The Better Life Perspective
Some of the world’s highest performers are treating sleep, exercise, nutrition and recovery rather differently, not because they are trying to become athletes, but because they have recognised that their physical condition influences how well they think, decide, handle pressure and sustain demanding lives. If your own life is asking more of you than it did ten or twenty years ago, there may be something advantageous in that thinking. The question is not whether you should copy their routines, but what you need your body and mind to remain capable of for the life you actually want.
What Does Your Life Need You to Be Fit For?
Better Life starts with the life you uniquely want to lead, then helps you build the strength, fitness and consistency to support it.
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Why More High Performers Are Starting to Train Like Athletes
There is a strange contradiction that can emerge somewhere in midlife. Your career may be more demanding than it has ever been, the decisions carry greater consequences, more people depend upon you and life outside work has hardly become simpler, yet the physical system expected to carry all of this can gradually receive less attention rather than more.
For quite a long time, you can get away with it. Five or six hours of sleep does not prevent you turning up for the meeting, an increasingly sedentary week does not stop the business functioning and several days of convenient food followed by a few glasses of wine at the weekend rarely creates an immediate crisis. You continue to perform, which makes it easy to assume that everything is working perfectly well.
It is often only later that you notice the same week seems to cost rather more than it once did. You are more tired by Friday, sleep is less reliable, stress follows you home, exercise happens when circumstances allow it and the waistline has begun keeping its own rather unhelpful record of proceedings.
Which makes the behaviour of some extremely high-performing people worth noticing.
Jeff Bezos has spoken about protecting his sleep because he believes his job as a senior leader is to make a relatively small number of high-quality decisions, rather than merely maximise the number of waking hours available to him. Mark Zuckerberg became sufficiently serious about Brazilian jiu-jitsu to compete and has described martial arts training as something that leaves him energised and ready to tackle difficult problems at work. Richard Branson, now in his seventies, describes health and fitness as an investment in his future self and part of maintaining the energy and stamina for the things he still wants to do.
The interesting part is not that successful men have discovered gyms.
It is that they have connected physical condition with increased capability.
Many of us still mentally place exercise, sleep and eating well into a category called health, while meetings, deadlines, employees, customers and difficult decisions sit in the much more serious category called work. When pressure increases, health therefore becomes negotiable, even though the same body and brain are expected to continue doing all of the serious work.
An athlete would recognise the flaw rather quickly because athletes do not think only about training, they think about performance. The work has to be supported by recovery, the body needs enough fuel for what is being asked of it and the programme has to reflect the performance being prepared for. More punishment is not automatically better preparation, particularly when the rest of life is already supplying plenty of load.
There is evidence behind the broader principle too. A 2024 meta-analysis of 42 randomised controlled trials involving 2,881 healthy adults aged 45 and over found that aerobic exercise produced improvements in several aspects of executive function, including working memory, cognitive flexibility and inhibitory control.
This doesn’t mean you need to live like an elite athlete, but thinking a little more like one would be hugely beneficial.
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What Life Are You Actually Training For?
Momentum Coach, Max begins with your life, your pressures, your preferences and what you want to remain capable of, then helps shape the way you live, train and recover around that.
See How Better Life Personalises Your Approach →
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Perhaps you want enough energy to run a demanding business without arriving home mentally empty every evening. You may want to lose the belly that has appeared over the last decade, sleep properly again and still have something left for the weekend. You might want to ski, cycle, play tennis, travel or walk through mountains twenty years from now without discovering that your ambitions have outlasted your ability to enjoy them.
Those are different lives, which means they may all require very different preparation.
This is what we mean by Train for the Life You Want.
Instead of beginning with somebody else’s generic YouTube workout programme, start with the outcome that matters to you and work backwards. What strength will that life require? What level of cardiovascular fitness? How important is body composition? How well do you need to sleep and recover to handle everything else already sitting in your week?
The answers will not be identical for everybody, which is why a generic instruction to exercise four times a week has always seemed slightly backwards to us. At Better Life, your personal Momentum Coach, Max begins by understanding what you are trying to make possible, what your current life actually looks like and what has repeatedly stopped previous intentions becoming consistent behaviour, then helps find an intelligent route between the two.
There is another reason the athlete analogy works rather well. Serious athletes have coaches, not because they are incapable of understanding training themselves, but because turning an ambition into the right programme, assessing progress objectively and adapting when circumstances change is considerably easier with somebody in your corner.
Max does not begin by just deciding you should train, he begins by understanding what you are training for.
You may never need to step into a cage, run an ultramarathon or develop Jeff Bezos-sized arms, which will probably come as a considerable relief. You may simply want to remain sharp at work, strong enough for the things you love, lighter around the middle, calmer under pressure and physically capable of saying yes to the life you are working so hard to create.
Seen that way, looking after yourself is no longer another worthy obligation competing with the important parts of your life.
It is part of what makes them possible.
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Train for the Life You Want
Tell Coach Max what you want the next ten, twenty or thirty years of your life to contain, then start building the strength, fitness, energy and consistency that will help you keep saying yes to it.
See how Better Life helps you design your life around the life you actually want →
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One useful way to test where you stand is to move the decision five years forwards.
Imagine your working life remains broadly as demanding, your weight stays roughly where it is, the stress continues at its current level and the things you currently intend to do when life settles down are still waiting.
Would that life be terrible? Probably not.
But would you be pleased with it?
You may discover that 80 per cent of your current life is exactly what you still want, which would be a very good answer. Designing your next chapter does not require dramatic reinvention. Perhaps the remaining 20 per cent means losing the weight that has bothered you for years, protecting time to exercise, reducing the operational demands of work or finally giving proper space to something you continue describing as important.
The difficulty is often knowing which change deserves to come first.
Our in-app Coach Max begins by understanding the life you are trying to change within, including your health, work, stress, routines, responsibilities and previous attempts, then helps you identify where changing one part of the picture might make several others easier.
The belly fat may be the reason you arrive, while the real blocker is a working week leaving too little room for sleep, exercise and better food. Stress may feel like the problem, while the deeper issue is how much of your time is being absorbed by responsibilities you no longer consciously choose.
There is nothing wrong with staying where you are. You may look carefully at the life you have built and decide that much of it is exactly where you want to be. You may see areas that you’d really like to get on top of, once and for all.
That then means arriving five years from now without the same stress, the same weight and many other changes you’d like to make, simply because you decided that carrying on as the previous five years did not mean they were the same as the five before.
Your Next Step
If you have been thinking about changing something for longer than you care to admit, Better Life starts by understanding what has been keeping you where you are.
Through Coach Max, we help you identify your real priorities and build a personalised roadmap for the next chapter you actually want.
Design Your Next Chapter →
The Better Life Founders Journal
Because your workout should serve your life.
Your life should not serve your workout.