Turtles All The Way

The Forgotten Constraint of Time

One of the simplest and most overlooked constraints, both in performance and in life, is time.

Athletes and health enthusiasts often think in terms of how today’s work will help them adapt. Even professional coaches who have memorized exercise selection to encyclopedic levels often fail to account for the hand of Father Time.

As human animals, our sense of time is woven into small, sensible slices that afford action opportunities in the environment. We easily understand the effects of our actions in seconds, minutes, and hours. But days, weeks, months-certainly years and decades-far more easily escape our grasp.

The truth is, time is not neutral. It is the medium through which biological systems change, adapt, and sometimes fail. If we don’t account for time, we’re coaching into a void.

Resting On a Turtle

Some ancient creation myths describe the world as resting on the back of a giant turtle that carries us through space. This turtle, on which the experience of reality rests, could be thought of as a representative of time.

Time isn’t just the orientation of hands on a watch or a reminder of when to be at work. It’s not a backdrop to what we do but the substrate that drives all of physical reality. Understanding it, even just a little better, can empower our health and performance choices and may especially help us make sense of the avalanches of data that we tumble through in modern fitness and performance culture.

The “arrow of time” demands that things unfold in sequence, and because of that, precursor events inevitably influence succeeding events irreparably. No matter how much we wish it were otherwise, there’s no hopping into a George Carlin–piloted phone booth to fix our pasts.

Timescales of Adaptation

This is especially essential when we think about how stressors influence our biology. Our biological systems operate on co-mingling timescales. Ultradian rhythms like sleep cycles, brainwave patterns, appetite, and digestion cycle over hours in the course of a single day. Circadian rhythms (around a day) cycle every twenty-four-ish hours.

Training responses are based on timescales, too. Neurological changes can emerge in minutes to days. Structural responses, like increased hypertrophy and bone density, are seen in weeks, months, and years. This is true for both desired adaptive outcomes, like those just mentioned, but the turtle drives unwanted changes too (loss of lean mass and movement toward chronic disease).

Each adaptation is gated by its own speed of change. Interestingly, though, these component systems, while gated, then dance together over longer timelines to produce broad systemic outcomes.

History Matters

In complex systems like human beings—history matters. What happened before constrains what happens now. When I work with an operator to recover from extensive lumbar surgery or help an athlete return to sport from a knee surgery, I know that no matter how much work we do, they are now different. The new them is not the old them, because this history will influence how they move and solve problems forever.

This doesn’t mean injury or trauma can’t be fully integrated so that new strengths emerge. What it does mean is that there’s no going back to how things were. So comparisons to historical values should be used sparingly. No matter how much PRP, stem cells, bionic surgery, physical therapy, or infrared light you shoot at a tendon that was injured—the history of that injury lives in that tissue.

The recognition of this reality isn’t to boohoo over what’s happened, it’s to carry that experience forward into strategies that recognize these changes in an integrated fashion.

Stress of all kinds is imprinted on the historical record of our biology. Allostatic load, which I frequently mention on this Substack, is the term Bruce McEwen gave to the accumulation of stress over time. Magnitudes, frequencies, and chances for system reset all influence the emergence of system robustness and resilience. Those two capital-R buzzwords find their way into both physical and mental performance circles, often without the full appreciation of the role time plays in how we work to both measure and enhance them.

Data points like heart rate variability, for example, are measurements of cardiac response to autonomic conditions and can be measured quite literally in moments. They cannot be fully understood, however, without access to history.

This is why it’s important for all of us, laypersons and practitioners alike, not to get too anchored to information we get without context. Especially historical context.

Coaching With Time in Mind

Coaches often design programs as if time were elastic, attempting to cajole faster recovery, more volume, and fitting everything in. But recovery, adaptation, and skill learning are all bound by real biological clocks.

You can’t hack these processes without trade-offs, and external pressures like work schedules, firefighting shifts, or competition calendars further compress the available windows, forcing constant negotiation between what the body needs and what the calendar permits.

So what do we do with this?

• First, stop pretending that one session, one week, or one protocol is the full story. Begin to think in layers of time. What are you stressing in milliseconds, in days, in years? Where are the mismatches? This will help you choose strategies and interventions more wisely.

• Second, respect accumulated allostatic load. Every program shines on paper, but if the turtle of stress is not respected, the system will not respond positively. The rules of time have already been violated.

• Finally, honor history. Every athlete, client, or patient carries a biography in their biology. Past injuries, chronic stress, and learned behaviors shape what is possible now. Coaching is not about wiping the slate clean; it’s about steering a system with a past into a better trajectory for the future.

Ride The Turtle

Time is not just a schedule. It is the deepest physical constraint on human performance. Biological clocks tick at different speeds. Allostatic load accumulates when those clocks are mismanaged.

History is written into the tissues, nervous systems, and behaviors of the people we serve. If we want to move beyond surface prescriptions, we have to coach with time in mind.

Otherwise, we’re not working with humans, we’re working with a fantasy. Learn to ride the turtle or be crushed by the steamroller of time.

Thanks for reading,

Rob