The problem
Can health trackers that have proven
valuable to top athletes help leaders
to better understand their
potential—and limits?
By Meghan Walsh
Norway, the northernmost of the Scandinavian countries, is known for producing champion winter endurance athletes. But how did this country—with fewer residents than the state of Minnesota—catapult to the podium in the triathlon and mid- and long-distance running? The answer may be found in a training approach with a simple name—the Norwegian Method—that not only influences countless athletes, but may also have something to offer knowledge workers.
Like many strategies, the Norwegian Method involves spending the majority of training time on low-intensity workouts, with only a brief period for high-intensity activities. What’s unique here is that the high-intensity training isn’t based on an external marker, such as pace, or even heart rate. Instead, it’s determined by the stress impact on the body, which is tracked throughout the workout by repeatedly pricking the ear or finger to measure the amount of lactate, a metabolic waste product, in the blood. Athletes modulate their efforts as necessary to keep lactate levels within a specific range. The theory, backed by a nascent but growing body of research, is that once lactate levels rise beyond a certain threshold, the time required for the body to recover increases exponentially. It’s an approach designed to minimize wear on the body, so athletes can train at a high level more consistently and over longer periods of time, leading to greater adaptations, and, ultimately, elevated performance.
Roughly a quarter of the world’s population now dons some sort of device that tracks personal-health data, and among corporate leaders, they include the Oura Ring, WHOOP band, or a smartwatch. It makes sense. In many ways the demands on C-suite executives are similar to those on professional athletes: long hours, tiresome travel, expectations to perform day after day. The difference between top-level athletes and leaders is that the former actually use health data to inform how they work. “Those of us who aren’t world-class athletes can still learn from the world of professional sports about how to best make use of wearables,” says Natalie Kupperman, an applied sports science researcher and assistant professor of data science at the University of Virginia. “A lot of what we’re doing now is around athlete well-being, longevity, and injury prevention.” These issues are just as relevant to knowledge workers, especially considering growing concerns of burnout and chronic disease.
Key performance indicators are held in high regard when it comes to monitoring the vitality of a business, but outside of sports, organizations aren’t leveraging health KPIs. Imagine this: What if, along with cell phones and laptops, companies also gave employees devices to track their health? What if leaders had advisors to help make sense of biometric feedback and guide them in the way athletes have coaches and trainers? If CEOs optimized their schedules so they were showing up to important meetings in peak condition and prioritizing recovery as much as effort? “This could revolutionize the workplace,” says Jamen Graves, Korn Ferry’s global leader of CEO and enterprise leadership development.
Or the outsourcing of self-assessment to technology could take us even further from ourselves. After all, the first consumer step-counters debuted during the 1964 Tokyo Games, and we’ve only gotten more sedentary since then. And while some swear by the Norwegian Method, many others have had success with an analog approach that is also backed by research: the Talk Test. Instead of pricking your ear umpteen times, you assess how hard you're pushing according to whether you’re able to talk in full sentences, short phrases, or only four-letter words.
Leaders and their workers are burning out.
Performance and health are symbiotic.
Why it matters
Use tech to find the edge without going over it.
The solution
Know
Thyself
View Contents
What if leaders had advisors to help make sense of biometric feedback and guide them in the way athletes have coaches and trainers?”
“
What’s most relevant to business leaders about the Norwegian Method isn’t the technology employed. It’s the concept that the greatest gains are found as much through restraint as through exertion. The technology is simply the means for measuring and preventing excessive strain. The appeal of wearables, experts say,
is in their potential to provide more personalized and precise
health recommendations.
For example, if metrics reveal that someone’s anxiety levels tend to rise in specific meetings, a device might nudge them to do a breathing exercise beforehand. Or data could be used to predict a traveling executive’s recovery time after each time zone crossed, so they can schedule the necessary rest upon arrival. Other apps are in the works to detect markers of stress for those suffering from depression or addiction and send real-time notifications offering to connect the wearer with professional support. “The key to improving performance and health will be integrating all of the available information, not depending on an isolated measure,” says Arturo Casado, a former world-class runner and sports-science lecturer at King Juan Carlos University in Madrid.
The technology to collect health data exists. Experts are learning how to make decisions based on that information. Still, there is a quagmire of ethical and logistical considerations that have to be sorted through before there is widespread incorporation of health KPIs in the workplace. There are privacy and security issues, of course. There will need to be walls between employers and employee data. And then there is the question of how leaders value ephemeral qualities that can’t be measured by a device, such as joy and purpose. Sports science, Casado says, is ultimately about learning to listen to the body and the multitude of ways it speaks to us.
