Training For Profit

We reduced their sick days by 50%. Average HRV climbed 33%. Time-to-burnout more than doubled. On the reduced sick days alone, the intervention paid for itself — and that was before the trading desk started making more, measured in dollars per second.

I'm starting with the numbers because for once in fitness, the numbers weren't a proxy. They were the point. Most of what gets measured in this industry is a stand-in for a result nobody actually verifies — you track the weight on the bar and assume it means something about your life. Here, success and failure were plotted on a spreadsheet as an absolute value of every decision a person made. You were either a profit or a loss. And it forced me to confront how much of what I'd coached for fifteen years was aimed at the wrong target.

What you measure is what you get — and most people measure the wrong thing

Performance is a metric. It goes up, down, or stays the same. Stagnation is as much of a result as progress — it's just usually a poor one built on a focus on the wrong thing. What you measure matters.

The biggest issues in fitness come from metrics most people call "good" — heavier lifts, more hours training, weight gained or lost — that can have almost nothing to do with an improved life. People outside sport and gym culture don't value fitness because there's a gap between the effort it demands and the benefit they can feel. Say your training "works." You're leaner. Do you feel better? The number on the bar went up — but did the new injuries leave you feeling less capable than when you started?

I can't count how many "fitness enthusiasts" tell me they're discouraged because after hundreds of hours, they feel worse. More often than not, they're aiming at the wrong objective because they're measuring the wrong thing. To add insult, many of the world's top performers in business recognize a correlation between their success and their fitness and health but still don't understand the exact correlation. They are stuck doing mindless exercise repeatedly, or applying any number of new "interventions" to gain an advantage. Like putting money in a slot machine and expecting a result.

Money rarely gets used as a metric for fitness. But in 2024 I took a project where it was the only metric that counted — and it changed what I believe about human performance, including my own.

A different kind of high performer

We were invited to work with a select group of some of the world's best commodities traders out of the UK. This was not what I pictured when I said I wanted to work with "high performers." Most of them have logged more hours at a desk by twenty-four than I have at nearly twice their age. The sloped neck. The body composition that tells you most meals are ultra-processed and eaten without looking away from the screen.

Appearances lie. These were the survivors of a brutal selection program built to weed out the incompetent, the slow, and the mentally fragile. You might not think an office job could be that hard, but 85% of applicants wash out in the first few weeks under the physical and emotional load — a higher attrition rate than most military special selections.

Many were pulled from mathematics or law degrees, which tells you they needed logic. But nearly all of them were gamers, which tells you they could recognize patterns and make lightning-fast decisions under pressure. This was a dopamine-driven, high-pressure, no-fucks-given-to-the-weak environment unlike any I'd worked in.

The trading itself is old school. They have custom AI and machine learning algorithms at their disposal, but they still yell and throw office supplies at each other inside hour-long trading windows. Anyone who screws up is, immediately and without ceremony, a "cunt" — an insult that starts to feel proportionate when you learn a single mistake can cost hundreds of thousands.

Our mandate was simple: increase their performance. If they make more money, we succeed. If they don't, we fail. Between the high attrition, the chronic burnout, and the remote nature of the work, the obstacles were real — but that's exactly why we took it. It forced an immediate, unsentimental answer to a question fitness usually gets to dodge: what does training actually do for performance? Who cares if we gave someone a six-pack if they were too fried to do the job. We had to find the physiological components that directly increased a person's ability to make money.

The first problem to contend with was the perception that an intervention is a technological breakthrough. Management had obviously been listening to a few too many human performance podcasts where they discuss the changes you can make in your physiology and performance through nootropic supplements, $150k red light beds, and even microdosing psychedelics. They half expected us to start our process by buying a bunch of stuff, and were in almost disbelief when we advised them to not buy a thing. Instead, we wanted to know what was breaking.

Why does burnout break people — and what does it actually cost?

We looked at it as a survival problem. Even among those who survived selection, the self-reported burnout window was about six weeks. We used that number to buy time. Relate it to sport: more time means more practice, more practice means better results, better results means more money. We just needed to stop the bleeding.

Burnout is a sensational mismatch between your effort and your result. Picture digging a hole. You dig hard for an hour, sweat pouring down your face, no thought — just the shovel hitting soil and the grunt to heave it behind you. Then you turn around and every shovelful has slid back in. Most people can't pick the shovel back up. Not because they're weak — because the outcome stopped being worth the effort, and nobody reframed it for them.

