WHY MOST PEOPLE
Most people do not understand how to
apply scientific method to their lives, nor have the awareness or ethics to do so. |
|
Trying to get guys to stay out of the gym and rest is like telling teenagers to stop wanking.
Overtraining is a ratio between stress and rest.
When you do not rest enough days between workouts relative to the size of the workout in terms of its volume or intensity.
People who habitually overtrain generally have no clue how to define and measure progress whether they are doing strength, anerobic HIIT, aerobics, or the confused mishmash of cross-training.
In strength training with weights, for example, if you are not stronger every set of every exercise every workout then you are overtrained.
Most people do not want to understand what I just said. They have no principles of physiological adaptation, metrics, or process of improvement. They have “bro science” they heard at the gym or read in muscle magazines. Often they are fixated on trivial details like techniques for certain movements when the whole strategy is wrong. They lack understanding of science and their own mind, heart, and motives.
More effects and signs of overtraining are:
What Are Your Real Motives?
A whole bunch of issues are run together that need to be disentangled with the rational mind first so you can know when to use logic and when to use feeling to make decisions.
The first thing is to distinguish is results from motives for going to the gym.
Exercise results are greater capacity to perform the exercise at a higher level, which is the measurable step to the physical appearance or result one wants long-term.
Other motives include getting the workout high and socializing at the gym. Both of these are emotional issues that are perfectly legit but should not be dependent completely on working out for satisfaction. The conflict is between resting to recover and grow from a workout versus being driven to the gym or workout to reduce stress. If you don’t make the distinction then your decisions will be too feelings based and you rationalize decisions that are not optimal.
Arnold Schwarzenegger famously said that pumping iron is a full body erection. It feels great, but like wanking too much, it can lead to exhaustion.
If the body is a temple many people are just painting the outside, not looking inside to what it is for. They may not see the mold growing inside that will eventually grow through the paint.
Alternatives for Emotional Needs
To reduce stress or for emotional needs, you can try something else to do on rest days to get your dopamine high: walking, sun bathing, meditation, yoga, chi gong, dancing, socializing, actually cooking rather than protein powders, etc. Just getting in the sun can do a lot for your mood and health than a gym full of unhealthy artificial blue light and electromagnetic radiation and radio frequencies. Sun is not just for vitamin D, it charges the water in your body like a battery and signals your eyes to regulate hormones and creates dopamine to feel good.
It is also indispensable to sit with emotional discomfort that you are constantly avoiding. This means feeling sensation in your body and dropping the story of complaints but focus on the sensation where it is the body, not even feelings like anger. Let the insights occur to naturally later. Just stay with pain for a little while, this can be unpleasant and tedious and seem like it is going nowhere but it is more about surrendering to receive, which is the opposite of going to the gym, always doing, doing. This is your life lesson for now, grasshopper.
A Rational Way to Workout
The rational process of exercise is this:
First, how do you want to work-outs to improve your life? For example, be more attractive to get a romantic partner. If that is the goal, some other efforts will be needed besides physical conditioning.
What is your work out goal? If it is general fitness then you can explore what mix of appealing activities are doable without overtraining: strength, anerobic, aerobics, sports, etc.
Each activity has different principles of physiological adaptation to stress or neurological learning that needs different regulation of the combination of frequency, intensity, and volume. This determines the right overall ratio of stress to rest to adapt. Cross training mixes activities with different principles that need to be scheduled and measured separately to improve. I will not explain details here, most people cannot understand this in writing. This article is about first getting your mind right by opening to seeing what you don’t really know.
If You Can’t Measure It, You Don’t Know
The second is how to evaluate progress to determine whether your mix of activities is each and in combination at the right levels of intensity, frequency and volume. You need metrics such as:
Randomly picking a fixed schedule and sticking with it will not do. You must know how to adjust your schedule to your body at any point in time. This is scientific method, not blind obedience and copying. This requires a new level of conceptual understanding. Science is a method, not a body of knowledge. It’s about experimentation and revision, an iterative learning process.
Some people think science is lab tests. People who claim to be able to interpret the meaning of those tests do so as kind of virtue signaling for those who have to rely on authorities to make their decisions. Nobody has done a double blind study on your life so you will have to figure it out for yourself.