Athletes, professional or amateur, are eager for feedback. They show up to training wanting to get better at their respective endeavors. They know without looking at a monitor if something is off in their swing or stroke or stride. It’s only more recently, with the growing field of sports psychology, that they have understood that the mind is as essential to performance as the body. The knowledge worker seems to be going through the inverse of this awakening, realizing the body’s impact on the mind. Whether on the field of play or in the corner office, whether through modern technology or timeless intuition, it comes back to the simple, if not easy, Greek philosophy: “Know thyself.” “Can we use this data to create greater self-awareness?” Graves asks. “Can we bring a training mindset to leadership and start to be able to ask, ‘Hey, why am I not on my
game today?’”
With new options hitting the market every year and existing products becoming more reliable and user-friendly, the health-tracker market can be confusing. Here’s a guide:
Home
Post Game-Day
Know Thyself
Eye for a Star
Winning…with a Work-Life Balance?
Leadership at the Top
World-Class Athletes on the Job
Every Four Years: The Challenge of Staying Long-Term
Health KPIs tell a
story of what people
have gone and are
going through,”
“
It’s about knowing what the problem you are trying to solve is, and what’s the best instrument to help
do that.”
“
Read more about
Gold Medal Leadership
Eye for a Star
Eye for a Star
Winning…with a
Work-Life Balance?
Winning…with a
Work-Life Balance?
Oura Ring Generation 3
Best for: Tracking sleep
The 1964 step-counter anecdote offers another valuable consideration: Know why you're collecting information and the greater context it’s a part of.
Many of the devices in wide use encourage logging at least 10,000 steps a day, rewarding users with a haptic celebration when they hit this goal. One might assume that this number is based on some sort of science. Nope. Marketing. The Japanese company that created the step-counter wanted to gamify fitness to appeal to consumers, and, with very little to back it up, decided on that figure. Some 60 years later it’s still the standard.
In 2009, the Fitbit rolled out, and half a dozen years later came the first Apple smartwatch. While it took years to develop reliable, compact, and affordable sensors, new and more sophisticated technology is hitting the market every day. Inconspicuous and relatively inexpensive devices now can monitor oxygen saturation, glucose levels, sleep cycles, and movement patterns, among many other metrics. “It’s really easy to get excited by all the shiny things,” Kupperman says, “but it’s more about knowing what the question or problem you are trying to solve for is, and what’s the best instrument to help do that.”
The problem everyone seems to be solving for is sustainability. That doesn’t just refer to the climate. It’s about performance, too. How do workers, in particular leaders, show up at their best over the span of an entire career? “Health KPIs tell a story of what people have gone and are going through,” Graves says. “We need to shift our thinking and take seriously that health KPIs being off creates risks for poor decisions, poor interactions, and wear and tear on leaders.”
Just as business KPIs stand as guideposts of progress, they serve as cautionary tales about what happens when a single piece of information is focused on myopically or taken out of context—as the parable of the step-counter illustrates. Economist Charles Goodhart infamously cautioned: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” Metrics can reveal what is happening, but they don’t necessarily tell us why, or what to do about it. Now that we have the technology and data, what’s needed are experts to parse it all. “What organizations have realized over the last 10 years is that working with data in all contexts is way harder than they thought,” says Stephen Smith, cofounder and CEO of sports technology firm Kitman Labs. “They looked at data as a small tactical piece. It requires big-picture thinking.”
Knowing how many steps we’ve taken isn’t all that useful without an understanding of how increased movement supports hormone regulation, which in turn encourages a good night’s sleep, which ultimately leads to greater emotional resilience and ability to focus. And even if an individual does appreciate the long-range impacts of self-care, it doesn’t much matter if the company culture doesn’t share that same appreciation.
Garmin Forerunner
Best for: Runners looking for a middle-of-the-line option
Whoop Body
Best for: Capturing data inconspicuously
Fitbit Charge 6
Best for: All-around fitness tracker on a budget
Apple Watch Series 9
Best for: Going from the office
to the field of play
Polar H10
Best for: Recording an accurate heart rate
The Wearable Movement
Norway, the northernmost of the Scandina-vian countries, is known for producing champion winter endurance athletes. But how did this country—with fewer residents than the state of Minnesota—catapult to the podium in the triathlon and mid- and long-distance running? The answer may be found in a training approach with a simple name—the Norwegian Method—that not only influences countless athletes, but may also have something to offer knowledge workers.
Like many strategies, the Norwegian Method involves spending the majority of training time on low-intensity workouts, with only a brief period for high-intensity activities. What’s unique here is that the high-intensity training isn’t based on an external marker, such as pace, or even heart rate. Instead, it’s determined by the stress impact on the body, which is tracked throughout the workout by repeatedly pricking the ear or finger to measure the amount of lactate, a metabolic waste product, in the blood. Athletes modulate their efforts as necessary to keep lactate levels within a specific range. The theory, backed by a nascent but growing body of research, is that once lactate levels rise beyond a certain threshold, the time required for the body to recover increases exponentially. It’s an approach designed to minimize wear on the body, so athletes can train at a high level more consistently and over longer periods of time, leading to greater adaptations, and, ultimately, elevated performance.
