Pushing the body to push the mind.

Today I thought… about pushing the body to push the mind.

I recently finished watching the Amazon Prime series called The World’s Toughest Race (spoiler alert in the essay). It was the revival of the Eco-Challenge adventure sports racing from 2002 where international teams race non-stop for ~10 days. 

My only foray in any kind of endurance racing was 8Ks in high school and that’s just a 30-minute jog. Though I was amazed at the stamina and mental grit required for the race, I was particularly drawn to two individuals. Emma, captain of the Spanish team, and Nathan, captain of the New Zealand team. 

Emma was a mother of three, who was getting her Ph.D. in biochemistry, was a professional firefighter, and had three businesses. Her team also finished in the top 10 of the race. Insane. 

Nathan and his team won the race and I think they completed in some ~6 days. They barely slept (not advised) and they had this monster pace. They probably would’ve finished in <5 days if it wasn’t for a forced wait and one of their boats breaking in the ocean. Turns out, he’s been on some 6+ world championship teams for adventure racing. Throughout the show he was so calm and focused it was hard not to admire the mental grit. He also had a line where he said if he was suffering, then he knew everyone else would be suffering more. Just awesome. 

This coincided with reading a line in my current book, The Best Place to Work, where the author said the body was meant to be pushed and the body pushed the mind. It’s not a new notion, this mind-body connection. There are mountains of research supporting how exercise improves cognitive function (i.e. memory, creativity) and just simple logic that if your body fails you… a smart mind is useless when dead. 

The idea of exercising regularly is becoming widely adopted, which is great. But it got me thinking about constantly extending our capacity to suffer. 

As I think about my own strength training strategy, I’ve been incorporating a method adapted from the Emerging Strategies approach used by my previous coaching team at RTS. Like the more popular daily undulating periodization, it’s basically having general frameworks but responding to the body’s condition daily. So, some sessions could be as long as four hours of training. 

What I’ve noticed is that some athletes on this program will have longer and longer training sessions… with increased frequency in the week (maybe twice a day) as the body needs more and more stress for adaptation. Increasing weight and having different exercises are other sources for stress as well. But it makes me think of constantly pushing our capacity to suffer that spurs on growth. 

It’s hatched an idea where maybe I can program periods of intensified stress (i.e. suffering) in strength training for a few weeks to coincide with when I take a two-week quarterly break from my work. Creating a period of undulation where cognitive output is minimized and physical output is cranked up. 

The thought is that this massive increase in physical stress will then spur on greater cognitive development (maybe in the form of idea generation) for the next quarter. Just like how runners experience ‘highs’, the endurance athletes on the adventure race note how they feel the most alive when they are suffering through the 10-day race. 

Now, I have minimal interest in endurance racing but thinking of replicating such physical suffering to induce greater cognitive development with a strength training scheme could be a worthy experiment.