Sustainable Performance: Lessons from Eric Cressey
What can the people responsible for keeping elite athletes performing under extraordinary pressure teach us about the modern workplace?
More than you might expect.
Eric Cressey has spent his career studying what happens when talented, driven people are expected to perform at the highest level, again and again. As Director of Player Health & Performance for the New York Yankees and one of the most respected names in human performance, he has worked with some of the world’s top athletes.
His experience also extends far beyond professional sports. Eric is President and Co-Founder of Cressey Sports Performance, an entrepreneur, author, educator, and host of the Elite Baseball Development Podcast. Through his businesses, digital education, and CSP Amplify platform, he has built a career around developing high performers, leading teams, and putting the science of performance into practice.
That combination has given Eric a front-row seat to something every organization is trying to understand: what allows talented people to perform at a high level, navigate pressure, avoid burnout, and continue doing great work over time.
In this conversation with Spirence Co-Founder, President, and CCO Laura Kunz, the lessons from elite sports quickly become lessons about leadership, workplace mental health, and sustainable performance.
The things we often celebrate in our best people, their drive, intensity, resilience, and willingness to keep going, can also make it harder to recognize when something is no longer working. Recovery is not always the solution we think it is. Balance may not look the way we have been taught to pursue it. And sometimes getting the best out of someone requires knowing when not to ask for more.
Eric has spent his career inside that tension.
What he has learned offers a different way to think about performance, burnout, leadership, and what it actually takes to stay good at what you do for the long haul.
Conversation Transcript
Laura Kunz:
Welcome to the show, Eric. Thanks for being here. So you work with athletes under constant pressure. What do you think causes these athletes to burn out?
Eric Cressey:
We talk about this with athletes a lot, having highs and lows in your training. You don’t just go in and go crazy every single training session, day after day after day. There have to be hard days and easy days. And nowadays I think in this world it’s easier, from a pure stress perspective, to find high days all the time, right? Yeah, the game is intense, and the training is intense, but then you go, and you look at your social media feed, and there’s noise there that bothers you. You have an argument with your wife or girlfriend, or your newborn baby is up all night. So, very rarely do we see athletes that have more avenues to just keep adding additional stress. So I think one of the things that we see with a lot of these high performers who can handle it is that they have an ability to just shut it off. There’s more of an ebb and a flow to their training cycles.
When you play a sport like baseball, where there’s 162 games in a season, spring-training games, and postseason games, so really from early February to potentially late October, you’re on every day. You’re changing time zones. So there’s pulling in a lot of directions, and the best ones are ones that are competing and managing well.
Laura Kunz:
So that’s interesting. On the topic of the nervous system. Is that a part of elite performance training, teaching nervous system regulation? How does that all tie in?
Eric Cressey:
I have a lot of friends who work in the NHL, NBA, and other sports. Baseball’s unique because the minute you may have two off days, you’re paralyzed. It’s very similar to being an entrepreneur. Everyone else works a 9-5, but you bring a lot home with you.
And they can’t fathom what baseball players do. We had a day in 2022 when we played three games in two different time zones in twenty-four hours. There’s overnight flights, so it’s a constant pull on your recovery capacity and nervous system.
There’s so many layers to being successful in that world. It actually is a great place to study. It’s like when they do a lot of research on health, they look at people who work night shifts. Nurses are some of the most unhealthy people because they are up all night. Baseball players are kind of the athletic version of the most stressed.
So I think you can you can draw a lot of conclusions from the people who actually are successful in those really stressful environments.
Laura Kunz:
Do you have examples of when you’ve seen people do it? When you have seen people not do it well?
Eric Cressey:
I’d say the biggest thing, and I’ve seen this dozens of times, so it’s not even necessarily a specific example, is we’ve seen guys that just can’t handle social media. You know, they go on, and you see a lot of it with gambling being as significant as it is with certain sports. We have some professional tennis players. And if you look at the direct messages, they go on Instagram for people who have lost money betting on a match they played. It’s some of the drags of society.
Laura Kunz:
I would have never thought about that.
Eric Cressey:
And it’s pretty wild to see. I think that happens universally. So it’s one thing for somebody to be in your comments because people will say something like that. It’s another thing altogether for them to send messages because they lost $1,000 on me last night or something like that. And it’s such a long season. Everybody’s going to have those good days and bad days.
There’s stressors, and then there’s how you actually perceive them. And if you don’t let them in, they can’t stress you out. So some players can handle it. They can banter with fans, they can post pictures of their kids, all the fun stuff they do. They can work with their sponsors.
