A sure-fire way to improve your performance: Interval Training

Image: It takes a long time to grow young by nattu

There’s been a lot of talk lately about train­ing our peo­ple for suc­cess; and about our desire to sig­nif­i­cantly raise our level of per­for­mance in the busi­ness. Inter­est­ingly enough, these 2 words (train­ing & per­for­mance) can be tracked to the sports arena. I won­der what we may learn by look­ing into some of the the­o­ries of sports train­ing, and how they affect per­for­mance lev­els for elite athletes?

An inter­est­ing dis­cus­sion relates to inter­val train­ing. The book “The power of full engage­ment” by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz, explains how “Russ­ian sports sci­en­tists res­ur­rected the con­cept [of inter­val train­ing] in the 1960s and began apply­ing it with stun­ning suc­cess to their Olympic ath­letes”. By push­ing your­self to your lim­its for short peri­ods of time, and rest­ing between these peri­ods of high inten­sity, you allow your body to recover suf­fi­ciently for the next bout of high per­for­mance. Accord­ing to this the­ory, fail­ing to rest will lead to “a mea­sur­able dete­ri­o­ra­tion of performance”.

What would be the con­se­quence of this train­ing approach to the cor­po­rate arena? Loehr’s and Schwartz’ book actu­ally encour­ages the appli­ca­tion of the con­cept to 4 areas of our every day life: Our phys­i­cal self; Our emo­tional self; Our spir­i­tual self; and our intel­lec­tual self.

How­ever, what could hap­pen to an indi­vid­ual who has longer peri­ods of per­for­mance and rest in his cor­po­rate life? One pos­si­bil­ity is that he is seemed as not depend­able. Con­sis­tency in high per­for­mance, many say, is the key to good appraisals and high bonuses at the end of the year. It is not good enough to demon­strate high lev­els of per­for­mance, it must be done day in, day out.

The prob­lem with this is that in a cul­ture that value diver­sity, we should account for, allow, and recog­nise, that dif­fer­ent peo­ple will have dif­fer­ent “train­ing inter­vals”. For some indi­vid­u­als, the peri­ods of high per­for­mance and rest could be mea­sured in hours, or even min­utes. For other indi­vid­u­als, it may be weeks. In a few rare ones, it could be months, or even years.

How can organ­i­sa­tions have a fair per­for­mance appraisal sys­tem, yet account for the nat­ural vari­ance in these peri­ods (at least for those peo­ple for whom ‘inter­val train­ing’ at work actu­ally works well for)?

Tagged as: Work Performance