How Constraints Free You Up

How a star athlete with mono taught me a new way to coach.

In the beginning of my coaching journey, the star athlete on the high school team came down with mono heading into his senior year track season. The dreams of a state championship looked dashed. When the doctor finally cleared him and told him it was okay to train and compete, we faced a serious problem. He was out of shape and his system had been wrecked so he didn’t recover or bounce back.

He didn’t want to give up hope on his senior year track season, so we made a deal: we’d take what his body would give him and no more. Anything long or intense caused too much fatigue. We couldn’t do the go run 70 miles per week, lots of long repeats and tempos to get ready for the 2-mile race. We started with whatever wouldn’t tip him back over the edge and built from there. At first, all he could handle was relatively slow 100 meter repeats. So that’s what we did.

As a coach, I went looking for answers. How in the world was I going to coach this kid, without risking long term damage, when I couldn’t use any of the traditional methods that had worked so well so far. The constraint forced me to look at it from a new lens. If I couldn’t go long, could we build endurance using controlled intervals. I borrow from a 1950s training style developed by Hungarian Mihaly Igloi which consisted of almost entirely short intervals that often weren’t very fast either, and guided solely by tension or effort. Igloi modulated the workouts based on if they were straining or not. It was a way to develop endurance in a constrained war-torn environment that Igloi occupied. Instead of mile repeats, you did sets of 8x100m with a turn around rest at “fresh” effort.

Fast forward a few months, and it worked. The athlete went on to win the state championship in the 2-mile, setting a school record, and becoming one of the top runners in the country. All, off of a few months of training post-mono. The constraint forced me to look at training through a different lens, and in doing so, it not only helped this runner, but gave me a tool I’ve applied numerous times in my coaching career.

In his new book ​Inside the Box​, Dave Epstein shows us why. Contrary to popular opinion, we don’t get creativity or breakthroughs from total freedom, we need constraints. We need some boundaries to help us innovate.

I recently had Dave on my YouTube channel to discuss his book and how it applies to so much in life. I wanted to highlight a few insights.

1. What got you good can be what’s keeping you from great.

We often play to our strengths. We find the workout types or coaching style that brought us initial success and we keep going back to it. After all, if it helped us get good, why would we abandon it. The problem is, the bottleneck or kink in the pipe shifts as you learn, develop, and grow. The thing holding you back has now shifted.

That’s exactly what happened to world class swimmer Sheila Taormina. She was a good but not great swimmer who had a big aerobic engine and trained to maximize it. As she was finishing her college career, she failed to make the Olympic team. She was about to call it quits until she took a management class on constraints and addressing the bottleneck. She decided to give it one more go, this time working on her weak point, her speed.

Long story short, she not only made the Olympics as a swimmer but went on to do so in the triathlon and modern pentathlon, all by applying the same mental model of finding her current kink in the pipe and addressing it. As Dave said in our conversation. “What made [Sheila] really good was a strong aerobic foundation. But to get great, she had to say, okay, this is here, but I’m gonna work on the opposite end of the spectrum...Every system is limited by its least efficient step.”

2. Stop optimizing. Start satisficing

It’s no secret that we live in the time of optimization. Just look at the number of complicated protocols to just get your day started. Some of this sounds good in theory. Of course, I want to be optimized, but Inside the Box shows us that “satisficing” can be the ticket to long-term success.

Satisficing is about setting a good enough standard. It’s understanding that if we try to optimize everything, we’ve just filled our day with stuff preparing to do the work, and have weeded out the time for the actual important stuff.

You pre-commit to something that you can maintain consistently. As Dave put it, “This makes you less likely to fall prey to Fredkin’s paradox, where we spend the most time on the least important decisions because we’re having trouble telling the difference between the options.”

3. You will self-interrupt on schedule...even without your phone.

We all know that having our phone nearby disrupts our concentration and workflow. We think about it and inevitably reach for it way too often. But in the book, Dave highlights a study that shows even when we remove the phone, we self-interrupt at the same cadence. It’s as if we’re used to a pattern of interruption and we stick to it.

This is both mind blowing and concerning. The good news though is we can create a new pattern. Over time, if we keep the distractions away, we self-interrupt less. It’s just another piece of evidence to protect your deep work and focused time at all costs!

There’s so many other great insights that helped shift how we think about work, coaching, and life. ​Grab your copy today​.

-Steve