for some shiny object to catch our eye before moving on to the next thing. Researching used to mean going deep on a topic. Then it became googling for a quick answer. Now AI teaches us to go after the gist. All to create the illusion of knowing.

In a recent article, Amherst professor Austin Sarat detailed how the students he teaches at an elite university can no longer finish a book. “Students now come to my office not to discuss what they’ve read, but to ask how to skim it. I generally refuse. I try instead to teach them close reading — the slow, deliberate kind that can’t be shortcut.”

He’s not fighting the tide alone: surveys of high school English teachers show they now assign an average of 2.81 full books a year, down from four a decade and a half ago. Some students reach graduation having read only excerpts.

It’s the end result of a society that values superficial convenience over slow, hard-earned depth.

And that has consequences. According to attention researcher Gloria Mark at UC Irvine, our average sustained attention on a screen has dropped from 2.5 minutes in 2004 to 47 seconds. We’ve essentially detrained our brains. It’s like telling someone who hasn’t exercised in 20 years to start by running 3 miles every day. When a short walk makes you out of breath, telling someone to run is a death march.

If you can only focus for less than a minute, there’s little hope of reading a book. Your brain does what it’s trained to do: look around and find something better. And that something better is often a video on your phone designed to keep you scrolling.

We can see the impact of phones in the data. When surveys look at the frequency of reading and the reported enjoyment of it, both fall off a cliff at the average age a kid gets their first smartphone (10–11ish).

And while it’s easy to get pessimistic and blame the phones and the kids, that would be doing them a disservice. As Sarat found when he started a course called “Why Read?”: “What struck me wasn’t students’ lack of interest — it was how unevenly prepared they were even to attempt something long and difficult.”

This is at a school that costs $75,000 a year and is ranked the #2 National Liberal Arts School in the country. If kids there can’t read, what hope is there for the rest of us?

To take the obesity analogy further, it’s not just our attention spans and phones. It’s that many kids and adults weren’t given the foundation to read well.

For roughly two decades, most US schools taught reading through balanced literacy. We stopped teaching phonics and instead focused on cueing and guessing. It’s akin to what my toddler does when she says “let me read this!” and then guesses what’s happening based on the pictures. That’s fine for a 2-year-old. Not so much for an elementary schooler trying to read the words. The result was a decline in early literacy, especially for those who needed the education the most.

We gave a whole generation of students a poor foundation. If you don’t have that foundational skill, why would you read for fun, or dare to take on longer books? It’s simply not possible to fall in love with reading early if you can’t read.

But even for our quality readers, there was another shift in schools that harmed enjoyment: the big push toward standardized testing. Middle and high school grades moved away from books and toward excerpts and short texts focused on comprehension. Why read an entire book when all the tests were going to be short passages? This was one of the ultimate teach-to-the-test moments.

In short, we spent 20 years teaching kids to guess at words instead of decode them, then tested them on fragments instead of books. Two ways to make reading feel like a chore and a failure at the same time.

We can see the impact in a 2023 Scholastic survey: the percent of frequent readers (5+ days/week) drops from 46% at ages 6–8 → 32% at 9–11 → 21% at 12–14 → 15% at 15–17. In the same survey, reading enjoyment falls from 70% (ages 6–8) to 46% (ages 12–17). And when they looked at what makes someone a lover of reading, the kids who picked their own books were far more likely to become frequent readers.

It’s not rocket science, yet we got it wrong, and the last few generations of readers have been screwed. Look what they were up against:

1. The rise of phones and tech commanding all attention, with little oversight.

2. Education policies that didn’t help literacy, and moved away from reading actual books.

We gave them an environment rich in highly processed foods (phones, social media) and then rigged the environment against them (lower literacy, worse education, little choice or actual books). If your stated goal was to kill reading books, I’m not sure you could develop a better plan.

Of course, it’s not just kids and young adults. Adults have been captured by their environment as well. We’ve traded the bedtime read for the bedtime scroll. And our attention spans have atrophied just as much, if not more. Reading has been crowded out by shiny objects — and even for those who desire to learn, by things that create the illusion of depth.

We’re inundated with CliffsNotes on steroids: short summaries of books, texts, and complex subjects. We ask AI for a synopsis whenever we’re stuck, then act like we know something. And we’ve largely replaced reading with longform podcasts and YouTube videos. Which — as someone who makes both — have value. But what they lack is the proactive discernment that reading teaches. Listening is more passive; we tune in and out, and seldom pause to question the argument.

Reading, on the other hand, demands engagement. And it’s that engagement that produces so many of the benefits.

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How Reading Helps

Reading is exercise for our brain. It’s the single most concentrated workout there is for attention.

Briefly, a few key insights from the research:

• It rewires our brain. In a study out of Emory, having people read a novel over nine nights produced heightened brain connectivity in both language and sensorimotor areas that persisted for five days after they finished.

• It builds knowledge and vocabulary. Our conversations and even TV shows contain roughly half the rare words a book does. It’s why first-grade reading ability predicts print exposure all the way out to 11th grade. Every book you read is scaffolding for the next one.

• Fiction is “a flight simulator for social life,” in psychologist Keith Oatley’s phrase. A 2018 meta-analysis found that fiction reading causally improves social cognition.

• It protects the brain. Book readers had a ~23-month survival advantage and ~20% lower mortality over 12 years vs. non-readers, and a mentally active reading life is linked to less cognitive impairment late in life — cognitive reserve.

• It improves listening and comprehension before kids can even read. In one study, preschoolers from heavy home-reading environments showed greater activation in narrative-comprehension regions while just listening to stories.

Those benefits compound. Every book provides background knowledge that makes the next book richer, your comprehension quicker, and staying focused easier. It’s the only workout where the equipment upgrades itself.

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So what do we do about it?

1. The phones, phones, phones…

Let’s start with the obvious. We need to repair and retrain our attention, and that starts with minimizing the thing destroying it: our phones. Consider what happened when researchers removed or limited them:

• After just 72 hours of phone restriction, brain scans showed craving circuits quieting — even while people said they felt no different.

• A two-week digital detox improved sustained attention by an amount equivalent to reversing 10 years of age-related cognitive decline.

• Partial removal helps! Only a fraction of people in one study fully unplugged, yet 91% still improved on attention, mood, or wellbeing.

How do we do it? Rig your environment. Just as you have to make it easy to get out the door to exercise, or hard to binge on junk food, you’ve got to do the same with reading.

• Limit phone time and add friction to the things that sap attention. Get a Brick to shut off your apps; take social media off your phone entirely. Put your Kindle or audiobook app front and center.

• Charge your phone in another room, not next to your bed. Create spaces meant for reading, not scrolling.

• Block off deep reading time with no other distractions. Same time each day, preferably the same place.

• If you read on a device, buy an e-reader that doesn’t do anything else.

• Make it active. Bring a pen or highlighter. Underline, argue in the margins, take notes.

2. Kill the elitism. Stop gatekeeping.

We do best when we choose exercise we enjoy. It’s the same with books, especially when starting out. It’s about establishing the habit, then letting the habit lead you into other genres.

Goosebumps, Harry Potter, manga, fiction, self-help, romance… I do not care. Read what you enjoy. Comic books get a bad rap, but research shows they aren’t dumbed down: one analysis found comics contained as many rare words as a sample of adult books (53.5 vs. 52.7 rare words per 1,000).

Too often we play gatekeeper, insisting someone love some prestige classic, when the point is to get people reading anything!

What unlocked my love of reading was a teacher letting me read Once a Runner for a book report — which led to more running books, and eventually, when I was ready, far beyond. The same goes for format. Hardcover, e-book, even audiobook: who cares. Just get people reading.

While we’re at it: you don’t have to finish. As a notoriously slow reader, I used to trudge through books and lose enthusiasm — and the pull of the book got too weak to compete with distraction. Now I do a few things to keep the pull strong:

• Embrace quitting. I give a book 50 pages, and if it’s not holding my attention, I have permission to quit. Quitting isn’t failure. It’s how you protect the habit.

• Cycle through multiple books. I usually have 2 or 3 going. You don’t watch the same show every evening — sometimes you’re in the mood for history, sometimes fiction. Rotate.

Too often we let perfect be the enemy of good, and we become that dude at the gym critiquing the person trying the stair climber for the first time. We run that person off instead of inviting them into a new world.

The proof is in the pudding: one of the few rapidly growing segments in publishing is romantasy. Millions of twenty-somethings got dragged back to books by dragon-romance novels. That’s not a decline in standards. That’s an on-ramp.

3. Start early. Make reading fun, not a chore.

Read to your kids. It matters for a number of reasons.

First, kids mirror what adults actually do, not what they say. If you say reading is great but you’re endlessly scrolling, guess what little Johnny or Suzy picks up? Model reading as a priority — bedtime reading with them, and letting them see you read around the house.

Second, it creates a bonding experience. Reading becomes less of a chore and more of something everyone looks forward to.

According to survey data from HarperCollins, Gen Z parents are more likely than previous generations to see reading as a “subject to learn” instead of a fun activity, and only 40% of parents of kids 13 and under agree that “reading books to my child is fun for me.” Which is probably why the share of children aged 0–4 who are read to daily or nearly daily has dropped from 64% in 2012 to 41% today.

When we treat something like work, it sucks the fun out of it. Just ask anyone who’s made their hobby their job. It can be done, but the moment we shift from “choose to” to “have to,” joy, fun, and intrinsic motivation plummet.

Reading shouldn’t be homework. If you see going for a run as punishment to endure, you’re never going to last. Whether it’s kids or adults, you’ve got to enjoy the thing.

One tip for parents — the bedtime loophole: if normal bedtime is 8:00, they can stay up until 8:30 if they’re reading. Reading becomes the privilege, not the chore.

4. Rig the environment.

When I was talking to NBA champion Shane Battier about kids and youth sports, he said, “If you want your kids to play sports, just put balls all around the house and things they can throw them into.” He said it somewhat in jest, but his point was spot on. Our environment invites action. It’s true in sport and in reading.

If you want kids to read, have books everywhere. It’s what my wife did as a teacher — comfortable reading nooks as the go-to spot in her classroom, surrounded by hundreds of books organized by level and topic. It’s what she did in our home with our two young girls: piles of books in the living room, in each bedroom, in the playroom. And we rotate them.

The research backs her up. In a study across 31 societies, growing up in a home with 500+ books predicted 2.4 extra years of education in the US, with lasting effects on adult literacy and numeracy. Researchers call it the home library effect. Books lying around aren’t clutter. They’re infrastructure.

It’s the same for adults. Stephen King takes a book with him everywhere so he defaults to reading in the in-between moments. The modern version might be a Kindle app on a phone with no social media. Or better yet, a book on your nightstand and one on the couch. You want books calling out to your brain: pick me up.

5. Do it with friends.

Run clubs exploded after the pandemic, when people were desperate to get outside and connect with real people doing real things. In the book world, book clubs are quietly having the same moment, for the same reasons.

In 2024, book-club events grew 31% on Eventbrite, and silent book clubs — where you meet up to read whatever you want, together — more than doubled. Silent Book Club now counts some 2,000 chapters in 61 countries.

Book clubs are running clubs for attention. And for good reason: it’s easier to build a habit when others are depending on you. It holds you accountable — and there’s a good conversation with a friend waiting at the end of the road.