Other people just can’t tolerate it because it pulls them to negative places. So I think it’s important for guys to understand how that works in the context of your life. And that’s true for a lot of things. Right? That’s true of people who get overcommitted with events in season, and some guys just need to find time to go play golf or hang out with their family and just step away from it.
Laura Kunz:
Yeah, absolutely. As a business owner and as a father, you have a lot of stressors in your life. You even own businesses in multiple parts of the country. How do you manage it? Do you draw from what you see in elite sports to manage your own stress?
Eric Cressey:
I think everyone would tell you it’s a work in progress. I have twin eleven-year-old daughters, and I have a six-year-old daughter, and I work with my wife since it’s a family business. So I think one of the things that I’ve come to appreciate is that you can’t be balanced, right? You’re usually all in on one thing.
And when you’re done with that, you go on to other things. But if you’re answering text messages while you’re coaching your daughters at softball, and you’re just pulled in a lot of different directions, what I try to do is just to be where my feet are as best as I can.
I remember a long time ago hearing a quote that goes: family, friends, sleep, fitness, and career. Those are the five. And it was pick three. I want to say it was Mark Zuckerberg’s sister that said that, and it’s spot on.
So I know, for me, fitness has always been something that’s important because it has a trickle-down effect. I feel like I think more clearly when I exercise. Obviously, family is a super high priority.
Career has been a high priority. So sleep and, basically, the friends’ side of things. I’ve never been a good sleeper. I’ve always struggled with it. Most of our friends come through the gym, our kids’ events, things like that. So I think I’m kind of at three and a half, and I’ve always had to really work hard with the sleep side of things.
So that’s an algorithm that’s always guided me and been helpful.
Laura Kunz:
That’s a great tip for people. Because a lot of our listeners are business leaders. They’re high performers in their careers. So these are tips that I think easily translate to the business world, especially in today’s really fast-paced environment. I’m glad you mentioned technology. I think that’s a factor for a lot of people contributing to the burnout epidemic.
Eric Cressey:
100%. Also, things have evolved, right? I competed as a powerlifter for a long time. It was something that basically started in grad school until my late 20s; I was really, really involved in it. But those sessions were three hours of training that, every Sunday morning, I’d go and squat with a group of ten guys who were selling out for the dream, and you could go with us.
I just, I can’t do this, but also do that and run a business and chase everything. So, you know, you drift from kind of training to working out, just checking the box and getting in. But you still get all the health benefits and stress reduction and all that stuff, but you’re just not doing it to the best of your ability.
Laura Kunz:
Yeah. Moderation.
Eric Cressey:
That’s it.
Laura Kunz:
So is burnout more about workload or recovery?
Eric Cressey:
I think it’s both, but I don’t think. . .put it this way. If you had a headache and I gave you an Advil, but you kept banging your head against the wall, the stress is from banging your head against the wall. And I think recovery is a hot topic because the longevity industry has taken off. Right?
Everybody has a sauna. Everybody wants to do cold plunges. The number of anti-aging doctors on every street corner, particularly here in Florida. There’s so much out there on the recovery side of things, but so many people aren’t looking upstream. Upstream, in many cases, you need that because your sleep quality isn’t good, you’re not eating the right stuff.
And big picture, you’re probably over-inflating your schedule, right? You’re putting way too much into a limited amount of time. So I think that is probably the root cause of a lot of stuff that’s harder to fix, right? It’s much easier to be like, I’m going to take more vitamin D.
And then hop in the sauna for 20 minutes while I answer text messages. It’s a lot harder to say no to things on your schedule that don’t belong there and prioritize the things that really matter to you.
Laura Kunz:
Well, yeah, prevention is really a mentality. I mean, that’s what the show is, Prevention Pioneers. And it’s really embracing those everyday things and finding that time and that space to recover.
Eric Cressey:
It’s interesting in our world, too. Like everyone else, I started out in personal training. And I had a mentor who once said there’s A, B, C, and D clients. “A” clients are the people who show up and work hard. They’re always on time, and they ask great questions. They’re fun to be around. The hour goes by like nothing, just because they’re fun people.
And, different, steps back from that, where it’s maybe it’s just someone who complains a lot, but they always show up. And he said nobody should ever train a “D” client. And the “D” client is the person who’s always late. They’re not adherent at all.
