Many of you may not be aware of where I spent the majority of my professional career but I actually spent a decade working with 7 different professional sports teams.
During that time I was fortunate to be a part of teams that won premierships, championships and made a number of grand finals.
From this I have been able to take away so many lessons and learnings from these incredible athletes.
I believe that many of this lessons can be applied to other high performance industries and in this episode I want to share a glimpse of some of the key lessons our athletes know that you should know too.
In this episode I share:
- My experience working with elite athletes
- What elite athletes are taught about nutrition that many of us don’t know
- What pre-hab is and how it can help you as much as it helps athletes
- The importance of daily routines and rituals
- How elite athletes periodise their training and how doing the same can help you
- How rest is important for elite athletes and is for you too
- The ways athletes utilise rest
- How we can bring that rest strategy to high performance and leadership
- The other parts of rest besides just sleeping
- How seeking therapy can help with rest
- The importance of building mental resilience
- The sort of hurdles athletes and high performers may encounter that require resilience
Key Quotes
“Elite athletes understand that nutrition is a key component to optimising their performance and enhancing their longevity.”
“Most people don’t know how good they can actually feel and this is a by-product of you having never experienced it.”
“We don’t want to reach burn out or break down before we change and unfortunately that is often the case.”
Episode Resources
Jessica Spendlove Website – www.jessicaspendlove.com
Jessica Spendlove Keynotes – JessicaspendloveKeynotes – Jessica Spendlove
The High-Performance Profile Quiz https://jessicaspendlove.com/quiz/
Jess Spendlove Instagram https://www.instagram.com/jess_spendlove_dietitian/?hl=en
Jess Spendlove LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessica-spendlove-64173bb8/
About Your Host
Jessica Spendlove | Wellbeing Speaker & High Performance Strategist
Jess Spendlove is an international wellbeing and high performance speaker, coach, and advisor. With over 15 years of experience across corporate leadership, elite sport and the military she is known for helping ambitious leaders and teams optimise energy, build resilience, and sustain peak performance.
As one of Australia’s leading performance dietitians and a trusted voice in executive wellbeing, Jess delivers science-backed strategies that empower individuals, teams and organisations to thrive under pressure and achieve long-term success.
Episode Transcript
The following transcript has been automatically generated and not checked for accuracy
Jess (00:04.486)
Today I want to share part one of 10 lessons high performers or those who want to be high performing humans can learn and leverage from my 10 years in professional sport. Now I’m not sure how many people tuning in to stay at the top are aware of where I have spent the majority of my professional career, which was a decade working with seven different professional sports teams.
from AFL, NRL, netball, basketball, soccer, rugby union, pretty much basically every team sport except for cricket. Maybe that’s an easier way to say. And during that time, I was fortunate to be a part of teams who won initial premierships, multiple championships, made a number of grand finals, and even without the accolades, which is part of…
professional team sport, not just seeing behind the curtain, but contributing to the success, the lessons, the learnings, the elevation, the evolution of hundreds of professional athletes and thousands of emerging athletes. With this experience, which totaled more than 30 seasons, which means a season is a year. So within the space of a decade, I managed to cram a career’s worth of experience into that time.
The main point.
Yeah. And with that, I was able to see what were the real needle movers? What are the things and the lessons and the strategies and the evidence-based practices that these elite athletes can learn, can embed, and can leverage to maximise their performance? And then as I started to transverse and become interested in the world of business and work with entrepreneurs and executives or those wanting to be.
Jess (02:02.966)
with an elite athlete or a leader, I was able to see the common denominators and the things that each of these people need to know to elevate their performance. That is what today’s conversation is going to be about. Now, before we dive into that, for anyone who hasn’t completed the high perform… Now, before we dive into that, I wanted to quickly mention the high performance profile quiz.
This is something that I have put together off the back of working with so many high performing individuals and seeing that there are three common profiles. There is the overachiever, the all or nothing human, and the ticking time bomb. If you click the link in my show notes, you can complete the quiz, which will only take you a few minutes, which you will find out which profile you are. And based on that, what your right next step is. Now on that note, let’s get into today’s episode.
Jess (03:05.794)
So team, I wanted to do something a little bit different and do a part one of a two part series, which is the first time I’ve run something like this.
