You can get five hours of quality sleep, which will allow you to be a higher performer than 10 hours of poor quality sleep. MARC EFFRON: There is a lot of research and about the best that I could find that talked about exercise and its impact on performance was: One, more vigorous – meaning weights, not aerobic exercise – tended to yield slightly higher performance benefits on the same day only. High performers say I’m going to spend more of those hours on things that deliver high performance and willingly sacrifice other things that might be very enjoyable, but that I don’t see adding up to that higher performance.