It just makes the hour feel like five hours. And so I think those are the hard conversations people talk about burnout. We can both work eight-hour days. And if you’re not doing it with the people that excite you and engage you and ask good questions and make you a better version of yourself, it’s like, who are you spending that time with?
And I’ve seen people leave jobs that are fulfilling for that reason. Their schedule doesn’t change, but the people that they’re with and the tasks they’re taking on are very different.
Laura Kunz:
That is such a great point, that circle. And we’ve had high performers and athletes on the show, and several have said that same thing. It really, really matters who you surround yourself with. And with that, I want to pivot into, because you talk about mentality and the A, B, C, D clients, and I was thinking, where is that born?
So let’s talk about youth sports, for example, because so many of our listeners have been athletes, they are raising athletes, and this is an interesting thing to think about. We talk about stress at work. You know, so many are navigating those things for their kids at home and then going to work and navigating so many other stressors.
I think you have an interesting perspective on that. So what do you think about youth sports today?
Eric Cressey:
We’re headed in the wrong direction. Yeah, I think that goes without saying. And it’s not just a subjective thing that you see, and you appreciate from talking with both parents, kids, and coaches. I think, objectively, the injury rates are astronomically high. I mean, you can look at a study they did on just Pac-12 injury rates in baseball players, and it’s up, 500% or 600%.
Laura Kunz:
Oh my gosh.
Eric Cressey:
2016 to 2021 was the study period. I don’t have the numbers off the top of my head. But it’s a study I often cite. So we’re really seeing this go in the wrong direction. In baseball, obviously the elbow injuries are something you usually see surgeries for in Major League baseball players. And now, far more of these surgeries are done on 15 to 18-year-old players because they’re taking on way too much earlier on their careers.
So I don’t know how it was for you, but I actually grew up next to a church, and the parking lot of the church was basically a giant athletic field every time, except for Sunday mornings.
And from my little neighborhood, we got all Americans in lacrosse and college football players. We joked that our little hub has kicked out like 7 or 8 coaches. Just because it’s like this little incubator in our backyard, you know? And so there was more free play back then.
It was less structured. And I often joke that the problem with youth sports is the parent. Because the kid doesn’t know what’s right or wrong, and they get signed up. A lot of times, for every high-performer prodigy, there’s 100,000 kids out there that hate their parents because they’ve been pushed far too much.
So I think it’s important for us to take a little step back and realize most of these kids are not going to get $300 million contracts to play professional sports, right? It’s going to be the small, small, small minority that’s going to play professional baseball or any other sport. Maybe 10% of them might end up as college athletes at some point.
The overwhelming majority of them just need to foster a positive lifelong relationship with exercise.
For example, you have a daughter and might realize that girls want to be surrounded by other girls. Sometimes it’s a struggle to get them to do something just with mom or just with dad. But if you ask three of their friends to come, they’ll play wiffleball all day.
Laura Kunz:
It’s so true.
Eric Cressey:
It’s 100% how it is. And I think that when our daughters were on the same team, that AU team was my favorite team ever because it had awesome kids and awesome parents. Every time those girls bump into each other, now it’s hugs, it’s reminiscing. So, it goes back to who you surround yourself with, and is it fun? Is it free play or is it too structured?
Laura Kunz:
And that’s such a good point. It’s like the dysregulated parent is another type of incubator that we don’t want, you know? So if you had one message for a parent of a youth athlete listening, what would that message be?
Eric Cressey:
It’s not about the parent, it’s about the kid. And then that’s the problem. Usually, it’s the parent that feels like they need to keep up with something. And I’m probably in a unique position to talk about this because I have twin daughters.
Laura Kunz:
Well, I was going to ask about that, right? You’re navigating all of this yourself.
Eric Cressey:
Yeah. So I think what was eye-opening for me, having twin daughters, is that they have been completely different since the ultrasounds. We would go in, and one of them would be like front and center, face pressed against the glass. The other would be hidden. We’d have to spend like ten minutes trying to find a heartbeat.
Laura Kunz:
I think I could probably tell you which one is which is just knowing them.
Eric Cressey:
My wife is Lebanese and Italian, so she has olive skin. I’m Irish and Scottish, so I’m a sunburn waiting to happen.
One is strawberry blond, one is the brunette, one’s lefty, and one’s righty. One is three inches and 25 pounds heavier and taller than her sister. One adores gymnastics. She will walk on her hands all day. Her sister will read a book for seven hours a day. They were just totally different kids, and they both play sports.
