Start by imagining your fitness as a 5 gallon bucket. This bucket represents your capacity as a human being – physical and mental. When the bucket is full you are operating optimally and as the bucket becomes empty performance goes down.
Now imagine you have the ability to choose how you fill your capacity bucket. Important and powerful items like sleep are large and independently create huge amounts of volume within your bucket. Trivial items like supplements, compression pants, mobility equipment, etc. are marbles.
Stay with me now. I’m not going to tell you exactly how to fill your bucket up. And if you’re following this analogy literally, you’ll make note that these items are always going to leave gaps, empty space, inside your capacity bucket. This is a fact – very rarely will anyone reach their true physical capacity. And no, you can’t do enough supplements and foam rolling to fill in the gaps with sand. Real life doesn’t work that way.
Sleep is number one. Mat Fraser, 4-time winner of the CrossFit Games and by the largest margins ever, is known to sleep 11 hours per night regularly. He even sets an alarm to ensure that he stays in bed and sleeps this amount of time. His alarm is to tell him that it’s okay to get up, not that he has to.
Missing sleep deflates your basketball and eventually leaves it flat, taking up much less volume and providing much less benefit to your body and mind. New parents will attest to the challenges presented with missing sleep: tired body, fatigued mind, irritable mood, impaired memory, and the list goes on. Go to sleep.
Think of training as softballs. One workout is one softball. Working out 6 days per week is 6 softballs. Working out 18 times per week overflows your bucket and leaves tons of empty space inside it. Remember, the goal is to fill the total volume of the bucket.
Nutrition is golf balls. Golf balls are small and can help to fill in the gaps between softballs. Eating one piece of broccoli will not make you a champion, but eating nutritious meals consistently will. Once your bucket is full of golf balls, one bad meal will not empty your bucket. If you feel one meal completely derails your nutrition, then you are less consistent than you could be.
We have our big three: sleep, training and nutrition. But what gives? There’s still a ton of empty space inside the bucket. The answer is not more foam rolling or butter in your coffee to start the day. These are just marbles, remember?
Get yourself a few marbles in the bucket – take a multivitamin, get a massage, foam roll on your own, do some light stretching before bed, whatever fits your schedule and makes you feel productive.
Now let’s fill the bucket completely. Personal connection and purpose are water, and will fill the bucket to the brim. Each of these are binary and can provide a negative effect as well. Remember the basketball in the bottom of the bucket? Lack of connection, or connection with constant negativity, sucks air out of that bucket. If you don’t feel purpose, you feel worthless, a wandering and aimless existence. It’s a sliding scale. You don’t have to feel like you’re changing the world to feel positive about your influence, but you need to feel like you’re accomplishing something worthwhile, or there will be a constant and nagging emptiness inside continually bleeding out that basketball.
This isn’t a how-to manual. It’s simply addressing the elephant in the room that no marketing campaign is going to tell you. More HIIT and a new fad diet aren’t going to change a thing. You need basics. Get the basketball in the bottom of your bucket, even if it’s half empty right now. Start training and moving consistently. Eat real and unprocessed food and throw out the sugar. Then start to fill in the gaps and inflate your sleepsketball by spending time with people who make you smile, calling old friends for a 5 minute chat, even if you know it won’t become a regular connection again – especially if this is the case. Finally, take a look inside and recognize that you are proud of yourself, or that you’re not, and honor those feelings by taking action to swing things in the proper direction.
