About our work

What is energy health performance?

The work we do here is pretty exciting stuff.  It is really at the intersection between health, wellbeing and high performance.

Coming from competitive sport and high performance backgrounds, both as competitors and as academics, we have seen that the tools and knowledge around energy science that get you to high performance are the same tools and knowledge that help you out of stress and burnout.

Our work brings together these 2 areas, health and performance. These are often treated as entities that only interact some of the time, like when an injury takes a competitive athlete out of the game, or an illness keeps a top sales performer from going to work for a few days, as opposed to being completely interdependent. You can’t sustain maximum performance for any length of time without a foundation of excellent health. The EHP work unpacks the science of stress and recovery to show you how to build extraordinary health, preventing and treating burnout and other stress related issues, and build extraordinary capacity for performance.

 Our philosophy is to “move you forward by increasing recovery”

This could sound a little counterintuitive, right? When you are driving toward high performance, how can you move forward by taking a step backward into rest and recovery?  Well, think of it like going to the gym. When you work out, you stress the muscles with weights and body movement, and you create micro-trauma in your muscles, small tears in the mitochondria = damage. This is part of going backward temporarily. However, that damage triggers the body to adapt, and taking a break with the right recovery, which may seem at the time like going backwards even more, the body heals itself better than before the exercise, making the muscles stronger.

Bingo! It’s the same for all systems in the body, not just the musculoskeletal and cardio-respiratory, but also the immune system, nervous system, endocrine, and every other system. If you stress any of your systems, but give them the right recovery, you can get stronger. There are now over 5 decades of scientific research on this one! 

Sean’s PhD on overtraining, energy health and performance in elite performance environments validates that this stress, recovery, adaptation connection is true for both mental and physical health and performance. Which demonstrates that this is not just about athletes, but humans working hard in any endeavour. When you build effective recovery systems into your life, not only do you recover faster, but you enhance your health and performance in every domain.