Peak Performance Requires Intervals of Rest

Rest is an important part of performance:

When I was racing bikes I learned a lot about performance, both individually and as a team.

One year I dedicated myself to being competitive in the state road championship I started training hard in the winter, riding hours on my trainer and rollers, and spending time in the fitness center. Basically, seven days a week I was working and when the spring races came around I did pretty well, giving me confidence that when August rolled around my objective of being in the thick of things at the end of the race would be realized.

But as the year wore on and into summer, I found myself lagging behind cyclists whom earlier in the year I was competing with. On the big day, I showed up still hopeful for a good race, sixty miles on a hilly twenty-mile circuit. Unfortunately, halfway through the first lap, I was dropped and by the end of the first lap, I was done, threw my bike on the car roof rack, and told my team that I was done racing.

As it turned out the next week I had a planned two-week vacation in Hawaii, and for the next fourteen days, I laid around the beach, went swimming, drank beer, and generally acted as if I’d never put a foot into a race again.

The funny thing about stuff you’re passionate about is that by the time I got home, I missed riding my bike and hanging with everyone on team rides. We had a race simulation ride every week, affectionally called the Grueling, so I joined them for the ride and found myself feeling strong and several times I dropped the team. What I learned through all of this is that for peak performance, rest is required at regular intervals.

SAFe acknowledges this with their IP Iteration, which provides some downtime to do some innovation work while taking some time to plan for the next PI. Sadly, I see too many organizations who say they adhere to this approach, but the reality is that their IP Iteration is simply another working iteration. The net effect is that teams are working continuously with no break to rest a bit and reenergize. In Agile we seek to obtain a sustainable pace, what this really means is that to maintain peak performance we need to provide downtime as part of this process, just as I learned with bike racing.