6. Train it like Couch to 5K.

Our attention spans are in the dumpster. Our capacity for deep, complex thought is being outsourced to AI, social media, and whatever other brain rot is out there.

You don’t get fit by attempting a marathon off no training. That’s a recipe for injury and burnout. You start where you are and progressively overload. Don’t jump straight to Infinite Jest or Ulysses. Start with 10 minutes a day on a short book, a novella, or an old favorite. Think of it as easy miles: a familiar route you enjoy, at a comfortable pace. As fitness builds, gradually challenge yourself and find out what kinds of workouts you like.

Concentration is a muscle. Deep reading rebuilds attention — but like running, the hardest part is getting out the door. Once you’re in a groove, you won’t turn back.

While this might seem overly depressing, like we’re staring into the abyss of another epidemic that we can’t escape from, I was the kid reading the picture-book version of A Tale of Two Cities. Proudly gloating that I somehow got an A on the test for a book I didn’t read. Now, I read voraciously and have written five books.

Nobody is born a reader. Readers are made. They’re aided along by a teacher who hands you the right book, a parent on the couch with a paperback, and a house where books vastly outnumber screens.

Our attention muscle has been detrained. We rigged the world against it. It’s time to rig it back. The obesity epidemic taught us that willpower loses to environment every time. Fine. Then build an environment where the good thing is the easy thing.

We’ve got a choice. Is deep reading (and thinking) something we value? Or are we going to go the way of comfort, like we have in so many other aspects of life.

-Steve

For daily insights, ideas, and practices:

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My Books: Do Hard Things and Win the Inside Game

On the evening of May 16, 2015, two men stood three thousand feet above the floor of Yosemite Valley about to jump off. Dean Potter was forty-three, the most famous climber of his generation. Graham Hunt was twenty-nine, his protégé and, increasingly, his rival. Just after 7:30, they stepped off in wingsuits, aiming for a V-shaped notch in a rocky ridgeline. Potter’s girlfriend stood nearby where they jumped with a camera. Hunt’s girlfriend waited at the landing zone.

Fifteen seconds into the flight, Hunt hit a side wall of the notch. Potter cleared it and crashed into the rocks beyond. Both lost their lives. In the Dark Wizard, the documentary series about Potter’s life, Dean’s sister Elizabeth tried to explain who her brother was. What she said has been rattling around in my head ever since:

“My brother would say the key to happiness is following beauty and not the urge to be the best. Was he able to always do that? No. Right up to the end, that was something he really battled. But in his most centered moments, he knew it was about listening to your heart and following that.”

Beauty versus the urge to be the best. That’s the central tension of so much of performance. For Potter, this inner argument unfolded in a world where judgment had immediate consequences and a single mistake could be fatal. For the rest of us, the consequences usually accumulate more slowly: burnout, ethical compromise, resentment, or the gradual loss of the love that brought us to the work.

It’s the inner battle between love of the thing, the artistic side, of feeling alive or in flow while you’re flying down the track or letting that creative spark take over. And it’s also the competitive instinct. The desire to win, to be the best, to make a name for yourself.

Too often, we treat these as competing forces that are opposites. I get the inclination, but I don’t think that’s the case. It’s far messier. It’s more that we need these working in harmony.

How do we make sure competition brings out the best in us? That’s the trick all performers, from athletes to artists to entrepreneurs, are trying to master.

Before the Scoreboard

Long before we understand ranking, we understand absorption. We all start with the desire for joy and expression. Those feelings are what drive us initially. Just go look at a toddler roaming around trying to figure out a simple puzzle or to explore their new environment. There’s no comparison going on. In fact, they’re largely oblivious to everyone else, including the other toddler in the same room. The feelings that come with mastery of a task are what push our earliest pursuits.

Over time, we develop an awareness of others. First, to the friendly audience of mom and dad watching. And over time, to our sibling or friend doing the same activity. That urge to win, to be better, surfaces in all of us. We become deeply aware of how we stack up. And that can fuel us to pushing our performance to a new level, or getting us to throw in the towel because it’s not worth the effort.

We all have the competitive fire, but for some of us the scoreboard is always on and we’re staring at it. We’re the person who competes like crazy even against their kids at Monopoly. For others, it’s hidden, only coming out when needed in a chosen pursuit.

Almost every one of us starts out pursuing the thing as an interest that develops into love or joy of the craft. At some point, we start competing with others. First, maybe just in more abstract comparison, but over time potentially head to head.

It’s how we manage that jump that determines whether we’re stuck proving our worth, or letting the work reveal and shape who we are.

When Love Becomes Obligation

In the pleasant Montreal summer, psychologist Robert Vallerand went to a few different cycling events and had folks fill out a questionnaire on their passion for the sport. They were all regular cyclists, putting in about 10 hours a week of training. Then he waited…

In February, when the average temperature was hanging out at 8 degrees Fahrenheit with about 80 inches of snow having accumulated, he reached back out to find out who was still cycling outside in the hazardous conditions. Only 30% were, and it was those who scored dramatically higher in what he called obsessive passion back in August.

Vallerand found that there are two kinds of passion. They both come with the same intensity and drive, it’s just what fuels them underneath. Obsessive passion comes from “I have to do this to remain who I am.” It’s an almost compulsion that has a bit of fear or insecurity underlying it. Harmonious passion is driven by love of the thing. It’s “I choose to do this” because it aligns with my values and interests. You’re able to step away when needed. It doesn’t control you.

The only thing that predicted who’d ride through the ice was whether the passion controlled the person. As he wrote, “It is as if the person said: ‘I know it’s not good for me, but I can’t help myself, I just have to continue doing this activity.’”

His paradigm holds beyond just cyclists training in the ice. Later research on dancers found that those with more harmonious passion tended to have fewer prolonged injuries, while those with more obsessive passion tended to have chronic injuries. Why? The harmonious folks would seek out information and help. They were willing to take off a few days if it meant long-term health. Those with more obsessive passion, refused to even partially scale back training and admitted that personal pride was what prevented them from getting treatment

It’s not that we are either obsessive or harmonious. We have both. It’s whether one dominates the other, whether the compulsion drowns out the desire.

The difference is not intensity. It is ownership and identity. Harmonious passion says, “This is part of who I am.” Obsessive passion says, “Without this, I do not know who I am.”

For Potter, following beauty was the language of choice: the experience called to him. The urge to remain the best carried a different demand. It made the next accomplishment responsible for protecting his identity, reputation, and place in the world.

That’s what the obsessive variety does. It nudges us towards defending our spot. That’s the essence of the variety of competition that pits us against others. As researchers found in studying elite swimmers across a season, the lesson was: intensity wasn’t the problem. The quality of the motivation underneath it was.

Competing isn’t the issue here. The intensity of the passion isn’t it either. It’s tying our worth and value to defending our place that is. When mistakes, failure, or results threaten our status, self-worth, and sense of where we belong, that’s when bad things happen.

The danger occurs when the next feat, the next result becomes a verdict on whether you are still who you think you are. We’ve got to be in charge of our definition of success. That’s what Potter’s beauty versus competition is all about. One defines ‘success’ as the act itself, the feeling of aliveness that comes with it. The other, exports that definition. It hands it to someone or something else.

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Defining Success and The Arena

The battle is in writing your definition of success, and then holding true to it.

In psychology, this is represented in the idea of task vs. ego orientation. When we take a task approach to a craft, we’re asking: Am I learning, improving, solving, or expressing? It’s about the act itself. When we take an ego orientation, we’re asking: Did I establish my superiority? It’s about status and rank.

A group of researchers out of the University of Birmingham randomly assigned students to play table soccer under a few framings. One group got the “Table Soccer Challenge”: learn three skills at your own pace, get rewarded for self-improvement. Another got the “Table Soccer Competition”: a top-ten leaderboard mounted next to the table, scores to be posted on the school’s website, and instructions to outperform the expert in the training videos. While the third was a control. Then they had reviewers who were blind to the condition watch everyone on hidden cameras to see what they did.

The competition group racked up roughly double the antisocial acts of the others. They broke the rules nearly twice as often, taunting doubled, and displays of anger tripled. And when players later got the chance to gift bonus goals to their opponent, with real stakes attached (raffle tickets for a £50 cash draw), the challenge/mastery group gave away more. The researchers didn’t find worse people. They built them.

Researchers found that the more years people spent in a heavily win-focused sports environment, the more ego orientation they had and the lower moral functioning. Similarly, other work found that ego orientation was tied to a higher likelihood of doping in sport. We don’t need research to tell us this. Just look at the Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, Lance Armstrongs of the world. When remaining on top becomes responsible for protecting the self, cheating becomes easier to rationalize. The question shifts from “Is this right?” to “What do I have to do to remain who everyone believes I am?”

We all have that pull towards measuring up and winning. But if we let it run amok, the competitive fuel that can help raise our game, turns against us. I know this drift because I lived it as a runner. What began as the simple satisfaction of moving fast gradually became a referendum on who I was. Racing moved from exploration to a judgement on who I was as a person. The more I needed running to prove something, the harder it became to run freely.

It might seem like competition and artistry or mastery are opposites, but they’re not. It’s only when competition gets pushed in the wrong direction, with a crappy definition of success underlying it. Competition directed toward discovery can become part of the art.

Competition is not merely something the artist must survive. At its best, it is a creative constraint. An opponent helps reveal possibilities we could not see alone. A race against others, gives you the extra juice to convince your brain to push a little deeper into the depths of fatigue so you can explore just a bit longer. Another writer, scientist, musician, or entrepreneur can help us to sharpen and refine our ideas. In this form, the competitor is not someone standing between us and the work. They become part of the work.

We can see it in the original meaning of compete, which stood for “striving together.” A modern twist on this might be, do we see our fellow competitors as either a:

1. Threat: Their success diminishes me.

2. Teacher: Their presence reveals more of me.

The question is never simply how competitive we are. It is what we are competing against, and what the competition is for.

Psychologists measuring competitiveness found that hypercompetitiveness and personal-development competitiveness are statistically independent traits. You can be intensely competitive without being hypercompetitive”

We can see this in the research on the impact of rivalries. Rivalries genuinely raise our game. Runners literally run faster against a rival than against a stranger. But the same research found rivalry’s dark side: it makes the stakes feel personal, tying our self-worth to the outcome. And once self-worth is on the line, we drift toward doing “whatever it takes.” We transform into “win at all costs.” It’s the same signature as obsessive passion: the outcome stops being something you want and becomes something you are.

Once again, it comes back to what’s underlying our competitiveness, our basic drive and motivation.

Just to be clear, following beauty is not a safety protocol. Pure motives do not make dangerous activities safe, just as competitive motives do not make tragedy inevitable. The argument here is about what these motives do to judgment, identity, and our relationship with the work—not about reducing Potter’s death to a tidy psychological explanation.

Risk Not Winning

After spending his younger years working at Los Alamos on the Atomic Bomb, Richard Feynman was afraid he’d never live up to expectations. He was burned out, working at Cornell when he decided, “I’m going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance whatsoever.” Shortly after, he watched a cafeteria plate that was thrown wobble around and he worked out the rotation math for fun. “The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate.”

