Barefoot Fitness

Elegance

Note: If you haven't yet read the post on complexity and fractals you should start there.

It's a curious aspect of knowledge that both ends of the development spectrum, from naive beginner to well-versed expert, are marked by simplicity.

Bruce Lee once said, "Before I studied the art, a punch was just like a punch, a kick just like a kick. After I studied the art, a punch is no longer a punch, a kick is no longer a kick. Now that I understand the art, a punch is just like a punch, a kick is just like a kick."

Resist the urge to dismiss this as trite pseudo-wisdom involving single hands clapping and break it down a little bit. It entails a three-stage process of knowledge development. Simplicity to complexity back to simplicity.

When you begin an undertaking, you have no idea how much detail you don't understand. As you begin learning and exploring more, you begin to see the fractal nature of your subject as it increases in complexity with each advancement in understanding. Finally, and this doesn't happen very often, you begin to assimilate the scattered complexity into simple, unified, yet precise concepts.

On a discussion following the fractal article, a reader posted another article with this excellent TED talk by Eric Berlow on the concept of complexity ultimately leading to simplicity.

Towards the end of this talk, Berlow says, "We're discovering in nature that simplicity often lies on the other side of complexity, so for any problem, the more you can zoom out and embrace complexity the better chance you have of zooming in on the simple details that matter most."

Note that an understanding of complexity is an essential and intermediary step in that process.

Earlier in the talk, he makes this point again in a slightly different way when he says, "So the more you step back and embrace complexity, the better chance you have of finding simple answers and it's often different than the simple answer that you started with."

The word elegance is used to describe an object of beauty with remarkable aspects of simplicity and effectiveness. Einstein's E=MC² formula is an example of this. It also applies to the TED speaker's distillation of U.S. military strategy in Afghanistan to a small number of easily understood points.

The inherent simplicity of elegant solutions often leads them to be misunderstood. It's common for them to be dismissed as too simple to be original or truly effective.

This is sometimes the case, for example, with John Boyd's OODA Loop, a strategic concept originally developed for military applications which is now prevalent in the business world. The OODA loop is so simple on its surface that it's easily dismissed as self-obvious, but few understand the overwhelming depth of knowledge from an incredibly diverse range of fields that was synthesized by Boyd in order to produce it.

The concept of elegant simplicity is easily applied to the fitness world, from individual movements to principles of nutrition or training. In fact, if you look past the methodological differences in most successful training and nutrition systems, you'll find quite a few seemingly simple principles at their roots.

This is not to say that anything in the fitness industry that is reduced to simple set of principles is inherently effective. As Eric Berlow said in his TED talk, the simple answers you end up with are often different than the simple answers you started with. In many cases, people who adhere to simple concepts are merely stuck in the first stage of development and haven't even realized how potentially complicated their field is.

Likewise, that a system has an in depth knowledge of a single aspect of something like nutrition is not to say that it's going to be effective either. It's quite easy to be sidetracked with informational "rabbit holes" and fixate excessively on a few particular components while disregarding many others and failing to see how they function together. This is essentially grasping at elegance without the necessary means of attaining it.

Think of how many faddish dietary trends have focused on a single concept, analyzed the crap out of it, and attempted to use it as a philosophical basis without integrating other related factors.

Things like calorie counting, volumetrics, precise macronutrient ratios, or focusing on things like cholesterol and saturated fat can all potentially have a place in effective nutrition. But to focus on one of them at the exclusion of everything else leads the end-user further away from effective long-term results. Don't mistake reductionism for elegance.

If you look at most successful physical training systems you'll see that they focus on doing simple things extremely well. Squat, run, push, hinge and pull. Simple things, but difficult to do flawlessly. Once that flawless simplicity is attained those movements are used in a countless variety of combinations to induce a desired training effect, but it all comes down to simple movements done well with gradually increased load, volume or density.