That’s Not Good Science
People site scientific studies of the value of anaerobic high intensity training over aerobics but do not know what is missing. For example, some people seeing advantages of HIIT over aerobic go into all or nothing doing only HIIT. Scientific studies do not always compare all combinations of variables so the untrained mind cannot see the biases. I follow actual athletes from my own experience as well as current high school and world class athletes to determine the right mix of distance and speed work with racing.
Science is not a static body of knowledge but a method of learning through experimentation. It requires an open mind with a lot of skill. The scientific revolution still has not fully advanced in the minds of people. The scientific method can be applied to all problem solving.
It Starts with Attitude: Science Depends on Ethics and Awareness
The first step is attitude. You think you know and you don’t. Everyone is sure they are right and the other guy is wrong.
I have seen this played out in the application of scientific methods through what is known as six sigma and was known as total quality in business and organization of all kinds. I have a PhD in how to implement this and why it fails.
Everyone thinks they know what the customer wants but once the facts are gathered by asking customers or experimenting to see what customers buy no matter what they say, then that’s often something different.
Or if there are problems at work (defects) the first reaction is often to blame someone. Root causes are usually in the design of systems. Systems must be defined conceptually as how the parts of a process work. The right questions can be asked to gather facts about what is actually wrong, and root causes identified to improve a process, to basically redesign the system. The reaction to blame individuals is for people stuck in concrete operations who cannot conceptualize a system. The concrete mentality in body building is people who think body building is lifting the weight. So try all the machines. More is better. There is no conceptualization of biology as a system.
The use of scientific method requires a certain level of adult awareness that you are not the center of universe and automatically right. This has huge implications for how we run an entire society. A new paradigm of social organization is one based in the legitimate authority of “management by fact” rather than just the authority of positions in a hierarchy. Facts are about the human needs that are the goal of the organization and the most successful means of satisfying those ends. Human needs are the customers, the means are all the processes of the system. That means getting the voice the customer continuously (results) and measuring technical processes for alignment to customers (quality assurance.) This requires adults acting together in the best interests of someone else as an alternative to arbitrary authority or just following the rules of doing your job, narrowly defined.
Personal life can all be organized by management by fact. Different parts of you are different customers.
Have clearly understood personal needs, distinguished and linked to different means. Some means are workouts, some means are for the goal to relax and deal with stress, some means are to heal emotional issues, etc.
It all begins with attitude. An adult level of awareness is necessary to reflect before acting reactively. That is why in total quality they first distinguish reactive management of blame versus management systems with facts.
Many adults are in some ways baby adults. Here are signs of reactive baby adults:
Baby adults please grow up.
It is terrible to waste a mind on an ego.
By ego I mean reactively being attached to being right, not noticing or observing things outside your mind (science), like what others are going through (empathy) by being too self-absorbed. This is a first step to the sophistication to go beyond concrete operations thinking to connect dots into systems of cause and effect that are not obvious.
If you tell me you are making progress I want to see in writing your data for every workout: what you did and the results. Merely “listening to your body” is touchy feely gobbledygook.
People trained in six sigma quality improvement are called “black belts” have been nick-named “Mr. show-me-the-data.” Asking people to justify their decisions with management by fact is so disruptive to business as usual one internal consultant was called, “Rambo,” after an action hero played by Sylvestor Stallone.
Something as mundane and seemingly only physical as working-out actually requires a high level of theory to understand. Scientific and moral development go together. There is nothing quite as practical as good theory.
Overtraining is a ratio between stress and rest.
When you do not rest enough days between workouts relative to the size of the workout in terms of its volume or intensity.
People who habitually overtrain generally have no clue how to define and measure progress whether they are doing strength, anerobic HIIT, aerobics, or the confused mishmash of cross-training.
In strength training with weights, for example, if you are not stronger every set of every exercise every workout then you are overtrained.
Most people do not want to understand what I just said. They have no principles of physiological adaptation, metrics, or process of improvement. They have “bro science” they heard at the gym or read in muscle magazines. Often they are fixated on trivial details like techniques for certain movements when the whole strategy is wrong. They lack understanding of science and their own mind, heart, and motives.
More effects and signs of overtraining are:
- Persistent joint aches: particular problems are usually systemic and reflect overall capacity to repair tissue damage. Organs of digestion repair tissues, for example, that’s systemic.
- Less joy and power of concentration.
- Insomnia, the more exhausted you are the less you sleep.
- Fat gain as cortisol and stress increases.
