What Professional Sport Can Teach Executives About Sustaining Performance

The same external demand can create a different internal response.

Two players can complete the same training session and experience very different levels of fatigue. Their previous workload, sleep, fitness, stress, injury history and individual physiology all influence what that session costs them.

That is why good performance programmes become increasingly individualised.

The same applies outside sport. Two executives can have identical diaries and experience those days very differently. One may recover quickly from travel. Another may struggle for two days. One may cope well with late evenings but find early starts difficult. Another may be affected more by consecutive meeting-heavy days than by long working hours.

This is where generic performance advice becomes limited.

Research in elite sport increasingly supports interpreting workload and readiness over time and within the individual's context, rather than treating isolated measures or fixed thresholds as definitive.

The practical lesson for executives is not only to ask, "What is a good routine?" It is to understand how they respond to the demands they face.

That answer takes time to build.

Recovery should not be treated as the opposite of performance. In professional sport, it is part of the same process. Training creates a stimulus, competition creates a cost, and the next decision depends on how the player has responded to both.

That does not mean reducing work every time someone feels tired. A professional player may still need to train under fatigue, particularly when building fitness or preparing for repeated competition. The judgement comes from understanding what has created the fatigue, how significant it is, how long it has been present and what the player will be asked to do next.

Sleep is a good example. Athletes can experience disrupted sleep around competition, travel, early training and changes in workload, but one poor night should not be interpreted in the same way as a sustained period of poor sleep. Expert guidance in sport has increasingly moved towards individualised interpretation rather than assuming that one number or threshold should drive the next decision.

The same principle applies to executives. Someone who sleeps badly before an important meeting may need a different approach to the day, but not necessarily a lighter one. The useful question is which parts of that day matter most, where there is room to reduce unnecessary load and how the person tends to respond to poor sleep in the first place.

That is why the schedule matters. In football, some of the most important information is often not physiological at all. When is the next match? What did the player do two days ago? How much travel is involved? What is planned tomorrow? Those questions give meaning to everything else.

Executive performance should be approached in the same way. A readiness score or sleep metric tells you something about the person, but very little about the importance of the day ahead. A lower-readiness morning may carry more consequence if the diary contains a major negotiation than if it contains routine internal meetings.

The goal is not to make the diary less busy at all costs. It is to understand where the important moments sit and make better choices around them.

Professional sport now produces enormous amounts of information. GPS, wellness questionnaires, force plates, sleep devices, heart-rate measures, medical data and training information can all add value.

The challenge is deciding what deserves attention.

During my career in football, the question was rarely whether we could measure something. It was whether that measurement would help us make a better or faster decision.

If the answer was unclear, it became difficult to justify adding another test, report or dashboard.

That distinction matters because more information can create the impression of more control without improving the quality of the decision. A number may be accurate and still not be useful in isolation. Its value comes from combining it with recent workload, the individual response, the schedule and what is required next.

The same applies to executives. Wearables, subjective feedback and schedule information can all help build a useful picture, but collecting more information should never become the objective.

The better question is: what does this help us understand, and does that understanding improve what we do next?

Good sport programmes are planned, but they are not rigid.

A player may complete a different session because the previous game was more demanding than expected. A training load may change because travel has disrupted sleep. A rehabilitation plan may progress faster or slower depending on how the player responds.

The plan provides direction, but the response helps determine what happens next.

That distinction matters for executives because rigid performance routines often look good until the week becomes unpredictable. Meetings move, travel changes, work runs late and personal demands intervene.

A better approach is to establish the principles that matter and allow the execution to change.

Exercise still matters, but the session may change. Sleep still matters, but the strategy may need to fit around travel or evening commitments. Nutrition still matters, but the practical solution on a business trip will not look the same as it does at home.

The aim is not to remove structure. It is to build enough flexibility into the structure for it to remain useful when the situation changes.

High performance is not built by avoiding difficult periods. Professional players train hard, compete under fatigue, travel and operate under pressure.

The challenge is understanding which periods should carry more load and which periods require greater recovery.

Senior leadership is similar in that respect. There will be weeks where the right response is to push because the demands of the role require it. There will also be times where another late evening, another hard training session or another meeting creates cost without adding much value.

That is where good performance support should help.

The aim is not to remove pressure or create an ideal routine around every day. It is to understand what the person is trying to achieve, how they tend to respond and what demands are coming next.

The strongest lesson from professional sport is not that executives should live like athletes. It is that sustained performance needs to be managed over time.

The best systems understand the individual, interpret the demands, use data selectively and adapt when the response differs from what was expected.

For executives, that means using enough information around sleep, recovery, exercise, workload, travel and schedule demands to make better decisions without turning performance into another job.

Good support should reduce complexity, be tailored to how the individual responds and make the next decision clearer.