You fly more than you train. You sit in meetings for 10 hours, eat whatever arrives, and expect to make your best decisions at 18:00. No coach would let an athlete prepare like that.
That’s the idea behind the corporate athlete, and after 30 years in health and performance I think it’s still the most useful way for a leader to look at their own body.
Where the idea comes from
In 2001, Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz published “The Making of a Corporate Athlete” in Harvard Business Review. Their argument: executives face demands as heavy as professional athletes, but nobody trains them for it (HBR, January 2001).
They described a performance pyramid with 4 levels: physical wellbeing at the base, then emotional health, mental sharpness and a sense of purpose. And they made one point I use every week: recovering energy is as important as spending it.
What holds up, and what I’d add
The pyramid holds up. Most leadership development still starts at the top, with strategy and mindset, and skips the base. Physiology before strategy.
What I’d add after working with founders and executives since 1998:
- Measure first. Blood work, body composition and fitness testing tell you where the base is weak. Guessing wastes months.
- Plan for travel. The plan has to survive a week in 3 time zones, or it isn’t a plan.
- Use the minimum effective dose. Athletes train for hours. You don’t need to. 3 strength sessions of 20 minutes a week keep me lean and strong.
How to train like a corporate athlete
- Set your season. Work in 90-day blocks with 3 outcomes each. Athletes peak for events, and so can you: a fundraise, a launch, a board cycle.
- Train the base. 2 sessions a week is the minimum. 3 is what works best for most people.
- Build in recovery. Sleep first. Then short breaks in the day: I work in 30-minute focused blocks with 5 minutes of movement between them.
- Fuel for the work. Eat for steady energy through the afternoon, not for the 15:00 crash.
- Review the tape. Every Friday, look at what happened: sleep, sessions, energy, the decisions you’re proud of and the ones you’re not. Adjust next week.
For teams
The same system works for a leadership team. Through Fitcorp Global I run leadership performance programs for companies whose leaders need to perform under sustained pressure. If that’s you, get in touch.
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