When we’re competitors, the hardest thing in the world can be to let go, to stop striving towards productivity or one-upping those around you. But often, the thing that allows us to break through is returning to our roots: play, joy, fun.

We all started out as explorers. Again, just go spend some time with toddlers or elementary school kids. But over time, as productivity and winning took center fold, we often lost a little of that magic.

It’s the same thing skateboarding legend Tony Hawk noticed when he was relentlessly practicing for another big trick. He kept falling short, and was becoming miserable doing it. His skateboarding friend Rodney Mullen gave him the advice that would set him free: “risk not winning.” He followed it, letting go just enough, so that when he returned he landed the first 900 in competition. He did not escape or flee from competition. He changed his relationship to it. Once winning stopped being compulsory, he became free to create again.

Warren Buffett called this the difference between an inner and outer scorecard: Are you measuring the work against your own values and standards, or against what other people think of you? And coach John Wooden built his entire system around the same principle: winning mattered, but the final score was not a complete measure of whether you had succeeded.

They knew the tension of the striver. They weren’t saying winning isn’t important or that striving or competing was bad. They were literally in the arena, competing. But they realized the messiness of it all. That if they didn’t create their own inner scorecard, define success, and make sure they held on to the joy and mastery that got them hooked in the first place, the ugly head of winning at all costs or obsessive passion would rear its head. And that would fundamentally alter what they fell in love with in the first place. You need to let go, just enough.

That’s the nuance of competition. It’s the messiness of striving. It’s far easier to keep the fairytale version in our head, that if we just build hard-nosed “competitors” everyone will be great. That’s not how it works. That fuel can burn you.

Mastery isn’t the absence of the urge to be the best. It’s the daily act of returning the urge to the service of the craft. It’s having something to ground you in the joy of the process. And that’s often what the best coaches do. They realize that everything in the world is already pulling us towards competing and comparing. And that it’s near impossible to resist that urge, without help and support.

For Potter, the argument unfolded in a world where mistakes could be fatal. For most of us, the consequences are slower: burnout, ethical compromise, resentment, or losing the love that brought us to the work.

We’re all fighting that battle. It’s not a tug of war between art and competition. Harmony is not a permanent achievement. Even the most centered person does not solve the conflict once. It’s keeping that joy front and center, so that it makes the competition less about defining who you are to others, and more about exploring who you are for yourself.

The scoreboard can tell us where we stand. It cannot tell us why we began. For that, we have to keep returning to beauty.

-Steve

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My Books: Do Hard Things and Win the Inside Game

This weekend, a 2,800-year-old poem had the biggest opening of Christopher Nolan's career. Bigger than Batman, Oppenheimer, you name it. A quarter of a billion dollars, worldwide, for a story your high school English teacher assigned you. One reason, is that while it might seem like an adventure story. It’s really about the traps inside our own head and how to get past them.

At its heart, The Odyssey is one of the oldest surviving maps of pressure, fear, temptation, homesickness, trauma, identity, leadership, and recovery. It’s resonated for millennia because it gets at the human condition, and our own struggles so well.

At its very base is goal conflict. A drive to get home, to see his family, while everything is pulling us in competing directions. Sometimes, it’s shiny objects and temptations, other times its items that pull at our own ego.

It might just be one of the clearest demonstrations of what real toughness is all about. It’s not some macho fearlessness. It’s the ability to keep making the right choice while fear, grief, fatigue, desire, shame, uncertainty, and ego are all trying to hijack you. It’s taking wise action amidst the chaos.

So with that said, let’s take a look at what the Odyssey can teach us about navigating a messy world.

1. Uncertainty is at the root of stress and anxiety

Odysseus is known as a brilliant cunning man. But throughout his ordeal, he’s acting on incomplete information. Half the time he doesn’t know where he is, what god is angry at him, whether his family waited for him, or if home even exists anymore. And he often finds himself in situations with no clear comparison or way out. It’s the basic psychology of stress: an always looming threat, with lots of uncertainty, and much of it beyond your control.

It’s the constant battle of hope. The moment that you let the uncertainty shadow everything else, and throw up your hands because it seems like nothing you do matters, you default to hopelessness. And trying becomes impossible.

You’ve got to get comfortable acting despite incomplete information. You’ve got to learn how to take the leap, despite not knowing whether you still have a shot at your goal or not. You’ve got to hold on to hope, even if the situation seems dire.

It’s exactly what Viktor Frankl communicated in his work on surviving the Holocaust. It’s holding on to the smallest bit of meaning and sense of control.

2. It’s the Numbing That You Have to Watch Out For.

When Odysseus men eat the lotus, they get stuck in a state of pleasant contentment. They forget all about the mission or their desire to go home. It’s so bad that Odysseus has to drag his crying men back to the ships and tie them up. That’s how strong the pull is.

It’s not hard to see the parallels to modern life. There’s the addiction angle, but I think for most of us it’s more that modern life has a tendency to numb us out. We scroll endlessly, get trapped in cycles of watching TikTok videos for hours instead of meaningful pursuits. The feed asks us to care about everything, so we end up caring about nothing. It’s not just our phones, it’s that we design a life of comfort so that we don’t feel anything anymore.

We don’t get the struggle of doing hard things, or of pursuing meaningful relationships, because much of our modern life is designed around avoiding anything with even the littlest friction.

Too often, we think we want ease and comfort, but what we really need is things to make us feel alive. Pursuits that challenge us, relationships that force us to grow. At the heart of living a good life, is keeping the pulls towards avoidance at bay with a strong enough desire.

It’s what Odysseus had. Even when he went astray, that pull or even ache towards home, is what guided him. It’s what kept him alive.

3. You Can’t Willpower Your Way Through Everything

Everyone knows the story of the Sirens. Odysseus had his men tied him to the mast of the ship so he could hear the songs, while his men put wax in their ears and were told to ignore his commands and not to untie him no matter what.

It’s a simple but profound lesson. We can’t grit or willpower our way through everything. Even the great heroes can’t. This is the original anti social media influencer hustle and discipline content. It’s telling us that at some point those things will fail, and you better have something else.

It’s not saying those things aren’t valuable. It’s just that you need to know their limitations. You need to understand when environmental design beats discipline. Or when you need good people around you to prevent you from doing something stupid.

4. Ego Can Sabotage Everything

In one of the more famous stories, the cyclops Polyphemus traps Odysseus and his men in a cave. Odysseus tells the cyclops that his name is “nobody.” After they stab the cyclops in his eye, the monster screams out to other cyclops and when they ask what’s happening, he says “Nobody is attacking me.” So they leave him alone. This cunning move ultimately allows Odysseus to escape.

But then, on their ships sailing away, Odysseus can’t resist taunting the cyclops to make sure that he knows who it was who beat him. The cyclops then prays to his father, the sea god Poseidon, to curse him with a long journey back home.

That’s the reason why Odysseus journey takes 10 long years.

This is the clearest lesson in the book. You can win the battle, you can be the most intelligent and masterful. But a tiny slip of your ego, destroys it all. Ego is the engine of self-sabotage. When we prioritize status-seeking over all else, it erodes our judgement and ability to think clearly under stress. It’s really freaking hard to turn off that status and comparison engine.

If you don’t do the work to keep your ego just in check, it’s going to come back to bite you.

Odysseus shows us the way. Being nobody saved his life. But the need to be somebody, cost him a decade of misery.

5. We all need a Mentor

The word “mentor” comes from the Odyssey. It’s as simple as that.

Mentor is an old friend that Odysseus leave in charge of his son, Telemachus, to help guide him from being a timid boy to a capable man. The goddess Athena repeatedly tooks disguises (most famously Mentor's) to guide Telemachus.. But what’s interesting is that she doesn’t just guarantee him victories or rescue him. She does what we now think a mentor does, support and nudge him towards action. She instructs him to speak, to travel, to seek news of his father, to enter adult spaces, and to take responsibility for his house.

It’s the origin story of good guidance and coaching. Treat people as capable, show them the way, but don’t pave the path for them. A good coach or mentors helps move them towards independence, not dependence. They lend belief long enough for the athlete, student, or young leader to build their own.

6. Define Success Well

Achilles was known as the greatest warrior of his time. He was seen almost like a human god. In the Iliad, Achilles tells us of the choice he had to make as a child, “If I hold out here and I lay siege to Troy, my journey home is gone, but my glory never dies. If I voyage back to the fatherland I love... my glory dies, but the life that’s left me will be long.”

He chose glory over a quiet long life. In the hero culture, it seems like he made the right decision. When Odysseus meets the hero in the underworld, he lavishes him with praise, but Achilles quickly corrects Odysseus, “I’d rather slave on earth for another man — some dirt-poor tenant farmer who scrapes to keep alive — than rule down here over all the breathless dead.”

The man who got what so many craved, an immortal name with poems that echoed for eternity, said it wasn’t worth it. He’d swap all of it for an ordinary Tuesday.

The external is always tempting. The awards, accolades, status, and notoriety seem like they are the ultimate prize. Even now, we sacrifice so much for it. But in Homer’s epics the hero of the Iliad who wanted to be remembered meets the man who just wants to return home intact, and the former is saying love is more important than glory.

7. The Return is the Hard Part

At the heart of the epic is a simple lesson. The war took a decade. It’s what nearly everyone would say is the hardest part. It’s an actual war after all. But Homer’s poem was trying to tell us that it’s the journey back home that is often just as difficult.

Whether it’s the research on modern soldiers struggles and PTSD, athletes and their rate of depression after hanging up their jersey, or the difficulty for folks after retiring. It’s not that you finish the hard thing, and then it’s all joy, bliss, and contentment.

The hard thing changes who you are. You saw it when Odysseus finally returned to Ithaca. He doesn’t just show up as a triumphant king. It’s the same island, but it is no longer the world he left. He’s got to wrestle with how he and the world he once remembered changed.

It’s what every athlete comes to realize.

Andre Agassi: “Now that I’ve won a slam, I know something very few people on earth are permitted to know. A win doesn’t feel as good as a loss feels bad, and the good feeling doesn’t last as long as the bad. Not even close.”

Olympic medalist Molly Seidel: “Winning it and realizing it didn’t change me as a person... it didn’t fix anything in my life… Defining yourself by those accomplishments will destroy you ultimately.”

Phelps called it the weight of gold. And at it’s heart, it’s what Homer’s epic is all about. It’s right there in the poem. Odysseus returns to Ithaca about halfway through it. The entire second half is about what happens when he finally reaches his goal. He has to find himself, and his place again.

Getting home and being home are different problems. Which is exactly the retired athlete’s discovery: the plane lands, the medal’s on the shelf, and the harder half hasn’t started.

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What is toughness? What’s it mean to endure, to be resilient? Homer gives us an answer in the first line of the poem, andra polytropon. Which translates to “the man of many turns.”

Living life, pursuing goals, performing is messy. Odysseus himself is a flawed human being. But that line gets at what is at the heart of performing in just about anything: flexibility and adaptability. It’s what all great competitors possess. The challenges that you face are vast and varied. And no solution or tactic works all the time. It’s flexibility, having a big toolbox of coping strategies, which separates those who can figure things out versus those who get stuck.

