Shouldn’t we do as athletes do?

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about a book EveryData and the data the author was using, specifically the relationship between amount of weekly exercise and mortality rate. The more hours a week you exercise, the lower your mortality rate is. But there was a curiosity in the data:

Some people apparently were exercising more than 40 hours a week, even up to 75 hours a week! These exercise hours were supposed to be LEISURE exercise hours.

And I asked, “Who does that?”

If you want to read that post, the link is here.

But digging into the data for that post led me to the following question: do elite athletes such as Olympians or sports athletes exercise more than 40 hours a week? Some research suggests NO.

I do remember reading about some concept where if you exercise the muscles one day, you relax them the next day for recuperation. It stands to reason that one cannot exercise the body too many hours before the muscles and possibly bones get too stressed and maybe start to break down.

And my very brief research into athletes seems to suggest that dynamic. I found 32 hours a week for Simone Biles. Michael Phelps is said to practice every day for three to six hours. Kristin Armstrong rides 20 to 25 hours per week. Nothing up to 75 hours per week.

As a matter of fact, I don’t think I have ever read anywhere about athletes pulling all nighters at the Olympics before the competition the next day. Instead, they turn in for the night to sleep and get mentally prepared for the next day. Now, they could be partying…

So why don’t we treat our brains with the same amount of care and investment? While the brains aren’t being exercised in the same fashion, we do require sleep. But the corporate world appears to want us to work as much as possible.

Elon Musk has extolled the virtues of the Chinese, “who do not burn the midnight oil, they burn the 3 am oil.” (Something like that). A lot of entrepreneurs seem to believe the all-nighters are want makes the company succeed. Maybe…or maybe not.

I kind of find it hard to believe. Maybe when you are young, in college or just out of college, but I have my doubts. I remember hearing a girl say that she couldn’t do a simple engineering problem (a problem we learned to solve in our freshman years) and I told her, “But you know how to do that!” And she said, “It was at 4 am in the morning.”

“Oh, okay, that makes sense.”

At that hour, yeah, solving a problem that we learned how to do in our freshman year becomes very difficult. Which goes to show our brains do not function well without sufficient sleep.

For most of us, our brains are the money maker, so we need to regard them as investment and treat them well. We should not be constantly pulling long hours, not if we want elite results like the Olympics.