This is a
long time pet peeve of mine, and that I’ve gone this long without addressing it
astounds me, but here we go. Maybe this
is stoicism, or nihilism, or maybe it’s just common sense, but for the life of
me I just plain can’t understand the need people have for useless
information. And I don’t mean useless
like trivia: celebrity underwear sizes, which Kardashian is married to who, etc
etc, because hey, maybe one day you’ll be on a quizshow and knowing that will
get you some money. No, I’m talking
truly useless information. Information
that, once learned, changes absolutely nothing about your current
situation. Examples? “I just got hurt: how long will it take to
heal?” “Is my progress slow?” “How much muscle will I lose when I take 2
weeks off?” Oh my god folks, I just
about have an aneurysm when I read this nonsense. What the hell are you going to do with that
information?!
At least THESE guys were getting paid to telemarket...
No,
seriously, I want to know. Why should I
answer these questions? What changes
when you get that information? Are you
on some sort of timeline? And hey, wanna
notice something funny: there’s a benefit to answering all these questions I’M
asking you here, whereas there is NONE for answering your own. Primarily, when you answer my questions, it
helps you understand how silly yours is.
That’s what a GOOD question looks like: the information obtained from it
is beneficial towards making decisions, changes and action. Questions where answers serve no action
benefit are simply trivia questions, and you’re polluting the dialogue by
asking them. These things will happen AT
the rate that they happen at.
What are you
going to do NOW that you know how long it’s going to take your injury to
heal? You can’t undo the injury. If the answer is too long, are you just going
to quit? No? Then you’re going to heal at the rate you heal
at: no faster, no slower. If I tell you
your progress is slow, are you going to start working harder? Why not work as hard as you can possibly work
now, and leave no doubt? Or what if I
say your progress is fast, are you going to ease off the throttle now, so you
can be closer to average? Who the hell
does that? Are you going to cancel your
vacation plans if I tell you that you’ll lose 1.8lbs of muscle in 2 weeks? What is your threshold for not taking time
off?
These are
worthless questions! All they’re going
to do is give you anxiety, at BEST. An
anxiety is a great way to be kept up at night, compromise your recovery,
accumulate a good degree of cortisol and go catabolic. Oh geez, how much do you think that’s going
to affect your progress? No, Jesus,
STOP! Quit wasting brainpower on this nonsense. Your time is a finite resource and you’re
squandering it on trivia. Not even
minutia: pure trivial knowledge that has ZERO bearing on your ability to
succeed OR fail. This is just an answer
to a gameshow quiz. Hell, at least if
you’re asking about if sleeping 7 hours compromises recovery compared to 8, you
have an actionable answer, even if it’s a dumb question. That question is stupid, but not completely
useless.
You have to
accept that there are blatantly some thing you cannot change. These are the “rules” that you have to play
the game by, and as much as we’re conditioned to break the rules, cheat, skirt
the law, or blatantly ignore them to succeed, these ones are unbreakable. You simply have to frame your paradigm around
these rules, and wondering about the hows and whys behind them is just wasting
brain power. Instead, accept these as
givens and then go forth operating with these rules. You have to take 2 weeks off? Cool: if you lose any muscle, first, seek
immediate medical attention as you may have some sort of muscle wasting disease
or flesh eating bacteria, and THEN, go put it back on over the next 2 weeks. Injured?
Great: take as long as it takes to heal, and then go back. These things are going to occur irrespective
of your knowledge of them occurring: you knowing changes nothing.
With these
answers that don’t matter, you may as well just make up your own answers to
these questions. You can’t possibly
change reality, but you CAN change the way you think and react to it. That IS a lesson straight out of stoicism,
and it works. Injured? Decide that you’re going to heal
quickly. How are you progressing? Fast.
Taking a vacation? You’re going
to gain muscle. All these gee whiz questions
are an opportunity for you to reaffirm and solidify your knowledge that you ARE
something amazing, you’re on the right track, you’re making good decisions, you’re
training hard and succeeding.
And if you
CAN’T do that, figure out WHY. Most
likely you’re exhibiting some form of guilt over the knowledge that you aren’t
doing what you should in order to meet your goals. No, it’s not a question about not knowing
some sort of best kept secret from the pros and you’re wondering if you’re
missing out: if you’re not growing the way you want to grow, you KNOW why that
is. When you know you’re eating like
crap, cutting your workouts early, skipping your conditioning, living off energy
drinks and haven’t had water in a decade, etc etc, no wonder you’re asking
questions about if you’re progressing fast enough. No wonder you’re worried about muscle loss
from a 2 week vacation. Do those things
that you KNOW make you great and then you’ll no longer worry about if you’re
achieving greatness: it’s a foregone conclusion.
Spot on. I don't think you could have put it any more eloquently than this.
ReplyDeleteThanks man.
DeleteI love this one. I won't go down the stoicism/nihilism/other rabbit hole that we've gone down before...but how about post-structuralism? Have we done that one yet? Paradigmatic shift from positivism, the idea that everything can be scientifically measured and quantified if we just have the right science for the job. Post-structuralism says there are multiple individual realities--it's basically the "but objectivity is subjective!!" argument from Woody Allen's "Love and Death." Does your tool actually measure what you think you're measuring, is what you're measuring actually meaningful, and what is the individual importance of the information, would all be central questions to critique the dogmatic knowledge produced by positivism. It's fun to think about, and I think the applications to fitness and sports are plenty. More to discuss if you're interested. There's some really interesting academic research on post-structuralism, sports, and the unintended negative effects of over-disciplinary, positivist systems of training.
