By John Allen Mollenhauer
An article by Axios, a publishing company that helps you get smarter, faster on what matters, talks about How data and the pandemic have democratized the “high-performance lifestyle.”
They say, “A New Fitness and Wellness Vertical Has Emerged Amid the Pandemic.” Dubbed the “high-performance lifestyle” (HPL), it combines physical health, mental health, and technology.
Why it matters: HPL aims to track and optimize human performance. Athletes have been doing this for decades; now, thanks to data democratization, anyone can.
The state of play: From wearables and wellness apps to personalized nutrition and at-home gym equipment, HPL has given rise to a wide variety of products and services. Fitt Insider, which helped coin the term, breaks it down like this:
- Fitness: After gyms closed in 2020, home fitness — which was already on the rise — exploded. Examples: Tonal, Peloton, Mirror, Strava.
- Health trackers:What began as counting steps has now expanded to monitoring sleep, recovery, heart rate, and more. Examples: WHOOP, Oura Ring, Apple Watch.
Nutrition:The plant-based, is popular with high-performers, and demand for personalized nutrition is gaining traction quickly. Examples: Athletic Greens, Bulletproof. - Recovery/Sleep:There are now beds designed to optimize Sleep, and the number of companies making recovery equipment grows by the day. Example: Hyperice, Eight Sleep (“the first sleep fitness company“).
Mental health:The mental health conversation accelerated in 2020, as we experienced death, isolation, and more—examples: Calm (partnered with LeBron James), Talkspace (partnered with Michael Phelps). - Between the lines: Professional athletes have played a key role in HPL’s acceleration by promoting products and living the lifestyle themselves. Our sports superheroes used to be “strong” or “fast.” Now, they’re “healthy.”
- “10 years ago, the trend was ‘Can you exercise more. Can you put more stress on your body?’ The pendulum was just fully on the side of ‘more is more.’” says WHOOPfounder and CEO Will Ahmed.
“Our point of view back then was that Sleep and recovery might be the missing piece. And that was a somewhat contrarian view at the time. But ten years later, it’s front and center.”
“You’ve got a 43-year-old winning the Super Bowl because he takes insanely good care of his body. That’s the new story in sports.”
And it’s the new story in human performance, not just for athletes but for entrepreneurs, small business owners, and professionals of every kind who can learn what a high-performance lifestyle is all about and create one they can call their own.
What’s next: Corporate America has taken notice, and an increasing number of companies are now offering HPL-related benefits — both as a recruiting tactic and as a way to improve work performance.
“HPL is becoming a part of the benefits package… That’s really going to power companies from a revenue standpoint and create bigger players in the space.”
— Steinberg
But the question is, outside of the “marketplace” of the High-Performance Lifestyle, how do you live a high-performance lifestyle?
That’s what I’ve been focused on for the last 20 years, as an in-the-game entrepreneur with a family including two kids, who wanted to answer the initial question– “how do you live the hard-charging life without burning out or trading your health for success?”
It’s an age-old dilemma.
Despite being proficient at nutrition and adept at fitness training, among other lifestyle skills, burnout is something I had gone through one too many times myself, and it was throwing off my life! What I found answered a new question, “how do you live in balance with vibrant health and peace of mind while achieving even your most ambitious goals?” The answer is, not surprisingly, a high-performance lifestyle.
So how can you live a balanced lifestyle that delivers high performance?
Especially as an entrepreneur, business owner, and working parent, you know the relentless demand we all experience on our time and energy. You also know how important it is to function at full capacity, meaning, with the level of energy you need, without mental or physical health problems distracting and holding you back, and at peak performance when you need it.
If you don’t have that and know how to maintain it, frankly, it’s simply hard to succeed and sustain that success, and/or for long.
Today’s high-performance culture calls on us to have a lifestyle that fully supports us and what we are to in the world. We need to function and perform at much higher levels than in decades and centuries past and maintain quality of life in the process.
So, follow these guidelines if you want to live a high-performance lifestyle.
Using all the new tech gadgets in the world measuring steps, HRV, sleep, and so much more does not mean you live a high-performance lifestyle. They can certainly help, but they are not the lifestyle itself.
- Learn how to operate your head- get grounded in what you really are (not just who and how)- and in the right relationship with your brain. You are not your brain, thoughts, and feelings, and if you ever want to change the way you think and produce the results you wish to consistently, this is vital; it’s the foundation of any transformation!
- You’ve got to learn what a healthy “performance lifestyle” is. Your lifestyle is one practice as a whole, but it’s comprised of many practices or ways of life, and you want to get them all aligned and working for you, 80-90% of the time or more.
If you’d like to learn more about this, I’ll be doing an actionable advice webinar on this very topic. You can register here.
Personal and professional development is excellent, but today, the tide has shifted; unless you are living your full potential, chances are you’ll never achieve your full potential, and the high-performance lifestyle is what makes that possible.
JAM is a leading Performance Lifestyle Coach and authority on living the High–Performance Lifestyle® with an online training academy and community that teaches people how to manage their energy like the pros. As “client zero,” he was in such desperate need of this “practice of all essential lifestyle practices” himself. He did what he had to do to develop a better way to live and work, and in that process, assembled the principle, practices, and ultimately the 5 lifestyle strategies all healthy, high achieving people know and live by to thrive to fulfill their God-inspired dreams with their health and wellbeing intact!
JAM helps you get free of the hidden lifestyle challenges that distract and hold you back from living your full potential as you optimize the way you live for the energy, health, and high performance you need to achieve your goals and flourish. Performance Lifestyle Inc. is currently based in Florham Park, NJ, where he and his team run RegenUS Center to help you restore your energy for life. For a complimentary strategy session with JAM or a Member of the Lifestyle Coach team, click here.
