There is a photograph I remember from race week in Kona a few years ago. Hundreds of athletes lined up on the beach ready to swim. Not one of them, as Debbie Potts observed when we spoke, appears to have double-digit body fat. Every single person looks the picture of health

And yet a significant number of them are running on empty under the surface. High cortisol. Disrupted hormones. Gut issues. Poor sleep masked by the adrenaline of race week. A performance cost that keeps getting deferred until the bill finally arrives.

Debbie is a health practitioner, former Ironman athlete and five-time Kona qualifier who spent years training 20 hours a week alongside 12-hour working days. At 42 she experienced a complete breakdown of her health. Looking back now, she says the signals were there long before the collapse. She just was not paying attention to the right things.

Fit is not the same as healthy

This is the distinction Debbie keeps coming back to, and it is one that endurance sport is particularly bad at making. We have learned to read fitness markers. Power output, pace, heart rate, VO2 max. What most athletes are not reading is what is actually happening inside the system that produces those numbers.

Think about the pie chart of your day. Training occupies around 10 to 15 percent of your waking hours at most. Sleep, nutrition, stress management, digestion, movement throughout the day, social connection, recovery practices: these occupy the rest. If you are optimising the 15 percent and ignoring everything else, you are putting impressive bodywork on a car whose engine is struggling.

Debbie describes this as sending signals to the body. Every decision you make across the day is a message: you are safe, build, recover, repair. Or you are not safe, conserve, survive. Athletes who are chronically under-fuelled, over-stressed, under-sleeping and training at high volume are sending a consistent message to their bodies that resources are scarce. The body responds accordingly. It cannot build muscle efficiently. It cannot recover properly. And eventually something gives.

Check out the full podcast with Debbie Potts: Just because you exercise, doesn't mean you are healthy​

The cost of being lean

Debbie watched athletes in Kona and elsewhere chasing single-digit body fat while training at enormous volume. The performance cost of being that lean is real and well documented, but it tends to get deferred. Athletes feel strong, they hit the sessions, the numbers look fine. Until the deficit accumulates and the body has nothing left to draw on.

This is particularly significant for female athletes navigating perimenopause and beyond. Severe carbohydrate restriction combined with high training load and hormonal change creates a physiological environment that looks like high performance on the outside and is quietly undermining health on the inside. Debbie herself was doing fasted training, one meal a day, and 20-hour training weeks at the point her body broke down. In isolation, any one of those things might have been manageable. Together they were too much.

The lesson is not that leanness is wrong or that volume is the enemy. It is that the body needs to feel safe in order to build and repair. When it does not feel safe, it conserves. And you cannot outperform that response with more training.

What the Blue Zones are actually telling us

Debbie and I talked about the Netflix documentary on Blue Zones, the communities around the world where people routinely live into their 90s and beyond. The lessons are not complicated. People move throughout the day rather than doing concentrated exercise and then sitting still. They eat real food in company, slowly. They have purpose. They have genuine social connections, not Instagram followers. They are outside in natural light. They do not abstain from everything, but neither do they over consume anything.

None of these people are training for an Ironman. None of them are monitoring their lactate threshold. They are simply living in ways that send their bodies the right signals, consistently, across decades.

Debbie's observation about her mother in Palm Desert is worth sitting with. Surrounded by convenience, she cannot be persuaded to walk to the post box two minutes from the house. The people climbing stairs in Greek villages and walking down to fishing harbours have never been told they should not do these things. They just do them because that is life. The lesson for athletes is that movement woven into daily life matters as much as structured training, and that the obsessive focus on sessions often comes at the cost of everything else that keeps the body functioning well.

The minimal effective dose

One thread running through the whole conversation was the idea of the minimal effective dose. Getting the maximum return from the least training stress rather than defaulting to more volume as the answer to every problem.

Debbie described working with high-performing type-A athletes who want instant results, who have done the labs, bought the supplements, seen the specialists, and are still not where they want to be. The reason, in almost every case, is that they have skipped the foundations. Sleep, nutrition, digestion, stress management, movement throughout the day. These are not exciting. They do not give you something to post about. But they are what makes everything else work.

Get the foundations right first. Then assess what else is needed. The polished bodywork means nothing if the engine is struggling.

What to actually do

Debbie's practical framework starts with sleep and circadian rhythm, then builds through nutrition quality and timing, stress management, daily movement outside of training, and genuine recovery practices. Functional lab testing has its place, but only once those foundations are in order. Testing without the foundations gives you data you cannot act on properly.

One small, immediately useful detail from the conversation: before eating, especially if you have been rushing or stressed, take one minute to breathe slowly before taking a bite. A long inhale, a longer exhale. It activates the parasympathetic nervous system and shifts the body into a state where it can actually digest and absorb what you are about to eat. It takes sixty seconds. Most athletes never do it.

The bigger picture is this. The question is not what training plan should I follow this year. It is what signals am I sending my body every day, and are those signals telling it to build and thrive, or to conserve and survive?

That is the question that determines not just this season's performance, but the life you are capable of living in twenty years.

The Battle Ready system is built around exactly this principle. Training sits on top of the foundations, not the other way round. If you want a structure that addresses the whole picture, New members join at £65 a month with no minimum term. Find out more HERE:

Simon Ward​ Performance coach for endurance athletes over 50 Helping you train smarter, race stronger, and stay in the sport for the long haul.