What is the biggest needle mover to improve performance on game day?
It’s actually the fitness minus fatigue paradigm, a.k.a. readiness.
It doesn’t matter how goddamn fit you are, guys. If your fatigue is currently higher than your fitness, you simply will not be able to express your capacities.
Think of recovery or fatigue as a cup. Let’s say the cup is 250 milliliters. If we put in 275 milliliters, the cup starts to overflow. The liquid that’s overflowing is your performance.
On game day, if you feel sluggish, you can’t keep up with your man, you can’t win the ball out the front — and you usually can, you’re usually athletic — it’s likely a fatigue issue, not a performance one.
Fatigue will always mask performance. Fatigue will mask fitness gains that you’ve made that are subdued because fatigue is too high.
The most acute performance enhancer is simply dropping fatigue to reveal your newfound fitness and all the hard training you’ve done.
The best way to drop fatigue is not saunas, compression boots, or collagen powders. It’s simply to drop training volume. Training volume is the biggest determinant of fatigue.
Alongside that, then, is passive recovery modalities like sleep, relaxation, and food.
So when planning your training week, your training month, your training season — yes, it’s important to train hard. Yes, it’s important to present an overload. However, if you’re looking at your training week and it looks like that theoretical cup is close to being full, or is full and is overflowing, remember: the thing that overflowed, the cup that’s overflowing, is your gains.
Reduce training volume and scale back up slowly as performance allows.