I didn't do anything for fitness for most of my life. I played soccer when I was kid, but then once I got into playing music, by the time I was in high school I was more focused on playing in bands and running sound at local clubs around Richmond Virginia where I grew up, and then once I was in University I was so focused on all of that, I never really focused on exercise. I was also really into mountain biking when I was living in Northern California so I got most of my exercise that way.

It wasn't until I was living in Sydney that a mate of mine Joshua suggested I should try Crossfit. This was back in 2011. I headed to Inner West Crossfit (IWC) in Sydney, and was hooked ever since. I went to IWC for around a year, then found KGV Crossfit in the city just next to the Harbour Bridge and went there for many years.

What I really enjoyed most about Crossfit was the community, and doing crazy challenging workouts with a group, and made some great lifelong friends in the process.

Back at this time, while I could feel a lot of fitness gains, I wasn't really measuring or monitoring anything. Various devices like the Apple Watch were providing interesting information, but not really telling me anything more than my total calories for the day. I used to not even think about my sleep or recovery at all.

Crossfit was really great for me because I liked being able to fit a huge workout into an hour at lunchtime, and break up the work day between morning and afternoon. Anything frustrating in the morning was completely wiped away after a good WOD.

I also traveled a lot for work. I could find a Crossfit in almost any location, and meet a lot of like-minded Crossfitters around the world. From Byron Bay

Melbourne

To India, Hyderabad

Mumbai

Bangalore

Korea

Beijing

Bali

Hong Kong

Kuala Lumpur

Jersey City

Virginia, Goochland, with horses :)

And this is just some highlights. Being a Crossfit tourist is a great way to meet a lot of local people and find out the best healthy places to eat, where to go, what to do, turning most of what might have been boring business trips into explorations.

Over the years, while developing more skills and being able to at least perform all of the movements like double unders, handstand pushups, bar and ring muscle ups, I had reached a plateau - I wasn't improving, mostly maintaining.

WHOOP

The thing that really changed my awareness about everything was the Whoop band. I started with the Whoop band when the third generation was just hitting the market, I started wearing the Whoop in February 2020, around 6 months after it launched in the States.

The Whoop transformed me. I never paid attention to how much sleep I was getting. For the first time in my adult life I was focused on bedtime, when to go to sleep to get a green recovery the next morning. I experimented for along time and optimised my sleep with a bunch of routines and systems.

What I learned, and still practice today, is the following:

How much sleep
I can get a green recovery with 85% of my sleep need, assuming no other interferences like alcohol or jet lag.

When to sleep
The best sleep pattern is to sleep and wake at almost the same time everyday. This optimises circadian rhythms, and you have to stick with it because it takes approximately 2 weeks to reap the benefits.

How to sleep
The room needs to be fully blacked out - no light so you need blackout drapes.
The room has to be cold enough to sleep with a sheet or light blanket, but not too cold, just right.
Noise source - enough of a noise source to remove any little noises in the middle of the night or early morning to not disturb you, but not loud enough to feel loud when you wake up in the morning. I can't sleep with a white or pink or brown noise sound, so I use a rain loop that is mostly pink in spectrum but more natural.
Mouth tape - breathing only through your nose while sleeping makes a huge difference to sleep quality. There are inexpensive mouth tapes that you can buy 100s for a few bucks. Don't use regular bandage style tape it's not made for lips!

Sleeping well makes all the difference. This is nothing new and has been researched for years and years, but you just have to learn some things for yourself sometimes!

Whoop derives recovery from a few measurements, the two most important ones being your resting heart rate while sleeping, and your heart rate variability (HRV). Whoop does the best job of measuring HRV, and that is not an opinion. I tested it myself against all the other devices on the market, and independent third party tests have been done comparing the accuracy of HRV to hospital grade medical equipment, and the Whoop band is better than the rest.

So all of this is great, and if you follow it, you will benefit from it. A lot of people don't like Whoop because it shows them that they have a yellow or red recovery, but this is super important information that you should be listening to. You will overtrain if you smash yourself on a red recovery, you won't achieve any fitness gains that way and worse you might injure yourself.

The Whoop band has helped me over the past few years get fitter and stronger, recover better and know myself a lot better. I continued to improve and in the past year I've reached a competitive level in the Master's division here in Asia. I went to the finals for the Masters League last year, qualified for this year, and in between qualified and competed in the Cebu Throwdown. I've been going to Mobilus in Chinatown in Singapore for the past 3+ years and it's a super great community!

However, I'm now at the next plateau. I'm not making any gains. Most of my recent improvements have been about perfecting the movements, not increasing strength or cardio fitness.

The reason for this, which I have more recently discovered is that I train too much, and the Whoop band kind of encourages this mentality. I used to think "no rest days". I would only rest if I had a red recovery. This is not the best philosophy. In the Whoop world, you try and hit your strain target every day. When you do this day in and day out, you end up fatigued because your body has been spending more time and energy dealing with stress than recovering from it.

A better philosophy for fitness gains is to consider adaptation.

Below is the philosophy espoused by Joel Jamieson, founder of Morpheus Labs. Joel is a best-selling author and one of the world’s foremost authorities on strength, conditioning, and energy systems. His training strategies have been used by thousands of elite performers and top athletes worldwide, including the Navy SEALS, UFC champions, and dozens of teams from the NFL, NBA, MLS, NCAA, and more.

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In simplest terms, adaptation is the process the body goes through to become more fit to handle the demands of its environment. This is how training works. By lifting weights, doing cardiovascular conditioning, practicing a skill, playing a sport, etc., you are creating a specific environment that your body has to adapt to.