Elegant, beautiful simplicity is the end result of the knowledge development process and can't be produced without first understanding the complexity of the system in question. It's also easily confused with reductionism and distinguishing between the two is an art in itself.

When looking for a system based on an elegant solution, look for easily expressed simplicity. In order to determine the basis of that system, you'll have to work backward in the process toward fractal complexity and see how much the creators know about the myriad interrelated factors underlying the system.

As a user, you don't have to know the complexity part in order to benefit from the simple principle that it produced, but it's a good idea to make sure that the people advocating it do.

(To read and post comments for this entry, visit http://barefootfts.com/)

Improvised Workouts - Anti Piracy

The Horn of Africa isn't the safest place to take a cargo ship, but that doesn't change the fact that it's one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world. With piracy incidents increasing in frequency and complexity, many companies have taken to hiring private security personnel to guard them on their transit past Somalia and adjacent countries.

It can be a pretty cool job. Lots of pretty sunsets, open ocean and stopovers in a new country every few days. One of the major challenges to it is finding ways to stay in good physical condition while living in a very limited environment that changes every week or two.

Enter Matt Roberts:

I have heard stories of gyms on ships that some guys have worked on with nice equipment, tons of weights, and even a top deck big enough to run on. I even knew some marines that got jacked while at sea. This wasn’t the case for me.

The first ship that I worked on was quite small, so I was surprised to hear there was a gym onboard at all. I had to know where it was right away, even before settling into my cabin.

This is what I had to work with. Needless to say, changes in my current routine had to be made to accommodate my new facilities.

I was scheduled to be on this ship for a little over two weeks with nothing to do but stand guard and watch movies. I wanted to make sure that I trained daily to help pass the time. It was obvious that I wasn’t going to be doing much heavy lifting, which meant that recovery wasn’t going to be much of an issue.

I knew that the food onboard probably wouldn’t meet all the nutritional requirements that I had, so I made sure to bring supplements with me like protein, superfood and fish oil. I also packed a thick band, I don’t travel anywhere without it.

I took this as an opportunity to work on qualities that are often neglected and because it was a smaller ship I had to deal with it rocking from side to side while I trained. Since I chose to focus mostly on unilateral moves due to the lack of weight, this presented an extra challenge.

The only heavy lift that I could do relatively safely was the deadlift. There was a rusty straight bar and about 260 pounds of weight.

Since this was well below my max, I was able to deadlift a few times a week, paying close attention to technique and speed.

Because of the constant swaying of the ship, each rep was different than the last. The weight would be shifted to my left side for the first rep, and then to my right for the next.

Using the rope from a container, I was able to hang a bar from the boom of an old crane onboard for pull-ups. Using the ends of that same rope, I also hung a second bar just above the deck for doing pushups, triceps extensions, and fallouts.

This made for a brutal combo of deadlifts superset with pull-ups and pushups. The instability of the bar hanging freely along with the swaying of the ship made stabilization extremely challenging. Every move was also a really good core exercise.

For the pushups, I almost always wrapped the band around my back for added resistance. The only other thing I did with the band was pull-aparts at various angles. Since there was no room for any form of cardio, I often did my workouts in a circuit fashion for a conditioning benefit. There was also a solidified punching bag that I hung from the crane’s hook.

Me pretending to know how to box.

I performed a lot of dips on railings, sometimes with body armor, sometimes without. I alternated my days using body armor. One day I would go heavy and wear two vests, and the next I wouldn’t use anything.

For legs I performed lots of lunge variations using 20lb dumbbells. Rear lunges, forward, sideways, jumping, and pistols. I didn’t want to risk injury putting a heavy bar across my back while rocking side to side. I also did a lot of single-leg hip thrusts. Although I couldn’t use much weight with these exercises, performing them explosively in various directions on an unstable surface was still effective.