And one is really into softball, tennis, and dance. The other’s into gymnastics and softball. But you have to try so hard their entire life not to compare them. One of them walked seven months before her sister. One’s better at reading, one is better at math. And it’s like a constant struggle to not compare them, because there’s always going to be certain things that one does better than the other.
And I think the problem is, as a society, we look at 15-year-olds on a softball team, and we think they’re going to be homogeneous. And that couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s no different than looking at your employees in an organization where they all have unique skills. We always joke, “let your freak flag fly,” like whatever it is you do it really well, let it be you.
Laura Kunz:
Fantastic. I love that.
Eric Cressey:
Just kind of let their personality come out. You see that with youth sports as well, but I think too often we expect every kid to be a robot that is just going to have crazy attention to detail at a young age.
My mom says I taught myself to read with baseball cards because I was a kid that was not a good sleeper. She would put me down for a nap, and the only thing that could get me to nap was putting me on the couch while baseball was on T.V. So I watched the Cubs, like Ryan Sandberg, and I matched up who I saw on TV with the baseball cards. So, I could read off the back of a baseball card.
What’s interesting now is kids don’t watch sports nearly as much. You see kids who aren’t familiar with a lot of players. Even young baseball players don’t know who some of the biggest superstars are. They won’t actually sit down and watch the game.
So it concerns me because baseball is a unique sport where there’s a game within a game, like if you know about it, you understand. Like this catcher has a secret sign for a back pick to first base, or hey, this guy on second base is, you know, trying to steal signs from the pitcher.
There’s always that side of the game that is so fun to appreciate, because there’s breaks in the action. It’s like watching a golfer line up a putt from seven different angles. Maybe the kids’ attention spans are shorter because of electronics, or they’re just playing so many games that they don’t have a chance to really practice or even just go watch games.
But in general, young athletes, you know, they’re probably watching 10 or 15-second clips of highlights on Instagram and not actually getting lost in the game, which is, if you look at long-term happiness, like figuring out that thing that you can just get lost in. Whether it’s a book, or, for me, I got back and played tennis in my 40’s after playing in high school.
So it’s just one of those things where I worry that we haven’t set kids up for a really long-term love of the game and sold out for, you know, the next weekend’s tournament.
Laura Kunz:
I think you’re so right. And what I hear in so many of the points that you’re making is community. And the real embracing of community. I mean, I think even last night, my daughter went to the high school softball game with a few girls from her racquet travel team, and some of the high school girls who played a different sport at the high school had a kickball game with them on the football field. And you’re just like, it’s things like that that are so important, where they are still having fun, and it’s not just work, work, work.
That being said, what do you think about KPIs and youth sports? I always think about it in the context of a sales team. I mean, it’s even difficult for adults to work under that type of pressure.
Eric Cressey:
To your point about community, I’ll say, I think that a study just came out that said loneliness is a bigger risk factor for mortality than smoking.
Laura Kunz:
Oh my gosh.
Eric Cressey:
To your point about KPIs, this will surprise you, but nothing matters before puberty. It’s crazy because we have kids that shoot up six inches in six months, and they become completely different. All that matters prior to that age is falling in love with different sports and trying a wide variety of things. Not just because trying different sports works different muscles, awareness, and exposes them to patterns.
It also exposes them to different social circles. So they learn how to roll with their volleyball team, their softball team, their soccer team, their kickball team, random friends that they meet at a game. So I think that part of them is really, really important.
KPIs are a little bit different after that. We do it less because we need to show that the training is working with young athletes.
You do it more because it gives you a really good objective measure of feedback to show the kids and say, listen, this is working.
So, for my daughter, she broke her arm last year, had 4 pins put in it, and she was like really into gymnastics. And she was 9 or 10 when it happened. It was right after her 10th birthday when it happened. She was in a cast/sling, kind of on the shelf for a while.
It was the perfect time to go to the gym. You know, the kids have always loved to come in and jump on the floor space just because it’s been cool. And so I was like, well, you’re gonna come in, you’re gonna work out three days a week. You’re going to do the kettlebell in one arm, and work in other stuff, and keep running and having a vertical jump in six weeks.
Not because we were trying to prove that specific KPI. It’s just that she did something that she hadn’t done. And it was like cross-training, right? When she had gymnastics four days a week, it was really hard to get in and do extras when she was getting pulled in a lot of different directions. She had time to focus on a quality she hadn’t focused on.
And it’s funny because, like, she could do like twenty-three press handstands in a row, and she’s like checking all these boxes now. But I don’t know if I had a specific KPI.
