Dear Athletes! “You can’t manage what you don’t measure”. Diligent protocol keeping is allegedly an indispensable necessity in training sciences. Are we losing the ability to listen to our instincts? My sister dug deeper and reminded me of the importance of letting both - data and instincts - equally count in coaching and training. Yours, Coach Katharina 🌺
Hanni Steppan started an exploration into why the ostensibly opposite approaches of instinct-driven versus data-driven performance improvement methods easily unite to build the perfect sandwich of performance goodness.
The method sandwich runs parallel to an athletes ability levels: beginners, advanced athletes and professionals are driven by intuition, then data, then intuition again.
##The Baseline
...is non-negotiable.Good quality sleep, nutrition and a somewhat robust emotional constitution and a Plato-nian knowledge of thyself, are prerequisites for any training theory argument. What constitutes “good” in those categories opens an onslaught of fields of study, so for the ease of this article we will only assume the following self evident truths: they are irrefutably intertwined. One improves and/or destabilizes the other and for the sake of ourselves and those around us we should strive for the best quality of sleep, nutrition and self knowledge we can muster.
##Proprioception
What is it and what’s it got to do with performance improvement? If we want to look at intuitive training we must first look at one of our more mysterious senses:
Proprioception is the sensory information your muscles, tendons and ligaments are sending to your brain. Your mind-muscle connection. Standing on a beach in bare feet with your eyes closed, arms stretched out, head tilted back, sea-air filling your lungs, the sun on your skin, the tingling sensation in your ears as a seagull sounds out to its mate, without you losing all sense of bearing...that’s its job.
When you squat, your feet tell your brain where they are in time and space and which muscle to activate to not fall over. It’s our system to “make it make sense”.
Proprioception is often falsely interchanged with motor skills. Motor skills and performance are in direct linear relation to one another (improve your motor skill = improve your performance), whereas proprioception and performance are not. Motor skills improvement shows relatively easy on data results, such as improved levels of perceived exhaustion, because of better technique.
Interestingly enough, motor skill deficits are clearly linked to psychological trauma or impaired genetics, but proprioception is sometimes even improved under those conditions. The hypervigilance of a PTSD survivor is one such example. Whilst research papers are inconclusive, because the overlap is simply too large, proprioception is fast getting a rep for being the scientific explanation of the ever elusive 6th sense. Our instinct.
So: unless you’re in a brain scanner during your workout, the closest thing to decent representation in data of your proprioceptive ability is at the far end of the data funnel. I.e. Proneness to fatigue injury, performance ability under heightened cortisol or adrenaline (i.e. competition mode), etc...
Simply put, if your deadlift weight increases the data will reflect it. If you learn to get a better sense of why your push-ups feel more flowy than usual or which mental pain cave you can afford to go into during an extraordinarily hard workout...there is no app for that (yet).
Proprioception and instinct are more than how you feel on any given day about your training routine. There are days you might feel like you’ve been hit by lightning simply because you stood up too fast, yet still have this guttural feeling that today might be a good workout day.
Why is this relevant to the sports performance sandwich of goodness? Let’s see:
##Take advantage of being a beginner
Much like youth is wasted on the young, the joy of first year training progress is wasted on the beginner. Struck down by lacking a clear purpose, struggles of scheduling, and surrounded by an indecipherable amount of training information, beginners who (crucially) stick with it, often fail to recognize the most significant training progression of all: Turning a whim into a habit.
First let’s define a beginner: It takes the mind roughly 3 months to create a new habit, and another 6-9 months for our lives routines to adapt it into all its repetitive yet unpredictable circumstances (holidays, travel, sickness, changes at work or in family). The brain will have built new neural pathways in the same 3 months and now needs to test run them through all that daily life throws at us. Quite a lengthy process, but once set, hard to ignore.
Dr. Mike Israetel, popular YouTuber and Sport Sciences professor at Lehman College NY, states that in the beginning stages of any kind of regular training, people see both the most rapid improvements and equally make the most objectively measurable mistakes.How does such a blatant contradiction come to be?
Well, because in that first year of training, mistakes are actually what help build those neuroreceptors. We need that first year of continuous trial and error in order to teach all our senses how to deal with this new challenge. Making “mistakes” is the closest thing we have to tangible, perpetual dialogue with our bodies. The word “mistake” is absolutely substitutable with the word “learning”.
As a beginner, the only data you should be obsessed with is your numbers of consistency. Just show up. Your sixth sense will do the rest.
##Intermediate to advanced training and it’s love affair with data
After a year or so of having successfully programmed a new sporting habit, and sharpened our mind-body connection instincts, we should be good to go, right? A sharp learning curve in the beginning may eventually decelerate, but we should still progress, right?
Well...kind of.
The negative psychological effect of loss of momentum can spiral quickly backwards into Newton’s law of inertia, and you run the risk of finding yourself back home on the couch, Pringles tube in hand. Sure, you can willpower your way through the loss of endorphins, but
willpower is a limited resource, which anyone who’s ever tried to taste only a single Pringles chip will confirm.
Data driven training, focusing on numbers, reps, hours, amps, whatever your sport supplies, is now your anchor. With those ever increasing data challenges and points you can happily monkey-swing your way to your next level of athleticism.