- More cortisol than testosterone. Every time you compulsively go to the gym when you should be taking a day off or doing extra sets you repeat the mantra: “I now make my balls smaller.”
What Are Your Real Motives?
A whole bunch of issues are run together that need to be disentangled with the rational mind first so you can know when to use logic and when to use feeling to make decisions.
The first thing is to distinguish is results from motives for going to the gym.
Exercise results are greater capacity to perform the exercise at a higher level, which is the measurable step to the physical appearance or result one wants long-term.
Other motives include getting the workout high and socializing at the gym. Both of these are emotional issues that are perfectly legit but should not be dependent completely on working out for satisfaction. The conflict is between resting to recover and grow from a workout versus being driven to the gym or workout to reduce stress. If you don’t make the distinction then your decisions will be too feelings based and you rationalize decisions that are not optimal.
Arnold Schwarzenegger famously said that pumping iron is a full body erection. It feels great, but like wanking too much, it can lead to exhaustion.
If the body is a temple many people are just painting the outside, not looking inside to what it is for. They may not see the mold growing inside that will eventually grow through the paint.
Alternatives for Emotional Needs
To reduce stress or for emotional needs, you can try something else to do on rest days to get your dopamine high: walking, sun bathing, meditation, yoga, chi gong, dancing, socializing, actually cooking rather than protein powders, etc. Just getting in the sun can do a lot for your mood and health than a gym full of unhealthy artificial blue light and electromagnetic radiation and radio frequencies. Sun is not just for vitamin D, it charges the water in your body like a battery and signals your eyes to regulate hormones and creates dopamine to feel good.
It is also indispensable to sit with emotional discomfort that you are constantly avoiding. This means feeling sensation in your body and dropping the story of complaints but focus on the sensation where it is the body, not even feelings like anger. Let the insights occur to naturally later. Just stay with pain for a little while, this can be unpleasant and tedious and seem like it is going nowhere but it is more about surrendering to receive, which is the opposite of going to the gym, always doing, doing. This is your life lesson for now, grasshopper.
A Rational Way to Workout
The rational process of exercise is this:
First, how do you want to work-outs to improve your life? For example, be more attractive to get a romantic partner. If that is the goal, some other efforts will be needed besides physical conditioning.
What is your work out goal? If it is general fitness then you can explore what mix of appealing activities are doable without overtraining: strength, anerobic, aerobics, sports, etc.
Each activity has different principles of physiological adaptation to stress or neurological learning that needs different regulation of the combination of frequency, intensity, and volume. This determines the right overall ratio of stress to rest to adapt. Cross training mixes activities with different principles that need to be scheduled and measured separately to improve. I will not explain details here, most people cannot understand this in writing. This article is about first getting your mind right by opening to seeing what you don’t really know.
If You Can’t Measure It, You Don’t Know
The second is how to evaluate progress to determine whether your mix of activities is each and in combination at the right levels of intensity, frequency and volume. You need metrics such as:
- Are you lifting more weight in a rep range?
- A you running further or faster while your resting pulse remains the same?
- Do you know how to measure whether you are recovered before a workout, for example by taking your pulse?
- Feeling should focus on whether you are feeling tired physically, and that should be distinguished from feeling low and wanting a work-out high to fix it. Sometimes you feel bad because you are tired from overtraining and workouts become a temporary stimulation that makes the problem worse in the long run. That is an addiction. Just “listening to your body” is not enough, you need exact metrics with awareness of motives and how you rationalize.
Randomly picking a fixed schedule and sticking with it will not do. You must know how to adjust your schedule to your body at any point in time. This is scientific method, not blind obedience and copying. This requires a new level of conceptual understanding. Science is a method, not a body of knowledge. It’s about experimentation and revision, an iterative learning process.
Some people think science is lab tests. People who claim to be able to interpret the meaning of those tests do so as kind of virtue signaling for those who have to rely on authorities to make their decisions. Nobody has done a double blind study on your life so you will have to figure it out for yourself.
That’s Not Good Science
People site scientific studies of the value of anaerobic high intensity training over aerobics but do not know what is missing. For example, some people seeing advantages of HIIT over aerobic go into all or nothing doing only HIIT. Scientific studies do not always compare all combinations of variables so the untrained mind cannot see the biases. I follow actual athletes from my own experience as well as current high school and world class athletes to determine the right mix of distance and speed work with racing.