But I do think it is helpful to give kids, especially boys, because boys are very, very competitive with one another. With girls, they don’t like to stand out nearly as much. They’d rather be celebrated as part of a team. So I think you have to manage it a little bit differently. But with boys, especially, if you get them to compete with one another, it’s like the reason they thrive.
Laura Kunz:
I could totally see that. And I love the story about your daughter because it reminded me of growth mindset and what a valuable skill to first teach our youth. Because I feel like that’s such an insulator, even with failure along the way, and later on in life, business people deal with that. You see adults that really struggle with it because they didn’t learn, you know, how to embrace not necessarily how to deal with failure, but how to live in a growth mindset where there can be many areas that you can dive into and feel like you’re achieving and reaching goals.
Eric Cressey:
We always say training is just teaching kids to fail without consequences. If you go to a tournament and you lose, and it’s the next national championship next week.
But I do think there’s something, like good training is actually giving the opportunity for people to fail, not excessively, but to fail with no consequences. And I think that’s what nurtures a growth mindset. If you go and you lose a game and your parents eviscerate you on the car ride home and tell you everything you did wrong, you’re going to be tender the next time you go back up to participate. You don’t want to be a tender athlete.
So I think what we look for in people that we hire in their 20s and 30s and beyond is, are you a good person? Do I want to spend all that time with you? It’s that community part that we talked about, right? Are you curious? Because to me, curious people have a growth mindset. They’re trying to figure out ways to make something work more efficiently, maybe just overall to make it work completely better.
So we always look for that. I know in our world, we can teach people what they need to know to be successful, right? We know what the path is. Much like any industry. Whether that’s an entry-level position working at a restaurant or it’s managing, crazy, collections of teams across multi international organizations.
Everybody ascends to those roles. But you can’t do that if people aren’t curious. So I lean on that a lot. It’s what you call curiosity or a growth mindset. It’s important.
Laura Kunz:
So what does a healthy high-performing athlete look like at age 14 versus 24?
Eric Cressey:
You’d be surprised that they’re not entirely different in terms of what they do. It’s just that the stressors that interfere with things. You can’t drive yourself at 14 like you can at 24. So when we talk to our athletes, I actually talk about things that make them very consistent. And this is a conversation I have with leaders, and I also have with beginners.
You have to have a routine that prepares you. You hear about morning routines and things like that.
But I would say consistent daily routine, quality sleep, quality nutrition, and then a really high-quality off-season.
So those are the things that I talk about, and they are necessarily general. I think we know that kids that sleep better generate better performance in school. All the research on cognition and reaction time and all these different things. Injury rates go up. You know, it’s like 1.7 times higher injury rates in college athletes if they sleep less than seven hours. And I mean, this has been done in many different studies over the years. So sleep is like, if you could bottle it up and sell it as a pharmaceutical company, you’d be incredibly wealthy.
The nutrition side of things is big. And, it’s funny you mentioned 14 versus 24. 14 is really when kids start to realize how much of a difference there is.
Twice a year, we have a 14-year-old kid at the facility that gets lightheaded and almost passes out while working out. And it’s 5:00 at night, and he hasn’t had anything since his 11 a.m. lunch at school. He hasn’t had a sip of water all day. It’s like, of course, you’re lightheaded; you’re completely undernourished. So that goes a long way. And it matters obviously for professional athletes, college athletes. So across all of sports.
But I think the offseason part is probably an important discussion, because there ought to be seasons of life. And I think what we see with young athletes, particularly as year-round participation has become a thing, is that there are no true off-seasons. When you’re young, those off-seasons are playing a different sport.
So if you were like all in on soccer in the fall, it means going to basketball or wrestling or ice hockey or something like that, and then going to something different in the springtime. And then once summer rolls around, maybe it’s a little bit of everything. You can sleep late, eat home cooking. It’s a more relaxed schedule.
So I think we see a lot of athletes where the idea of an offseason has really been pushed out. I personally know, in the interest of being transparent, I struggle with this in gymnastics because gymnastics is a sport that chases very early success, and they’re okay with a lot of attrition. With kids just walking away from it at 11, 12, or 13.
You just don’t see a whole lot of kids that are still competing in gymnastics by the time that they get to the end of high school, and there’s obviously not a lot of time in college opportunities for it. So if you’re not going to the Olympics, it’s like, all right, what do I do?