Jess (03:19.208)
Team, today I wanted to… Team, today I’m trying something for the first time, which is…
Jess (03:27.806)
Sorry Sam. Team, today I’m trying something for the first time which is taking you through part one of a two part series. So today we are going to be focusing on five lessons, all high performers or those wanting to be high perform… Oh my god, sorry Sam. Start again. Make it clean.
Team, today I’m taking you through the first five lessons that you as a high performer or anyone listening who wants to embed high performing behaviors into their lives can learn from the lessons, can learn from the lessons, can learn from the lessons and behaviors that elite athletes practice and embed into their lives to maximize their performance, both now.
while considering their sustained success and enhanced longevity. Now, this is part one of a two-part series, which is the first time I’m hosting a series like this within Stay At The Top. So please, if you love it, let me know or provide me with feedback. Now,
Jess (04:41.086)
Now, the first place I wanted to start today, which is probably no surprise, is talking about how elite athletes understand that nutrition is a key component to optimizing their performance and enhancing their longevity. Now, what elite athletes learn to do really well?
Now, what elite athletes learn when it comes to performance nutrition is this is a fundamental component of how they can fuel their performance, to train harder, to perform longer, to get fitter, to get faster, to get stronger, and to continually be able to do that. Nutrition is so much more than being healthy, which don’t get me wrong, that is in
incredibly important for an elite athlete. If an athlete isn’t healthy, it means they are more at risk of illness or injury, which means more risk of them not being able to do what they love, whether that is competing, whether that is being selected, or whether for certain sports that means continuing to have a contract. There is so much on the line when it comes to their physical fitness and their overall performance. So,
The thing with athletes, which a lot of you might be surprised, is they all don’t just know this information. They need to be taught this information. I will never forget the very first professional athlete that I sat down and had a consult with when I first started at the Cronulla Sharks in 2013. It was Wade Graham, and I remember being
very excited to be finally embarking on this part of my career and finally having my first consult with a professional athlete. Because I am the way I am, I did a little bit of prep the day before, you know, making sure that these meals that I was going to suggest to him were like textbook perfect in inverted commas, that they were ticking all the boxes, you know, at least 20 grams of protein. He was having breakfast before training, so we at least wanted to make sure he was
Jess (06:52.93)
The technicals here are important, but I’m just highlighting the example. So I went there and I worked out like four or five different breakfast options. I probably spent like an hour the day before preparing all of this. I sat down with him, had a little bit of small talk because rapport is so important. And I remember saying, Wade, start at the start of your day. What do you have before you come to training? And his response to me was nothing or a coffee. So.
throw out the window my idea of telling him to have four eggs and a few slices of toast and an orange juice or some Greek yogurt in a smoothie with a banana and some oats. That was out the window. And what I learned there on my very first day of consulting a professional athlete is you need to start where that person is starting. And you should not assume that just because this person is a high level athlete.
playing in representative sides, it doesn’t mean that they just have this knowledge or even if they have it, it doesn’t mean that they know how to execute it. So I hope for anyone listening here today, even if you know what I’m going to talk about, reflect on if you’re actually doing it. I think we all have opportunities to pause, reflect and reset, given we are at the back end of 2023, but all probably a little bit tired.
some behaviors have probably dropped off. Maybe this can serve as the reset and the circuit breaker that you need. Anyway, back to my point on harnessing the power of nutrition to optimize performance like an athlete does. So nutrition is just so much more even than just fueling, which is such an incredible piece of it. It is maximizing their recovery, which is also important in terms of optimizing their adaptation to the training session.
it’s also used to mitigate or reduce the risk of illness or injury. Or if and when that occurs, it can be used to buffer that, to reduce the injury. Sorry. It can be used to buffer that. So either reduce the illness time as much as possible or reduce the symptoms. Or in terms of recovery, it can support it or fasten. It can support it to minimise the amount of time.
Jess (09:16.514)
out of the pool, off the track, whatever it might be. Sorry, Sam, I need to turn the air-con on. Dying.