The very back of the ship had a low freeboard that I used for a very effective hamstring move. I would splash water on one half and then lay down on it, keeping my feet on the dry half. From there, using my hamstrings only, I would pull myself to my heels, and then push myself back to the starting position. Much like a swiss ball hamstring curl, just without the ball. The water and sweat mix made the surface quite slippery. A word of caution though, your back will look like you’ve been attacked by a cat after this, but don’t worry, the salt will sanitize the wounds. Kind of.

Although my core got a good workout from the instability of every exercise, I also did fallouts, hanging leg raises, and planks. Planks (a suitable name when on an anti-piracy job) are fun on a rocking ship and about ten times harder than in a gym. I would alternate which direction I faced each time. On one set I would be positioned so my weight shifted from head to toe, and on the next, I would position myself so it shifted side to side.

This is where I did hamstring curls.

So, that’s basically it for this ship. Deadlifts, various weighted and non-weighted bodyweight movements, lunge variations, planks, and band work. Some days when I had some extra energy to burn, I would finish my workout with a dumbbell circuit which is where I included some vanity exercises like curls and delt raises.

I would change up the order I did the exercises in each day, except for any day in which I deadlifted, in which that was always first. It had to be, because the deadlift bar was also my pull-up bar. With all the free time I made sure to perform lots of mobility work and focus on any problem areas I had.

While I didn’t make any significant strength gains in the basic barbell lifts during this phase, I did increase my pull-ups quite a bit, strengthened my core and vastly improved in single-leg lifts. I would call this a win.

Here are some other pictures from that trip.

After that trip I invested in a TRX suspension trainer and rings. Good thing too, because no other ship I worked on had any weights. On these ships I strictly performed bodyweight exercises (with armor at times), and just about everything in the TRX manual. I kept the volume high on the first two exercises of each workout and the rest of the moves were done in a maintenance/recovery range. For example:

Monday:

1) Pull-ups and dips superset - as many sets as it took to get to 100 reps of each. (the next time I performed this workout I tried to decrease the sets)

2) Push-ups and TRX row superset - 3 to 4 sets of 10-15 reps

3) TRX lunges and either broad jumps, or TRX leg curls - 3 to 4 sets of 6-10 reps

4) Core work and prehab work (planks, fallouts, face pulls, rotators, etc)

For the next workout, I would switch up the order of exercises but keep the rep ranges for that number the same. So 1) would always be done for high reps, regardless of what movement it was. A couple times a week I would start my workout with handstand push-ups, keeping a foot hooked into a TRX strap for balance, but this wasn’t done for high reps.

Assisted pistols for when the ship was rocking too much to balance.

Body armor pullups.

Another ship with even less room.

My time working in anti piracy usually entailed several weeks out followed by a few weeks at home, during which I would go back to heavy strength training at a conventional gym. Alternating between unstable bodyweight and unilateral moves with little external load in an almost gymnastic fashion and more conventional strength training while at home proved to work remarkably well. The little strength I lost while at sea was easily regained and the progress I made in unilateral stability, bodyweight control and strength endurance carried over well into weight room training.

Training in this undulating fashion is effective even if you stay in a conventional gym setting. No trips to Mogadishu necessary. If you need a break from your normal routine, I'd recommend giving it a try.

Indian Ocean - 2011

(To read and post comments for this entry, visit http://barefootfts.com/)

Fractals - Understanding Complexity

The picture above is a vegetable called Romanesco broccoli. Yes, it's real. It's often referred to as fractal broccoli.

A fractal is a mathematical phenomenon involving a property called self similarity. It's an object comprised of multiple components which can be split apart, but each of which resembles the whole.

There are variations on this theme, but here, and with quite a few other objects found in nature, it involves spirals. The spirals on the surface of Romanesco broccoli increase in size, but the shape of each component stays the same.

Viewed from far enough away, this piece of broccoli looks like a simple cone. Limited to this perspective, this is how one would describe it. And that would be technically correct.

If you look a little closer, it's a cone made of spirals of other little cones. Again, if this is the closest you look, this description is correct.

