The Performance Edge Most High Achieving Women Have Never Been Told About
Performance edge for high achieving women is not in a better training plan, an earlier alarm, or a harder workout. It is in the one variable that elite athletes have been tracking for years and that most entrepreneurs have never been introduced to. If you train hard, work hard, and still feel like your output never quite matches your effort, this is the piece you have been missing. And once you see it, you cannot unsee it.
What Simone Biles Knew That the Rest of Us Were Never Taught
In 2021, Simone Biles withdrew from several events at the Tokyo Olympics. The world talked about mental health. What did not make as many headlines was the thing underneath that conversation, which was this: Biles had years of somatic and psychological support built into her training. The withdrawal was not a breakdown. It was a highly trained nervous system communicating exactly what it needed, and a team that knew how to listen.
That is not a story about limitation. That is a story about elite performance infrastructure.
Most high achieving women were never given that infrastructure. Instead, they were handed a version of success that said: if it is not working, push harder. And they are excellent at pushing harder. The question worth asking is whether pushing harder is actually delivering the results it promised.
The Metric Elite Athletes Use That Entrepreneurs Have Never Heard Of
Heart rate variability, or HRV, is one of the primary metrics elite coaches use to determine whether an athlete is ready to train hard or ready to recover. It measures the flexibility of your autonomic nervous system, specifically its ability to shift between effort and rest.
High HRV means your nervous system is adaptable, responsive, and primed to perform. Low HRV means your system is under load and needs recovery before it can grow stronger.
Elite teams do not push through low HRV days. They adjust. They understand that training hard on a depleted nervous system does not build fitness. It creates breakdown.
For high achieving women running businesses, HRV is almost never part of the conversation. However, the principle applies with equal force. A nervous system that never fully recovers cannot perform at its ceiling regardless of how talented, disciplined, or motivated the person running it is.
What Your Nervous System Is Actually Carrying Into Every Workout
Here is where the performance edge for high achieving women gets genuinely fascinating.
Your nervous system does not clock out when you close your laptop. Every high-stakes decision, difficult client conversation, cash flow concern, and pressure-filled launch leaves a physiological imprint in the body. Not just a memory. An actual physical residue stored in the tissue.
Researcher Bessel van der Kolk demonstrated that chronic stress does not live only in the mind. It lives in specific places in the body. The psoas muscle, a deep hip flexor that connects your spine to your legs, contracts under sustained stress and stays there, quietly keeping your stress response activated. The jaw, neck, and shoulders store the accumulated tension of being constantly on. The diaphragm tightens in ways that restrict breathing so gradually you stop noticing. The hips hold unprocessed stress responses that have nowhere else to go.
When you take all of that into a high intensity workout and push hard, you are not training a recovered, ready body. You are training a body that is already braced. Strength built on a contracted foundation plateaus faster, recovers slower, and costs more effort than it should. Not because something is wrong with you, but because you are missing the variable that makes everything else work better.
The Science Is Actually Really Cool
Stay with this for a second because it is worth understanding.
Your vagus nerve is the master regulator of your autonomic nervous system. It governs the shift between your sympathetic state, which drives effort and output, and your parasympathetic state, which drives recovery, adaptation, and growth. Somatic practices, slow intentional movement, specific breathwork, and body-based release work, directly stimulate vagal tone. Better vagal tone produces better HRV, lower cortisol, faster recovery, and a nervous system that can actually shift gears.
Dr. Emily Nagoski’s research on the stress cycle adds another layer. Stress hormones are not discharged simply because the stressor is gone. The body needs a physiological signal that the threat is over before it releases what it has been holding. This is why you can finish a genuinely successful week, rest over the weekend, and still arrive Monday feeling wired and depleted. The stress cycle never completed.
Physical movement can complete that cycle, but the type of movement matters enormously. High intensity training on top of an incomplete stress cycle does not discharge accumulated tension. For a nervous system already at capacity, intense exercise registers as another stressor. Cortisol climbs, recovery slows, and the results start to feel disproportionate to the effort.
That is not a discipline problem. That is a physiology problem. And physiology problems have solutions.
The Performance Edge for High Achieving Women Is in the Integration
This is not about training less. It is about making everything you already do more effective.
Think of it like this. You would not run high-level software on a computer that has not been rebooted in months and expect peak performance. Somatic nervous system work is the reboot. It is the maintenance that makes the machine run the way it was built to.
Before your workout, a few minutes of somatic movement releases the bracing patterns your body accumulated during the workday. You stop training a defended body and start training an open one. The difference in how your body responds to the exact same workout is something you have to experience to fully appreciate. The Overflow Room has somatic routines specifically designed for this transition, moving you from work mode into a body that is ready to train rather than one that is already gripping.
Throughout your workday, short somatic practices interrupt the accumulation of tension before it layers up. The jaw you have been clenching since your 9am call. The shoulders that crept up somewhere around the third Slack notification. Catching tension early means you carry less of it into your evening and far less of it into your next training session. If you want somewhere to start, the routines inside The Overflow Room are short enough to do between meetings and specific enough to actually work.
After your workout, a somatic cool-down helps your body complete the stress cycle the training created. Without it, the cortisol and adrenaline generated by intense exercise continue circulating, which is a significant contributor to the wired-but-tired feeling that high achieving women often normalise as just how life feels. The Overflow Room includes post-training release routines that do this work without adding another hour to your day.
What Actually Changes
When high achieving women add this variable, the shifts are real and specific.
Training becomes sustainable because the body is no longer performing on top of accumulated tension. Recovery works because the parasympathetic nervous system can actually activate. Decision-making sharpens because a regulated nervous system has reliable access to the prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain your business depends on most. The compulsive quality of needing to push harder softens because the nervous system has learned that rest is safe and effort is a genuine choice.
And something more fundamental shifts too. The relationship with the body moves from adversarial to collaborative. For women who have built everything through discipline and drive, that turns out to be the most significant performance upgrade available.
The Variable Was Always Available
The performance edge for high achieving women has not been hidden. It has just been left off the training plan.
Elite athletes have built nervous system regulation into their performance infrastructure for years. It is time entrepreneurs had access to the same framework, because running a business at a high level is its own form of elite performance and it deserves the same level of intelligent support.
Before your next workout, try this. Take five minutes to notice where you are holding tension without trying to fix it. Then take three slow exhales that are twice as long as your inhales. That is your nervous system learning that it is safe to perform from an open body instead of a defended one.
That is a different workout. Over time, it becomes a different business, a different body, and a different relationship with what high performance actually means for you.
The performance edge for high achieving women was never about working harder. It was about working with more of yourself available.
Are you ready to add the variable that makes everything else work better?
Every week in Bubble Baths and Boundaries, I write about nervous system regulation, recovery as a business strategy, and what sustainable high performance actually looks like for women who are building something real. If this resonated, join the list.
