Every year, the winners of the Roland-Garros French Open are celebrated for their tennis prowess. Their talent, their mental strength, and their technique are picked apart in detail. But there is another vital yet less glamorous factor that plays a decisive role in their success: their ability to recover. In tennis, the challenge is not just to be fast or powerful, you must be able to play up to seventy matches a year, sometimes over a career lasting 15 or 20 years. So a tennis player’s performance depends not only on how well trained they are, but also on their ability to recover between matches.
Roger Federer has made it one of his secrets to longevity. LeBron James invests several million dollars each year in preserving his body. All great athletes, regardless of their specialty, have understood one thing: recovery is not the opposite of performance, it is an integral part of it. As Pierre Paganini, physical trainer for athletes Roger Federer and Stanislas Wawrinka, points out in an interview for 24h: “Recovery is an active part of training. Resting the body doesn’t mean taking a holiday. The goal is to train better and showcase the hard work you have already done.” Perhaps we could apply this sporting attitude to the workplace?
The need for active recovery
It is widely understood in sports that there are two forms of recovery. Passive recovery, which is when athletes stop exercising and rest, and active recovery, which is when they do light exercise, like walking, gentle swimming, stretching, and low-intensity cycling.
The idea is not to keep training, but to restore balance to the body. These activities promote blood circulation, which improves the supply of oxygen and nutrients while helping to reduce inflammation and muscle fatigue. And there is no doubt about the benefits. A 2010 study published in the International Journal of Sports Medicine showed that triathletes achieved better performances after an active recovery session in the water than after a full day of passive rest. Other more recent works such as those in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health point out that light activity helps to eliminate metabolic waste and reduces the sensation of muscle fatigue. There is no doubt about it: if you want to achieve more, you need to organize your recovery process.
Why do we keep forgetting about that at work?
The example of an athlete’s need to recover after a physical challenge is easy to understand. But it’s more difficult to grasp when applied to our own work. In many companies, break times are considered as nothing more than an interruption to production, a tolerated but rarely valued “time out”. As if performance depended solely on productive time. But our brains also work in cycles of effort and recovery.
Research on biological rhythms shows that humans aren’t constantly alert all day long. Back in 1957, sleep specialists Nathaniel Kleitman and William Dement demonstrated the existence of ultradian cycles: biological sequences of 80 to 120 minutes that repeat throughout the day and are part of the twenty-four-hour circadian rhythm that regulates phases of wakefulness and sleep. During these phases, our heart rate, brain activity, muscle tension, and level of attention vary naturally. In other words, if our concentration falters after an hour or two of continuous work, it’s not because we lack motivation, it is due to a normal physiological phenomenon. So why do we try to fight it? We push through breaktimes, skip lunch and plan back-to-back meetings until we're exhausted. As a result, our nervous system is drained and eventually becomes exhausted. Mental clarity decreases, our decision-making ability deteriorates, and mistakes are made.
A break is not wasted time
The French Labor Code stipulates that workers must take a minimum twenty-minute break after six consecutive hours of work, according to article L3121-16. But recovery shouldn’t just be about following rules. A break is not just the absence of work; it is a chance to regulate the body. Walking for a few minutes, leaving the office, having coffee with a colleague, changing your environment, stretching, breathing, or simply letting your attention wander are all forms of active recovery.
Psychologist and Harvard professor Tal Ben-Shahar explains the different types of recovery: micro-breaks lasting a few minutes during the day, daily breaks, weekly breaks and holidays. They all meet the same goal: regenerate the body and mind to sustainably maintain their capacity for action. The popularity of methods such as the Pomodoro Technique is based on that hypothesis: voluntarily alternating phases of concentration and recovery improves performance more than trying to stay focused for long periods. Some companies are already experimenting with walking meetings, sports sessions during lunch breaks, or even the famous Oxfam Trailwalker, a 100km non-stop team walk.
Restoring value to the times that matter
And recovery is not just about individuals; it is also important for teams. Catherine Delgoulet, a professor at the CNAM (Conservatoire national des arts et métiers), recommends restoring value to what she calls “the times that matter”: opportunities to talk about work, share knowledge, training, debate or decide on regulations.
These times are often considered unproductive because they do not immediately generate measurable results. But they contribute directly to the health of employees and the quality of the work they do. Having said all that, making room for recovery isn’t easy. The industrial revolution taught us that the main goal for a company is to produce more, faster, and with fewer resources.
Olivier Hamant, INRAE research director at the Plant Reproduction and Development (RDP) laboratory at ENS Lyon, points out in Antidote au culte de la performance that companies have become machines of constant optimization. We are always striving to be effective (achieving our objectives) and efficient (doing it with the fewest possible resources). But this approach is now reaching its limits: burnout, disengagement, mass resignations and widespread fatigue prove that a model based on constant pressure is unsustainable.
Nature can teach us another lesson
The most resilient ecosystems are not those that maximize their short-term yield. These are the ones that protect their ability to handle change, adapt, and regenerate. Olivier Hamant calls this robustness, making a comparison between reeds that bend in the wind without breaking, and rigid trees that resist and resist, until they crack. In the end, the reeds are more robust.
Perhaps the most valuable lesson that top athletes can pass on to the world of work is that sustainable performance is not based on the permanent intensification of effort, but on alternating between engagement and recovery. In other words, the question is no longer just about how we can work more efficiently right now, but how we can recover enough to continue working well tomorrow.
