Common Ground Between Professional Athletes and Investors | 5Y View
Every day, strict training discipline.
Recommended by
Kai Liu, Partner at 5Y Capital
Originally published on "He Shan Zhi Shi Guan Tou Zi" (Viewing Investment Through Other Mountains' Stones)
Author: Saint Paul
As non-professional athletes, our intuition tells us that professional athletes train by pushing themselves as hard as possible, constantly testing their limits, and maximizing their capabilities. Grind through the pain until their bodies break down or they stubbornly push past the breakdown. No pain, no gain.
But professional athletes' actual training schedules are different. Contrary to what we imagine, their training tends toward calmness.
A group of researchers studied the training programs of dozens of Olympic skiers from different countries. Skiing is absolutely one of the most thrilling sports.
Over the course of a year, the athletes trained an average of 861 hours per person, roughly 3 hours per day. Each hour was divided into three categories: high intensity (>87% of maximum heart rate, gasping for breath after exercise), medium intensity (82%-87% of maximum heart rate, heavy breathing required), and low intensity (60%-82% of maximum heart rate, able to hold a conversation during exercise).
Over the course of more than a year, the training breakdown looked like this: 88.7% low intensity; 6.4% medium intensity; 4.8% high intensity.
Most of the time, they were training at a pace that only pushed themselves slightly.
Don't think this training approach is unique to skiing. When studying professional runners, their training programs broke down into almost exactly the same percentages. The same goes for professional cyclists, rowers, and swimmers.
The conclusion of this research is fascinating. Some of the world's best athletes spend almost all their time on low-intensity work, deliberately not pushing themselves to the limit. Of course, they don't race at a leisurely pace. During competition, they operate at maximum intensity for the duration of the event.
And there are more examples. The great NBA star Kobe Bryant was famously devoted to training — he saw the 4 a.m. mornings of Los Angeles every day.
I looked at his daily training regimen, and it went like this.
Kobe's daily training totaled 6 hours, divided into four parts.
- 2 hours running: HIIT (high-intensity interval training), including 100-yard sprints and 200-400 yard walking or jogging
- 2 hours basketball skills: 700-1,000 shots per day. Twenty minutes of dribbling drills, 10 minutes of defensive slides, and 90 minutes of shooting.
- 1 hour cardio: including running, jumping, swimming, walking, etc.
- 1 hour weightlifting
Kobe's daily training was certainly intense. But even Kobe, known for his obsessive training, didn't push himself to the brink for 10-plus hours a day.
For professional athletes, what matters more is "every day" and "training discipline," not torturing themselves with intensity. Only this way could Kobe sustain a legendary 20-year career and create the Mamba miracle.
In professional athletic training, the goal is to keep athletes performing longer — this is favored over intensity. An athlete's body during training needs to receive signals of adaptation, not perceive itself as undergoing temporary torture. What athletes most need to avoid in daily training is injury and mental burnout from training. Only then can the best athletic machine be built.
Exercise physiologist Stephen Seiler had this to say about athletic training:
Professional athletes do long recovery training at low intensity, repeating it day after day. This is what truly brings success. Under ultra-high-intensity training, chronic stress leads to mental burnout and stagnation. Over time, to reach the highest level, the training process must be sustainable.
Doesn't that final sentence apply perfectly to investing?
In investing, the most important question isn't "What's the highest return I can earn?"
Rather, it's: What is my best return over the longest possible period?
We all know the power of compounding in investing, and we all want to capture compounding machines. A key variable in compound growth is the length of time. In the compounding function, what we seek is exponential return — and that exponent is time.
"Several consecutive years of ultra-high returns" is far less attractive than "maintaining solid returns over the long term." As investors, I believe the past five years have given us all a deep appreciation of this. Over the past five years, many investors have exhausted themselves trying to maximize annual returns, squeezing every drop of profit from every opportunity they could find. Some risk-loving investors even added leverage.
Like amateur athletes, they imagined that chasing hard and giving their all was the whole formula for success. But just like with athletes, if you go all-out in every training session — sure, in the short term, this approach can make you feel like a champion, even win you a trophy. But it will only leave you physically and mentally exhausted. And if you use leverage, you're even more likely to increase your risk of serious injury.
This is somewhat counterintuitive. But if you focus only on maintaining solid returns for as long as possible, you will likely end up maximizing your investment returns over the longest time horizon.
Doing good investing should be like being a professional athlete — not a short-term sprint, but setting the highest-level goal and pursuing a sustainable training process over time.
Kobe's 20-year career, 18 All-Star starts, 15 All-NBA selections, and 5 championships were built on this training philosophy:
Every day, strict training discipline.
5Y Capital seeks out, supports, and inspires lonely entrepreneurs, providing them with support ranging from the spiritual to all aspects of business operations. We believe that if the "crazy" you in others' eyes begins to be believed in, the world will become a different place.
BEIJING · SHANGHAI · SHENZHEN · HONG KONG
