Physical Environment & Performance

Summary: 

• What are the pillars of performance? 
• How your environment can impact your physical activity levels.
• How to set your kitchen up for a successful week.
• Why it is worth keeping a neat and organised space to help get work done. 
• Tips for improving sleep hygiene for a better night’s sleep.
• Create a wind-down routine personal to you.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) stated that at least 80% of all heart disease, stroke and Type 2 diabetes, and up to 40% of cancer could be prevented if people ate better and engaged in more physical activity. Individuals sleeping less than seven hours a night were found to be 1.83 times more likely to be overweight and 1.57 times more likely to be obese than those sleeping seven to nine hours (Li, 2021). Relaxation exercises can reduce stress and anxiety levels by up to 40% (Sandlund & Norlander, 2000). Investing in your mindset can increase resilience, decrease depression, reduce stress and even increase your lifespan. It is clear the importance that movement, nutrition, sleep, recovery and mindset have on your overall health. We cannot control every single variable within these five pillars of performance, but one thing we can control is the physical environment we immerse ourselves in.

Have you ever noticed a time when your desk was completely cluttered, which made your mind feel just as chaotic? Has ‘the chair’ in your bedroom ever annoyed you going to sleep as all you can see is an unorganized pile of clothes? For me, trying to get work done in my college house during winter was a huge struggle as even though I was covered in 3 blankets and a hot water bottle, I was still too cold. It’s not just in your head. It turns out that your performance is significantly impacted by the physical surroundings you are in. Today we are going to explore how your physical environment is affecting your performance and simple tips to help create an environment that fosters your optimum performance. 

There are certain factors within our environment that we might not have much control over. For example, if you are an athlete training outdoors during the summer months, you cannot change the temperature or humidity. However, there are things that you can still do to alter aspects of your physical environment. 

At daveynutrition, we focus on 5 Pillars of Performance. It’s not just about how fast you can run or how heavy you can lift – these pillars make up the fundamentals of performance, and no matter if you are new to exercise or an elite athlete, these pillars are the same. These 5  pillars consist of movement, nutrition, mindset, recovery and sleep. Many factors can be considered within each pillar, but today we are going to delve into how your environment can affect your performance within each of these pillars. 

Movement

It has been found that your physical surroundings can impact your physical activity levels (Sallis et al., 2024). Some people much prefer going for a walk somewhere scenic rather than through a busy town with a lot of people and traffic. I for one can vouch for that. Being surrounded by some of Ireland’s most beautiful beaches, I would rather get sand in my shoes than weave my way in between people on a busy street. For example, if you have recently started running but are getting a little bit bored of it, maybe try a new route. What nice walkways are nearby? How about beaches? Are there any nice forests? Sometimes a change in our physical environment is all we need. 

The people you are surrounded by within your environment can also make a huge difference in your performance. From my own experience, being surrounded by like-minded people in a gym can make a big difference in how I perform. When you see people trying their best and challenging themselves. When you see people consistently showing up. Even when you see people put back their weights and equipment. They all tick my box and make me want to perform at my best. Take a moment to think about the people who push you, support you and encourage you. When was the last time you met them or did something fun with them? 

Nowadays, we are surrounded by fast food chains and food delivery services. They can have their benefits, but also have many drawbacks. Ten years ago if you wanted to go to the chipper, you would physically have to go there. Now it can be delivered to your home so that you don’t even have to go outside. Similar to grocery delivery services. When life gets busy, there is the huge advantage of ordering your food online and having it delivered to your door. But again, it’s decreasing our overall movement. Modern technology has made life easier in many ways, but is it at the cost of impacting our physical activity levels negatively?

Nutrition 

Nutrition plays a crucial role in how you perform – in your everyday life and sport. Beyond the athletic accomplishments that can come from eating a well-balanced diet, your nutrition helps to fuel you throughout the day by sustaining your energy levels. Does your kitchen environment help you to make better choices when it comes to your nutrition? For example, if you are a busy individual who doesn’t like to spend a hours time in the kitchen preparing meals, does your kitchen provide you with options that take less time? Have you a blender to make smoothies? Are your frying pans non-stick so you have to spend less time scrubbing the pan at the end of the day? These might seem very simple – but can make a huge difference by providing you with an opportunity to to make the most you can out of the tools that you have. Your kitchen tells the future. Equipment and workspace aside, do you have easy recipes that you can follow that fit your lifestyle and nutritional goals? To help you with this, check out some of our quick and easy recipes from our website. If you have a goal of improving your nutrition for performance and overall health, why not consider signing up for our monthly membership which will give you all of the tools needed to help you along with this journey? 

