3 Lessons From Week One of the Journal

3 LESSONS FROM WEEK ONE OF THE JOURNAL

632 words | 2 min 18 sec read

Setting a goal at the start of a New Year is common for many of us, be it across the domains of health, wealth and relationships.

The goal of documenting my personal and professional journey through The Performance Journal is exciting yet challenging. Recording daily life and doing what I said I was going to do (post daily) was difficult last week, posting just three times.

Despite training 5x last week, and feeling positive at how Organic Strength started the year, there was a frustration at the lack of consistency with The Journal.

There are three main reflections from Week 1 that I thought was worth sharing with you:

Lesson #1: Structure for Success

I have created a new schedule, using the productivity technique timeboxing to establish set times with the day to focus on a given project.

Mapping out my week in advance has enabled clarity and focus with my work, training and coaching.

I have found that I feel more fulfilled and productive.

Author Ryan Holiday says that having planning your day frees up mental space, removing the need to think about ‘what is next’ or ‘what is the priority’.

This creates stillness, enabling more focused work.

Lesson #2 Win the Morning Win the Day

Three times per week I train first thing in the morning - I am grateful that my schedule allows me to do so.

Having a big win before 9am has been great for my mental health whilst allowing me to prioritise my training again.

If you can’t train early, scheduling in when, where and what you are going to train creates clarity, accountability and ultimately trust, when you do what you said you were going to do.

Lesson #3 Fail Faster

My inconsistency with The Journal last week was largely due to the fact that I had planned to produce The Journal in a video log style.

In reflection, this is not a modality that I am best suited to, The Day 1 Post took at least 10 takes 😂

I enjoy long form content like this, not voice overs or talking to a camera! So it’s something I will work on for the long term.

So this week, I am trying a new approach for producing content for The Journal..

But to know this, I needed to take action, to fail faster, to find out what didn’t work so I can get closer to what does.

The Performance Journal Day 06 🌱

Today’s training was a planned interval run. I have been using a WHOOP Strap to dial in my performance and recovery in 2024. This mornings data told me that I was 40% recovered, so I have moved the run to tomorrow - with today’s focus being to finish of some of yesterdays work, and prioritising sleep tonight with an earlier bed time.

If you have a WHOOP Strap, join the community with code COMM-66F82A!

Research Paper of the Week 📝

This weeks paper is one of my favourites. Albeit in a team sport context, it provides a really nice introduction to the concepts of internal load (heart rate, RPE, VO2, muscle-tendon forces), external load (distance covered, ground reaction forces) and their relationship.

Understanding these relationships and their influence on the load-adaptation pathways allows us to appropriately plan training programmes to improve performance and reduce the risk of injury.

If you want to read the full paper, reply to this email and I’ll send it over!

TAKEAWAYS

Week 1 had its ups and downs. Today we discussed the 3 main lessons which I am taking into this week:

Lesson #1 Structure your week to seek stillness and clarity

Lesson #2 Prioritise your training by doing it early in the day / schedule it in

Lesson #3 Take action, fail faster, learn and succeed quicker.

🌱 Dan

Got any questions or thoughts about this edition? If so, send us an email to [email protected]