24 Hour Fitness

Every Day, We’re Confronted With a Thousand Choices That Can Make or Break Our Health: Cream and Sugar? Carpool? Walking Meeting? Check Instagram? Hiit or Long and Slow? One More Beer? But Decision Fatigue Can Also Increase Stress and Zap Motivation. So We Enlisted Olympic Decathlon Champion Ashton Eaton (and a Few of the Best and Brightest Researchers in the Country) to Design the Perfect Day. 

- Gordy Megroz

We’re calling it:

28-year-old Ashton Eaton is the greatest athlete alive. OK, not a shocking choice now, but he hasn’t always been world-class. The Oregon track star was high school state champion in the 400 meters and the long jump, but he was barely looked at by college recruiters. Then, in his senior year, his track coach suggested Eaton try the decathlon. “What’s the decathlon?” he said. But he gave it a shot and soon earned a partial scholarship at the University of Oregon. Titles quickly followed: five NCAA crowns, five world championship gold medals, and, most important, back-to-back Olympic golds in London and Rio.

It’s easy to look at the staggering medal count and think that Eaton’s life has been nothing but joyful tears during the national anthem and photo-ops with his similarly successful heptathlete wife, Brianne Theisen-Eaton (bronze in Rio). But as any triumphant athlete knows, it’s daily habits that make you a success. “After college,” says Eaton, “90 percent of my days were bad. The better I got, the harder it was to improve.” He plateaued. Then, in 2011, he made some changes off the track, improving his nutrition and devoting more time to rest and recovery. A year later he was atop the podium in London. Though his life is far different than most of ours, Eaton contends that raiding his playbook can help anybody optimize their workweek for year round health. So we did. In the following pages, we lay out an ideal day in the life of, well, you—one that takes inspiration from the best of Eaton’s game plan.

6 A.M.

RISE AND SHINE