For the first part of my career, exercise was everything.
I came out of being an athlete and moved into strength and conditioning. My world was reps, sets, loads, recovery and getting the body ready to perform. I believed strongly in the connection between physical preparation and performance.
I still do.
What I didn’t understand was what all that exercise was doing to the brain.
That changed when I read Spark by Harvard psychiatrist Dr John Ratey on a flight from Sydney to London. I was heading over to present at a fitness conference and by the time I landed, John had tipped a big part of my thinking upside down.
John’s work opened my eyes to the connection between exercise and the brain. When we move the body, we’re not only training muscles, lungs and the cardiovascular system. A lot is happening in the brain as well.
More than two decades later, that idea is deeply embedded in how I work with leaders, executive teams and athletes. And when I finally sat down with John for the Performance Intelligence Podcast, I wanted to go back to the question his work first raised for me all those years ago.
What is movement actually doing to the brain, and what does that mean for the way we prepare people to perform?
The higher you go, the more you have to switch
Think about a CEO’s day.
They might start with a board discussion, move into a difficult performance conversation, then talk to a regulator. They jump in the lift to head to another meeting and when the doors open, a graduate says hello.
That young person doesn’t know what happened in the meeting upstairs. They don’t know the CEO has just had three difficult conversations. They just know the CEO either looked at them, said hello and was present, or walked straight past.
That ability to switch matters.
John talks about cognitive flexibility, being able to recognise when one approach isn’t working, switch sets and try another. I see a version of that every day with senior leaders.
As you move further up an organisation, you’re asked to move between different people, problems and emotional environments, often with almost no transition time.
That’s why I talk to leaders about front loading their cognitive skills.
If you’re going to switch like that all day, you need a physical and psychological foundation underneath you to do it well. That’s something John and I came back to in our conversation. You can’t separate the demands you’re placing on the brain from the system supporting it.
Motion is lotion
John has a line I’ve remembered for years: motion is lotion.
It sounds simple, but there’s some serious science underneath it.
One of the things we discussed was BDNF, or brain-derived neurotrophic factor. It’s a protein involved in supporting brain-cell health, connections and memory. John has a much more memorable description for it: “brain fertiliser”.
His interest in the relationship between movement and the brain goes back decades.
Early in his career, John worked with a highly accomplished academic and long-time marathon runner who had been forced to stop running because of a knee injury. Without his regular running, he began experiencing problems with focus, memory and agitation.
That experience became one of the things that made John want to understand what was happening between movement and the brain.
And that is the part that fascinated me when I first encountered his work.
I already knew movement changed performance.
What I hadn’t appreciated was how much was happening in the brain.
Once you understand that, you start looking at a normal working day differently.
We tend to think about exercise in terms of muscles, heart, lungs, fitness and energy. We don’t tend to think as much about what’s happening in the brain.
Yet that’s the brain we’re relying on all day to focus, make decisions, regulate emotion, solve problems and keep switching between competing demands.
They’re not separate systems.
The brain you’re asking to perform is connected to the body you’ve brought into the room.
Knowing isn’t the same as doing
Of course, most people don’t need another person telling them movement is important.
I’ve had plenty of people tell me they can’t afford a personal trainer.
My response is usually to ask them what car they drive.
What happens when the car starts spluttering or someone puts a ding in the door? They get it fixed. They’ll spend thousands of dollars buying and maintaining this big box on four wheels, but hesitate at spending money on the physical system carrying them around every day.
You can normally see the pause when I put it that way.
And I’m not saying everyone needs a personal trainer. Far from it.
I’ve studied exercise physiology and worked with some of the world’s leading athletes and sporting teams, and I still go through periods where I’ll get a trainer myself.
Why?
Because it challenges me and gets me out of my comfort zone. Left to my own devices, I’ve got a default weights session I’ll always go back to.
Talking with John, I kept coming back to two things in his approach: simplicity and accountability.
Make movement simple enough that you’ll actually do it. Then find something that helps keep you accountable.
That might be a trainer. It might be walking with someone. It might be a group or something already built into your week.
You don’t need to make it complicated. You need to keep doing it.
Start paying attention to what happens afterwards
This is where I’d encourage leaders to get curious.
Don’t only measure movement by kilometres, steps, weights or minutes.
Pay attention to what happens afterwards.
Think about the twenty minutes after you’ve moved. Maybe you’ve been for a walk, trained before work or simply got away from the desk and moved properly.
How does your brain feel?
How is your focus?
What happens to your energy?
How do you show up in the next conversation?
Then compare that with twenty minutes spent sitting in the same position, bouncing between emails, meetings and another browser tab.
There’s usually a difference.
And if your job requires you to think clearly, regulate emotion, solve problems and switch between people and decisions all day, that’s a difference worth paying attention to.
More than two decades ago, I knew movement mattered to performance.
John Ratey’s work helped me understand what I’d been missing: when I trained the body, I wasn’t only changing the body.
That changed the way I thought about performance then, and it still shapes the way I work with leaders today.
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About the author
Performance Intelligence is a human performance consultancy founded by Andrew May, working with senior leaders and teams to build sustainable, high-level performance. Andrew hosts the Performance Intelligence Podcast, where he explores the science and practice of performance with leading experts and practitioners.
