Hello and welcome back to Brain in the Game. Brain in the Game is a podcast that's been specifically designed for athletes, coaches, and parents who are out there looking to do their sport just that little bit smarter. Brain in the Game pops up when everyone else is tucked up in bed. And I'm your host, Dave Diggle.
In this episode 51, we're going to look at sustainability. Now, when we talk about sustainability, we're not talking about consistency, we're talking about being able to sustain our performance. So when we talk about sustainability, there's physical, which is our fitness, and that's not my area of expertise, so that's not what we're going to talk about today. There's emotional and that's utilising our emotional fuel to move us along and keep us going. And we dealt with that in episode 50. And so there's mental, which is structural, and that's what we're going to do today. We're going to focus on sustainability. Now, I was lecturing recently and I was having a few issues trying to get this group of people to understand the concept of sustainability. And I said, okay, what do you do in the shower? Now don't worry. This is not going somewhere where you don't want it to go, and I certainly don't want it to go. But what do you do in the shower? When you go and have a nice long hot shower, either after training or at the end of the day, you want to make sure that you've got enough hot water that's going to last the whole length of your shower. There's nothing worse than when you have a nice hot, relaxing shower and then the hot water goes and you're standing there in a freezing cold shower and you've still got shampoo in your hair. So you want to make sure that there's enough sustainability of hot water for your whole shower. But when you get in, you want to make sure it's just right, don't you? So do you either get it just right and is a mix, or when you want it hotter, do you turn up the heat or do you turn down the cold? And it's a really interesting question when I ask people that they've got I don't know. Just think about that for a second. When you're in the shower and you want it to be hotter, what do you do?
Do you rack up the heat so you've got more hot water coming through, or do you take the long term approach and turn down the cold, because that's what we're talking about when we talk about sustainability. If you want all that hot water to last for your whole shower, then racking up the heat is going to be great for that there. And then it's going to make you feel cool. It makes you feel hot and warm, but it's going to run out quicker. So what you do in the shower indicates how you probably approach most of the things that you do. If you're an athlete and you want to increase your output, do you do more or do you do it smarter? The smarter athletes will do it smarter. They will take things out so that they're more concentrated, more focused, more precise in what they do rather than just increase the numbers. Now, we've talked before about doing more doesn't give you more. Doing more just promotes more fatigue. It makes you less precise in what you do. It embeds a less precise mental image and neurological point of reference. It exposes you to physical, mental, emotional fatigue.
It also exposes you to more possible injuries. So doing more doesn't necessarily give you more. And that flies in the face of traditional coaching philosophy. If you speak to most coaches and it doesn't matter whether they're modern day coaches or coaches from 2030 years ago, they will say, you got to go out there and do more. You've got to go out there and do more laps. You've got to go out there and do more, pushups more chin ups. And to a certain degree, when we talk about the physical sustainability, yes, absolutely. Preparation is important. You need to be physically capable of doing the skill in order to do the skill or the routine. So we want to make sure we're physically capable. However, when you're physically capable, doing more doesn't give you more. It just exposes you. It weakens some of the areas that are probably just holding on. We can train our physical preparation smarter by being more precise. Now, when I was a gymnast back in, the philosophy of more was prevalent everywhere you went. And the higher up I got within my career, the more injuries I had, yet I was probably more physically better prepared.
What I was doing was just overwhelming my body, and I was highlighting weaknesses. That when I got to that level and I was increasing the intensity. I wasn't gaining anything from the extra training. I was just weakening the areas that didn't need to be weakened. What I see today is some coaches still keep that philosophy, yet we're smarter today than we was back in the least. I hope we are. When I work with athletes, mentally, I'm all about quality, not quantity. I would rather than go do five really key and precise exercises than do 50 average exercises just because more meant more. So sustainability is about being smart. Sustainability is about choosing, what do I need to do to get what I want? If I want to be precise and reliable at this skill, what do I need to make me feel good about that? Now, we've talked before about number five being the key and the magic number. When you do something five times, you have a good enough neurological point of reference in your brain, a neural pathway to be able to replicate that skill or that routine. Again, it becomes part of our longer term memory.