-Steve

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My Books: Do Hard Things and Win the Inside Game

But with the World Cup we got an interesting case study to help quantify how each impacted performance just by following England’s journey. I covered altitude and heat before each of their matches, but it’s worth a deep dive retrospective to see what actually occurred.

England played their first 4 games either indoors or in temperate climates, before then playing Mexico at Mexico City (7,200 feet altitude) and Norway outdoors in Miami (120 minutes in hot and humid conditions). Before playing Argentina a few days later at an indoor stadium.

This provides a nice baseline of normality for their play before we can take a look at what altitude, humidity, and fatigue do to their players. I used FIFA’s in depth statistics to look at total distance run, high speed running distance, sprint distance, and number of sprints completed.

Notes: To standardize because Norway went 120min versus other games 90, I calculated meters per minute to help give us a better comparison. Zone 4= anything above 20km/hr. Zone 5 = anything above 25km/hr.

The Impact of Altitude:

What’s clear to see is that during the group stage, there were some slightly different metrics based on style and tactics of the game, but it’s all in the same bandwidth. Then, we get to Mexico City and altitude…

Total distance covered dropped slightly, but what really fell off a cliff is the higher intensity runs. Zone 4 and 5 declined by between 39 and 48%. A huge drop off compared to what they were doing before. Yes, tactics shift and playing in a low block tends to decrease this, which they were doing for part of Mexico, but you can tell the altitude drop off because it’s much lower than when England defended for 30+min against Argentina.

So the altitude hit was real and significant…

One question is how big was it compared to Mexico, who should have been better adapted after training and competing up there. Well, I ran the numbers here too:

You can see that Mexico has a slight to significant advantage in every category. If we looked at every other game that Mexico played at their home stadium, the numbers are even higher for them. Showing that they consistently had much higher high speed running metrics at altitude.

The bottom line on altitude: It did exactly what I outlined before hand: it significantly impacted high speed running, both in distance covered and number of sprints. And tended to have a greater effect on England than Mexico. Which makes sense because one side was acclimatized and the other wasn’t.

Could England have done anything about this? Small tweaks might have helped, as I outlined before the match. But the truth is with such short times between games and this not being the primary target, it’s hard to employ strategies like longer term acclimatizing that would have helped.

Mexico’s home field advantage is real and significant. It forces teams to change how they play.

What About the Heat?

After surviving the altitude, England headed to Miami to play Norway in a 120 minute match that took place with upper 80 degree Fahrenheit weather with high humidity. In other words, miserable conditions.

What impact did the heat have? It mirrored altitude really well. We can see it in the decline of high-intensity running for England (meters/min).

And we can see across every variable we tracked. On average, heat comes in pretty dang close to the same decline (when compared to the baseline 4 games before we hit round of 16 and round of 8).

Heat sucks… Now, there is a caveat here. The Norway game went 120 minutes. So even though it’s normalized for per minute, we can’t discount that the last 30+min were in a more fatigued state so high intensity or sprint running could have been dragged down a bit. That’s a fair critique. I don’t have data split by half, just the totals. But regardless of that, the drop was significant and remarkably similar to altitude.

But who handled it better? When we looked at altitude, the adapted Mexico team had a clear advantage. With heat, we’ve got two European teams who spent time training in the heat and preparing for it. Who fared better?

First, let’s look at Norway’s baseline and drop data:

As you can see, a pretty steep drop in high intensity and sprint running. In particular, it’s interesting to see the impact of a warm but not quite as hot and humid game against Brazil.

When we compare them versus England, we get a relatively similar drop off. Norway seemed to hold up a little bit better with high intensity running and their sprinting was about the same.

So who was better prepared? It’s impossible to say from this data. They both saw a big dropoff, though Norway may have handled it ever so slightly better. Though, officially, I’d call it a toss-up.

What about Fatigue?

And the final question…did playing in hot and humid conditions for 120min, then having one less day to recovery cause undue fatigue against Argentina?

This is the hardest question to answer because there’s no available data source to truly answer it. So we have to get a little creative. For England, if we compare players who only played a part of the Norway match to those who played nearly the whole time, and then looked at their high speed decline against Argentina versus their baseline data. It’s not perfect. But in theory, if fatigue was the culprit, those who played significantly less would have held up better.

That wasn’t the case. Although it’s a small sample size, you can see that those players who played less than 50 minutes against Norway versus those who played nearly the entire game had about the same percent drop in high intensity running against Argentine. Gordon was the only exception.

So what?

Heat, humidity, and altitude all have significant impacts on soccer play. In particular high intensity running significantly declined in each. This is exactly what we’d expect to happen, but nevertheless, it’s cool to see the data lines up with theory and research. If you aren’t preparing for altitude or heat when playing 90+ minutes of soccer, you are at a significant disadvantage.

-Steve

Josh Kerr just did him one better. In March of this year he announced Project 222, an attempt to break one of the hardest and most hallowed in sports, El Guerrouj’s 3:43.13 mile world record. Something that had stood for 27 years.

Kerr called his shot: “It’s time for that record to have a real go at it, and I’m going to be that guy to do it.”

Today, July 18th, Kerr backed it up. Running 3:42.66 to bring the record back to the UK, to join legends like Bannister, Ibottson, Coe, Ovett, and Cram.

And the way he did it was impressive. Just look at his splits: 55.22 (400m), 1:51.06 (800m), 2:46.45 (1200m), and 3:27.6 (1,500m).

He had two rabbits that got him to 1,000 meters, but then had to make a long push home. And let me tell you, pushing for a lap and a half while you are riding the razors edge is HARD. During that push, his 100m split only varied between 13.67 and 13.88. Just incredibly consistent.

It was one of the most impressive performances I’ve seen. And Kerr has one of the most impressive mental games you could imagine.

Kerr’s M.O in his career has been confidence. It’s sometimes interpreted as cocky, but what it really is is a deep conviction that’s founded in the work. He and his coach, Danny Mackey, are methodical in preparation, and always keeping the main thing the main thing.

It’s one of the reasons why Kerr always shows up at the big meets. He’s got a history of coming through at championships when the lights are brightest. It’s so hard to do, and yet Mackey and Kerr almost always get it right.

Part of that comes from how they approach training and performance. They know what matters most: consistency.

“I don’t do crazy workouts or crazy mileage. I just don’t miss days. Consistency is my biggest weapon. I’ll break any athlete down with how consistent I’m going to be training wise and just getting the work done.”

They realize that the whole game is compounding. It’s not having one killer workout here or there. It’s putting together a body of work that prepares him. Too often at this level, we turn workouts into proving grounds, to show what we’re capable of. It’s easy to fall into that trap, both as an athlete and coach. Often, it’s the doubt and insecurity that pushes us to prove ourselves, especially in the era of strava and comparison.

“The way that I get fast is stacking. I’m stacking years, I’m stacking days, I’m stacking months.” It’s about winning the workouts. As Kerr said, “If you show up and put in the same level of effort regardless of how you feel, you’re winning every day.”

Putting in the work is step one. The second and just as important is: trusting and letting go.

Kerr uses the analogy of the work filling the cup: “If you can stand on a start line with a filled cup, you’re ready to go to war.” Then it’s time to release and show what you’ve done. You can see it in his pre-race talk. Yes, he’s after the record, but he’s chasing that feeling:

“That’s what I’m chasing with this record — full flow — like I’ve done every single thing I can. I’m now giving my body and my mind over to this experience. That’s living for me.”

On the starting line, trying harder is the enemy. If we overthink, try to force actions that are ingrained, we get in our own way. You turn down our impulse to overthink by trusting what's underneath. And that only works if you've built something to trust

It’s why famous sprint coach Bud Winter coined the term “Relax and win.” And jazz maestro Charlie Parker once said, “You’ve got to learn your instrument. Then you practice, practice, practice. And then when you finally get up there on the bandstand, forget all that and just wail.”

Kerr certainly let it wail. His similar philosophy could be seen in what he said before the race: his body was capable of the mark, so his job was “to have my mind be available to let my body do its job.”You spend years grabbing control. Then, in the moment that matters most, the skill is letting go of it. As Kerr alluded to, it’s not turning your brain off completely, it’s getting out of the way so you can focus on the task at hand and let you do what you’ve trained to do.

Kerr has some of the best insights and quotes on mental performance. But more so, what I’m thrilled about is that you can trust this record. I’ve known his coach Danny Mackey for almost two decades. He was right there with me in the hardest time of my life as a whistleblower. He put his career in jeopardy by stepping forward in the same situation. He loves the sport and respects it.

So celebrate this one. An absolutely amazing performance.

He called his shot. And got it done in the hardest event in track and field. Astonishing.

-Steve

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There’s not much worse than having that hope and excitement ripped away.

I’m not here to give you a tactical breakdown. That’s not my expertise. But what I can do is help evaluate the psychology of it all. And once we do, there’s some profound implications that reach far beyond the soccer pitch.

First, let’s look at some data to describe what happened.

During the first half, possession was well-balanced with England at 44% and Argentina 56%. After Gordon scored at the 55th minute, the possession changed drastically. From then until Argentina’s equalizer, it looked like this: England 12%, Argentina 88%.

That is an absurd shift. To put it in further perspective, one analysis found that during the 18 minutes preceding the equalizing goal, England had exactly 2 accurate passes, both from their goalie to their defender. That’s it.

They went into prevent and protect mode. In American football, we’d call this a prevent defense. Where the goal shifts from trying to score to protecting the lead. It has a strategic reason. It’s generally harder to score goals against a low-block, and we’ve seen it ‘work’ in this world cup. But that strategy comes with a high psychological cost, especially when it’s implemented in the middle of the game, versus a deliberate approach from the beginning (as Paragauy did, for example).

That psychological cost, could be summed up by American football coach and broadcasting legend John Madden’s words, “The only thing a prevent defense does is prevent you from winning.”

Or if you’d prefer the football version of this, just listen to manager Cesc Fàbregas:

“Imagine you’re winning 1-0 and in the last 10 minutes you put on a defender instead of a striker. You put on a line of 5 because, from the outside, you see that they’re attacking a lot. I don’t like it. In their heads, the players interpret the change as DEFENSIVE and, automatically, their mentality changes. ‘The coach wants us to defend’, they think. And so you attract pressure, you give them the ball and you invite them to attack you more and be more dangerous. One day it may happen that you finish the match on the counterattack, but 80% or 90% of the time it HARMS YOU. A penalty, a free kick or a rebound inside the box can be serious.”

Prevent defense sometimes works. It’s not as do or die as Madden suggested. But the psychological shift underlying it is real. And if you aren’t prepared for it, it can do exactly what Fàbregas hypothesized: push you to avoiding, playing not to lose, instead of approaching and playing to win.

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Do we approach or avoid?

When an animal encounters an opponent, they default to a stress response that either pushes them to attack, to take on the prey and be the aggressor. Or alternatively to avoid or escape the predator. A lot of this depends on a simple calculus: do I have a shot, am I the dominant aggressor or not?

In humans, we might not be trying to kill or survive, but the same underlying psychology and biology applies. When we think we have the capabilities to handle the demands of the situation, we tend to have a challenge response. More testosterone and adrenaline, less cortisol. That helps nudge us towards having approach motivation, where we are the aggressor. If we assess the situation in a different manner, thinking that we don’t quite have the skills to meet the demands, we have a threat response. Way more cortisol that pushes us towards protection and avoidance. We flee or try to minimize the damage instead of pursue. In essence, are we driven to play to win, where we want to take on the challenge before us? Or are we trying to survive via playing not to lose?"