Roughly a quarter of the world’s population now dons some sort of device that tracks personal-health data, and among corporate leaders, they include the Oura Ring, WHOOP band, or a smartwatch. It makes sense. In many ways the demands on C-suite executives are similar to those on professional athletes: long hours, tiresome travel, expectations to perform day after day. The difference between top-level athletes and leaders is that the former actually use health data to inform how they work. “Those of us who aren’t Olympic athletes can still learn from the world of professional sports about how to best make use of wearables,” says Natalie Kupperman, an applied sports science researcher and assistant professor of data science at the University of Virginia. “A lot of what we’re doing now is around athlete well-being, longevity, and injury prevention.” These issues are just as relevant to knowledge workers, especially considering growing concerns of burnout and chronic disease.
Key performance indicators are held in high regard when it comes to monitoring the vitality of a business, but outside of sports, organizations aren’t leveraging health KPIs. Imagine this: What if, along with cell phones and laptops, companies also gave employees devices to track their health? What if leaders had advisors to help make sense of biometric feedback and guide them in the way athletes have coaches and trainers? If CEOs optimized their schedules so they were showing up to important meetings in peak condition and prioritizing recovery as much as effort? “This could revolutionize the workplace,” says Jamen Graves, Korn Ferry’s global leader of CEO and enterprise leadership development.
Or the outsourcing of self-assessment to technology could take us even further from ourselves. After all, the first consumer step-counters debuted during the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, and we’ve only gotten more sedentary since then. And while some swear by the Norwegian Method, many others have had success with an analog approach that is also backed by research: the Talk Test. Instead of pricking your ear umpteen times, you assess how hard you're pushing according to whether you’re able to talk in full sentences, short phrases, or only four-letter words.
The 1964 Olympic step-counter anecdote offers another valuable consideration: Know why you're collecting information and the greater context it’s a part of.
Many of the devices in wide use encourage logging at least 10,000 steps a day, rewarding users with a haptic celebration when they hit this goal. One might assume that this number is based on some sort of science. Nope. Marketing. The Japanese company that created the step-counter wanted to gamify fitness to appeal to consumers, and, with very little to back it up, decided on that figure. Some 60 years later it’s still the standard.
In 2009, the Fitbit rolled out, and half a dozen years later came the first Apple smartwatch. While it took years to develop reliable, compact, and affordable sensors, new and more sophisticated technology is hitting the market every day. Inconspicuous and relatively inexpensive devices now can monitor oxygen saturation, glucose levels, sleep cycles, and movement patterns, among many other metrics. “It’s really easy to get excited by all the shiny things,” Kupperman says, “but it’s more about knowing what the question or problem you are trying to solve for is, and what’s the best instrument to help do that.”
The problem everyone seems to be solving for is sustainability. That doesn’t just refer to the climate. It’s about performance, too. How do workers, in particular leaders, show up at their best over the span of an entire career? “Health KPIs tell a story of what people have gone and are going through,” Graves says. “We need to shift our thinking and take seriously that health KPIs being off creates risks for poor decisions, poor interactions, and wear and tear on leaders.”
Just as business KPIs stand as guideposts of progress, they serve as cautionary tales about what happens when a single piece of information is focused on myopically or taken out of context—as the parable of the step-counter illustrates. Economist Charles Goodhart infamously cautioned: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” Metrics can reveal what is happening, but they don’t necessarily tell us why, or what to do about it. Now that we have the technology and data, what’s needed are experts to parse it all. “What organizations have realized over the last 10 years is that working with data in all contexts is way harder than they thought,” says Stephen Smith, co-founder and CEO of sports technology firm Kitman Labs. “They looked at data as a small tactical piece. It requires big-picture thinking.”
Knowing how many steps we’ve taken isn’t all that useful without an understanding of how increased movement supports hormone regulation, which in turn encourages a good night’s sleep, which ultimately leads to greater emotional resilience and ability to focus. And even if an individual does appreciate the long-range impacts of self-care, it doesn’t much matter if the company culture doesn’t share that same appreciation.
View Contents
Home
The (Tough) Economics of the Games
Winning It All—After Hours
The Competitive Spirit
Post Game-Day
Winning...with a Work-Life Balance?
Eye for a Star
Know Thyself
Leadership at the Top
Where Are They Now?
Snaring Medals...And Then, Consulting?
The Home Office, with Trophies in the Closet
World-Class Athletes on the Job
Every Four Years: The Challenge
of Staying Long-Term