Jess (10:01.182)
And so my intention of highlighting all of that is to let you know that an elite athlete doesn’t just know how to do that. They need to work with a specialist, at event, they need to work with a specialist to either increase their awareness on how to do that, or even when the awareness is there, work on strategies that can allow them to actually put things into place. Because with an athlete, just because they know they need to eat more before training to feel more…
Jess (10:34.478)
Just because they know they need to fuel better before training doesn’t mean they can actually just go away and do that.
There are a lot of factors at play there. If they’ve never really had breakfast, it can be a really difficult thing to start to do, particularly if they’re training in the morning because they may feel sick. And this is where nutrition training and coaching and strategy comes into play. So this is why for my leaders, my high performers, or those who want to be high performing, sometimes it’s not just a matter of know the thing, do the thing. You are
Jess (11:12.302)
How you eat is a byproduct of your habits, how you’ve grown up, what you’ve learned, behaviors that you have, subconscious behaviors that you have. A lot of the time we are learning and rewiring and putting.
putting improved behaviors into practice. So this is why if you are someone who doesn’t really eat breakfast or you’re eating a late lunch or you’re eating sporadically across the day, this may just be a byproduct of something that you have always done. But for you, if you want to improve your focus, improve your energy, improve your productivity, you need to approach nutrition the same as an elite athlete
and their career. If you really want to be the best version of yourself, you really need to learn how to eat to optimize how you feel every single day. But the best news with that is you don’t just get return on investment immediately, you get return on investment for the long run. Nutrition is one of those behaviors which you can, nutrition is one of those behaviors which is a non-negotiable. We all do it every single day, which means every single person has an opportunity out there to
learn to eat better, to learn to eat for a certain outcome. The other thing I will say is most people don’t actually, most people don’t know how good they can actually feel. And this is a byproduct of you having never experienced it. I feel.
The one thing I see is a lot of high performers feel like, well, I eat, you know, I do a pretty good job, but they’ve never engaged an expert to really drill into that. It’s not just about ticking a box and feeling okay. If you want to be great, you need to have every area of your life lining up to support you with that. And one of those includes nutrition. And nutrition isn’t just about the food you eat. It is about the outcomes and how you want to feel each day. It is about how
Jess (13:13.484)
sleep which we’ve covered in previous episodes.
Jess (13:29.014)
So I guess just to bring this point home, understanding that nutrition is a key performance and wellbeing driver to how you feel and perform and function every single day is a critical part of learning to leverage, is a critical part of you performing at your best, no matter if you’re an elite athlete, a leader, a high performer or someone who just wants to be their absolute best.
Now, the second lesson that high performers can learn from elite athletes is the value of being proactive with strategies, similar to what athletes do with their prehab exercises. Now, if prehab isn’t a term that you’ve heard of, it refers to preventative measures to prevent injury. So you’ve probably heard of rehab as in rehabilitation. So you may think if you’ve ever experienced, if you’ve ever experienced an injury,
physio, you’ve had to do some rehabilitation exercises. Prehab is about putting into practice exercises or strategies or protocols, which can also include nutrition and supplements to prevent, minimize or mitigate the risk of an injury happening. So I’ll give you an example in terms of an athlete and then we’ll extrapolate it out to a leader, a high performer or someone who wants to be high performing.
Let’s take for instance like a squad, a team sport. They will often have preventative
exercises and protocols that every athlete needs to do. So for example, for a lot of the team sport athletes, it will be like plyometrics. So that is to load their tendons and also prevent the risk of certain overuse injuries. Now whilst that might be included into strength and conditioning or specific like pre or post field sessions, there will also be athletes who have their own specific protocols.
Jess (15:32.472)
So this may be an athlete who has had a specific injury in the past, maybe a specific tendon issue, or is potentially at a certain part of their career, whether that is early on or whether that is later on, and they are potentially more at risk of certain overuse injuries. So the idea of having preventative measures in place or strategies in place that are gonna minimize their risk of injury is something that they utilize
very well. A second part to that which I slightly touched on the first point is nutrition strategies and supplement strategies to minimize their risk of illness or injury or if and when they do get sick or injured strategies we can put in place to reduce the severity or the time or the time out of training. So I think when we look at
So when we look at leaders or high performers or those people who want to be high performing, this is why I often talk about the need to be proactive rather than reactive. This is why we wanna use nutrition to maximize energy, maximize performance and maximize productivity, not just waiting until we get tired and then looking to band-aid it.