It’s a kind of inner calculus we run based on the situation, our capabilities, AND the goal of the situation. Psychologist E. Tory Higgins developed a similar model that outlined we have two motivational systems for goal pursuit:

• Promotion focus: We focus on the gains, growth, or aspirations. It’s a hopeful future we see a shot to “succeed.” It’s tied to who you’d IDEALLY like to be. We’re more aggressive, taking calculated risks because the goal is worth it.

• Prevention focus: We focus on safety and security. It’s tied to running strategies that are based on being vigilant and protective. We transform into the lookout, watching for threats, avoiding errors, and prioritizing not messing up. It’s tied to who you feel you OUGHT to be.

Whether we call it challenge vs. threat, promotion vs. prevention, or approach vs. avoid; all of them get at the same thing. One leans us towards playing a bit more aggressive, taking control, and focusing on what you can do to win. The other shifts us to risk avoidance, playing it safe, and preventing big mistakes.

Which way we go depends on where the evidence pushes us. That evidence includes not only our assessment, but the signals we’re picking up around us. What our coach, teammates, captains, fans, history, and more are telling us. Have we been in this spot before and rose to the occasion or fallen flat? And in the case of England, the heavy weight of raucous fanbase and a history of falling short…means the deck is already stacked against them.

They are the Chicago Cubs or Boston Red Sox before they finally broke the ‘curse,’ carrying the burden of generations before them, that nudges them towards protection because they’ve grown up with the stories of just falling short. So their brain logically screams “PROTECT!” It’s one of the hardest things to overcome.

That’s the exact shift England made. They moved from create the next chance to don’t make the mistake. And we saw it reflected in their play. Let’s break down how shifting to a prevent mode impacts our psychology, performance, and what we can do about it.

Even one of their defenders, Marc Guehi, diagnosed the problem afterward, “We should have carried on pushing. It kind of felt like we scored and then the mentality was go back, defend.”

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1. Don’t look over your shoulder. Run to the line.

In running, every athletes hears these same instructions, from high school to pro. When you’re leading a race, there’s this temptation to look behind. It’s the classic photo of Roger Bannister versus John Landy, where just coming off the final turn, Landy takes a glance over his shoulder, and Bannister comes flying by.

The reason this advice is given is straightforward. It puts you in defensive mode, focused on what you might lose. You stop executing your task, locked-in on the finish line and driving towards it. And instead shift your focus to what others are doing. Even for just a moment, it can throw you off, taking you away from the task at hand.

What you attend to gains value; what gains value directs action. If you’re focused on someone else, you’re giving them power. It’s not too different from when a golfer sees the water trap, can’t stop thinking about it, and ends up hitting it there. When it comes to attention, we want to keep on things that shorten the path to the right action. If all we’re thinking about is our opponent, then we turn reactive instead of proactive.

And perhaps more importantly, it gives the chaser hope. The moment your opponent sees you glancing back, they interpret it as “they’ve got doubt. They’re worried about me.” And the chaser suddenly receives a signal of hope, and gets a boost of energy.

Just listen to what the Argentina manager said after the game,“The opponent hesitates a bit, we smell blood, and we go for it. That's the feeling I'm left with.”

The runner who looks over their shoulder does two things at once. They take their eyes off the finish and tells the chaser “I’m scared.” Both help the chaser.

2. Stay in control. Don’t cede it.

Control is like an ignition switch, turning on our ability to navigate difficult situations. When we have agency, it gives us hope and tells our brain that we can take actions that matter and make a difference. When we drop into protective mode, we give away control. And research from sport to life to animals, shows that when we cede control, we increase stress levels, and are more likely to drop into ‘why try’ or ‘what’s the point’ mode. After all, if we’re just stuck reacting to others instead of controlling the game, what can we really do about it.

When we feel like a situation is outside of our control, effort plummets. We lose hope, which is the engine of effort. Hope is your brain’s calculation with four inputs: whether the goal matters, whether your actions can change anything, whether there’s a workable route, and whether the signal is clear enough to act on. As they drop, effort collapses.

A prevent defense frame quietly takes away those inputs. It says “there are no real paths besides protecting,” and that “your job isn’t to make things happen.” It shifts us out of goal pursuit mode, where we are prey with something to chase. And instead tells us there’s nothing worth chasing, so conserve energy.

As I outlined in Do Hard Things, our brain treats passivity as the default under stress. Having a sense of control is what shuts that collapse off.

3. Presence vs. Dragged to the future

When we’re stuck in prevent mode, we get dragged to thinking about the future instead of playing in the moment. We’re begging the clock to speed up, with half our attention on whether we’re inching closer to the line. It’s akin to the runner staring at their watch as you make progress 0.01 miles at a time towards the finish line. When you do that, it drives you nuts, and you stop doing the things that help you keep the next bit on pace.

It’s why every piece of advice during the crucial moments of a game are to ‘stay in the moment.’ Stress and pressure drag us towards worrying about or ruminating about what’s to come. We start worrying about and picking up cues that have nothing to do with our execution and instead amplify the potential threat. It’s why the attentional control theory tells us anxiety shifts our attention from task-relevant to threat-relevant cues. Presence is the antidote, allowing us to put the right action front and center.

You can’t fully play the moment and count it down at the same time. England spent the last 30 minutes watching the clock.

4.Sending and Receiving the Signal

Fabregas said, “In their heads, the players interpret the change as defensive and, automatically, their mentality changes.” In the arena, we’re inundated with signals that push and pull us towards challenge vs. threat, or approach vs. avoid. It’s what makes it so freaking hard to manage.

The coach is the one who sets the emotional thermostat. They are the person who everyone looks to. It’s why psychologists at the University of Amsterdam found that whatever emotional state coaches expressed predicted their players’ emotional state and subsequent performance. If a coach was angry, players grew more frustrated, made more errors, and were more likely to tank. When the coach loses it, every person in the room picks up the same message: something’s wrong.

It’s the same when we get the signal, through body language and communication as well as actions (e.g., our tactical or sub choices) on what emotion and behavior to inhabit. In many ways, it’s no different than a toddler who looks to mom and dad on how to handle a difficult or stressful situation. If mom is freaking out, kid will shy away.

It’s not all on the coach, players transmit signals too. But the point is that our emotions and behaviors are contagious. If everything around us is screaming to be risk averse, don’t make mistakes, then even subconsciously we will adopt that posture.

5. Run your race. Play your game.

In running, we have another saying, “run your race.” You don’t want to get caught up running someone elses, letting them dictate your pacing or moves. You want to stay in control and execute your race. Yes, their tactics and moves may influence yours. But the point is to be in charge.

Ultimately, you seldom win when you start playing someone elses game. You lose agency and confidence. You cede ownership and get lost reacting.

The teams who play defensive well find a way to stay in promotion mode. Sure, they may be in a low block, but they are using it as a way to look for opportunities to punch and counter. They see it as their opportunity to find their spaces to promote. It’s not a hanging on for dear life, but an active strategy that they take ownership over. They dare you to play their game so they can exploit it.

Look, being in the arena, competing at the highest level is tough. This isnt’ a critique on England’s players or even their manager. That’s not my business. What I hope you got out of this is to understand the psychology behind performance.

It’s a tricky tight rope to walk. And subtle shifts can influence our behavior, motivation, and biology.

It’s not as simple as say as promotion good, prevention bad. The point is does it fit the performance and performer. Think back to your animal cousins, a dog going up against a bear should prevent. It’s the same here.

When researchers put soccer players through a penalty kick situation, performance improved when the framing matched the player’s natural orientation. A promotion-type player kicking under a “score!” frame did better. A prevention-type player kicking under a “don’t miss” frame did better. When framing and personality were mismatched, performance dropped. It’s that the fit between the instruction and the person is what boosts performance.

You’ve got to know your team and the opponent. In running terms, do they love to front run or stalk from behind. In soccer teams, do we have a scrappy aggressive defender nation like Paraguay, or are we about possession, control, and the beautiful game of football. Every team and individual has an identity. And too often, when we shift out of the one that’s brought success, and we open up the space to allow our opponents to occupy one they thrive under….well, we let the shark smell blood. And we left ourselves few options or tools on how to handle it. Threat is the rational response.

-Steve

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“I see so many kids that are so anxious to do the wrong thing because the coach or the parent is yelling at them throughout the game that it drives me crazy.”

That’s Landon Donovan, arguably the greatest American men’s soccer player ever, describing exactly how we create fear of failure. And another legend and science backs him up.

The late Kobe Bryant once pulled a parent aside at his daughter’s basketball practice who was yelling from the sideline, and told them,“Don’t say anything. There’s a conversation happening inside her head. She’s pumping herself up. An outside voice interrupts her process. Let her figure it out herself.”

We look to others to understand how we’re performing and what’s important. You don’t need research to tell you this, you just need to be a parent. When your child was a toddler, they tried to build a block tower or take apart something, and when they succeeded or struggled, they’d inevitably turn to mom or dad for encouragement or approval. Give a smile, a clap, or what have you and your child tries again and again. Look angry or frustrated and the kid throws in the towel. Research tells us that toddlers often switch their emotion to match their parent, and will decide to persist or quit based on mom’s facial expression.

We still do the same thing as kids and even through our teenage years, for both parents and coaches. Adults send signals. They tell us whether it’s worth it or not to persist, and more so what they value in watching us perform. If we’re always screaming on the sideline or on the flip side giving the cold shoulder after a mistake, then it sends a clear message that my support is contingent on how well you perform.

That takes our attention away from the game, and pushes it toward thinking about the reaction we might get from mom, dad, or coach if we mess up. We’re learning to seek approval, and fear messing up. Every touch becomes a test with an audience. You’re literally training them not to be present and focused, but to worry about the reaction.

And that’s exactly what leads to fear of failure, choking, and under performance.

We wonder why kids play tight. We’re standing right there, teaching them to.

Away from the sporting fields, psychologist Andrew Elliot tracked fear of failure across generations and found it passes from parent to child. He coined the mechanism as love withdrawal. When a kid senses that mistakes cost them warmth, approval, or attention, failure transforms into a threat to the relationship. The yelling gets interpreted as a signal about what your love depends on.

While love withdrawal might seem dramatic, research in sports backs it up. We tend to use the phrase “parental conditional regard, when affection is given or withheld based on performance. In studying youth sports, one of the largest drivers of fear of failure is parents and coaches. When researchers dug into why they identified the three parental practices that build fear of failure: punitive behavior, controlling behavior, and high expectations. In other research, when kids perceive parents as valuing winning over learning, fear of failure rises.

Kobe Bryant saw the same thing. His dad told him: “Whether you score 0 or 60, I love you.” Kobe said that it gave him“the confidence to say, ‘Okay, it’s okay to fail because you’re going to be loved no matter what.’... I’ve seen too many parents do the exact opposite and it terrifies children. Children become paralyzed by their own fear because they don’t have that security blanket of love and comfort.”