So we know that five is a key number, but how many times or how often do you need to do something? And that's an emphasis on need rather than want. How many times do you need to do something in order to have that skill? Not in order to feel comfortable with that skill, but in order to have that skill. There's two different questions there. If you need to do it five times, ten times, that's great. That's one thing. If you want to do it 50 times, then we're looking at a different reasoning in a different emotional buying. There's a confidence issue. There not a skill based issue there. So sustainability comes down to what do I need to do? So think about shower. When you're in a shower, do you turn up the heat or do you manage it with the cold? If you are one of these people that just innately turn up the heat, then now you're aware of that, focus on that. If I want to be here longer, if I want to enjoy this for longer and we're talking metaphorically here because it's about a career. If we want to make sure our career spans the whole distance of what we want it to, then we need to be sustainable.
That's our shower metaphor I'm talking about here. I'm not just talking about you guys in the shower. I'm talking about your careers here. We want to make sure that we have enough in the tank for the whole career, not just this week or the next competition. So increasing intensity doesn't necessarily increase our output. We want to be smart with it, turn down that cold, make it last for longer and be more precise with it. The flip side of that is, again, another analogy I use is the sports car. Man, they're great men. They get real good speed and they're impressive. Yet if it was a road car and you were going on a road trip, you'd have to have the tow ball in the back and be towing the petrol or gas tank behind you to constantly keep filling up because you couldn't sustain that kind of output without an input. We want to make sure that the output and the input are equally balanced. Otherwise we're either going to be carrying too much load or we're going to be running on empty and constantly in the back of our mind thinking, when is this bubble going to burst?
Wednesday. There could be no more acceleration in this is going to die and they're going to have to pull over to the side of the road. So, again, the same career metaphor here. We want to make sure that we have got enough gas with us and enough locations to constantly fill up in order to get to our end destination, a big end objective, a career objective. And the same. The flip side of that is we don't want to go too slow either because we'll miss out. We don't want to say, you know what? We're going to be the grandpa of this, and I'm not going to go fast. I'm going to have cold showers the whole time just to keep that hot water for one rainy day. That, you know what? I need a hot shower. Because the likelihood is we've missed our opportunities. So sustainability is about balance. It's about the right amount of output and the right amount of input and the consistency of that in and output. So how do we do that? How do we do that? Smart. So the first thing is about planning, knowing where you're going to go, you know what you want to get out of your body, both mentally, emotionally and physically.
What do I need to be able to do in order to get what I want? If it's this season, when I get to the end of the season and it's the finals, how do I want to turn up? Do I want to just crawl out onto the pitch and go, I'm here, or do I want to come out onto the pitch and go, I'm here, and I've got everything I need to do in order to win this? Of course, in the back of your mind, you're saying, I want to rock up and be ready. That comes down to how we get there. That's the journey. In order for us to get to the finals. It's not just about getting to the finals yet. That's what you're here often. We just got to get the guys to the finals. No, we got to get the guys to the finals and have them ready to go out there and win because it's painful not getting to the finals, but it's even more painful getting to the finals and not being capable of being competitive. That can completely ruin motivation and momentum for the next season. We want to be able to get there and be able to compete.
We want to be there and be the best prepared athlete on that pitch. So preparation and planning, we want to be completely in control, to be able to respond to everything between here and that objective, not be reaction, not being like that chicken, the head cut off, running around, what's next? And waiting for it to fall over. We want to be structured. We want to make sure that if my objective is to get to that final and win it, then work way back and you can use a decision matrix, or you can just do it in your mind right now, working my way back at each stage, what do I need to do to get what I want? And then how do I need to make myself prepared and ready for that? What specifically? And again, if we talk to most elite athletes, they'll turn and say to you, the first third of my season, I need to be able to perform, I need to be able to be one, maybe 2% below my best. I've always got somewhere to strive for, to keep moving, keep growing. So when I get to the finals, I'm on my best performance.