This is why we want to have daily routines and rituals in our lives, such as a morning routine or slush as a sleep routine, or maybe it’s a brain break, which is something I’ve spoke about before, you know, taking time away from your desk, preferably in nature.
away from technology, if that’s not possible, maybe it’s just stepping away from your desk or even pushing yourself back, doing some breath work, doing some meditation. We need to put these proactive strategies in place to help us manage the day-to-day stress that we have in our lives.
Jess (17:33.018)
Often what I see a lot of people do is they take action when the crisis happens. They take the holiday when they’re feeling totally burnt out. They…
Jess (17:46.294)
They rest when they’re completely exhausted. What if we flip that script? What if the goal is to optimize and sustain? Now for me, that sounds like a much better outcome, a much more enjoyable way to live. And when we talk about high performance living, when we think about elite athletes, that is exactly what they do to get through their season as unscathed and in the best shape as possible. And that is exactly what leaders and high performing humans
humans should be doing as well.
Jess (18:33.842)
Now, the third point I want to touch on today is how elite athletes periodize, how, now the third point I want to touch on today is how elite athletes
periodize their training. Well, to be honest, they don’t periodize their training. They have coaches and experts and high performance staff periodize their training for them. But the notion of having a periodized load, meaning they don’t just go hard and flatline and it’s the exact same every single day, every single week, every single month, every single year. They strategically have their
Jess (19:16.628)
and high seasons. They do this so they can push their bodies to the absolute maximum, get the most out of it, i.e. pre-season, which is where it is, i.e. pre-season for a team sport athlete where it is all about developing peak fitness, peak strength, optimizing their skills and then when they get to in season, which is all about competing on the weekend or whenever that
about sustaining what they’ve gained in pre-season, performing at their best when it matters most, and then having a big focus on recovery so they’re able to sustain that across the year.
The issue I see a lot of high performing individuals and leaders make is that they expect that they can just perform at their peak every single day. And I guess that’s the thing about a peak. It’s a summit. It’s something that we should reach, but it’s not something that we should sustain.
Different to that is high performance, which is how can we continue to perform at our optimal for an extended period of time so we can achieve the things we want, but take care of ourselves at the same time.
I really think if a high performer can start to adopt how an athlete approaches their year in the pre-season, in-season and then off-season idea, so their intense periods, their big focus periods and then their rest periods. And then within each of those phases or cycles throughout the year, they’ve got different days. They’ve got high, medium and low days or rest days. Now depending on who you are, depending on what your day looks like, depending on what
Jess (21:04.148)
your business looks like, I understand that it may not just be as straightforward as that and I also understand that elite athletes make a living from training and playing their sport. But what I’m talking about here is taking the lessons and what they do really well because what I don’t see getting done really well for high-performing individuals who are entrepreneurs or in the corporate world or just goal-orientated humans pushing and driving for more is
they don’t take that approach. They flatline, they go hard every single day and they only stop when they’re made to stop. And now I’m talking about this not just from being an expert, but from personal experience as well. I have definitely walked in the shoes of the shadow side of being a driven, motivated, high-performing individual who is out to help so many other, who was focused on giving and helping all of these amazing elite athletes. I understand
that sometimes putting these things into practice can be more challenging than just what the theory is. What my intention is with this podcast is to make you aware and hopefully enable you to put some behaviours into practice that will just help sustain and optimise yourself slightly more. We don’t want to reach burnout or breakdown before we change and unfortunately that is often the case. When it comes to an elite athlete if they push for too long it is going to increase their risk of illness or injury which is going to
to increase their time away from training, which is going to decrease their performance, which impacts their overall goal of being their best self. It is exactly the same for every human being who is out there driving for more, whether that’s work, life, sport or in general. So I think the
So I think the reflection piece for this point is what can you do within your days, weeks or months to periodize your intake? I had a really wonderful conversation with Shanna Kennedy last week, who was a prominent life coach, where we spoke about this. Shanna is incredible. She’s my personal life coach. I’ve worked with her for two years and I find her to be such an inspiration. I think part of that is I see a lot of myself in Shanna and how she used to be. And she has gone from being this,
Jess (23:23.196)
still high achieving don’t get me wrong but she’s gone from walking the shadow side of being a high performer too.