You lift heavy weights, it gets stronger. You run long distances, it gets more efficient. You practice a specific lift or movement, your technique gets better. This is nothing more than the body’s adaptive mechanisms at work. There are two parts to this process: stress and recovery.

When you’re training, you’re putting your body under stress. This means your stress-response system is working hard to crank up energy production. The more force and power your muscles produce, the more energy they need.

Once the workout is over, that’s when recovery begins. The most important thing to understand about recovery is that just like stress, it’s all about energy. In this case, the body needs energy to repair and rebuild stressed muscle tissue. To add new mitochondria (the power plants of our cells). To create and reinforce the neural pathways that improve our technique and skill.

This use of energy is what we call recovery. In other words, recovery is the process of using energy to adapt to the stress of our environment. When it comes to fitness, it’s this process that turns the workouts we do into improvements in strength, power, hypertrophy, body comp, skill, and performance.

The problem with recovery

Your body is constantly through periods where it’s put under stress, followed by time where it can recover from that stress. This is what we call a stress-recovery cycle. In a perfect world, you’d have all the energy you need to fully recover and adapt to each period of stress. You’d make constant improvements in your fitness. You’d never feel tired, run down, or lack the motivation to get off the couch. You’d never get sick. The problem is that we don’t live in that perfect world.

In the real world, our bodies can only produce a fixed amount of energy each day no matter how much we eat or sleep. The mental stress of life can add up quickly. We can convince ourselves that we need to do one high intensity workout after another. It can be all too easy to put our body under more mental and physical stress than it has the energy to adapt to. When this happens, we put ourselves into a recovery debt.

If a recovery debt is small, it most often leads to frustrating plateaus where you’re putting in the work, but not seeing any improvement. Unfortunately, this is where a lot of people in fitness get stuck. Over time, if the balance between stress and recovery isn’t fixed, the body will fight back.

You’ll start to feel more fatigued all the time. You’ll be less motivated to go to the gym and more likely to get injured if you do. You’ll crave foods you know you shouldn’t eat. Sound familiar? Almost everyone that’s trained hard has experienced this at one time or another.

Fortunately, there’s an easy way to prevent all this…

A lot of people have been led to believe that a low recovery score on an app means that their body can’t train hard or perform well. They are often confused when they get this low recovery score even though they feel just fine. Or, they are surprised when they choose to train hard anyway and then hit a PR. The reason this happens isn’t necessarily because the recovery score is wrong.

It’s because no matter what anyone tells you, a recovery score is not a predictor of what your body is capable of, or how well it will perform at any given time.

Instead, the most accurate way to understand a recovery score, particularly the one Morpheus gives you, is as a gauge of the balance between the amount of energy you’ve been spending on stress vs. recovery over the last few days (or longer).

If your recovery score is low on a given day, it doesn’t mean that you can’t train hard or put your body under more stress.

But it does mean, however, that you have less energy available to adapt to a hard training session.

So if you choose to train hard on a day with a low score, it’ll take you longer to recover from it than if you were starting from a higher recovery score.

…

The Morpheus system enables you to train in heart zones based on your recovery each day. The three Morpheus zones are based on a concept called dynamic heart rate training.

The biggest problem with the way heart training has traditionally been done is that the zones are entirely static. They never change and are only based on a percentage of your maximum heart rate.

There are two big problems with this approach. The first is that most people use the 220-age formula to determine their max heart rate.

That formula is outdated and research has shown it to be extremely inaccurate for most people. That’s because it was developed more than 50 years ago without any real research to even support it at the time.

It was also never intended to be applied across all ages and fitness levels in the first place.

The other big issue with the traditional approach to heart rate training is that even if you do use an accurate max heart rate, there is no connection to recovery. Your zones are always the same.

It doesn’t matter how fatigued or recovered you are.

The zones are the same either way, but that’s not how the body works.

Think about lifting weights. When you’re tired and sore, the bar feels heavier. It takes much more effort to get in the same number of reps. You can’t hit the same max numbers.

As we’ve discussed in previous lessons, fatigue and stress impact our bodies in many ways.

One of the most important of these is that they increase the cost of doing more work. This often decreases our ability to perform as a result.

That’s why heart rate training zones need to be dynamic and adjust to where your body is at each day.

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And so now, my philosophy is to optimise my workouts based on the Morpheus dynamic heart rate bands.

What the above quoted section does not say is that all of the Morpheus calculations are based on machine learning algorithms trained on millions of recoveries from professional athletes through to normal everyday people. So the system intelligently calculates the optimal amount of stress each week to build strength and fitness.

My daily process now is to continue using Whoop as an all day 24/7 monitor, and wear the Morpheus band during exercise as well. The Whoop still helps me manage my overall strain for the day, so for example if I have a big day for whatever reason (walking, or a big presentation or music performance or whatever) then I choose my total strain for the day since the Morpheus focuses on weekly accumulation. In this way I might still exercise on a day my strain is already high but I will focus on the lower third heart rate band.

From a dietary perspective I maintain a 40/30/30 macro split since many studies have found that 40/30/30 plans compared to higher carb approaches and even very low carb keto approaches drive better health outcomes as well as improvements in resting energy expenditure even after weight loss (which is rare since usually weight loss drives down REE)

I also do 16:8 intermittent fasting daily, which has also been scientifically proven to reduce weight while maintaining muscle mass when combined with resistance training (this works better for men than women BTW). With this 8 hour eating window I don't eat until 12 noon, and have dinner later around 8pm because I am usually very active in the evenings working, playing music, or writing ridiculously long blog posts like this one LOL!

I'm now focused on this new philosophy in the lead up to the next Master's League finals, so we'll see how well it works towards the end of the year :)