Burnout lives in the mind, but it shows up in the blood. Through testing we saw a clear pattern: low dopamine, low cortisol, low melatonin. We addressed it inside the individual — repairing sleep, killing the vaping and other endocrine disruptors, and showing them real physical progress through proper training.

But we also had to say the uncomfortable part out loud: leadership was manufacturing the burnout.

The thing leadership won't admit: you are selecting your best people to death

High-performance groups love to "never stop selecting." Selection methods test who persists in the absence of positive feedback — and that is worth testing. But selection is supposed to have an end date. A member of an elite group who has to keep proving they belong can't put their energy toward the goal that actually matters. They're spending their nervous system on an audition that never closes.

This happens more frequently as a rite of passage from the founders, or established leaders. They worked incessantly on getting the company off the ground; when asked how many hours it takes to be successful, most founders would reply "all of them." And they aren't joking. But paving the way is supposed to eventually ease the burden for those coming after. As a consequence of it seeming unfair or too easy, many in leadership hold others back in order to replicate their own experience, and this does nothing for advancing the company. In fact, it actively fights the one thing they're after: profit.

I could only see this because I'd seen it before — in sports teams, BJJ schools around the world, and especially in the SOF community. The pattern is identical: take resilient people, give them no terminal signal that they've made it, and watch their biology pay the tab for a psychological game management refuses to end.

This is the part most companies get exactly backwards. They think burnout is a personal failing in the employee. It's frequently a structural decision by the org, and the body is just the first place it becomes measurable.

Can you measure a decision?

For all the dishonesty around money, money is a lens few other things provide: it defines what is valuable. What it buys changes; what it's worth doesn't.

When your sport is making money, every decision resolves to a number. Most people recoil from that kind of pure equation. But it's clarifying. To be valuable you have to make exponentially more good decisions than bad ones, which means you have to learn from mistakes, reset, and move — fast. Self-pity turned out to be one of the most reliable predictors of imminent failure. And to my surprise the physical practice became a cornerstone in correcting it. A physical practice built on hard effort measurably improved decision-making, built confidence, and helped a person physiologically reset between blows.

That reframed performance for me entirely. The best in the sport of finance have brutally clear feedback loops for honest self-assessment. At the end of the day you either made above-average decisions or you didn't. And you can only improve the decisions if you understand the biology underneath them and can change your mental framework the moment you catch it failing.

Training is the arena where you test that process. It's also a near-perfect metaphor for why average results in fitness fall so far short of average ambition. Most people treat training as algorithmic: train X days, progress Y exercises, get Z result. They fixate on metrics merely correlated with outcomes — VO2 max, total tonnage — and outsource the actual problem to a spreadsheet. Worse, they outsource it to a chatbot.

There's a reason letting AI trade doesn't beat a skilled, experienced trader. It's the same reason letting AI dictate your training delivers below-average results. You've abdicated the part that matters — your own ability to decide and execute. The blend of logic, experience, intuition, and feel that produces a good call can't be handed off.

What is biological leverage?

So how do you make the best decision — for fitness or for finance? You have to understand leverage.

In finance, leverage is the multiplier on success or failure. In biology, it's the unseen tax of an overwhelmed nervous system, and it's just as multifactorial as a market. An overwhelmed nervous system can't process information the same way. Load it with chronic stress, malnutrition, sleep deprivation, hormone dysregulation — and especially gut dysfunction like intestinal permeability or bacterial and parasitic overgrowth — and the quality of your decisions degrades. On average, you decide worse. And you have no idea why. You're trying to build a more secure future, trading your health to get a financial foothold, and quietly dampening the exact biology that was supposed to get you there.

Run the obvious thought experiment. Two identical people, one difference: one carries no debt, the other carries $200,000. Which one makes better decisions? Which one would you rather have as a friend, a spouse, an employer? The one whose decisions won't be subconsciously influenced by leverage.

That's the leverage biology applies, and we watch it operate every day without naming it. It's the person who had a hard day and "treats" themselves to fast food to manage a feeling of despair. Who's exhausted but stays up binging a show instead of sleeping. Who tries to out-work poor performance with more hours in an office instead of better hours after recovering. You will not profit — biologically or financially — if you don't understand how you're leveraged.

