The corporate athlete: train for the job you actually do

By Dan Remon · Evidence checked October 2026

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. After 30 years in health and performance, including London 2012, where I coached at the Olympic Village training facility, I still think it’s the most useful way for a leader to look at their own body.

Athletes have a season, a training plan, recovery built into the week and someone reviewing the tape. Most executives have a calendar.

What is a corporate athlete?

A corporate athlete is a leader who trains for the demands of the job the way an athlete trains for a sport: with a plan, measured inputs and recovery built in. The phrase comes from a 2001 Harvard Business Review article by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz, who argued that executives should train in the same systematic, multilevel way athletes do. In practice you build a physical base, protect sleep and recovery, plan around your real calendar, travel included, and review each week the way an athlete reviews a game. You don’t need an athlete’s body for this. You need an athlete’s preparation for the job you actually do.

Where the corporate athlete idea comes from

In January 2001, Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz published “The Making of a Corporate Athlete” in Harvard Business Review. Their argument: executives are, in effect, corporate athletes, and if they want to perform at a high level over the long haul, they have to train in the systematic, multilevel way athletes do.¹

They described a performance pyramid with 4 levels: physical wellbeing at the base, then emotional health, mental sharpness and, at the top, a sense of purpose. Each level affects the others. They also pointed out that most approaches to performance deal with people “only from the neck up”.

The line I use every week is theirs: recovering energy is as important as spending it. They built their method around rituals that move you between spending energy and recovering it, the same rhythm an athlete trains on.

25 years on, the pyramid holds up. Most leadership development still starts at the top, with strategy and mindset, and skips the base. Physiology before strategy.

Fitness and the outcomes an executive cares about

The base of the pyramid is measurable. Cardiorespiratory fitness, how well your heart and lungs deliver oxygen when you work hard, is one of the most useful health markers you can track.

A 2009 meta-analysis in JAMA pooled 33 cohort studies, with more than 100,000 healthy adults in the mortality analysis. Each 1-MET higher level of fitness, roughly the difference of running 1 km/h faster, was associated with a 13% lower risk of death from any cause. People in the low-fitness group (under 7.9 METs) had a 70% higher risk of death than the high-fitness group.²

Fitness also tracks with mental health. A 2019 meta-analysis found that people with low fitness had a 47% higher risk of a common mental health disorder than people with high fitness, though it pooled only 4 cohort studies.³ Both reviews are observational, so they can’t show cause.

What I do with it: measure the base first. Blood work, body composition and a fitness test tell you where it’s weak. I run blood work through partners at Orba Health. Guessing wastes months.

The dose is smaller than most leaders expect. The WHO guideline for adults is 150 to 300 minutes of moderate activity or 75 to 150 minutes of vigorous activity a week, plus regular muscle strengthening.⁴ For strength, 2 sessions a week is the minimum I set, and 3 is what works best for most people. Athletes train for hours. You don’t need to. 3 strength sessions of 20 minutes a week keep me lean and strong. That’s the minimum effective dose: the least training that still moves the number.

Sleep: the training most leaders skip

If fitness is the base, sleep is the recovery that lets you use it.

In a 2003 laboratory study, 48 healthy adults aged 21 to 38 were randomised to 4, 6 or 8 hours in bed a night for 14 days, or to 3 nights without sleep. Restricting sleep to 6 hours or less produced cognitive deficits equivalent to up to 2 nights of total sleep deprivation. Their sleepiness ratings rose at first, then barely moved, so they were largely unaware of how impaired they had become.⁵

That last finding is the one I put in front of executives. You can’t judge your own sleep debt by how you feel. The CDC recommends 7 or more hours a night for adults aged 18 to 60.⁶ I schedule sleep like a client session: a fixed wake time, a cut-off for work and a plan for the nights you land late. It’s the biggest recovery input in the load-versus-recovery balance I cover in stress management for executives.