Depending on your locality, you might have a few or many food outlets near you. Within a five-minute walk from my house, there are 5 chippers and 2 Chinese takeaways. These are in addition to the many sit-down formal restaurants that line the street. Having so many food choices is wonderful, as long as they are not relied on every single day. It’s perfectly fine to enjoy these foods in moderation, but besides being out of pocket from getting them so frequently, we also may be depriving our bodies of the nutrients needed to help fuel our performance. Unfortunately, there is not much we can do about how conveniently located the chipper is. However, ensuring that you have food in the fridge to make a delicious and nutritious meal can help support you in achieving your optimum performance.

Mindset

Your performance and mindset are greatly influenced by your physical surroundings. Many aspects of your environment, such as lighting, noise levels and organisation, can affect how you think, feel and work. For a lot of people, within their designated workspace is where they are most productive and ideas get flowing. That is why you must create an environment that supports this productivity within your workspace. From simple things like the comfort of your chair, desk height and the pen that you may be writing with, to the availability of natural light within your workspace. Cornell University found that workers who were based in a space that had natural daylight reported a significant drop in symptoms such as headaches and eyestrain, by 84%.

A cluttered environment may lead to a cluttered mind. According to research from the Princeton University Neuroscience Institute, physical clutter battles for your attention, impairing performance and elevating stress levels. This study showed that having a neat and orderly environment might help in lowering stress levels and improving concentration. 

Ergonomic design is crucial to your productivity. Five aspects of ergonomic design to remember are safety, comfort, ease of use, productivity, and aesthetics. When considering your equipment at your workstation, try to remember these aspects when deciding on a desk, chair, laptop etc. so that you can work at your best.

Sleep

Poor sleep quality can hinder muscular strength, speed and other aspects of physical performance. Acute sleep loss can lead to a decline in next-day exercise performance (Craven et al., 2022). Mentally, a bad night’s sleep can result in a decline of cognitive functioning, ultimately affecting decision-making, reaction times and judgement (Taheri & Arabameri, 2012). Recovery from exercise can also be influenced by sleep (Bird, 2013). 

In youth athletes, achieving less than the recommended sleep can put these athletes at risk for illness and injury (Riederer, M., 2020). Sleep deprivation can affect your body’s ability to fight infections and disease and compromise your immunity. It is clear the importance that sleep has on your overall performance, but when it comes to sleep, the quality of sleep triumphs over the quantity of sleep. It is recommended for adults to achieve between 7-9 hours of sleep per night. But the quality of sleep that you get within this window is the determining factor of your performance. How can you improve your sleep quality? Some studies show a direct link between sleep hygiene practices and sleep quality (Brick et al., 2010). Sleep hygiene is a term used to describe good sleep habits. Your bedroom environment and the environment you are immersed in in the lead up to bedtime, can either elevate or sabotage your sleep quality. 

How to improve your sleep environment:

• Sleep in a dark room: Melatonin is a hormone produced in the brain that induces drowsiness and is stimulated by darkness. Blackout curtains or eye masks can also be great tools to use to help create a dark room so that you can get to sleep quickly. 
• Sleep in a cool room: Lower temperatures encourage improved blood flow and relaxed muscles. Sleeping in a cool room can also help reduce night sweats and allow for a better quality of sleep. Temperatures between 15.6°- 20 ° are generally recommended. 
• Avoid electronics before bed: Using electronic devices emits a blue light that can disrupt the secretion of melatonin which helps you to get to sleep. Trying to turn off electronics an hour before bed can help promote a sound night’s sleep. 

Recovery

Recovery is defined as ‘’the set of processes resulting in an athlete’s renewed ability to meet or exceed previous performance levels, and the recovery period is defined as the time necessary for the various physiological parameters that were altered by exercise to return to resting values’’. The ability to recover is critical to an athlete’s overall performance and long-term success. Building muscle and increasing strength requires proper recovery (BJ., 2010). Fatigue, a decline in performance, and an elevated risk of injury can result from overtraining. Recovering strategies such as rest days, healthy eating and getting enough sleep can help avoid overtraining and burnout (JB., 2012). Enhancing endurance, strength and overall performance is possible through recovery, which enables the body to adjust to training stimuli. Such adaptations are jeopardised in the absence of adequate recovery (AK., 2008)

Your physical surroundings have a significant impact on how you recover, affecting both mental and physical rejuvenation. The area surrounding you has a big influence on how quickly and effectively you heal from injuries, recover from strenuous exercise, or just rest after a long day.

