LEADING FROM THE FRONT

Last week the Allegiate VPs of Marketing, Business Development, Member Relations, and Janitorial Services went down to San Diego for an industry conference called BOLD. Packed with enough panels, speed networkings, vendor demos, and card-passing-out to chew up and spit out even the most enthusiastic of entrepreneurs, it was a worthwhile experience.

Arianna Huffington was a keynote speaker. She’s best known as the founder of The Huffington Post, an American news and opinion website which AOL acquired in 2011 for $315 million. For this conference, her presentation was about the health and wellness revolution, specifically: the change in workplace mentality from burn-out to succeed to prioritizing health and wellness to increase productivity, creativity, and decision making.

The main point of her presentation was we can create a more productive, successful, and creative workforce by sleeping 8 hours, working out, detaching from technology at the end of the day, and championing today’s leaders embodying this new mindset. Her example was Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon for anyone born 15 minutes ago. In a Thrive Global interview Bezos said this:

Eight hours of sleep makes a big difference for me, and I try hard to make that a priority. For me, that’s the needed amount to feel energized and excited. Mostly, as any of us go through our lives, we don’t need to maximize the number of decisions we make per day. Making a small number of key decisions well is more important than making a large number of decisions. If you shortchange your sleep, you might get a couple of extra “productive” hours, but that productivity might be an illusion. When you’re talking about decisions and interactions, quality is usually more important than quantity.

And if you've seen a photo of Bezos lately, you know's he's rocked the hell up and looks like he's been smashing weights and leading his own ARM FARM.

Circling back to the point here, for both sleep and programming Allegiate is leading from the front on what we encourage & tell our members. We track our member’s sleep because it is the miracle supplement – for athletics, creativity, personal life, work, success. Keep it simple: we tell our members to sleep 8 hours each night and train 3 days a week in our program and then watch the return on that investment.

In addition, our coaches record our member's rate of perceived exertion (RPE) at the end of each workout. RPE gives us a holistic, macro view of how members are responding through a training block. If we pushed really hard for a 4-week training block and the RPE’s reflect that, we use that data to inform and adjust accordingly for the next block. For example, maybe our nervous systems need a break to recover after an intense block. We mold the next block based on that feedback and once we’re recovered and the RPE’s reflect that, we have the feedback to rev up the intensity for the next block.

Proper training and programming for life is not about keeping the body guessing, monthly challenges, tequila and treadmills or using some bullshit algorithm to string together a cardio workout.  Successful training is about hard work, maintaining technique when you're tired, full range of motion, and using the relevant data like RPE, sleep, and consistency in training to make informed, smart decisions and structuring your training for the long game.

Train at Allegiate.  Lead from the front.