Too often, we think that if we’re a hard-ass on our kids it’ll build competitiveness or toughness. It’s a common trope, but research backs up Bryant. We need a baseline of love and support to play free.

Care + Expectations Beats Authoritarean

In the 1960s, developmental psychologist Diana Baumrind pioneered how we understand parenting. Through research and observation, she discovered that parenting styles can be classified based on two factors: responsiveness and demandingness. If a parent was low in demandingness and high in responsiveness, they were too soft, a permissive parent who would let their child get away with just about anything. If a parent was high in demandingness and low in responsiveness, they were too hard, an authoritarian who relied on harsh discipline, with little attention to the child's needs.

Across research, the hard-ass authoritarean style failed. It led to more behavior problems, lower rates of resilience and persistence. It even failed in the one place you might expect it to pan out, when kids went into military service. And it makes sense, we all knew the over-controlling parent who gave no autonomy. Their kid was often the one who figured out how to sneak out and break the rules. They rebelled.

The magic came in the middle, with high support and expectations. That’s what Baumrind found in parenting and what other researchers found in sport. We need standards but also support. Or as self-determination theory tells us, we’re most motivated when we have autonomy, competency, and belonging.

That’s what is missing when we have a a parent losing it on the sidelines based on performance. Parents mistake it for tough love. When in reality it just creates fragility. Great performance is built on having a stable support group that allows you to fail and not internalize it. That support is precisely what allows for good and sometimes tough coaching.

As a lifelong coach, it’s the genuine care and respect that allows you to drill down into how to get better because it doesn’t activate a threat response whenever any constructive criticism arises.

Creating Space to Perform

Landon Donovan experienced the impact of the pressure and expectations first hand. He showed up at the 2006 World Cup as the face of American soccer after a brilliant run at the previous edition: “It was the only time in my career where I played tentatively, hesitant, not aggressive. I was a little bit in my own head and sort of more worried about the outcome instead of just performing at a high level.”

We’re all susceptible, even the best. But if you’ve ingrained that pattern from a young age, it becomes harder and harder to kick it.

Donovan went on, “I was so wrapped up in my identity as a soccer player that I had to succeed. And when I didn’t succeed, my whole world fell apart.”

When failure attacks your identity, it’s hard to perform in just about anything. Like so many other stars, he had to get help to understand “that they weren’t so tied together that failure would destroy me.” So many legends have had to learn the same thing, like Bill Russell who said about basketball, “That’s what I do, that’s not what I am.”

It’s simple to say, but hard to do. But if your a kid who has parents who make it clear that their love is dependent on performance, what do you think you learn to do? Your sport becomes your identity.

Let Them Learn and Fail

Failure is our greatest teacher. But we can either ingrain a mindset that allows us to handle it and grow from it. Or one that makes us scared of it. It always stings, but the difference is whether it becomes temporary pain or a scar that just won’t go away.

Sport is about learning this complicated dance. It’s about taking risks, seeing what we’re capable of, making mistakes…all in an environment where consequences are in the grand scheme of things temporary and mild. It’s not life or death.

If we allow kids to experience this wonderful arena, they learn a lot. Which is the point Kobe was making. Put them in the arena, but don’t get in their way. When kids never get to assess risk on their own, never get to feel the small triumph of doing something hard alone, the brain learns one lesson: everything is risky.

We default to protection or “why try” mode when the pressure is on and we’re thinking about what the sideline might say.

So there you have it, two great competitors in two different sports, arrived at the same instruction for parents:

Kobe: “Don’t say anything. Let her figure it out herself.”

Donovan: “Just shut up on the sideline and let their kid play.”

And the research backs them up.

The sideline is the first arena where kids learn what mistakes cost. Do you want love and identity to be on the line? If so, you’re building fragility. Or do you give them the space to figure it out?

Sometimes, silence is the best gift.

-Steve

Before taking on Brazil, Erling Haaland told his teammates: “No matter what happens just smile and enjoy it. Just live in the moment because we did everything we can... just enjoy playing football.”

Then he scored twice and Norway knocked out a 5-time World Cup champion...

Haaland is having a blast. He’s known as the “smiling assassin,” joking around with teammates and opponents before unleashing. Just days before the biggest game of his life, a World Cup quarterfinal against England, Haaland was spotted golfing in Florida. Some fans were annoyed. Shouldn’t the joint-top scorer at the World Cup be locked in?

They’re missing the point... Haaland is one of the most dedicated athletes on the planet. He calls himself a 24/7 athlete, with 10 hours of sleep a night, blue-light glasses to help out, saunas, ice baths, you name it. The man treats recovery like a profession. The golf and the jokes sit on top of one of the most disciplined operations in sport. And that’s the point... dedication and fun work in concert. They not only co-exist they feed off one another.

Our image of elite performers is often one of stoic seriousness. We mistake being serious for being dedicated. They are not the same thing. And confusing them has consequences.

How The Best Actually Are Fueled:

I conducted a survey of 2,000+ performers, including Olympic medalists, pro athletes from every major sport, actors, and more. I asked them a series of questions:

1. When did they perform best and what prevents them from doing so?

Performing out of a place of joy, fun, and curiosity beat stoic, serious, gritting it out 11 to 1. When I asked what advice these world-class performers would give their younger self? “Enjoy it, have fun, don’t take it so seriously” dominated. Only a single person in the entire survey said to be more serious. When asked why they compete, joy/fun was the number one response by far.

The preventors? Expectations, overly concerned with outcomes, letting others or themselves down, and feeling like they “had to” instead of wanting to. They performed up to their potential when they felt secure in who they are and what they’re doing, when their motivation was from joy, instead of fear. They felt free to perform. As Josh, an athlete turned entrepreneur, reported, “When I was where I wanted to be, pursuing what I wanted to pursue out of joy. When I wasn’t worried about if I would succeed, rather I was seeing what was possible and simply learning and adjusting if I fell short. That’s where the magic is.”

It’s not the first time I’ve run into this answer. As I outlined in my recent book, in 2023 I sat down with three superstars to discuss how to achieve peak performance. Chris Cassidy is in a group that only includes three people in history. He started his career as a Navy SEAL, before becoming a NASA astronaut and spending a collective 378 days in space. Roberta Groner was an average college runner who took a decade away from sports to work and have children. Upon her return to competition, as a full-time nurse and mom, she placed sixth at the World Championships in the marathon. She accomplished that at 41, an age often considered past our athletic prime. Olav Aleksander Bu is a science whizz who revolutionized training in the endurance world. When we sat down to chat at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics conference, I was sure the conversation would head toward how to use science to innovate. After all, we were at the mecca of data analytics in sports.

After an hour-long discussion, we ended up elsewhere. “It’s about love,” stated the physiology guru Bu. “The human element is key.” Cassidy echoed his comments, discussing the impact of teamwork, connection, and purpose. Groner outlined that her key for going from a mediocre to world-class was “finding joy.” It sounds nebulous and unmeasurable, but here were three people who had pushed the bounds of what is possible at the highest level, all conveying the same message. They all put in tremendous work; they wanted to be great, but they found the balance to not let their striving get in the way. The late Kobe Bryant echoed the same sentiment when asked what quality all the greats share: “It’s love... And it’s a pure love. It’s not the fame. It’s not the money.... it’s not even the championships.”

It’s why when I asked in my survey, what advice the world-class performers would give their younger self? "Enjoy it, have fun, don't take it so seriously" dominated. Only a single person in the entire survey said to be more serious.

The Passion to Perform

Psychologist Robert Vallerand found this out decades ago. He found that nearly all performers have passion. But there are two kinds. Obsessive passion: your self-worth is on the line, you NEED to win. Harmonious passion: you love it, it fits your life, mastery. Both could lead to elite performance, but obsessive tended to lead to burnout and a growing fear of failure.

In an aptly titled study, “A meta-analysis of the dark side of the American dream,” psychologists Emma Bradshaw, Richard Ryan, and colleagues reviewed over 100 studies with 70,000 participants. They found that when individuals’ extrinsic aspirations dominated their intrinsic ones, it was “universally detrimental” to their well-being. It’s not that we need to have solely intrinsic motives. It’s the balance that matters. When we tip too far to the external, we languish instead of thrive. When winning is all that matters, it might work in the short term, but over the long haul, we increasingly play out of a place of fear. And perform worse.

Joy isn’t soft. It’s rocket fuel.

Want proof that it runs the other way, too? In 2018, Kate Courtney won the mountain bike world championships, the first American to do so in seventeen years. As Courtney told me in an interview, “My superpower is being able to grind.” But what often makes us great can transform into our worst enemy. Heading into the 2020 Olympics as one of the favorites, her cycling performance fell apart. She finished fifteenth.

Worn out and disappointed, Courtney didn’t do what most athletes do in those moments, double down and work harder; she went the other direction. To rebuild her motivation and to have a better relationship with a sport she loved, she went toward joy and mastery. “When you have a more well-rounded life, it doesn’t take away, it doesn’t distract you as an athlete. It makes you stronger and better.”

Courtney found her joy in training and competing again. She moved from being ranked twenty third in the world in 2021 to eighth in the summer of 2023. Joy wasn’t a consolation prize. It was the intervention.

Joy is an expansive emotion. It frees us up, we get to explore our potential and play to win. Just look at a toddler... You know the best way to get them out of losing-it tantrum mode? Curiosity. If you get them curious about something, a funny noise, flickering light, etc., the tantrum fades. Curiosity is the antidote to fear and losing it. It opens us up to explore. That’s the basis of fun.

It’s why you see Eliud Kipchoge smiling at mile 23 of the marathon. Or Steph Curry smiling on the free throw line... They understand that while for some, bearing down may work, for far too many it pushes us into do-or-die mode. And despite what you hear on social media, very few perform well there. It’s a mistake I saw all the time as a coach: the tight, grim athlete who trained perfectly and raced terribly.

Contrary to what’s often proclaimed, holding the game lightly doesn’t make you fragile. Learning how to lose better doesn’t mean we aren’t passionate or don’t care. It allows us to perform at our best. From a place of love and striving to get better, instead of fear, shutting down, and a lingering negative emotional hit.

Far too often, we think that if they are laughing around, joking, smiling, it means they aren’t serious, that they don’t care. That’s BS. Fun is the fuel. It’s what allows us to be locked-in without tension. It’s the nuance that sprint coach Bud Winter noticed decades ago: to sprint your fastest, you have to give maximum effort while relaxed. It’s the same here. To be dedicated, to get locked-in, we have to have fun doing it. It’s what puts us in seeking mode, hunting for goals with teammates we care about, because that’s what we know and love to do.

This is the shift I wrote a whole book about: moving from fear-based avoidance to joy-based pursuit. It’s about fulfilling your potential in a world that continually signals that you aren’t good enough—not because success is what defines our self-worth but because we find joy in the pursuits.

The Norwegian secret hiding in plain sight

Haaland is the product of a system built on this exact idea.

Norway doesn’t allow for official scorekeeping until the age of 13. They dissuade early national travel teams in favor of local leagues. You can’t even post the results of youth games online without being fined. As Tore Ovrebo, Norway’s director of elite sport, put it, “We think the biggest motivation for the kids to do sports is that they do it with their friends and they have fun while they’re doing it and we want to keep that feeling throughout their whole career.” Their youth sporting model can be summed up with their chosen slogan: “Joy of Sport for All.”