##The far ends of the statistics
Courtney de Waulter is amongst the top 5 ultra runners in the world. Amongst both women and men. She is the first person ever to win the hattrick of the ultra world (Western States 100, Hardrock 100 and the UTMB) all in the same year. She also won a race called “Big’s Backyard”, covering 455.9 kilometers in 68 hours. A rare case in which a woman holds number 1 titles across both sexes, which is due to the nature of the sport. If you want to know more why that is, do yourself a favor and have a little google. It is truly fascinating.
Now, you’d expect that this elite athlete has a highly fine tuned training schedule, lots of specialized coaches and excel sheets brimming with data coming out her ears. She does not. She has a close knit team of support crew who all bring various skills and benefits, but she famously said she “gets up in the morning and just sees what she feels like doing”.
Her college sports career certainly laid the groundwork of basic training principles such a good tapering, so you might question if what she calls intuitive are just extremely deeply automated data driven training principles, but considering how much room for change she lets happen on any given day, this argument does not hold up against further probing. DeWaulter is exemplary in that, the training sandwich of goodness (intuitive-data-intuitive), glides smoothly parallel along the continuum of ability and athletic level.
##Caveats about data
You know how real estate is all about location - location - location? Well, data is all about context - context - context.
A simple thought exercise: if I were to make a factually correct yet stand alone statement: “Mary goes running twice a month, for 45 minutes, at a 7.8 minute pace” and were to ask you: is that good or bad? I sure hope you would reply with the only correct answer: “I don’t know. I need more information about Mary”.
Data value is also quite frail in the context of volume. It takes a considerably large volume of data to obtain reliable readings. Individual data points are prone to technical failure and human imperfection.As non-professional athletes we obtain most of our data via training watches, which, granted, have improved dramatically in terms of GPS or heart rate accuracy, but they are far from perfect and so are we. All it takes to mess up a full day's worth of training data is forgetting to charge the watch in time, run into a GPS blind spot while hiking, or pressing the wrong lap button during training. Thus, to get a somewhat accurate interpretation of the data you generate as an amateur athlete, volume trumps quality.
This is what sports scientists and (well educated) coaches are for. Much like your lawyer knows how to read, and explain back to you, legal mumbo-jumbo, so it is the job of your coach to read and explain back to you the mess that is the data you are creating.
##Caveats about intuitive training
Intuitive training is sometimes mistaken for prioritizing the joy factor in training. Now, while the innately tenacious personalities will experience overcoming hardship as joy, someone more pleasure center or hedonistically inclined will simply stop working out once the hard stuff comes around. They will plateau, initially making peace with the maintenance of status quo, only to eventually give up training altogether because inevitably, they will hit bore-out. You cannot escape your shortcomings with the argument that training difficulties make your sport “not fun” anymore and retreat into old patterns. This is when that Plato-nian knowledge of self comes in. Like with most things in life, intuitive training is only effective if you dare to look deeper into your mind's musings and your body's doings.
Intuitive training does not only ask the question: what do I feel like doing today? but rather, What does my mind, body and soul tell me I need today?Much like when we care for someone we love, we should know that giving them what they need, is often not what they want. Though the capacity to push one’s comfort zone can certainly be developed (emotional maturity helps also), an athlete with the intrinsic temperament of a war horse has a much better chance at success with intuitive training, than those of us who'd rather prance around a petting zoo.
##Limerence
In the field of attachment theory psychologists have identified a behavior in anxiously or disorganized attached people termed: limerence. Limerence is a “state of involuntary obsession with another person or object”. It’s a much stronger compulsion than just wearing rose colored glasses. People who suffer with limerence often want to stop being infatuated, but no matter what distraction they try, the object of their focus can do no wrong. They fart rainbows and walk on glitter clouds. So, make sure you don’t go running around evangelizing neither data nor instinct as the true one prophet of the training sciences. Be mindful that the lines are as blurry as your vision in water filled goggles.
##Be who you are - on purpose.
In order to get the best out of both data driven or instinct driven training, you need to first know WHO YOU ARE and WHERE YOU ARE in your journey:If you’re highly conscientious, analytical or maybe a little neurotic in your planning, data is what will sustain you quickly during mid-level performance plateaus.
If you’re quite open, creative, maybe a little disagreeable, intuition will be your favorable guide, maybe letting you stumble into more mistakes, but still accelerating you through the slump.
For either training principle to work, you first must want to do hard things. Read that again.You must want to do hard things. Good luck out there, and may your data and intuition be with you.
Thanks, lil' sis!
References:
“The effectiveness of proprioceptive training for improving motor function: a systematic review” Joshua E. Aman, Naveen Elangovan, I-Ling Yeh,and Jürgen Konczak, 2015, Frontiersin.org“Making Sense” Smetacek, V., Mechsner, F. Nature 432, 21 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1038/432021a)
“The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg
“Increase Tenacity and Willpower” Andrew Huberman Lab Podcast OCT 8, 2023
Dr. Mike Israetel YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@RenaissancePeriodization) DeWaulter on Rich Roll: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOtSvYSnzNk&t=3600s
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