So I’ve struggled with that part of things because it’s so year-round, and we’ve, as a family, had a lot of discussions about whether we can offset that with good training. With periodic times of rest, a break from it, where we go play softball in the spring.
So that’s something we wrestle with. It’s like the analogy of a professional baseball player who has a bad game, goes 0-4 with 4 strikeouts. And so he stays after the game, and he hits for two hours in the cages and wakes up the next day exhausted.
We have a joke that “I’d rather tame a tiger than argue with a donkey.” And sometimes you have to protect the tigers from themselves. And it’s a really hard thing.
Those five principles, you’d be amazed at how much they can trickle down to really any aspect of not just sports, but life.
Laura Kunz:
I was going to say that tiger analogy really relates to business, too. Because you think about it, I just think of sales teams that have been on or managed, and that is just the truth.
Eric Cressey:
I had a staff member, he’s still with us. And if I had him show for an 8:30 start, he was terrible for an hour and a half. And we moved into a 10 a.m. start, and he is the best coach on the floor at 6 p.m. when everyone’s like hanging and all that stuff. Just some people are not morning people, you know?
And that actually worked really well in professional baseball. It was like a wildly compelling moment when there was a guy who actually took a medication that he had to take first in the morning for an autoimmune condition, and it took time for it to work for him. And I was like, man, like, I can either have him get up at six and take his medication and be ready for 8:30.
I can let him sleep to a normal schedule, take it, and then just start at ten. And our business allows that, and it worked great. So, just some of those things, you just never know what people are kind of wrestling with and how you can impact one of those five different things.
Laura Kunz:
Well, I was going to say again, and you being an advocate for that employee and also being an advocate for your daughter through that, because as we were saying earlier, some kids don’t have that, some employees don’t have that. They can be in a high-pressure situation, but they don’t have someone teaching them the skills, because that can make a big difference.
Eric Cressey:
And I think it helps. I’m a realist. I’m five feet eight, and my wife is five feet three, like, our kids aren’t going to the WNBA.
I always remember when I was in high school, we had two dads that came all the time. Man, if I had just had your training when I was in high school, like, I would have been playing professionally. I would have been a fantastically mediocre division two athlete.
But I do know, just from the number of thank-you notes I’ve gotten from parents after high school, how transformative being in a good training environment can be. We talk about there’s three places, right? There’s home, there’s school. And what is that third place? That third place might be the softball field.
That might be the gymnastics center for us. It’s been the gym for a lot of them, where it pushes out potentially a lot of bad behaviors. And I think it is also where some of our employees are struggling. They have home, and they have work. They might not have a third place, and they might desperately need it if work isn’t fulfilled in the ways they want it to be.
So I think you can integrate an exercise environment. That’s why you see a lot of CrossFit and things like that doing so well in the world, is that they create crazy camaraderie. Whether you’re really training principles or different stuff you see on the internet or not, they do create community with people.
Laura Kunz:
For sure. And it’s educational too, because you can’t always rely on the team or the work environment to do that. You know, just having as many perspectives as possible is so important. And in the context of prevention.
So physical recovery is really structured. There’s a science behind it. What do you think about emotional recovery? If an athlete has a failure, as a business leader, if you have a letdown, talk about that.
Eric Cressey:
So, I’ll nerd out for a second. In the world of training, we have overreaching, and we have overtraining. Overload is an inherent process of what we’re trying to do with our athletes. If you’ve squatted 135 and come back the next day and squatted 145, we want to break you down and build you back up.
You have to adapt and go this way. It’s not different than long tossing in softball. You throw the ball a little bit further each time. So, overload is inherent to the training process. And there’s times where we push athletes harder. We do it for an extended period of time, maybe three or four weeks. And then on our fourth week, it’s going to be a deload period. We’re going to take the stress down, so you can compensate and come back better. You do that more in advanced athletes as they get more training experience under their belt.
And then you have overtraining, right? So this is when an overreach was too big. And it creates all kinds of challenges that are more than just, hey, I’m not stronger.
And the really hard part about it is different kinds of overtraining are perceived differently. So if you go to the endurance training community, if you have an elite marathoner and they’re overtrained, you see some crazy things there. It parallels clinical depression. You see alternative testosterone-to-cortisol ratios. You see disturbed sleep patterns, all these different things. It’s very hard to see that as much in athletes that are involved in endurance sports. So you’re looking at golfers, you look at baseball players, you look at weightlifters.