Keep that feeling throughout their whole career. Watch Norway row an imaginary Viking boat at midfield after knocking out Brazil, and tell me it didn’t work. Or just look at Usain Bolt or Alysia Liu and see that when we’re having fun, the performance just flows.

Fun is the best performance enhancer there is. Dedication and joy can co-exist. In fact, they feed off each other. We knew this as kids. Somehow we got sold a story that seriousness was the solution, taking all the joy out of the pursuit in the name of a result. That may work in the short-term, but over the long haul it degrades the very thing that makes us special: that joyful passion for a pursuit we once loved.

Or just listen to my 3 year old... when she saw Haaland, she asked “Is that Elsa’s brother?”

That might be the best theory for his superpowers we get...

-Steve

Bonus: How England and Norway Should Deal with the Heat of Miami

How do England and Norway handle the heat and humidity of playing in Miami? I got you covered. Here’s what I’d do if I was advising either team.

Here’s my view as an exercise physiologist who has spent a lifetime in Houston, TX...

Playing soccer in that heat will decrease performance by a lot. It’s currently supposed to be around 90 degrees with high humidity in Miami for game time.

In one study on the Champions league, when a game was played above 21 deg C/70 F, when compared to cold conditions, high speed running dropped by 12% and sprinting dropped by ~11%.

In data tracking the 2014 world cup, in the hottest games, high intensity running was about 8% less, and the total number of sprints declined by 10%.

At the 2025 Fifa club world cup, for every 1°C rise in air Wet Bulb Globe Temperature, players covered 0.18 m/min less at high speed and 0.34 m/min less at moderate speed.

In other words, it impacts players performance, especially ability to make high speed runs, significantly. Add in the humidity, and I’d expect an even further decline.

How does heat and humidity impact performance?

It’ll increase fatigue, and make cramping and dehydration way more prevalent.

We used to think you just go close to a critical core body temp and then you fatigue a lot or get catastrophic damage. Modern models tell us that our brain anticipates it, and helps influence fatigue by increase perception of effort to try to slow us down. So our fatigue occurs well before we reach critical moments.

From the early moments, we’ll pace and slow down from normal conditions. Think of it as our brain doing a rough estimate of the slope of the increase and trying to slow us down to decrease the rise.

All the while, less blood flow is going to our muscles, and more is diverted to our skin to help dissipate heat. So your heart is doing double duty — feeding the muscles and cooling the skin — which is a big driver of the strain.

The humidity makes it much harder and worse. Why? Because the mechanism we use to help cool us off, sweating and evaporating that sweat, doesn’t work. It’s too humid. So even at the same heat, the effort will feel much much harder.

What do you do about it if you’re England or Norway?

1. Acclimatization

All teams have been training in the US in hot conditions, and most have employed some strategy to get used to it. That’s good.

Ideally you need about 2 weeks of training in hot conditions to get all the changes that help (increased plasma volume, shifts in sweat rate, etc.) So this should help.

But you never truly adjust all the way. Performance still suffers compared to cool conditions. It still feels miserable and hard…and like death. I’ve been training nearly my entire life in Houston…and the summers still suck… They just suck a little less than if you’re adjusted.

2. Pre-Cooling

During their warm-ups, athletes should wear an ice vest to help keep body temp down. You don’t want to start at an already really elevated body temp to start the game. Ice vests are something that are very common in distance runners competing in hot environments.

Other strategies that work are ice baths pre-performance and the cooling glove.

It might sound crazy to jump in an ice bath pre-performance, but it’s one of the strategies that elite marathoners used in preparing for the world champs marathon in Qatar.

The cooling glove is something that I used 15 years ago with athletes competing at US champs in Sacramento. It was developed at Stanford and it works by cooling your palm, which has a network of blood vessels that essentially work as radiators to help manage temperatures. You stick your hand in this glove with chilled water circulated through it. Blood flowing through the palm’s AVAs gets cooled by conduction, returns to the heart, and lowers core temperature far more efficiently.

One of the keys here is if you make the hand too cold, it backfires. The blood vessels clamp down, and blood flow gets restricted. It’s why you need the glove and not just tons of ice. And you typically use this at the end of your warm up for a short bit.

In research, these pre-cooling strategies significantly improve performance and time to exhaustion across a number of studies. It boosts 5k performance by about 1 to 1.5%.

I used some of these with an athlete who got 6th at the World Champ marathon in Qatar. They are necessary.

3. Cooling During It

Think of it like this, if we can slow that rise in temperature OR make ourselves feel a little better during it (which some research shows we use perception of effort as kind of the collective prediction governor.)

It’s why you’ll see runners during a hot marathon wearing a hat with ice in it, or that’s been soaked and frozen. It’s why you’ll see them dump cold water on their head and face, or even drape an ice cold towel around their neck at an aid station.

This is where hydration breaks come into play.

Cold towels, dumping water on face, and even taking ice slushies will help. There’s research that shows consuming an ice slushy helps with temperature control and performance in runners.

The hydration breaks should be thought of as cooling breaks. Half-time is an even bigger chance to cool down.

It’s a constant battle. Which is why most of the research and practical experience says use multiple methods to try to fight the heat.

4. Hydration

You’re going to lose a lot of water and electrolytes sweating like crazy during the match. At some point, dehydration can impact performance, though contrary to older thinking we don’t need to replace every drop of fluid that we sweat out. And contrary to conventional wisdom, electrolytes are not the primary cause of cramping.

But fluid intake and even electrolytes are still important because they help defend against the drop in plasma volume and blunt the rise in perceived effort. Adding in sugar will help with hydration and combat some fatigue. Consuming some caffeine during half-time will help with the increased perception of effort during the later half of the match.

5. Pacing and Subs

If you get too fired up and try to play like normal, you will be screwed. That’s the equivalent of the marathoner who doesn’t adjust their pacing due to the heat. That means starting a little more strategically, and using the subs at the right time with those players who are going over the edge. Because once you get close to that edge in heat, performance can suffer quickly. Use your subs strategically...and keep those subs cool!

SO there you go. It will impact everyone. And it’ll make the last part of the match feel tough. Your legs will feel sluggish and non-responsive, effort will be through the roof, and your brain will try to convince you that you’re miserable and to slow down, walk, and don’t make that run at full speed.

How the teams manage could be a key in a tight game. I didn’t see Norway use cooling vests during warm-up the last hot game, so we’ll see who does what and if they follow the best practices or go for it on their own.

For daily insights, ideas, and practices:

​Instagram: ​Steve Magness​

Twitter/X: ​@Stevemagness​​​

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Do Hard (Meaningful) Things

We need to do hard things. In a world that lets us shortcut almost everything—from taking performance-enhancing drugs to outsourcing our writing to AI—there’s something magical, and much needed, about the thing that forces you out of your comfort zone. It makes us feel something in a world where we increasingly numb and distract our way out of our own internal experience. Doing hard things reminds us we’re alive.

As the person who literally ​wrote the book ​on the subject, I love watching the idea take hold. But like almost anything, we can miss the mark. And somewhere along the way, “Do Hard Things” reached its performative meme stage. We turned doing hard things into posting hard things.

Look around social media and you’ll see people glorifying their time in an ice bath, puking on the side of the track after a workout, or flashing a 4 a.m. watch to prove the morning grind is real. None of these things are inherently bad. Many can be genuinely useful. But in turning a helpful idea into a meme, we dropped the most important word in it. The point was never to do hard things. It was to do hard, meaningful things.

Think back to gym class, or junior high football. Chances are you had a coach who decided that running bleachers, laps, or “suicides” would toughen you up. Maybe you kept going until you puked or could barely stand. The coach walked away certain he’d built you into something tougher. You walked away having learned that exercise was punishment, and that the only reason to keep going was to satisfy the man with the whistle.

You didn’t get tougher. You got better at surviving while someone controlled and judged you. And those are not the same thing. Real toughness is about decision-making. It’s navigating discomfort and learning to choose the wise action for the situation in front of you. Survival teaches none of that. Worse, the moment you remove the thing driving it (e.g., the controlling coach) the motivation to keep going collapses. It’s the same pattern ​researchers​ find with authoritarian, controlling teachers: the kids look productive while being watched, then their effort falls off a cliff the second the teacher leaves the room.

In many ways, we’ve simply swapped the junior high coach for the social media audience. We take the ice bath to feed the feed, and we tell ourselves the exact same story the coach did: this is making me tougher. But the whole point of doing something hard was to reconnect you with your body, not to perform it for everyone else.

When we choose something difficult—when we actually have agency in it—a few things happen. First, it forces us into feelings we usually avoid. We have to sit with the anxiety, the stress, the pain, the discomfort, instead of ignoring it, pushing it away, or gritting through it. Those feelings kick off an internal battle, an angel and a devil on each shoulder, one pushing you to keep going and one hunting for the exit.

And part of that battle comes down to why. If the reason is big enough and means enough, we tend to stay. Sure, fear can keep you moving. But all fear teaches you is how to survive a threat, which turns out to be useful for almost nothing else. You run the laps to avoid the coach’s punishment. You write the book because you believe it might change a life. You run the marathon because it carries a meaning only you understand. Same discomfort. Completely different reason. And the reason is the whole thing.

Those meaningful hard things rarely change your life in the moment you finish them. What they change is harder to see. The act of committing—to write, to run, to learn—becomes a venue for discovering who you are. You don’t just feel alive. You shift your sense of what you’re capable of, and you grow into someone who can handle the next hard thing.

Can an ice bath or a training program do that? Maybe. But there has to be something underneath it more than this kind of sucks and now I get to post about it. Performative hard can move the needle a little. It just rarely delivers the growth that choosing a worthy goal does.

Everyone’s worthy goal looks different. But it almost certainly doesn’t look like running bleachers as punishment. It looks like a just-manageable challenge, in something you actually chose, that carries a meaning deeper than the post.

Do hard things. Just make sure they’re yours.aut

-- Steve

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Reflect: Responding Instead of Reacting is a Skill You Can Develop.

“True toughness is about expansion, instead of constriction... Not to push against the experience, but to create space between the stimulus and response so that we can better navigate what’s going on. It’s the child who learns that the frustration from making a mistake doesn’t require a tantrum. The husband who can sit with his frustration, instead of lashing out at his loved ones. The athlete who can separate the jittery sensations of nervousness from the emotional response of anxiety or dread. How we respond is malleable.”

—​Do Hard Things​

For daily insights, ideas, and practices:

​Instagram: ​Steve Magness​

Twitter/X: ​@Stevemagness​​​

YouTube: ​Steve Magness​

What went wrong? I’m not a soccer expert so we’ll leave tactics to someone else, but what I’d love to focus on is the mental side.

First, what gave folks hope is that the US manager Pochettino seemed to give this team a shot in the arm of confidence and creativity. The opening match against Paraguay showed an attacking team that could solve a team’s defense and break it down. That continued against Australia and Bosnia. Sure, those weren’t top 15 teams, but it was a Paraguay squad that only lost 1-0 to France thanks to a PK, and an Australian team that only lost to Egypt in a penalty shootout.

