What Bodybuilding Taught me about Sustainable Pace

As I've recently started to prepare for my next bodybuilding competition, I was walking on a treadmill and found myself wondering how I am able to keep up the effort throughout the process, year after year. And as I thought through the system components involved, it hit me that they might be of use to others trying to design a system for agile team sustainable pace.

So here is where I landed followed by some ideas for attaining true sustainable pace with a group.

The first question I asked is....what does sustainable pace really look like?
This was my starting point because I've experienced patterns of behavior that appear to be sustainable only to dissolve into failure. So here they are:

• Constant pace then hit a wall - doing well, feeling good, being productive, then all of a sudden the bottom drops out. This could not be considered sustainable as the root cause is typically the gradual build up of systemic fatigue. 
• Gradually deteriorating - in this case everything starts well enough but diminishes gradually over time until a pattern of deteriorating goals sets in and then the bottom falls out. I don't consider this sustainable as it usually means that systemic fatigue is delayed but not avoided. 
• Constant incremental increase then hit a wall - this is the most similar to bodybuilding where I am always trying for very incremental increases, and may keep it up for a good while, until I hit a wall and the bottom drops out again. 

In each of these, if you graphed productivity over time, it would appear to be sustainable or nearly so, until the cliff is reached. And the critical piece is not a given load or commitment for a short time period or series of periods, but the load of slowly increasing systemic fatigue.

How do you measure sustainable pace?

• In the short term, sprint velocity for teams; total volume of work for bodybuilding
• In the longer term, and more appropriately, average sprint velocity for teams; average total volume for bodybuilding. 
• Here is the first place I wonder if my bodybuilding can help - for measuring true sustainable pace with a leading indicator in bodybuilding, I use my morning resting heart rate. When I am working hard in a sustainable way, not only is my volume headed in the right direction, but my morning heart rate when I first open my eyes is between 40 and 44 bpm. When I notice it creeping up and falling in the 48-52 bpm range over several days, I know an adjustment is required.
• So what might be a good leading indicator other than volume of work to indicate the build-up of systemic fatigue in a team?

So then I really starting to get down to the nuts and bolts of how I can keep progressing while avoiding over-training (in essence maintain a truly sustainable pace)? And here is again where I think my bodybuilding experiences might help design such a system with a team or group of teams. See if any of these resonate or give you some ideas to consider.

A common pattern of short term load I use in the gym looks like a slowly rising ramp with a steep drop at the end. What this feels like is for a relatively short period of time, I start with a baseline volume, gradually increase it, and then drop off the volume to below the starting level. I would then start the next incline slightly higher than the last. The principle here is to achieve incremental increases followed by a period of recovery and allow that relative rest to fuel the next phase.

• Could the work for a team across the span of a quarter, release, some other concept be designed in such a way to reduce systemic fatigue?

NOTE: although the dip above appears just like when a team (or bodybuilder) hits the wall, there is a significant difference - it is planned and designed into the cycle in order to facilitate the next increase, it is not the result of pushing too hard. What that means fundamentally is that it "feels" very different - space to breathe, think; sustainability of energy and inspiration; and it is recuperative. That is a significant difference as it impacts cognitive load and neural / systemic fatigue. 

• Another tactic when I observe the beginning of fatigue and over-training is to mix up my workouts for a bit. I replace my standard exercises with something new; I spend a bit more time on stretching, core work, even plyometrics for a bit. The principle here is that a given exercise (or type of work) has a typical physical and cognitive load. By varying that over time, systemic fatigue is reduced - or probably more accurately, avoided through a different form of recovery - variety.
• Would mixing the type of work over time have a positive impact - spike work, quality work, new feature work, etc....?
• And one last form of variety is to keep the work the same, but vary the volume significantly through a cycle. My favorite cycle in the gym is to focus first on heavy weights with low repetitions (for maybe a month or so), followed by lower weights but very high reps, and finally my sweet spot, medium weights with common rep schemes. 
• Could it be as easy as mixing sprints of high achievement with lower and then middling be effective?

Of course it is the team who must decide on the commitments made based on the prioritization scheme used, but I wonder if these types of conversations between PO, SM and TMs might lead to some insights into actual, long-term sustainable pace.

So while this is obviously an imperfect analogue, I do think the following principles may be applicable to crafting a system of work for a team to truly achieve sustainable pace:

• Targeting longer term patterns of work load that include periods of recovery.
• Targeting a mix of work that requires a variety of cognitive load.
• Identify a metric that serves as a leading indicator that systemic fatigue is increasing.
• Varying absolute volume between low, medium, and high work loads. 
• Designing in recovery using any of these points or complete breaks for team building or other important but not urgent activities.