Fatigue accounting is not the same as effort accounting — and most fitness advice collapses because it never distinguishes between the two. The philosopher Henri Bergson made a career-long argument that clock time and lived time are entirely different substances: a minute of peak exertion is not the same as a minute of rest, yet we aggregate them as if they were identical units. Your body does not run on a clock. It runs on accumulated tension and release. The practical consequence for short workouts — and for the energy you bring to your practice and your cockpit — is that the sequence of stressors matters more than their sum. Ten minutes of high-intensity movement after a mentally exhausting patient load hits the nervous system differently than the same ten minutes on a fresh Tuesday morning. Treating them as equivalent is a category error Bergson would have recognized immediately. So the concrete move isn't to shorten workouts or lengthen them — it's to audit the stress that precedes them and adjust intensity accordingly, not duration.

In the last week, did you ever push through a workout or a demanding task treating it as identical to previous sessions — when your actual state coming in was completely different? What did you ignore to do that?

Drawing from Process Philosophy / Bergsonian phenomenology of time — Henri Bergson (Time and Free Will, 1889; Matter and Memory, 1896)