If only we could make more time. This piece applies to student/athletes who are dual wielding and looking to excel and perform on two fronts.
Athletes that juggle academics and sport can find themselves spread fairly thinly.
They can feel like they are constantly stretched; there’s never any time to relax, chill out or recover properly. It can feel like a constant loop of training and working.
In regards to time, it is healthy to look at time as an asset, you have so much of it a week and where and how you spend it will return invests.
Misuse of this time can result in a whole array of fun things:
- You burn out.
- You fall behind academically
- You begin to operate in a constant state of stress.
- You lose hours of precious sleep
The list could go on, but you get the picture. Not only is there a substantial psychological impact on how you’ll be conditioning yourself, but you’ll also be steadily dismantling your performance; making it exponentially harder to better yourself.
This is not ideal, with every athlete’s aim being constant improvement.
The trick is ensuring that, by viewing time as an asset, you maximise your returns from training without falling into one of the many thought-traps. There are two angles to analyse here:
What you spend your time on, and how you operate during that time.
“John”* had a tonne of work to do, it was Sunday evening, and he had left all his work to the end of the weekend, he continued to put it off until the last minute as just couldn’t face doing it. He ended up having to stay up until the small hours to get everything finished. To ease himself up the mountain of work, he was having a bit of banter with his mates and had Netflix on in the background.
He woke up pretty exhausted from the fun-fuelled night of academic work. He wasn’t looking forward to the lunchtime training session as he already felt like he was in a bit of hole. It was only the start of the week, but his body was already feeling heavy. He survived classes in the morning and made it to the lunch session. It was a threshold that day. He didn’t hit his target and felt like it was another kick to an already heavy day. He got topped up with a bit of food and spent the remainder of his day day-dreaming about lying down and nodding off to sleep. He did have a free period in which he managed to go and squeeze in a cheeky 40-winks. It was the end of lessons, and he had weights. He decided he’d try and make up for his lack-lustre effort earlier by going heavy in the session, which was designed to maximise endurance rather than weight.
He went big, then felt like a train wreck once arriving home. The teachers had given him a vast amount of work that day, but after a snack, nap, and dinner he eventually got round to doing his work, again not finishing until late.
The cycle continued for several weeks until John had enough and came to have a chat.
“I never have enough time.” John sighed, massaging his temple with his palm. “I’ve been doing things this way, and I feel wrecked, physically and mentally.”
He was unaware of how the consequences of burning his time in such a fashion; a mistake that could be detrimental for someone who was looking to excel.
Let’s first identify how John had conditioned his view of time:
- Leave work to the last minute
- Distract himself whilst doing the work
- View all-nighters as an inevitable part of his lifestyle
- Wake up exhausted
- Suffer through classes fatigued
- Be reluctant to perform in training
- Pretend things are fine
- Regularly use power-naps to recharge
- Train harder to make-up lost ground in previous sessions
- Put work off until the end of the day
Rinse and repeat.
In short, he had trapped himself in a destructive cycle.
Awareness of what’s going on here is the key. That is the first step. Aware of how small things stack up over time and when they become habitual, it is hugely detrimental to performance. This can be constructed to enhance performance.
The steps to improvement were:
- “John” audited how he spent his time.
- Saw how he was doing things
- Prioritising in advice what to do and when
- Adapted how he was working
- Refining his efficiency in academic work (not multitasking)
- Keeping things simple and consistent
Change has to happen in small and simple steps, too much too soon and it’s not sustainable. Small, incremental change over time delivers consistent, sustainable high-end performances.
I will go through these in more detail in our next video which will be released in the next few weeks.
Please send questions here about time use, and I’ll answer them in the video.
*The athletes mentioned in this article have been anonymised.
This article was written by Stephen Feeney. To find out more about his story, head over to our content partners page, or read more of his work here.
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Images by Roesie Percy
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