As much as I like to based all my decisions on rational, quantifiable parameters, life is never like that. In fact, one of the key characteristics of being a good scientist is to recognise and acknowledge the failings of your knowledge.
I’m no scientist, but I can surely say that in the realm of health and fitness, some things are completely unexplainable using our current body of knowledge. To tackle these things, we need self-knowledge, and thus the openness and willingness to experiment.
We need to believe in the specifics of story – our own individual story. Trying to explain things which science cannot reach brings you further from your goal.
Let me just give 2 examples from the fitness realm which I have grappled with in the past.
On the Craziness of Dieting
The first has to do with nutrition, specifically on dieting for fat loss. There is this group, disproportionately female, that suffers much more on a low carbohydrate fat-loss diet. When they drop their carbohydrates really low as some diets (Atkins) calls for, their energy levels simply crash, and everything screwy happens. Some are even diagnosed with medical conditions like hypothyroid.
The strange thing, is that when you feed such people just a little bit of carbohydrates, say a small apple, everything improves. What is more confounding is that it seems to occur only with certain types of food; some people get this kick out of apples but not rice, and others vice versa.
The experts in the field have no idea why. It’s a mystery as to why a mere 25g of carbs cause this, and an even bigger mystery as to why only from a specific type of carbohydrate source. But hey, the dieter feels better and now knows how to combat the side effects of his/her dieting.
On the Craziness of Training
The second has to do with training, specifically, pull-up training. Because pull-ups are part of many physical fitness tests, I wanted to be able to do them well. Unfortunately, your ability to do pull-ups is largely measured by the number of pull-ups you can do.
Now this is a problem. It’s a problem because some people can’t seem to do many pull-ups with their bodyweight. Many experienced strength coaches (who know what they’re doing) can tell you that some of their clients just plain suck at doing anything above 10 pull-ups. It’s a mystery, because many of such people are lean, strong men who can do pull-ups with 100 lbs strapped to them for 5 reps. For some strange reason, they simply can’t do high-rep sets of pull-ups.
Those in-the-know can try to explain this. Perhaps it’s their leverages; long arms make for a long pull. Perhaps it’s their muscle attachment points. Perhaps it’s their muscle fibre composition ratio; they got more fast-twitch fibres and therefore tire quickly.
The fact is that none of this speculation helps the trainee, who already knows what he/she must do. In this case, add weight and not reps.
You don’t need to know the fundamentals of computing and how to build software to use a spreadsheet effectively. Similarly, you don’t need to know how your body works to improve your health. You just need to know what buttons to push.
By saying that, I’m not admitting to the lack of utility of knowledge. All I’m doing is to restate our alignment in pursuing knowledge; that all knowledge you gain should be geared ultimately towards an executable outcome. Therefore, to create this outcome, experience and experimentation are critical to success until we can truly say that we thoroughly understand the underlying systems of the human body. Until then, hail the power of the anecdote.
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