The Americans were playing free. They were the spunky home team underdogs. Pochettino’s refrains were “Why not us?” and “We want to touch the moon.” They had an Argentinean coach who blasted country music in his office and embraced American culture. And you were met with stories of Europeans traveling around the US, surprised by American culture. It’s the power of the underdog, the power of having fun and playing free. And as we’ll see, research backs it up.

But then it all changed. Balogun goes off with a shaky red card. There was no way to appeal (which, as an aside, any legitimate pro sport should have a clear appeal process for suspensions. It’s part of good governance). But Donald Trump couldn’t resist being center stage. He called FIFA president Gianni Infantino personally to ask for a review, and FIFA did what FIFA does: they suspended the ban, fined Balogun $40,000, and let him play. It was the first time since 1962 that a red card at a World Cup didn’t produce a suspension. UEFA released a statement declaring that “when the certainty of rules is no longer guaranteed by its guardians, the integrity of the game is at stake.” Belgium’s coach compared the decision to an April Fool’s joke.

And the narrative flips. The US goes from good vibes to villains. Belgium is incensed and uses it to create a narrative that Belgium isn’t just playing for their country, but as their coach framed it “the integrity of football.” Now, the experienced squad has a purpose greater than themselves.

The US went from playing with nothing to lose and everything to gain, to now being put on the defensive. And it showed.

From the first touch, you saw a team that was hesitant and avoidant. Gone was the aggression that capitalized on their athleticism. In its place was a situation where on one goal, three Americans stood around watching a ball come down from the air, hesitating, inwardly hoping and thinking that one of the others would get it, when a Belgian player swooped in and took care of business.

Pochettino described the potential issue weeks ago: “Your strategy can be brilliant. But if you don’t have the energy, the commitment, the trust, the confidence... it’s impossible to play well.”

For the Americans, it looked impossible.

Even Pochettino couldn’t explain it afterward: “We need to assess that game and see why we didn’t approach that game in the same way [we did] the rest of the World Cup... it wasn’t the way we normally play.” Listen to the language. It was our approach…

The Psychology of Playing Free or Tight

How we frame the competition sets the stage. It primes our brain to either approach or avoid, to protect or attack, to play out of fear or fun.

When we’re underdogs, research shows we give more effort, have higher levels of commitment, take more calculated risks, and have a reduced fear of failure. The reason is simple: the framing shifts our brain’s inner calculus on risks versus rewards. As underdogs, expectations are relatively low, while the payoff is huge. It’s like playing with house money. You can bet big, and if you fall relatively short, it’s not a huge deal.

On the other end, when we’re heavy favorites, we tend to adopt a protective stance. We’re already on top of the mountain, high in status. The only place to go is to meet expectations or lose our spot. That pushes us toward protection. We can even see this at the individual level. In an analysis of world-class soccer players, psychologist Geir Jordet found that players who had won major individual awards converted fewer penalties after winning them. And they showed more avoidance behaviors: rushing their preparation, turning away from the keeper, hurrying the walk. Status raises the price of failure. A miss is no longer a bad kick, it’s an assault on our identity.

Of course, this American team had expectations. But this framing isn’t determined by some concrete evidence. It’s shaped by the story you tell yourself and how you’re interpreting information. It’s why we’ve seen heavy favorites in the Super Bowl or NBA Finals who talk about how “no one expected us to do this... everyone discounted us... the media said we couldn’t do it.” Coaches and teams strategically use information to create the right team-wide framework. Sometimes using bulletin board material of quotes from the other team to do so.

We can see this in our biology. When we see a game as a challenge, we tend to have more testosterone and adrenaline as part of our stress response. When we see the game as a threat, when our status is on the line, we have more cortisol and less testosterone. Our biology impacts our psychology, and when in threat mode, we start hesitating and avoiding.

Before Paraguay, Australia, and Bosnia, it was clear we were in a challenge state. For Belgium, threat it was.

Now, once again, it’s not as simple as favorites bad psychology, underdogs good. It’s all about whether your frame supports your psychology. Psychologists Philip Gable and Eddie Harmon-Jones found that when it comes to emotions, it’s not whether they feel good or bad that shifts how they impact performance. It’s whether that emotion pushes you toward or away from action. High-approach states (desire, even anger) narrow attention onto the goal. Avoidance states (anxiety) scatter it, and pleasant-but-low-drive states (amusement) broaden it. For three weeks the US played on desire that pulled toward action. Against Belgium they played on anxiety that pulled toward hesitation.

Does the framing push you to see the situation as a challenge? Does it activate approach motivation instead of avoidance? The bad boys Detroit Pistons embraced the villain role. They took it on to amplify their effort and aggression. Paraguay embraced it after the US dismantled them, shifting their strategy to be the antithesis of the “beautiful game” the Europeans dream about. And it got them all the way to a 1-0 loss against the #1 seed France.

But there’s a difference between choosing the black hat and having it slapped on your head. This US team was set up for fun, for spunky dreamers trying to show the world. They were after vibes and joy. When we talk about approach vs. avoidance strategies, it’s not that one is inherently better or worse. It’s that your frame needs to match your style of play and psychology.

And then... that frame got thrown into turmoil thanks to politics the players had no say in. As Pochettino said, “you need to connect with the energy to express your talent.”

That connection was lost against Belgium. They won the appeal but lost the frame.

Losing the Fun

We can see the same approach to fun in Norway, who just advanced to play England in the quarterfinals. Instead of country music, they had a Viking row and beating drums after their wins. Their star player, Haaland, said “Everyone just needs to enjoy themselves... Just enjoy it. Embrace it and enjoy the moment.” And as they won, he deliberately downplayed the moment, going so far as declaring that the next teams they faced were the favorites. Before facing France in the group stage he said, “Honestly I don’t care too much [about the France game]. They [France] are probably going to win against us, they’re probably going to win the whole tournament.” And then after knocking out Brazil: “No matter what happens next, nobody can ever take this feeling, these tears, or this piece of history away from us.”

He’s keeping the underdog mystique alive. He’s keeping the stakes low and the game enjoyable, putting the onus on the more established teams to show up. Bank the win, release the future. There’s nothing left to protect, so there’s nothing to play tight over.

The US had a bit of this magic. But then it all went away. And it wasn’t their fault. Balogun handled the controversy like a champ, shaking the hand of the referee who gave him the red card and never complaining. Even after the Belgium lost, he went out to seek out the Belgium coach. He didn’t ask for this controversy, it was thrust upon them.

This isn’t to say the politics made the US lose. Great teams have to show up and play no matter what. And Belgium was clearly better that day. But what it shows is how fragile a frame can be, and how fast it can flip.

It’s fragile, but as Pochettino pointed out, the key to unlocking our potential. It’s why the best coaches get paid the big bucks. It’s an art more than a science. But getting your team in the right psychological state, with the right framing, and more so in a long tournament, keeping us there is vital.

When the story flips on you, and it will, you don't get to keep the old psychology by default. You've got to sit down and write the next chapter on purpose. Before someone else writes it for you.

-Steve

England is going to have to face Mexico on their home field, with screaming fans, and performing at over 7,000 feet altitude… That is no easy task. It might be the greatest home field advantage in sport. What do you do? Finally, a world cup soccer question squarely in my area of expertise.

First, the impact at 7k feet is real and significant. You can see it in the soccer data, total distance covered and high speed running drop significantly. 3-9% for the former, 10-15% for later. The higher the altitude, the bigger the effect. The less acclimated, the bigger the effect.

At 7k feet VO2max would drop about 10-13%. We saw this in track performances at the 1968 Olympics. And performance drops about 5-6% depending on race distance. Jim Ryun ran lights out in the 1500, but ended up second to Kenya’s Keino because he was better at altitude.

So what do we do?

1. Acclimate...if you had more time this would be the key. You train at altitude, maybe even use altitude tents, etc. But it takes time...

About a 3 week acclimatization cuts the VO2max/performance drop in half as your physiology adapts. One study on track athletes showed it took 19 days to fully acclimate.

England doesn’t have that time.

2. Arrival time

The research points to two different approaches: compete as soon as possible (within ~24 hours) after arrival. Why? You compete before poor sleep and plasma-volume loss sets in.

Generally, plasma shifts starts right after arrival but reach the level that impairs endurance capacity by about 24 hours and increase from there before leveling off.

Or you arrive 5+ days before and hope to acclimate. While it varies for each individual, generally 1-3 days after arrival, performance sucks as your body is adapting to the drastic change.

But...fly in/out is also risky as it involves travel, sleep disturbance, etc. close to the match.

So in their situation, it’s all about tradeoffs. Altitude is a massive stressor. Everything from blood to respiration is put under stress to adapt. So you’ve got this dip before adaptation.

You can lessen that dip being acclimated. But who knows what England did.

Honestly, depending on travel, if allowed I would have flown straight from the last game to altitude. Buy yourself as close to 4+ ays as possible. And if possible maybe even somewhere like 5k feet within driving distance. No idea on planning, but if I didn’t acclimate. That’s what I’d likely do. I’d avoid the coming in 2 days before. Worst tradeoff.

The bad news for England fans…reports say they are choosing to fly in Friday afternoon for a Sunday evening game (mostly due to FIFA rules)…What’s that mean? Do the math. 2 days on the dot…Not what I would have chosen.

So what do you do now?

1. Hydration and plasma volume.

Altitude drives respiratory water loss and diuresis, and plasma volume decreases acutely. Hydration strategies can blunt this. Folks have even tried manipulating high sodium intake to help sh9ift plasma volume

2. Fuel with carbohydrate.

We generally will burn more carbs at higher altitude. Make sure you are fueled up. AND use fueling strategies mid-game more like an elite endurance athlete. Something like maurten’s gels would work well.

3. Bicarb it up.

Altitude is going to harm aerobic abilities. All those sprints and high speed running will build up more fatigue. The new sodicum bicarbonate is a must here. I’d load up if I were England. Plus, altitude tends to lower blood bicarb. Also,, it tends to help more for folks who aren’t fully acclimated.

4. Protect sleep.

Disrupted sleep is a major part of it. So do everything you can to help get a good nights sleep. Limits screen time, blue light blockers, all the stuff. One high performance director of another sport told me about having athletes sleep with oxygen to minimize sleep disturbance, which in the short term is a great idea.

5. Tactics and pacing.

You’ve got to adjust. Mexico will be adapted. You won’t. Learning how to pace better and time your runs will be key. If you try to do the same thing as always, you will be screwed.

6. Beet Root juice.

It can boost endurance performance. Works better on non-elite endurance athletes. Which would honestly be a lot of these soccer guys. And altitude can impair the natural turning of nitrite into nitric oxide, so theoretically beet root juice would help even more at altitude. Though, you’d hoped to test it, or else you could be peeing red stuff that might scare folks, ha.

7. Caffeine.

Not altitude specific, but boosts endurance performance. A well timed dose to peak in the 2nd half would be helpful.

8. Heat adaptation.

Where England may have benefited from playing in the US is that heat adaptation (and its boost in plasma volume) can help with altitude. So even if they aren’t altitude adapted, the heat wave in the US may have helped them.

There you go. The science of altitude adaptation for performing. Hopefully, England is prepared! And if not, maybe they see this post and start downing the bicarb, maurten, beet root, and caffeine.

England, Tuchel, if you’re listening…I got you covered. :)

-Steve

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