Examine it in even more detail, and one sees that each of those little cones are actually composed of more tiny spirals of other cones which look identical to the largest version. This description, consisting of far more detail than the original perspective, is still accurate.

This pattern repeats for a remarkably long time. With the broccoli, at some point you're just looking at single cells and the pattern stops, but in the case of fractals used in mathematics, the self-similar repetition can be theoretically infinite.

Apply this concept to understanding the complexity of the human body. No, I'm not saying that it's self-identical in structure, although there are a surprising number of recurring ratios to be found. I'm referring to the repeating complexity to be found at each level of analysis.

When one first begins learning about human anatomy, physiology and kinesiology, it's at the same level of perspective as when the broccoli just looks like a simple cone. It's head, shoulders, knees and toes. Technically accurate, but limited.

Just as each cone on the piece of broccoli reveals further individual complexity upon closer examination, each component of the human body becomes more complex the closer you look at it.

For example, we all learned sometime in middle school that the knee is a hinge joint. Around the same time came the words femur, patella, tibia and fibula. Someone with this knowledge can fairly say that they understand what a knee is.

At this point, however, one must also consider that there are surgeons who have spent most of their lives specializing in this one particular joint. Like someone who looks at the broccoli under a microscope to see the countless layers of complexity invisible to the naked eye, these people possess a level of understanding far beyond what an average person "knows."

You probably know what a kidney is, and could express the sum of that knowledge with about two sentences and a crude drawing of a bean. By most measures, you would not be wrong. But if you were to ask a nephrologist who spent a decade studying this organ, you'd realize how many layers of complexity exist beyond your grasp and how insufficient your knowledge is on a relative scale.

The same applies to every component of the body, and beyond that, how those components interact and function together.

Pick a random person off the street and ask them what a squat is. They'll be able to tell you, and the information they'll provide will be correct, but only because it's at the most limited level of understanding. Ask Dave Tate or Perry Nickelston what a squat is, and the answer will be comparable to that of a knee surgeon in comparison to a sixth grader describing a hinge joint.

Knowledge is about more than correct and not correct. What the layman or your average weekend certification graduate describes correctly as a squat will probably be an abomination to Dave Tate. The metric of "correct" changes as understanding deepens.

To say that Romanesco broccoli is a green vegetable shaped like a cone is correct, but only if you fail to look closer. Each advancement in understanding reveals further layers of complexity.

When it comes to one's knowledge about any particular subject, be aware that what you know, and what anyone else knows, is likely to be correct at some level.

The qualitative value of knowledge goes beyond right or wrong statements. It's a matter of depth. Layers beneath layers of complexity. How deep does one's knowledge run? How close have you looked? Do you know how much you don't know? A statement can be "not wrong" and still lack enough understanding to matter.

An important component of knowledge is an awareness of how much one does not yet comprehend. The complexity of a living organism is quite possibly infinite, and if at any time we assume that we know everything there is to understand about something, it's only because we've stopped looking closer.

(To read and post comments for this entry, visit http://barefootfts.com/)

Quality - The Adventures of Timmy

Let's say you have a student in elementary school, young Timothy Von Shackleford Jr.

Timmy for short.

Timmy is sitting in class, going through his multiplication tables, ringing off the answers with increasing rapidity.

"Two times six is thirty. Five times five is forty-two. Twelve times five is one-hundred and eleven!"

Now let's say you happen to be an observer in this classroom. What would your immediate impulse be? Are you going to congratulate Timmy on his excellent work? High five?

You'd probably feel a combination of horror, wonderment and sympathy.

At this point you approach Timmy's teacher. You want to know why Timmy is doing math this way.

"He's doing great!" is the response you hear.

His teacher continues, "Timmy's only been in class for two weeks and already he's finishing his multiplication table three minutes faster than when he started, and he's even using bigger numbers!"

"But... He's doing it wrong. Allowing him to learn this way is destroying his potential as a student. It will take years to undo this when and if he finally finds a competent teacher and he'll never get this time back. You may very well destroy his enthusiasm for learning entirely when this catches up with him and he has to face that all his effort was for short term progress in metrics that didn't matter."