Your body will respond better to gentle, warm lighting in the evening, which will promote rest and recuperation. Including a purposeful wind-down routine at the end of the day will not only help you relax mentally, but encourage a good night’s sleep. But it is important to make this wind-down routine personal to you.

Identifying activities or rituals that you enjoy to help you feel more relaxed is vital in your recovery. Personally, a shower followed by fresh pyjamas, a cup of tea and my book is all I need after a stressful day at work. Create your list, embed it into your routine and work towards giving it your all.

At the end of the day, everyone wants to be able to perform at their best. Running the best 5km time. Finishing a college assignment at ease. Squat the heaviest weight. We all have our own goals that we wish to achieve. It’s simple to underestimate the significant influence that our physical surroundings have on our performance in our fast-paced world. The environments we work in, whether at home, the office, or at school, have a big impact on our output, creativity and general well-being. We must remember our physical environment within each of the pillars of performance to ensure that we are on the road to reaching our goals. At daveynutrition, we understand that this can be difficult to navigate on your own and sometimes personal guidance and support can help get you started in the right direction. To reach out to us and help get your journey to improving your physical environment started, email us at info@daveynutrition.com. Through purposeful change and improvement of our physical surroundings, you can empower yourself to achieve peak performance and unlock your full potential.

References: 

AK; B.P.E. (2008) Recovery from training: A brief review: Brief review, Journal of strength and conditioning research. Available at: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18438210

Bird, S. P. (2013). Sleep, recovery, and athletic performance: a brief review and recommendations. Strength Cond. J. 35, 43–47. doi: 10.1519/SSC.0b013e3182a62e2f

BJ;, S. (2010) The mechanisms of muscle hypertrophy and their application to resistance training, Journal of strength and conditioning research. Available at: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20847704

Boubekri, M. et al. (2014) Impact of windows and daylight exposure on overall health and sleep quality of office workers: A case-control pilot study, Journal of clinical sleep medicine : JCSM : official publication of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. Available at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4031400

Brick, C.A., Seely, D.L. and Palermo, T.M. (2010) Association between sleep hygiene and sleep quality in medical students, Behavioral sleep medicine. Available at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3572193

Craven, J. et al. (2022) Effects of acute sleep loss on physical performance: A systematic and Meta-Analytical Review – Sports Medicine, SpringerLink. Available at: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40279-022-01706-y 

JB; K.J. (2012) Overtraining syndrome: A practical guide, Sports health. Available at: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23016079/

Li, Q. (2021) The association between sleep duration and excess body weight of the American adult population: A cross-sectional study of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey 2015–2016 – BMC Public Health, BioMed Central. Available at: https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-021-10369-9 

Mechanisms of directed attention in the human extrastriate cortex as revealed by functional MRI (no date) Princeton University. Available at: https://collaborate.princeton.edu/en/publications/mechanisms-of-directed-attention-in-the-human-extrastriate-cortex 

Sallis, J.F. et al. (2024) Physical activity in relation to urban environments in 14 cities worldwide: A cross-sectional study, Arizona State University. Available at: x=https://asu.elsevierpure.com/en/publications/physical-activity-in-relation-to-urban-environments-in-14-cities-

Sandlund, E.S. and Norlander, T. (2000) The effects of Tai Chi Chuan Relaxation and exercise on stress responses and well-being: An overview of research – International Journal of Stress Management, SpringerLink. Available at: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1009536319034 

Surgery, D. of O. (no date) How sleep impacts performance in youth athletes : Current Sports Medicine Reports, LWW. Available at: https://journals.lww.com/acsm-csmr/fulltext/2020/11000/how_sleep_impacts_performance_in_youth_athletes.8.aspx#:~:text=Studies%20have%20shown%20that%20youth,illness%20(11%2C12).

Taheri, M. and Arabameri, E. (2012) The effect of sleep deprivation on choice reaction time and anaerobic power of college student athletes, Asian journal of sports medicine. Available at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3307962/#:~:text=Conclusions,function%20such%20as%20Reaction%20Time.