being forced through having chronic fatigue to rewire and re-change what she does. And now she has two businesses and she’s written eight books and she’s got, you know, an amazing family and they travel often in this really well-rounded life and she is a really walking embodiment of how to have it all. But it does take intentionality and it does take her periodizing her week and she gave a beautiful example of this being that she wrote a book with her business partner
And they did five days, 16 to 17 hours. And then off the back of that, she took a week off. Now I know a lot of corporates out there consistently working well above their eight hours, 12 hour plus days, letting it bleed into their lives. And I think you need to ask the question, what needs to give before your body or your mental wellbeing gives. Periodization and looking at how you can add layers and levels into your days, weeks and months is an incredibly important high performance practice.
that we can all learn and leverage from how elite athletes approach their professions.
Jess (25:01.27)
The fourth strategy we can learn from.
elite athletes, which I think is a good, a great continuation from point three is the importance of rest. Now, when it comes to an elite athlete, rest is actually where the magic happens. This is where the adaptation happens. So what that means is when they’re resting and when they’re recovering, and that could be in the form of active recovery, i.e. immediately after a training session, or that can be on their rest days, that
everything that they’ve done in their training for the last few days takes place. So an athlete who’s maximizing every type of their recovery, their sleep, their nutrition, some more active.
recovery practices like ice baths and saunas and float tanks and Normatec boots and all of these things. They’re the athletes that are going to get the most out of themselves and they are the strategies that are not only going to help them reach the peak of their physical fitness for that season or prolong it but they’re also likely the ones that are going to put in strategies to best manage their bodies for the long run. Now that of course does not like
That of course does not mean they will never get injured. Of course, injury is just a part of being an athlete. Some of it can be a load issue, some of it can be a contact issue. There’s just so many reasons that can occur. But the importance of rest, the importance of maximizing that recovery goes a really, really long way in sustaining and optimizing their physical performance. Now, the same can be said for high-performing individuals and leaders.
Jess (26:44.814)
How are you applying strategic rest? How are you switching off your brain from work, separating that cognitive, separating that cognitive.
Jess (27:01.238)
How are you separating your life and your work life? How are you switching off your work brain? What practices do you have in place that you are closing down your laptop, you are walking away, you are not checking your emails at night in bed or in the morning? How are you putting those boundaries in place?
One thing a high performer does really, really well is they know how to get into flow. They know how to set their day up, they know how to get into deep work and they know how to be efficient. But in able to work at such a high level, that also requires a really high level of rest and recovery. I’m reading a really amazing book at the moment, 10 Times Is Easier Than Two Times and they talk about this in the book. And when I, well, I’m listening to the audio book I should say.
But when they started to cover this off, I was like, yes, this is so incredibly important. The harder you work, the more you need to rest. The more you need to strategically use rest, and the more you need to consider rest as a strategy.
in your toolkit that is going to help you get more out of your life. Now a really interesting concept that I’ve become aware of recently is the idea of the seven types of rest and I think I will dedicate a separate episode to that where we can dive deep but I just wanted to give you a little example here today. So one of the seven types of rest is emotional rest and some ways that you can do that are to
therapy. It can also be a way that you can create space for your emotions to breathe. So
Jess (28:42.326)
Thinking about the different types of rest, definitely sleep. That is our macro most important form of physical and cognitive rest, optimizing that. But how can we have these days or hours or moments where we separate work and life, where we switch our thinking brain off, which I know can be difficult. I definitely fall victim to this at times. But if you’re someone out there listening to the personal development and the professional development books, do you need to switch that off? And do you need to watch some
that’s really easy or just read a book that allows you to switch off that isn’t so inspirational and goal-orientated? Are you taking care of all of the different facets of yourself?
Jess (29:29.674)
So just to drive this point home, we really need to consider rest and recovery as a high performance strategy. It is something that is not only gonna help you sustain high levels of output and achieve peak performance, but is going to allow you not just to sprint, but to sustain that marathon, which is all about living that high performance life.