So it's not about running on that sports car mentality of foot to the floor and just keep going and wait and hope I get to the finals. If I run out between now and then, a fuel, then you know what, I gave it a good red hot shot. It's about making sure that we get there and be planned how we get there and what we turn up for that final for in what mindset, physically, mentally and emotionally. So we do that by creating goals and then fuel when we get to that goal. So if we've got a competition in a month's time between now and then, there are probably three, maybe four goals I need to hit to be ready for that competition. Each time I hit a goal, I need to reward myself, I need to do something that fuels for the next one. Again, we're not talking physically here. It's not about taking a day off, it's about emotionally and mentally. So we're refuelling our drive, our emotional buy in, so that we're more clear in our mind, we're more precise, and we're going to be refuelled for the next goal and then the next goal to that objective.
So when we talk about planning, we're talking not only about where we want to be or what we need to do to get there, it's, how do I fuel each time when I get to a goal? If you go on a road trip, if you go on a really long road trip, you need to plan your fuel intake, don't you? You don't want to get in the middle of the desert like, I live in Australia, so I don't get halfway across the Nullarbor Plains and go, Man, I've run out of fuel. And someone said, well, the next fuel petrol station is another 30 kilometres up the road. Man, if I'd have planned better, I would have got fuel at the last petrol station. We want to make sure that it's sustainable, that every single time that we hit a goal, we got enough fuel to get to the next goal, maybe a little bit further on. And each time we get there, we refuel, keep that tank topped up. We also want to be calibrating, so if we go out and again, we use the same analogies here of the sports car. If our foot is flat to the bottom the whole time and we're going through our fuel consistently before we get to the next goal, then we need to change what we do.
Doing the same thing and expecting different results is never going to work. We want to make sure that when we're doing something, we're constantly conscious of calibrating. Is this the smartest way for me to get to my objective? If it's not, what do I need to do differently? If it is, how do I continue to replicate this? Again, those of you who are frequent listeners to my podcast will know I talk about what worked, what didn't work, what would I do different? Every calibration step along the process, we need to look at that, OK, what's working? What do I need to keep doing here? What part of my strategy is so good that I don't want to lose it? I want to keep replicating it. What didn't work? Okay, let's recognise what heavy emotional or physical luggage am I carrying that's not giving me return on my investment. When I go and do this, this and this, it's not working. Is it something I need to tweak or is it something I need to replace? What do I need to do different? So what worked? What didn't work? What would I do different? But what do I do different?
Changes our mindset from the broken to looking at what do I do to continue to grow? It's my solution based thinking process. So I'm always thinking forwards, not looking at my feet and thinking, when is this going to fall over? Because I've just acknowledged there's a couple of things not working. I've picked my head up and look forward and gone, right, I've got a solution to this, which means I'm going to keep moving forwards. So that's part of our consistent calibration process. We want to be completely, constantly conscious of where we're at and how we do things better. How do we continue to motivate and move forwards? Another aspect of that is our preparation funnel. We've talked about that competition funnel as seven to two process where we look at the week before competition, what do we need to do in order to rock up at that competition and be ready? We can take that same philosophy and put it over a much bigger period. Oh, you know what? That's a decision matrix. That's exactly a bigger picture of our competition funnel. It's the same process. We want to know when we rock up a competition, this is how we want to perform, right?
What needs to happen in the week before? So when we look at our competition funnel, that's a condensed version of a decision matrix. It's using the same psychology of preparation and planning. And when we get there, mentally, emotionally and physically, we've ticked off all the boxes to say, I'm ready. If we take that over a bigger period of time. We've got more to get in, but we've got more time to be precise about it. So making sure that planning process takes in everything that we need to do to get what we want needs being actions, wants being emotions. And when we do something that works, we create a trigger. And the trigger could be a verbal trigger, it could be an actionbased trigger, it could be a location based trigger. When I rock up and I do a really good session, what's making that is I do this, this and this. Before I start bang, that's a trigger. When I do this, this and this, I already know that I'm in the right mental space and the right mental mindset to get the best out of my performance, my training. I've created a trigger to a pattern.
Everything that we do is patterns and triggers in our brain. We've got a squillion in seven different patterns and just as many triggers, and we've got to marry up the right trigger to the right pattern. When we've got the two firing efficiently together, we can replicate performance, creating sustainability. That's also an aspect to consistency, patterns and triggers. And if we think about that in a I'm a bit of a nerd and I think about everything in a sciencebased way and I think if I have a pattern to do something and I've got the right trigger, then everything I do with those two is always going to give me the best outcome. I'm positive about that. I know neurologically, that's how it works and I know emotionally, that's what makes me feel good, that keeps me on track. So utilising patterns and triggers is a control mechanism that we can replicate time after time. If we don't know what our patterns are or we don't know what triggers it, then it's all higgled. We have no idea. We can't guarantee how we rock up and how we turn up. That is not sustainable. And it's about balance.