Believe it or not, the only thing that really is a good qualifying criteria for that is a drop in performance, which is not all helpful. “Hey, you weren’t strong today. But I really can’t pin it on anything else.”
So what I’ve drawn from that is the biggest takeaway is communicating; you have to check in constantly. It becomes hard if someone’s hypervigilant, where you have that athletes that’s crazy in tune with their body, and it’s never “I feel awesome.” It’s always like, well, this hurts, and this is a little sore. Those are the hardest athletes because they’re hyper aware.
But I always brought up this line from my business partner, who said, “Listen for whispers instead of waiting for it to yell.”
And I think that speaks not just to the physical stuff. If I have a 41-year-old athlete, and he’s got a little bit of a cranky Achilles one morning when he comes in, I’m probably going to adjust the training program, get some treatments, and maybe push what I wanted to do back a couple of days because I can get that work in.
So I think the same thing is probably true of the mental health side of things, that you listen to the whispers, you look for warning signs.
And so I think that’s the kind of a challenge. We want to create a safe space to even talk. And that’s why it’s so important. The single best thing you can do is tell your kid, “I love watching you play.” Or just not jumping to the ball that they booted, or, ”You should’ve timed out on this fly ball,” or whatever it was.
It’s always just ”I love watching you play.” There’s going to be a time to teach, but it’s kind of too raw and too fresh right there. So I think that’s probably part of it as well, it’s picking your spots, where to have those tough conversations, and admittedly, in the leadership role, I always struggle with that. Maybe too much of a pacifist, and then picking the wrong time to actually have that conversation.
Laura Kunz:
It’s very hard. Because every person is different.
Eric Cressey:
Yeah. And, you know, you need to give them more compliments than criticism. You have to compliment them very publicly, criticize them privately, and also make that criticism a growth mindset. So it’s a moving target for a lot of guys.
Laura Kunz:
Moving target. Leadership is not easy. We actually had one of our upcoming guests, we’ve already done this interview, is an executive. He owns an executive health company and is a triathlete and an Ironman. He competed in an Ironman. And we asked him what was hardest, and he said, being a leader/executive.
Eric Cressey:
It takes a special breed to do that. I always say, the thing about sports is it’s largely predictable. For him, he knows he’s going to run, he’s going to swim, he’s going to bike. You know, like maybe the temperature changes a little bit, the competition changes, the terrain changes, but he knows largely what he’s doing.
I think when you go into a leadership role, with the surprises that come up, especially in the service industry, you don’t know what personality is going to come in, and who you’re going to deal with, what their expectations are.
So that’s probably the hardest thing about business is just never knowing quite what you’re going to get from day to day. You know, the job should be very predictable. It’s not like we’re just manufacturing widgets, and it’s the same customer service problem, or it’s a quality control issue. And people are, by nature, irrational and unpredictable. And so it’s very, very challenging.
One analogy I use is: if you go to Walmart, you buy a pack of gum, you don’t barter a price. With the service industry, people will often approach with the thought of prices being negotiable. “Well, hey, if I buy eight, do we get a discount?” So it’s just training that a lot of people never really have to encounter. And that’s why I sometimes think sports are such a good break for people.
It’s like there’s some unpredictability to it, but largely, you know what you’re doing and you kind of just tune out for an hour.
Laura Kunz:
That’s true. Yeah, it is more of a science. And really, the mind is too, which is the business that we’re in, but it is very difficult. You’re building bodies, we’re building minds. Well, you’re building minds in many ways, too, clearly. It’s interesting to understand all that goes into what you all are doing when you’re building these high performers.
Eric Cressey:
When you get in this industry, you think it’s so much about the X’s and O’s and sets and reps, and you train people like actual humans with thoughts and perceptions of what they want, what they don’t want. And you really have to meet them where they’re at rather than just give them a rigid program and say, “Oh, that doesn’t work well.”
Laura Kunz:
With that, I want to go into the quickfire. There’s a question in there that kind of hits on this. So we’ll end with a quickfire, just whatever comes to mind. No right or wrong answer.
Grit. Essential or overrated?
Eric Cressey:
Essential.
Laura Kunz:
Confidence: built or born?
Eric Cressey:
Built.
I remember distinctly, there was a pitching coach named Justin Blood. He was a pitcher at the University of Connecticut. He was the head coach at the University of Hartford. He gave a presentation, and I distinctly remember him putting a picture of Pedro Martinez up on the screen. He was not a big guy, crazy successful, Hall of Fame career, and he put him alongside all these dudes that were like six foot five, 240.
