Take Your Performance Medicine
“Take your medicine” is an idiom that often triggers negative or displeasing reactions. It suggests that you must swallow some bitter pill or do something that is immediately unpleasant in order to realize some better, future state. Pushing your boundaries and getting better requires regularly taking actions that are tough and uncomfortable to expand your comfort zone. Self-development and improvement necessitate delaying gratification time and again—taking your medicine day after day.
Medical care in our current health care system is not about making you better than you are today. It does not help you reach a higher level of everyday function, energy, and performance. Rather, it is reactive, intervening when your health is already compromised, and your energy already depleted. It is defensive, treating in order to get you back to your baseline, not to make you better and more resilient than before. And it is cursory, band aiding symptoms without searching for the root cause of “dis-ease” to boost your body’s innate healing capacity and protective mechanisms.
Performance medicine recognizes that in a toxic, stress-ridden, obesogenic environment—the one we live in today—self-discipline is a critical skill to preserving and improving your health. Performance Medicine is about taking your daily medicine—doing the small actions day by day to trigger your adaptive response such that you come back fitter, sharper, and better than the day before. Sure, it is preventive in the sense that it helps to safeguards against disease, particularly chronic conditions that are primarily lifestyle driven. But more importantly it is proactive in the sense that it prescribes regular doses of discomfort in order to build you up and make you better.
In order to understand exactly what this means, let’s first establish the connection between an applied stimulus, stress and adaptation.
Stress is a fact of life—unavoidable and inescapable. We have come to understand stress as a negative or bad part of life. We usually try to avoid or mitigate it. But stress, if the result of a purposeful and pointed stimulus, is an extremely potent and productive medicine. The adage “that which does not kill you only makes you stronger” has some simple, yet serious wisdom. Stress is requisite for growth. The problem is that stress is usually something that we perceive as happening to us, instead of being carefully managed for an adaptive benefit. We become victims of stress, and often chronic stress that feels beyond our control.
“Medical care in our current health care system is not about making you better than you are today.”
Sure, in order to manage our emotions, reduce inflammation, and avoid illness, we need techniques to better manage our chronic stress. But if we actually want to develop into better versions of ourselves—think fitter, more focused, more energetic, more mindful, more patient—we actually need to create and subject ourselves to stimuli that cause stress. We need to learn how to carefully select the proper type and dose of stimulus in order to trigger adaptation and growth. We need to experiment with gradually increasing the volume or intensity of a given stimulus in order to create sustainable progress over time. We need to adjust the stimulus in such a way that our cumulative stress—physical, psychological, emotional—does not cause overwhelm or burnout. We need to temper the stimulus with time and strategies for recovery—the critical counterpart to stress which allows the adaptive changes to seep in and manifest. This is what Performance Medicine is all about. This is what makes Performance Medicine unique.
The reason that physical training is an essential Performance Medicine prescription is not simply because movement is essential for your health. That is beyond dispute. Instead, physical training provides the most tangible stimulus and strategy through which to explore and practice this dynamic process. When training, you are applying an intentional stimulus on your body. In order to build greater physical fitness, you must learn to apply new and more challenging physical stimuli to trigger functional overreaching. Your program should prescribe gradual progressions so that you can see incremental gains week after week. But increased stimulus causes increased stress. As you go, you must concurrently consider your current life context and circumstances to properly balance your cumulative stress with adequate recovery.
Physical training provides an apt metaphor for so many other domains of life. Sure, you want to excel in your career, but too much work without adequate time and techniques to recharge is a recipe for burnout. You may be focused on building a great relationship or marriage, but if you do not take some time for yourself you risk losing important parts of your identity. Or perhaps you are working to build a new skill and trying to devise a focused and efficient strategy that will work in the context of an already full and busy life. In each case, you need to select and incrementally dose the appropriate stress-inducing stimulus and pair it with efficient recovery to progress in the desired direction at a sustainable pace.
“Performance medicine recognizes that in a toxic, stress-ridden, obesogenic environment—the one we live in today—self-discipline is a critical skill to preserving and improving your health.”
The strategy, techniques, and process of building physical adaptations through proper training provides invaluable lessons that can help you approach and conquer other domains of life. You better understand your capacity, which is always changing given your life stage, the demands on your time, and other responsibilities. You learn to identify when you are “overtraining” or running too hot with a risk of crashing and burning. You bring a more mindful awareness of your energy levels and learn how to connect with and listen to the inherent wisdom of your body. You understand yourself on a deeper level that allows you to be more efficient and strategic about how and when you should push the pedal to the metal and when to hit the brakes.
“Stress management” is an essential component of any comprehensive health plan. But in today’s world, stress management has become synonymous with stress reduction. The reality is that you need to experience stress to improve in any domain of life. The challenge is how to proactively devise, apply, and increase adaptive stimuli and balance the ensuing stress with efficient recovery to make incremental and sustainable progress towards your life vision and goals. Performance Medicine uses physical training as your primary prescription to teach you how to do just this.