We want to make sure that we have a balanced life, so we're not full throttle all the time and waiting to burn out. We're not Mr McGuine driving along at five kilometres an hour hoping that we never run out. We want to make sure that we have efficiency and we do that by being balanced. And again, we've talked about the non athlete, the athlete and the pure athlete, or the off time, the student and the performer, when we know each different component that makes our life complete. When we're not the athlete and we're not the performer, we're just who we are. What do we do to have fun? What do we do to create that recharge process where we're not thinking about our sport, we're not thinking about competition, we're just enjoying life, we're just enjoying our company, of our friends or our family, of our loved ones. We're maybe learning something in a different environment, where growing as a person or whatever it is that is fueling our recharge process in our brain. So when we do become the student, which is training and that student mentality is when I'm training it's kind of okay if I make mistakes because I'm pushing boundaries, I can explore what works for me, I can interact differently, I can try things and then hone my skills.
That's different to the performer where I've got a rock oven. Perform, this is what I want, this is how I do it. If we think about those from a volume perspective, the nonathlete and the student athlete so the non athlete and the training you need to be where most of the volume is. Most of the time is spent in those two spheres, those two areas, recharging and learning. Recharging and learning. So when you come to perform it's such a small amount of your time and focus and effort goes into that because there's only a few things to do. You just got to replicate what you've learnt and you've honed in your training, in your competition. So let's think about it from a volume perspective. Most of your mental and emotional time is spent as a nonathlete and a student. The competitor just puts it all together, picks all the bones out, takes all the good parts out of that and just does those. You don't have to think about learning, you don't have to think about recharging. You just got to go and do what you do. So we want to make sure that we are completely recharged and we're learning.
If you ask most athletes where their focus is, it's on the competition, it's on the end step. I've got a competition in a month time. This is what I got to do. Step back. How do we get there? Because if your focus is only on that then you're not knowing what you need to do to get there. So the likelihood of you being precise is minimal, which is no sustainability. So let's quickly recap those. We talked about the shower. Do you rack up the heat and know that at some point it's going to run out of hot water? Or do you manage it smarter and lower the cold so you know you've got sustainability. The hot water in the tank is going to last for your whole shower and give you the outcome you want. When you get to the end of the shower you're going to walk out the shower and feel good about it. We talked about the sports car pedal to the metal and at some point you know that fuel is going to run out and then it's about planning, making sure that the journey is sustainable. We know where each goal is and when we get there's, a refuel station to get to the end objective.
We've got good planning in place. We talked about calibration and making sure that we constantly calibrate in. It's all about perspective, what worked, what didn't work, what would I do different? The frequency of your calibration is critical to the success of your calibration. If you're only calibrating at competitions, then you've left it too late. The frequency should be journaling every night. That's a calibration process at the end of every day. How did today go? What worked today? What didn't work today? What would I do different? Let me correct that or replicate that tomorrow. That's an efficient, sustainable kind of calibration. Journal every night will keep you on track. It will allow you to see when the wheels go wobbly so you can correct those, not leave it so long that you've crashed and you have to go back and try and rebuild from a crash site. We talked about the funnel process being a condensed version of the decision matrix, about what do I need to do to get to my end objective. We need to know what the buying is and what do I need to do to get there. And we talked about patterns and triggers and everything is a pattern and we got triggers to make those happen.
We just got to line the pattern and the trigger up and we've got sustainability. We've got consistency and sustainability and we finished off by talking about balance. We want to make sure that everything that we do is balanced. There's enough volume in our off time and our learning time. So when we come to compete, that condensed version of us goes out and does what we need to do to get what we want. So I hope you enjoyed that episode of Brain in Game 51. I look forward to our next episode, and until then, train smart and enjoy the ride. My name is Dave Diggle and I'm the Mind Coach.