ReplyDeleteWR
I've read a little on Post-structuralism, but hadn't even considered it from that angle. I really dig that perspective; thanks for sharing it. Feel free to go your own direction with it on the comments: definitely be interested in seeing how that goes.
Delete>I love this one. I won't go down the stoicism/nihilism/other rabbit hole that we've gone down before...but how about post-structuralism? Have we done that one yet? Paradigmatic shift from positivism, the idea that everything can be scientifically measured and quantified if we just have the right science for the job.
DeletePoststructuralism is generally taken to be primarily a reaction to structuralism rather than positivism. 'Positivism', by itself, is a somewhat of a vague term as it's meaning has evolved a great deal since its introduction by Comte in the early 19th century.
There certainly does exist this kind of scientism that maintains that science can do everything from determining values, providing founding myths for contemporary culture and legitimizing the current political order. And even further, that which it can't provide a grounding to must properly speaking be an illusion. But this is distinct from 'positivism' in the sense that scientific theories have empirical content only to the extent we can translate them into observational statements. That is indeed by now a mostly historical position as the debate has since moved on. It wouldn't have been opposed by poststructuralists, but also by others, such as Quine, Kuhn and Feyerabend.
>Post-structuralism says there are multiple individual realities--it's basically the "but objectivity is subjective!!" argument from Woody Allen's "Love and Death." Does your tool actually measure what you think you're measuring, is what you're measuring actually meaningful, and what is the individual importance of the information, would all be central questions to critique the dogmatic knowledge produced by positivism.
Poststructuralism typically involves a diminuation of the centrality of individuality itself that had enjoyed such a central status in existentialism, for instance. Questions of meaningfulness were theorized by such neopositivist (or perhaps more accurately, logical positivists) such as Carnap, who took it from Wittgenstein Tractacus.
I'll admit that coaching, exercise science and what-have-you may well have been hold outs for a vaguely positivistic (or perhaps more aptly Taylorian or scientistic) spirit and that poststructuralism may well be a fountain of interesting criticism and inspire applications. I do remember reading an article once that claimed that the Soviets were influenced by Tayloristic theories of management that were imported from America and put into work as principles for developing athletic talent.
Masapena, thanks for the historical schooling there. We looked at a lot of Foucault in my grad program too, and his work seems to be what most sports researchers draw on in modern sport post-structuralist research.
DeleteWhat this piece made me think of was the dampening effects of disciplinary structures, particularly knowledge.
For example, one of Foucault's ideas is "power/knowledge," and the idea that discourse, or how knowledge is constituted, produced, communicated, is inherently tied to power relations. A lot of the questions MS provides in this article are good examples of "learners" made helpless by a system of knowledge production/communication centered around gurus who have all the answers, and "learners" who are one slip away from losing everything.
More here: http://www.massey.ac.nz/~alock/theory/foucault.htm
The research I most enjoy on the athletic performance dampening effects of over-disciplinary structures comes from Jim Denison, Joe Mills, and Brian Gearity on analyzing sports and coaching through Foucault's lens.
This gets into the obvious disciplinary practices of coaching, such as communication structures, and also the less obvious ones, like how training sessions are constructed, the degree of athlete input in training programs, how coaches perceive their own knowledge, and how we (coaches, media, fans, athletes) perceive and discuss good/bad athlete performances.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1012690216654719
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1260/174795407783359777
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/280172714_Planning_for_distance_running_coaching_with_Foucault
Season 3 of this podcast features a 3-part interview (ep 8, 9, 10), one with each of these authors, that I haven't listened to yet but is on my list, talking about coaching, sports, and Foucault: https://soundcloud.com/just-kickin-it-pod
I think we can use "coaching" broadly in this discussion, to include Youtube gurus, people providing answers on forums, etc., as well as those explicitly entering a contractual coaching agreement.
I see this blog as going the direction of breaking the paradigm of reliance on others, and constructing your own knowledge. "What's the big deal, it's just a harmless question" is the typical response here. Extrapolate the reliance on others and you'll see the problem -- it's the form checks, the program hopping, the reliance on programs, and ultimately the paralysis by analysis that we so often see in the fitness field.
Further, even the idea that we can predict "performance" (however you define it) with given inputs, may dampen the athlete's ability to "out-perform" the projections. People who ask about their "potential" on forums, or use hand-wavy metrics to attempt to project outputs (wrist size to ultimate drug-free musculature was a popular one a few years ago), or even think that doing 8 reps with 82.5% means their 1RM is X, are all examples of this. It's the whole way knowledge is produced in fitness, which a Foucaultian analysis might say produces docile bodies.
This rant was built up over a cross-country drive and several cups of coffee, but I figured I'd just put it all out there and then we could go more in detail on any one branch of the discussion and have a good time.
WR
I think you'd love Rick and Morty.
ReplyDeleteI've seen a few episodes here and there. I always seem to catch the same 2 though, haha. Seems enjoyable though. I was a big fan of the show "House", and the protagonist seems like that to the Nth degree.
DeleteRight on money. Honestly, I truly wonder where the impulse for asking questions like this comes from. They strike to me as not only foolish, but also kind of sad. Instead of actually living in the world and engaging with it, you turn inside and mull over yourself in a solipsistic fashion. Each of the questions could be turned positive:
ReplyDelete- “how will I train now that I've gotten injured”
- “how much progress can I make in the next half a year?” or better yet “will program X work better for me than the old one?”
- “how will sloth and gluttony over two weeks bless my flesh?” or "will I recover over my vacation if push effort higher before hand?"
I don't have good enough funding to turn my lifting into a single subject study, I am indeed content to settle for correlations and experience in lieu of causations and information.
Make a log, put it online, and Bam, now you're your own case study : )
Delete