Understanding Habit Loops to Improve your Team’s Performance (and maybe lose a few pounds along the way)

In 1994, the NAIA held their National Tournament in Butte, Montana in early March.  Wrestling for Pacific University, I and my nine other teammates, piled into a van and drove the 12 hours from Forest Grove, Oregon to the tournament.  I learned a lot during my first season as a college wrestler but the memory that sticks with me most is that of a teammate of mine, riding a goofy travel version of a stationary bike in the stands to cut weight.  The bike was one that perhaps a traveling salesmen would use when jonesing for a workout prior to the day when every hotel in America having a workout room available for guests.  As a wrestler who ran off his weight (something that has dignity), and staying at a hotel where we had not only a workout room but a sauna, I didn’t quite understand why he wanted to ride that silly bike in front of every wrestler in the tournament.

What he was doing, was focusing on every variable that he could control.  The year prior, we had two wrestlers on the team who struggled to make weight because over the course of the season, they had relied on saunas to cut weight.  When they got to the national tournament, their hotel didn’t have a sauna and they weren’t used to running to drop the pounds.  At the most important tournament of the year, they were feeling the worst they had all season long.  My teammate had cut weight on a bike all season long, and he was going to make sure that he would make weight riding a bike at the national tournament.

The secrets of success are found in our daily routines.  Elite performers and teams are made through steady progress and daily discipline.  Habits and routines help us as people in critical ways that you may not be aware of.  Habits emerge because they are your brain’s way of saving effort. According to scientists, if left to its own devices, your brain will try to turn as many things into habits as possible so that it can ramp down.  It allows us to stop “thinking” about basic activities and devote more mental energy to analysis, creative thought, etc.  If you can analyze your day or practice week for all of the things you need to cover, building habit loops and routines into your day/week, can ensure that you cover all of your bases and maximize your preparation.

The Habit Loop.  In his book, The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg details what he contends are the three primary components of a habit:  Cue + Routine + Reward = Habit.  If we do an after action review on my use of Myfitnesspal.com, why was I successful using it as opposed to the myriad of other weigh loss methods that I had tried in the past?  The answer is that I replaced an old habit with a new habit.

In the past when I tried to lose weight, I would put strict guidelines on what I was going to eat.  If I happened to cheat, I often would just bag my eating plan for the rest of the day or say to myself, “I’ll just start over on Monday.”  When I started to journal my meals, I found that it gave me a lot of information to help me over time, make better decisions about what I was choosing to eat.  Let’s apply the habit loop to my eating habits:

• Old Habit: Cue-I’m hungry; Routine-Eat what I feel like; Reward-I’m full.
• New Habit: Cue-I’m hungry; Routine-Log my meal on Myfitnesspal.com and make an intentional choice whether to eat the meal as planned or adjust; Reward-Feel good about hitting my macros for the day and over time, I feel full because I’m refining meal choices based on both satiation and nutrition.

It may be worth mentioning that there is a little bit of gamification with the above example.  Tracking my meals becomes a sort of game that has a double reward: a) losing weight and b) hitting a daily goal.  Additionally, it’s an example of what Brian Cain calls knowing your numbers.  He likes to say “measurement is motivation, ”  and researchers know that in any study where they measure something, they are going to see an increase in the measured behavior.  Give anyone a Fitbit and you’ll automatically see an increase in how much they walk.

I think if you subscribe to the idea that you have to improve yourself before you can improve others, this is a great concept to ponder and attempt to apply in your own life.  But, since we’re looking at how alternative ways of goal setting may improve your program, let’s look at an example.

Let’s use an athlete or team’s pre-competition nerves as an example of how you might be able to create a habit loop in order to improve

performance. One thing I have noticed over the years is that coaches often times require players to report at one time but then don’t have anything structured for players to do once they are taped and dressed.  What usually happens is that they find ways to burn off nervous energy. How they burn that energy off can often time either drain them physically or cause them to lose focus.

A possible solution for this could be having highlight videos set up in a team room, or access to a mat room for players to lay down and relax.  If you really had some guts, perhaps you’d have players do a self guided “breathing exercise,” the way SMU Football and the Seattle Seahawks do before each practice.  Let’s look at the habit loop in this example:

• Old: Cue-Nerves before the game; Routine-Goof around outside the locker room until warm-ups start; Reward-More relaxed
• New: Cue-Nerves before the game; Routine-Players report to the mat room and listen to music, perform relaxation/breathing exercise; Reward-More relaxed and FOCUSED

Duhigg says that after reviewing hundreds of academic studies, “The evidence is clear that if you want to change a habit, you must find an alternative routine.”  The key part of that statement is that you have to change the routine.  You can keep the cue and reward the same but it’s essential to change the routine.  Another suggestion that is given to help change habits are the use of groups.  This is obvious but when you have negative habits on your team, using groups to help change them for the positive may be something you want to consider further.