And he’s like, “Do you think that guy’s more physically prepared to be successful?” It’s like, no, it’s a confidence thing. It’s trusting in that preparation. So it’s 100% a function of what you’ve done to get to that. I wouldn’t be confident at all going out and playing in the NHL right now. I can’t skate for the life of me.
But I would be totally fine jumping into power lifts just because it’s what I’ve rehearsed, it’s what I’ve done. So I think it’s 100% what you experience.
Laura Kunz:
Fantastic takeaway for people. I’m glad that you elaborated on that. So, balance: myth or necessity?
Eric Cressey:
I think myth. I think there are seasons of life. It’s important to have appreciation for how all the pieces fit together, but to have a perfectly balanced Tuesday to me is impossible in our family. And every afternoon is far too crazy. And there are times when I’m away for the Yankees’ responsibility.
So I think balance comes in the course of a year, not the course of the day.
Laura Kunz:
I’m in agreement with that 100%. One mental skill every executive should train?
Eric Cressey:
I would say, honestly, probably just having a calming moment before a conversation. I don’t know if that’s a mental skill as much as it is a habit. Where I would get in trouble was I’d see something early in my career that I didn’t like, and I addressed it immediately, not realizing who else was watching, what the circumstances were.
So I think I’ve gotten a little bit better as I’ve aged, and just been around it more. It’s just to take a deep breath, do a little bit of information gathering, and then circle back. And then you realize “that was being done that way because that kid rolled his ankle yesterday, and he had to adjust to a different exercise.” A lot of times, I think I was a little quick to rush to judgment early in my career.
Laura Kunz:
Love that. And then finally, one thing athletes understand about pressure that executives don’t.
Eric Cressey:
I think we’ve often heard that pressure is a privilege from the athletic world, and I don’t think I ever heard a CEO say that. It means you’re competing in front of a massive fan base, and that your team trusts you. And I don’t think we see executives challenged with really, really hard decisions, embracing that as a feather in their cap, so to speak, or an opportunity to be given because they worked hard to get it.
So it might actually help more of our CEO types to take a step back and smell the roses. I’m admittedly the worst person to say this. My wife and I joke about this like, on to the next. Like we had signed two pitchers in 2017, Max Scherzer and Corey Kluber.
So by definition, maybe the two best pitchers on the planet that year. They did the award ceremony on Wednesday night. It ended, and I just shut off the TV and wrote some programs, and my wife’s like, “You’re not gonna celebrate at all?” It’s like, it’s just back to the work. So we probably could have a scenario where people could be a little bit better at smelling the roses where appropriate.
Laura Kunz:
That just hit me. Between the eyes. I guarantee it hit half our listener base between the eyes. Fantastic, Eric. Thank you so much for being here and sharing your wide variety of knowledge in so many different helpful areas.
Eric Cressey:
Thank you.
The Real Measure of High Performance
High performance gets a lot of attention. Sustainable high performance gets far less.
We celebrate the people who keep going. The ones who take on more, push through setbacks, and move immediately to the next goal. In many workplaces, those are the people we trust with more because they have proven they can handle more.
But Eric’s perspective offers an important challenge to that thinking.
The people with the greatest capacity to push are not always the people who need another push. Sometimes they need someone paying close enough attention to recognize when their drive is beginning to work against them.
Eric shares a line from his business partner that captures this idea simply: “Listen for whispers instead of waiting for it to yell.”
In elite sports, waiting for the yell can mean waiting for the injury or the drop in performance. In the workplace, we have our own versions. Burnout. Disengagement. A high performer who suddenly is not performing. A leader who has nothing left to give. A valued employee who decides to leave.
The opportunity is everything that happens before that.
That is where burnout prevention and proactive mental health support matter.
At Spirence, we believe mental health support should not begin when someone reaches a breaking point. It should start much earlier, by giving people the knowledge to understand what they are experiencing, the language to talk about it, and practical tools they can use in the moments that shape their everyday well-being.
For organizations, that means creating a culture where mental health is not separate from performance. It is part of how people sustain it.
It means helping employees recognize their own whispers. It means equipping managers and leaders to notice changes in the people around them. And it means creating opportunities to learn about mental health before someone is in crisis and desperately searching for an answer.
Because the goal should never be to find out how much pressure great people can withstand.
The goal is to help people understand themselves, respond earlier, and continue doing great work without waiting for something to break.
That is the shift from reaction to prevention.
And it is exactly why Spirence exists.