Most of these traders were in their mid-twenties. Resilient, yes. But already corroding the system they relied on through stress, poor sleep, bad food, and inactivity — leveraging their biology in the wrong direction. The burnout wasn't the consequence of a hard job. It was the reaction to a handful of poor decisions, leveraged onto an overwhelmed system, while they were told to keep digging a hole that kept filling back in. The difference we made could be printed on a piece of paper, circled, and shown to them. That feeling of "I just don't feel right" that got brushed off by leadership and ignored, showed up in the functional tests we ran. When we changed how they felt, and changed how they performed, it showed up as a very different number on a follow-up test. Even if the goal is to move the numbers of profit, it comes from understanding the baseline from which that can happen. But most are so focused on one number they lose track of the foundation from which it's possible, like spending more to make less.

What we actually changed

What we saw is not something that shows up in the numbers reported on an annual checkup or traditional blood work. That's because traditional medicine is designed to detect disease — something it's very good at — but dysfunction happens long before the big markers start to flag a problem. What we look for are patterns that reveal emerging leverage, the co-signs of eventual problems that become very serious if left unattended — like someone in 2006 looking at the volume of home equity loans written against self-reported income and noticing something about to break. Some of these are tiny incremental shifts: how people wake, what they do before they fall asleep, which specific training mitigates stress instead of adding to it. In some cases we address food and fueling, supplementation, better habits. Each person had their own unique problem to fix, which is exactly why corporate wellness retreats and random practitioners handing out generic advice never move the needle. It isn't a one-size-fits-all answer.

Then the big one, we took time to recognize what the traits were for success and we trained for them. Admittedly, even I wrote training off as a secondary thought to the goal. But then I noticed a pattern, the main premise and purpose of training itself started showing up. The job has an energetic pattern, it requires 14 hours of attention with 3-4 one hour trading windows of intensity. The ones who did not train themselves never lasted, and I mean physically then mentally then emotionally.

The ones who prioritized aerobic work, either by hobby or commuting tended to last longer, shocker. But also those that took time to fix their imbalances through some kind of high intensity training or weightlifting tolerated something that is often overlooked: feedback. This wasn't just about movement, plenty of them loved to play a pick up game on the weekend, soccer or rugby. But this type, the ones that were only active while being entertained were the least likely to make it. So it isn't the movement itself, it's the intent. Training reveals the intent to improve, it is the purpose, to adapt to more stress, to tolerate more hardship. Playing games is looking to be entertained even if we are doing roughly the same work. If you don't intend to improve, it is next to impossible. And this takes addressing deficiencies.

We tested, asked questions, changed things, retested, and made more changes until each person hit a performance standard based on how they had to feel to make the best decisions and tolerate the load. No $100k light beds, no hyperbaric chambers, no sketchy supplements. We just moved the numbers that mattered. Some ran more, others picked up high-intensity training, a few even got into bodybuilding. What mattered is that the physical training represented the trait they were deficient in.

Sick days fell by half. Average HRV climbed 33%, resting heart rate plummeted — a nervous system surfacing for air. Self-reported time-to-burnout more than doubled, which on a trading desk means something very specific: every trader we kept in the seat got more time trading, feeling better and making better decisions. The actual profit gained remains a closely held company secret. But you can infer the outcome easily enough when the company is worth ten figures.

The reduction in sick days alone paid for everything we did. That number by itself should stop you. Before a single trader made one additional dollar — before the better decisions, the lower attrition — the intervention had already covered its own cost. The rest was profit on an asset that was sitting in plain sight the entire time, leveraged in the wrong direction, costing them money they never thought to attribute to a melatonin level, a perforated gut, or a lack of aerobic ability.

There are outliers certainly, but when you look at the most successful people in the most demanding positions, you often see what they do tied to some physical practice that reinforces the qualities they rely on to achieve their goals. They can often do more because they are not held back by a system that is leveraged.

I went into that project thinking I knew what high performance was. I left understanding that most people — in any sport, including the one with the heaviest barbells — are measuring the line of credit and calling it wealth. "Doing it for the money" means something very different to me now than it did before this project. I no longer assume it's a lesser goal. It's an honest one, because it tells you faster than almost anything else whether what you're doing is actually producing a result — or just filling the hole back in.