I have an American colleague who visited two summers ago and, by Sunday lunchtime, had the look of a man who’d woken up in a hostage situation. Shops shut. Bakeries shut. Hammer a nail into a wall on a Sunday and you’re technically breaking the peace, as if DIY were a form of assault on the neighbours. All he wanted was a bar of chocolate — the one thing on the entire planet nobody has to be talked into wanting — and there wasn’t a shop open in the whole city willing to sell him one. “So what,” he said, gesturing at the empty street like it was evidence in a trial, “do you actually do?”
I gave him the honest answer. Nothing. That’s rather the point.
He looked at me the way you’d look at a man defending a diet of only cabbage. Genuinely concerned, but also fairly sure I’d been got at.
I understood the reaction, because it used to be mine. When I first moved here twenty years ago, a country that closes for a full day, every week, by law, struck me as an economy actively trying to lose. Shops shut at lunchtime on weekdays too, for reasons nobody could ever quite explain to my satisfaction, and my instinct — trained by a career built on the idea that being available is the same as being useful — was that a nation this closed for business had to be paying for it somewhere.
Switzerland’s GDP per capita ranks among the highest in the world — richer than Australia’s by a wide margin, and ahead of the United States too. Which is an odd position to be in for a country that spends a seventh of its existence legally closed.
I did what any self-respecting man defending an indefensible position does. I found reasons. Banking secrecy. Pharma. Watches nobody actually needs. I built quite a good little argument that the Sunday closures were incidental to the wealth, not connected to it — a historical hangover the economy succeeds despite, like a very successful man who still insists on ironing his socks.
My Australian friends give me the same look my American colleague did, usually somewhere around the third round, and usually followed by some version of “at least we’d never let the government tell us when the shops shut.” Fair enough. Though it’s worth mentioning that every Swiss man under 35 has done military service, knows exactly where his old service rifle is kept, and the country’s murder rate is still lower than Australia’s. Make of that what you will. I’ve stopped trying to make sense of it and started just enjoying it as a fact I get to produce at dinner parties.
I’d have gone on believing the closures and the wealth were unrelated indefinitely, except that at almost exactly the same time, my own training fell apart in a way that made the connection harder to ignore.
For years my structure was the same: three weeks hard, one week easy. It’s the rhythm half of masters rowing trains by, because it’s the rhythm we were handed in our twenties and nobody thought to update it. It worked then. In my late forties it started producing the opposite of fitness — fatigue that didn’t clear in the easy week, niggles that used to be one-offs turning into a season, and a cold every eight or nine weeks with suspiciously good timing.
My instinct, obviously, was to fix this by working harder. If the fatigue is winning, you must be losing the arms race, so throw more at it. This is, I am told, a fairly reliable way to find out how long you can go before your body simply refuses to negotiate further.
What actually worked came from Darren, my new advisor, and it was smaller and more irritating than I wanted. Not three weeks on, one off. Three days on, one off. Sometimes four on, one off. A rhythm so short there’s barely time to feel virtuous about how hard you’re working before the rest day arrives and takes the choice away from you.
There’s a name for what Darren was actually doing, and it turns out the model behind it isn’t new — it’s just been badly named. Exercise physiologists call it the stress-recovery-adaptation cycle: a training stress disrupts the body, fatigue temporarily reduces performance, recovery repairs the damage, and adaptation leaves the body better equipped than before. Some purists don’t love the word “supercompensation” — a couple of well-known strength coaches have argued the term doesn’t add anything the plain stress-recovery-adaptation model doesn’t already cover — but the underlying mechanics aren’t in dispute. Train again before that adaptation window closes and you’re not building fitness, you’re just accumulating fatigue on top of fatigue. Which is a more scientific way of saying what my body was trying to tell me for about eighteen months before I listened.
The clock on that window is shorter than most of us like to admit. Full muscle glycogen resynthesis after a hard session takes about 24 hours, provided you actually eat enough carbohydrate to do it — which most of us, mid-forties, mid-career, mid-dinner-with-the-kids, do not reliably manage. And the “am I actually recovered” question isn’t just about fuel. There’s a well-documented window of one to nine hours after a long, hard session where the immune system is measurably suppressed and the risk of picking up a respiratory infection goes up — sports scientists call it, not very poetically, the “open window.” Heavy training loads without matching recovery are one of the more reliable ways to end up with more colds, not more fitness. Which explained rather a lot about my calendar. I hadn’t been unlucky every eight or nine weeks. I’d been running the same experiment on my immune system on a loop and getting the same result.
That’s the part I resisted longest, if I’m honest. One day off after working for three feels like giving up. A week off feels earned; three days off feels like you blinked first. But the week-long cycle only works if you’re honest enough to actually take the easy week when your body needs it rather than when the calendar says so — and nobody is that honest with themselves, including me, especially me. A shorter, enforced cycle doesn’t ask you to be. It just happens on schedule, whether your ego has signed off or not.
Which is, it turns out, exactly what Switzerland does with Sunday. Nobody here is trusted to decide, shop by shop, when they’ve earned a rest. The country simply closes, on a schedule nobody gets to argue with, and the economy — rather rudely — carries on outperforming the rest of us anyway.
I still don’t love it. I’d still like my Sunday newspaper at ten, and I’d still like to believe fatigue is something you can out-argue if you’re stubborn enough. But I’ve spent two decades assuming the Swiss were leaving money on the table every Sunday, and it looks rather more like they built the discipline in at a legal level because they knew none of us would manage it voluntarily. Which is an uncomfortable thing to learn from a country whose other great cultural achievement is refusing to let me wash my car on a Saturday evening.
The actual cycle — how Darren structures the on/off days, and when three-on-one needs to become four-on-one — is in the training plans, part of Faster Membership. Consider it the Swiss approach to your training calendar. Nobody asks if you agree with it.