Using micro-breaks as the key to coach longevity

By Dr Vanessa Thiele, Psychologist

AIS-Coach-Wellbeing-articles_Self-care.pdf

Gone are the days when we would push athletes to work at their absolute maximum level, repeating the same training routine, with minimal recovery, often for months on end. More than likely, come competition time, we’d end up with a bunch of overtrained, injury-prone, and exhausted athletes.

Today, we understand the science behind high performance. We recognise the role that rest and recovery plays in sport, along with varying the intensity of training, diversifying exercises, and including the element of fun. There’s clear evidence that managing wellbeing is critical for high performance, because our performance on the field isn’t just a product of our physical fitness, but also our mental and emotional fitness.

How would you describe your work week as a coach? If terms like ‘crazy-busy,’ ‘high pressure,’ or ‘flat out’ spring to mind, you could be like the overtrained athlete, putting in maximum effort for minimal gains. Unfortunately, ‘busy’ and ‘productive’ are not the same thing, which can result in a downward spiral of working harder to produce less, leaving you physically and emotionally wrecked.

Besides being detrimental to our health, the habit of working at a frenetic pace and nudging the boundaries of burnout sets a terrible example for the athletes we lead. An ability to role-model work practices that support wellbeing is critical for coach credibility and team confidence.

We can overcome this decline to burnout with a common high-performance strategy. We know that high intensity interval training (HIIT) is an effective training technique because it enables us to push the boundaries of physical capability, through balancing intense bouts of work with brief recovery breaks. From a brain perspective, the HIIT technique is also ideally suited to maximise performance.

Achieving maximum productivity, engagement and high quality work is all about focus. Studies into the neuroscience of attention reveal that our brain cannot sustain focus endlessly. Just as muscles need rest to regain full power, so does our brain. Research indicates that 60-90 minutes is the limit of our attention span. Therefore, optimising our mental capacity includes planning for intense periods of focus followed by short intervals of rest, fun or play.

Recent neuroscience studies have proved that micro-breaks can aid memory and learning. For new information to become memory, it must pass through an emotional filter called the amygdala to reach the prefrontal cortex. When our brains become frustrated, anxious, confused or overwhelmed, the activation of the amygdala surges until this filter becomes a stop sign. The passage of information cannot get past the filter, and new learning no longer reaches the prefrontal cortex and sustained memory.

Having brief brain breaks not only allows us the mental space to regulate our emotions, but also switches the type of mental activity from one area of the brain to the other. Much like resting one muscle group while you work another in weight training, this intermission allows the brain’s chemicals to replenish and our capacity for focus to be restored.

Strategies to optimise your performance and wellbeing at work:

• Program your day so after every 60-90 minutes you have a 5-10-minute recovery micro-break. Use an alarm.
• Use your mini-break to do something completely different. For example, if you’ve been sitting at your desk, get up and have a snack or drink of water out in the fresh air. If you’ve been on field or deck training, seek a quiet place and do a 5-minute meditation or deep breathing.
• Plan longer breaks into your day, at mid-morning, lunch and mid-afternoon to further recharge your productivity. Use these 20-30 minute breaks to go for a walk and listen to a podcast, have lunch with someone, or engage in a hobby. Learning, playing and socialising are the best recovery breaks, because they change your inner state of focus as well as recharging your battery.

Coaching can be an intense role, and coaches expend a lot of energy, every day. But that energy must be continually restored for career longevity. The idea of resilience has become confused with ‘toughing it out’ or being a workaholic, when this isn’t scientifically true. Resilience and longevity is about how you recharge, not how long you endure.