"Track is nothing but numbers. A good mathematician probably could be a good track coach."
A quote from the head coach of the University of Oregon's track and field program. They've picked some metrics that aren't applicable to sport which force young women to endanger themselves mentally and physically. It turns out to be a way to turn a "fitness goal" into body shaming and performance on the field can suffer. Here's a good piece on the subject. Unfortunately Oregon isn't alone.
Just what needs to be measured and how is it analyzed and interpreted. In this case it's an outdated belief that thin people can run faster and jump higher. It may be true to a point, but going past that point can reduce performance and lead to Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport. Sadly RED-S is common among female athletes - often the result of the athletes and their coaches not being aware of the last few decades of health and fitness in sports research. They may be very good at measuring body fat percentages, but that's barking up the wrong tree.
People, it turns out, are complicated. Traditionally medicine has been based on a biomedical model. Simply speaking you measure something and react (treat medically or create a fitness goal in sports) based on the number and then repeat the steps. For many medical conditions measurements and treatments are coarse enough that it works well enough - it's often all there is.
In the past twenty years there's been a recognition that the mind is involved.The mind and body react together to what we forecast might happen in the near future.1 Sometimes the mental component is small but it's can very large - particularly in competition. To get a handle on the mental side athletes are often asked to keep detailed training diaries on how they feel at various times of the day . A coach looks for changes and tries to adjust the training accordingly. To go deeper here's been explosive growth in the use of sports psychologists in professional and D-I college sports.
There's also been an explosion in wearable fitness devices. They can be great when the simple biomedical model applies. Using them to improve fitness levels works for many people who aren't at peak performance levels. Many paths can result in improved fitness and motivation is extremely important. Professionals find them useful in some areas of training - checking heart rates during aerobics for example, but don't find them terribly useful outside training.
And back to the amateur. You may have the twin goals of weight management and improved fitness. Exercise is almost always great for health and probably worth the price of a wearable if you have motivation issues, but weight management is poorly dependent on exercise. A device may tell you how many Calories of kilojoules you've used during a session, but sadly it's incorrect to assume that's tied to how much you eat. Metabolism is very complex and the body and mind adjust it to match new conditions. So you lose weight at first, but then it comes back even though you're exercising and eating the same. There are good evolutionary reasons for this that we've abundanced our way out of.
Assume you have a device that can measure a few metrics that are well-understood. How the information is used can be tricky. We're seeing a lot of amateur mistakes with date analysis in the pandemic - and often by people who should know better. It's common in fitness training and undoubtedly in many fields. My friend Greg Blonder put together two pieces of information that presented together are misleading.
You plot the amount of ketchup on the horizontal axis, and Tastiness on the vertical.
A hamburger is very desirable with a little ketchup, ever more so slathered. Liver is highly detested, but LOTS of ketchup helps. So more ketchup is better for either meal, but worse overall. The undesirability of liver skews the results when you aggregate data.
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1 In the literature the mind-body models are sometimes called anticipatory regulation or predictive processing. Journalist Mike Finch and sports scientists Ross Tucker and John Kiely talk about this and a few other training issues associated with elite sport in episode 26 Tucker's The Real Science of Sport podcast. If you have any interest in sports science this is one of the best podcasts around.
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