“In order for man to succeed in life, God provided him two means, education and physical activity. Not separately, one for the soul and the other for the body, but for the two together.  With these two means, man can attain perfection.”             —Plato (423-347 BC)

Peak performance, promising a vibrancy of efforts and purposeful achievement includes calling forth, developing, enhancing and protecting your resources.  Your number one resource is—YOU: Your good health and ample energy to get things done.

Exercise, restoration and renewal are requirements to empower your efforts.  John J. Ratey, MD, explains the value of moving the body in his book, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and The Brain,                                     “…exercise is the single most powerful tool you have to optimize your brain function…from your genes to your emotions, your body and brain are dying to embrace the physical life. You are built to move. When you do you’ll be on fire…getting your heart and lungs pumping can mean the difference between a calm focused mind and a harried, inattentive self.”

In a recent New York Times article, Relax! You’ll Be More Productive penned by Tony Schwartz, chief executive officer of The Energy Project—the value of performance ‘renewal’ gets additional traction:

     “A new and growing body of multidisciplinary research shows that strategic renewal — including daytime workouts, short afternoon naps, longer sleep hours, more time away from the office and longer, more frequent vacations — boosts productivity, job performance and, of course, health.

…Time is the resource on which we’ve relied to get more accomplished. When there’s more to do, we invest more hours. But time is finite, and many of us feel we’re running out, that we’re investing as many hours as we can while trying to retain some semblance of a life outside work (or school).

…Although many of us can’t increase the working hours in the day, we can measurably increase our energy. Science supplies a useful way to understand the forces at play here. Physicists understand energy as the capacity to do work. Like time, energy is finite; but unlike time, it is renewable.

…In a study of nearly 400 employees, published last year, researchers found that sleeping too little — defined as less than six hours each night — was one of the best predictors of on-the-job burn-out. A recent Harvard study estimated that sleep deprivation costs American companies $63.2 billion a year in lost productivity.

…The Stanford researcher Cheri D. Mah found that when she got male basketball players to sleep 10 hours a night, their performances in practice dramatically improved: free-throw and three-point shooting each increased by an average of 9 percent.

…Daytime naps have a similar effect on performance. When night shift air traffic controllers were given 40 minutes to nap — and slept an average of 19 minutes — they performed much better on tests that measured vigilance and reaction time.

…Longer naps have an even more profound impact than shorter ones. Sara C. Mednick, a sleep researcher at the University of California, Riverside, found that a 60- to 90-minute nap improved memory test results as fully as did eight hours of sleep.

…The importance of restoration is rooted in our physiology. Human beings aren’t designed to expend energy continuously. Rather, we’re meant to pulse between spending and recovering energy.

In the 1950s, the researchers William Dement and Nathaniel Kleitman discovered that we sleep in cycles of roughly 90 minutes, moving from light to deep sleep and back out again…A decade later, Professor Kleitman discovered that this cycle recapitulates itself during our waking lives.

The difference is that during the day we move from a state of alertness progressively into physiological fatigue approximately every 90 minutes.

Our bodies regularly tell us to take a break, but we often override these signals and instead stoke ourselves up with caffeine, sugar and our own emergency reserves — the stress hormones adrenaline, noradrenaline and cortisol.

Working in 90-minute intervals turns out to be a prescription for maximizing productivity. Professor K. Anders Ericsson  and his colleagues at Florida State University have studied elite performers, including musicians, athletes, actors and chess players. In each of these fields, Dr. Ericsson found that the best performers typically practice in uninterrupted sessions that last no more than 90 minutes. They begin in the morning, take a break between sessions, and rarely work for more than four and a half hours in any given day.”

Schwartz concludes…”By managing energy more skillfully, it’s possible to get more done, in less time, more sustainably.”