Jess (30:23.254)
And now the fifth lesson and the last lesson I’m going to touch on here today that we can learn from elite athletes is building mental resilience. Often what makes an athlete is their ability to recover from adversity, whether that is illness, whether that is injury, whether that’s not getting selected for a team or a representative squad, whether it’s being dropped, whatever it might be.
Often the athlete is made in how they perceive that situation. Are they seeing it as a lesson or are they seeing it as a failure? I covered off this exact conversation in quite a lot of detail with an episode I did with Shelly Johnson on my millennial career. So if you’re interested in exploring this one further, I’d highly recommend heading over there. It was about high performing habits, part one and two, and we talk about this. But building mental resilience
cultivating a growth mindset and cultivating the ability to look at something as a lesson. So for a business owner that might be you growing your business and then plateauing or growing your team and thinking you finally found the right team members only to work out that someone isn’t the right fit, you don’t have the right people on the bus. In the corporate world that might be getting looked over for a promotion which you thought you deserved or you
There’s so many examples of that, but I think it’s really important that we look at these moments as opportunities to learn, opportunities to grow and opportunities to take stock. It’s so easy when…
Jess (32:04.05)
It’s a lot easier to obviously look back in hindsight and see opportunities that did or didn’t happen or that weren’t made for us because something better was coming. Scrap that. I know it can be difficult in the moment when we’re facing what we perceive as failure or facing what we perceive as a missed opportunity to… Sorry, scrap that.
Jess (32:32.326)
Ultimately, this is about developing mental toughness and turning leadership challenges into growth opportunities. What we want to be doing is viewing failures as lessons and fostering an ability to improve our decision making. Learn from mistakes or learn from lessons or learn from opportunities and grow.
Jess (33:00.087)
team.
I want you to reflect on today’s episode, which is thinking about those five lessons that we’ve learned from elite athletes, which I’ll quickly run you over again. So one is learning how to leverage the power of nutrition to optimize performance, recovery and career longevity. Two is about how athletes have preventative strategies and employ and embed prehab exercises into their daily and weekly routines to minimize or prevent the risk of injury and illness
high performing leaders and high performing humans should be doing exactly the same with their own wellbeing strategies, their own daily routines and rituals and having their own toolkit to call on as they need. The third point was about periodisation and how elite athletes have their days, weeks and months periodised into high, medium, sorry, into low, medium and high days and pre-season, in-season and off-season.
leaders need to consider how they can bring that same strategy into their day-to-day lives. It’s not just maximum output, all the time, flatlining and pushing themselves to the absolute brink. It is considering how they can bring that strategy into whether it’s their days, their weeks or their months.
The fourth point was about the importance of rest and recovery and how this is where the actual magic happens for an elite athlete. This is where the adaptation happens and the same can be said for a leader or a high performer. This is where we consolidate. This is where we take stock. This is where we give our brains a break and this is what allows us to then when we work be as productive as possible and to get in as much flow as possible. And the fifth point.
Jess (34:54.398)
was about how do we build mental resilience? How do we take setbacks or?
And the fifth point was about building mental resilience. How do we develop that mental toughness and turn challenges into lessons and opportunities?
Now, I would love you all to reflect on today’s episode and ask yourself, what could you do, what could you improve or do better in your life? Likely, it isn’t about working harder or doing more, but leveraging one of these lessons, taking stock, taking a pause and embedding some strategies into your life, which you will feel benefit for now, but will compound and improve your performance and your wellbeing for the long run. Thank you for joining me today. If you keep
to have me speak on this topic or anything that I talk, if you’re keen on having me speak to your team, business or at your next event, I’m focusing on running speaking and workshops.
I’m focusing on conducting more speaking sessions and running workshops in 2024 and I would love to chat. You can either download my speaker kit in the show notes or you can contact me directly for more information. If one-on-one support is more what you’re after, you can also contact me and I’d love to hear about your goals, challenges and struggles and how we might be able to work together to help you get you to where you want to go. Otherwise, that’s all from me.
Jess (36:27.516)
this week team. I hope you reflect on today’s episode. I hope you take a lot out of it and most importantly I hope you will keep staying at the top. See you all next week.