Science is not a static body of knowledge but a method of learning through experimentation. It requires an open mind with a lot of skill. The scientific revolution still has not fully advanced in the minds of people. The scientific method can be applied to all problem solving.
It Starts with Attitude: Science Depends on Ethics and Awareness
The first step is attitude. You think you know and you don’t. Everyone is sure they are right and the other guy is wrong.
I have seen this played out in the application of scientific methods through what is known as six sigma and was known as total quality in business and organization of all kinds. I have a PhD in how to implement this and why it fails.
Everyone thinks they know what the customer wants but once the facts are gathered by asking customers or experimenting to see what customers buy no matter what they say, then that’s often something different.
Or if there are problems at work (defects) the first reaction is often to blame someone. Root causes are usually in the design of systems. Systems must be defined conceptually as how the parts of a process work. The right questions can be asked to gather facts about what is actually wrong, and root causes identified to improve a process, to basically redesign the system. The reaction to blame individuals is for people stuck in concrete operations who cannot conceptualize a system. The concrete mentality in body building is people who think body building is lifting the weight. So try all the machines. More is better. There is no conceptualization of biology as a system.
The use of scientific method requires a certain level of adult awareness that you are not the center of universe and automatically right. This has huge implications for how we run an entire society. A new paradigm of social organization is one based in the legitimate authority of “management by fact” rather than just the authority of positions in a hierarchy. Facts are about the human needs that are the goal of the organization and the most successful means of satisfying those ends. Human needs are the customers, the means are all the processes of the system. That means getting the voice the customer continuously (results) and measuring technical processes for alignment to customers (quality assurance.) This requires adults acting together in the best interests of someone else as an alternative to arbitrary authority or just following the rules of doing your job, narrowly defined.
Personal life can all be organized by management by fact. Different parts of you are different customers.
Have clearly understood personal needs, distinguished and linked to different means. Some means are workouts, some means are for the goal to relax and deal with stress, some means are to heal emotional issues, etc.
It all begins with attitude. An adult level of awareness is necessary to reflect before acting reactively. That is why in total quality they first distinguish reactive management of blame versus management systems with facts.
Many adults are in some ways baby adults. Here are signs of reactive baby adults:
- Automatically being right, closed to new ideas, thinking they already know.
- Arguing before listening to understand.
- Not being able to control anger and thinking you always need to express your anger.
- Having temper tantrums when you don’t get your way.
- Asking questions or making statements on Facebook that show you did not read the post you are reacting to and not taking responsibility for reading thoroughly. Expecting to be spoon-fed links and info you could look up.
- Being negative and picking fights.
- Joining lynch mobs on social media against people you do not know.
- Being caught in victim mode rather than taking responsibility for mistakes and how you make decisions.
- Being self-absorbed you don’t notice what other people are going through. Notice how little people understand you. Hearing about the suffering of others people often blame the person: People with chronic health problems like chronic fatigue are blamed for things beyond their control, like toxicity of the environment and medicine.
Baby adults please grow up.
It is terrible to waste a mind on an ego.
By ego I mean reactively being attached to being right, not noticing or observing things outside your mind (science), like what others are going through (empathy) by being too self-absorbed. This is a first step to the sophistication to go beyond concrete operations thinking to connect dots into systems of cause and effect that are not obvious.
If you tell me you are making progress I want to see in writing your data for every workout: what you did and the results. Merely “listening to your body” is touchy feely gobbledygook.
People trained in six sigma quality improvement are called “black belts” have been nick-named “Mr. show-me-the-data.” Asking people to justify their decisions with management by fact is so disruptive to business as usual one internal consultant was called, “Rambo,” after an action hero played by Sylvestor Stallone.
Something as mundane and seemingly only physical as working-out actually requires a high level of theory to understand. Scientific and moral development go together. There is nothing quite as practical as good theory.
Get a
Free Assessment
of Your Root Causes
& Most Energizing Solutions
that's a link
Then read how to get Health Coaching in 11 Steps
I work over video: Facebook, Zoom, Google, from Michigan, USA [email protected]
Join me on Facebook where I blog post. FACEBOOK
Free Assessment
of Your Root Causes
& Most Energizing Solutions
that's a link
Then read how to get Health Coaching in 11 Steps
I work over video: Facebook, Zoom, Google, from Michigan, USA [email protected]
Join me on Facebook where I blog post. FACEBOOK