The Energy Audit: where a corporate athlete starts

Athletes test before they plan a season. The Energy Audit is how I do that with leaders. It’s the second of the 12 protocols in the Stealth OS, and it does what the name says: it audits where your energy comes from and where it leaks. It looks at sleep, training, food, travel and the hours when your best thinking happens, then protects those hours before anything else gets booked into them.

You can run a basic version yourself this week:

1. Log the inputs. Each evening, note the hours you slept, whether you trained, when you ate and any travel.
2. Mark your peaks and dips. Note the 2 hours when your thinking was sharpest and the hour when it was worst.
3. Find the pattern. After 7 days, look at what came before your best hours and your worst. Late dinners, early flights and skipped sessions show up fast.
4. Protect the peak. Block your best 2 hours for the work only you can do, and move meetings out of them.
5. Fix one input. Pick the biggest leak and change only that for the next 28 days. That’s the Monthly Lever: one change per cycle, held until it runs by default.

How to train like a corporate athlete

Once you know where the energy goes, the plan has 5 parts.

1. 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.
2. Train the base, travel included. Your 2 or 3 sessions have to survive a week in 3 time zones, or it isn’t a plan. Have a 20-minute hotel-room session ready before you pack.
3. 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.
4. Fuel for the work. Eat for steady energy through the afternoon, not for the 15:00 crash. Personalised nutrition covers how to set this from your own data.
5. Review the tape. Every Friday, look at what happened: sleep, sessions, energy, the decisions you’re proud of and the ones you’re not. That’s the Friday Debrief, 15 minutes, and it sets next week. The full weekly rhythm is in a productivity system that survives a bad week.

For the daily habits that hold it together, see peak performance: the daily practices that work.

Corporate athletes in a leadership team

The same system works for a leadership team, with one condition: the leaders go first. A team takes its cue on sleep, travel and late-night messages from the people at the top, whatever the policy says. I’ve covered why most corporate wellness programs don’t change performance, and what does. Through Fitcorp Global I run leadership performance workshops for teams under sustained pressure. The details are on the corporate workshops page.

How to start

There are 2 ways in, depending on how much support you want.

1. The 1% Scorecard. 8 questions, 2 minutes, free. You get your Compound Index, a score out of 100 across 6 pillars, and the one thing to install first.
2. Stealth Coaching. Private 1:1 coaching, online or in person in Bangkok. We install the system around your real calendar, travel included. It starts with a Stealth Strategy Call so we both know it’s the right fit.

Train for the job you actually do.

Related reading: Leadership development programs: what works and how to choose one and Self-leadership: how leaders run themselves.

FAQ

Sources

1. Loehr, J., & Schwartz, T. (2001). The making of a corporate athlete. Harvard Business Review, January 2001. hbr.org/2001/01/the-making-of-a-corporate-athlete
2. Kodama, S., Saito, K., Tanaka, S., et al. (2009). Cardiorespiratory fitness as a quantitative predictor of all-cause mortality and cardiovascular events in healthy men and women: A meta-analysis. JAMA, 301(19), 2024-2035. doi.org/10.1001/jama.2009.681
3. Kandola, A., Ashdown-Franks, G., Stubbs, B., Osborn, D. P. J., & Hayes, J. F. (2019). The association between cardiorespiratory fitness and the incidence of common mental health disorders: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Affective Disorders, 257, 748-757. doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2019.07.088
4. Bull, F. C., Al-Ansari, S. S., Biddle, S., et al. (2020). World Health Organization 2020 guidelines on physical activity and sedentary behaviour. British Journal of Sports Medicine, 54(24), 1451-1462. doi.org/10.1136/bjsports-2020-102955
5. Van Dongen, H. P. A., Maislin, G., Mullington, J. M., & Dinges, D. F. (2003). The cumulative cost of additional wakefulness: Dose-response effects on neurobehavioral functions and sleep physiology from chronic sleep restriction and total sleep deprivation. Sleep, 26(2), 117-126. doi.org/10.1093/sleep/26.2.117
6. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2024). About sleep. cdc.gov/sleep/about/index.html

This article is general information, not medical advice.