Non-negotiables for stamina to actually live life outside of your work day

You deserve the energy to live your life outside of the work day. Don't work your life away.

I used to have problems getting to sleep each night. My head was swarming with racing thoughts that wouldn’t seem to stop and I’d be so frustrated because my body was tired, but my brain just kept going. I used to feel incredibly bloated and sluggish all day wondering to myself if it was just the onset of my 30’s. I was tired and unmotivated after, quite frankly, too long of a workday. I kept thinking back to my early working days and wondering where all this energy was coming from. 

This is probably the most common sense element to create healthy boundaries for work, but it’s often lumped into different categories like personal goals, fitness goals, or physical goals. In reality, it’s straight up essential for you to treat your body with the same respect and the same discipline for the ways you expect it to perform. It’s a simple INPUT = OUTPUT equation that we forget so frequently. 

So here are my top tips to create physical health boundaries to benefit your workday. As you read these, I want you to strip the emotional side of weight loss and dieting from your head. We are thinking about optimization for your day to day. I don’t care what you weigh, what your body fat percentage is, how much you can lift in the gym, how clean you eat or any of the other traditional fitness culture crap that is shoved down our throats by social media. Read these next tips like non-negotiables to nail peak performance for not only work, but to balance the energy you need for your life outside of work… because isn’t that what we’re all striving for?

Create the boundary of at least 60 minutes of movement per day

This is the number one thing that has drastically improved both my sleep and my energy post-work. It sounds counterintuitive because if I’m already feeling exhausted, how will exerting more energy help me feel more energy? At first, it won’t - plain and simple. When you start incorporating extra movement, that first week is going to feel like you got hit by a bus. The following weeks, you create an expectation of that movement and the body adjusts.

But I’m not a “gym girlie” COOL. You don’t have to be. Take the dog for an hour walk, roll out your yoga mat in your living room to do an hour YouTube yoga session, go take that hour to play a pickup game of basketball or tennis. Literally, just move your dang body. Don’t overthink your activities at first, just get them on the calendar and execute every day. Getting this full hour of daily movement over time creates a sharper attention to detail in the work that you do and gives you the energy that you need once you end your work day. Your body’s alertness feeds the mind’s alertness, so if you’re looking to uplevel at work, uplevel your movement.

Create the boundary of fueling your body so INPUT = OUTPUT

I’m not a nutritionist nor a dietician. I’m not here to tell you what to eat or how to eat it. I’m asking you simply to just pay attention to your “body fueling” habits. If you’re not eating enough or hydrating enough, you’re going to feel tired–even if you aren’t asking much of yourself physically each day. On the flip side, if you’re eating too much you’re also going to feel tired, but in a different way. Tracking how you feel after you eat each day is a great way to start understanding your needs.

The number one thing that changed the game for me was meal planning and turnkey assembly meals. I invest in a few hours on a Sunday to plan how I need to fuel my body based on the things I’m asking of it for the coming week. Take the path of least resistance: get single serve packs of premade items, create assembly types of meals rather than traditional prepping, sign up for a meal kit service. 

If you don’t want to invest in the trial and error method over time, take a shortcut and hire a coach that knows what they’re doing. The goal is to keep things on hand and easily accessible so you don’t have to make any additional choices throughout the day. You make enough decisions in your job, so reduce the decision fatigue and just execute. 

Create the boundary of adding expectation of progress

You’ll hear people talk about having an accountability partner over and over again. It’s not a hoax, it’s because that shit actually works. The best thing I ever did for my health, my business, and my relationships is to have someone “in my corner” that wants to see me succeed. I invested in masterminds and membership programs that demanded more of me, I hired fitness coaches to nudge me for more progress, and the vows my husband I created when we got married are mainly centered around being each other’s go to hype man/woman. 

The game changes when you learn to expect more of yourself–it also intensifies when you have someone else who’s expecting more from you and you don’t want to let them down. I don’t want to let my mastermind instructor down, I don’t want to let my fitness coach down, and I don’t want to let my partner down. When something becomes bigger than just you, it reframes the demand you expect from yourself. It’s less about whether you want to do it and more about the expectation to get it done. 

Combining the 60 mins of movement, fueling your body appropriately for your day, and adding an element of expectation of progress is the secret sauce to sleeping better, feeling more energetic, and feeling like you’re on another level mentally. I’m not giving you woo-woo advice. This is just what works. 

If you loved these tips, my online course the Main Character Method will be launching this year and we go real hard on boundary setting. Sign up here for pre-order notifications.