"Nonsense. Look, he just finished third in the class! And you can ask him yourself; this is the hardest class he's ever had. He's mentally exhausted when he's done every time. Nobody else has their students learn with this intensity."

Ludicrous, right? This never happens in our schools. We know better. And we can trust our teachers. Mostly. Even kids who wander into libraries and start learning things on their own wouldn't take this approach.

A multiplication problem is either right or wrong. One plus one does not kind of equal four. It's also based on a logical progression. You have to learn how to count before you learn how to add and subtract. After that, multiplication and division. Eventually, trigonometry. If trig is too much, maybe drop back a module or two until you get a better foundation and start again.

Human movement is similar, but with a little more "fuzziness." There isn't a completely concrete perfect squat, pushup or pullup that applies to everyone. There will be some anthropometric variance. But qualitative measures still apply and doing a movement well rather than poorly matters just as much if you're going to trade hours of your life in the gym for a stronger, healthier body as it does for Timmy who's putting in his time in the classroom.

It's a common assumption that basic movements should come naturally. The thing is, unless you're three years old, your body doesn't move naturally anymore. The longer you've been around, the more your body has slowly conformed to the shape of the chair in which you spend most of your day. The balanced, effortless mechanics you had as a young kid aren't there anymore. A simple movement like a squat is probably no longer simple.

This means that when you start working out or adopt new movements, you must first deconstruct them and spend time learning to do them right. You're going to have to make sure you can count before you jump into algebra, and that basis of precision can never be neglected.

Lock the bar to your chest when you do pullups and actually strengthen your upper back instead of adding more tension to your pec minors. Oh, and get up there by, you know, pulling. Squat below parallel with your chest high and your heels on the ground. Maintain a stable, neutral spinal curvature in your pushups, engage your lats and retract your scapulae at the bottom.

Stop worrying so much about how fast you can do it or how quickly you can pile on weights. If adding fifty pounds to the bar means that you now squat with several inches less depth, you are not making progress. You're being deluded in the same way that Timmy is when he starts repeating that five times five is thirty-seven. You're missing the point. Every rep is practicing error. Wrong. Wrong again. Wrong. Building a broken pattern.

Sure, you might be sore the next day. You'll probably be tired at the end of the workout, but please understand that you're only moving further away from long term physical freedom and athleticism.

Timmy should be in school to become more capable in mathematics, not better at saying nonsensical numbers faster. If you're trying to make your workouts harder by going faster, increasing technical complexity or adding weight at the expense of quality movement, you're making the same mistake.

You may not be doing this to yourself. Perhaps you're trusting the wrong person. Timmy's teacher may not be capable of actually teaching math correctly, so training his students to do math wrong really fast is easier and more immediately rewarding. There will be new students next year anyway.

Are you accumulating injuries? No, that's not actually supposed to be part of the process. I don't mean post-workout soreness, I mean the fact that you're adding weight to your deadlift every week but can barely put your shoes on because your back is starting to ache so badly every morning. That increasingly persistent pain in your shoulder? That's not weakness leaving the body. That's a SLAP tear. It means you're doing something wrong, and you're doing it over and over.

Measure what matters. The first metric is always quality. If you don't know what that actually means, you should hire someone who does or take it upon yourself to start learning. There is such a thing as good movement and bad movement, just as there is a right and wrong answer to a math problem. If good movement is being sacrificed for the sake of anything else, it's not progress.

(To read and post comments for this entry, visit http://barefootfts.com/)

A Scam by Any Other Name

I occasionally check out supplements mentioned by clients or readers. It's become a bit of a hobby because so much of the industry is inundated with overpriced, under-dosed supplements being peddled as part of various pyramid schemes.

Wait, they're not called pyramid schemes anymore. That term is gauche these days. They're multi-level marketing schemes. What's the difference, you ask? Well, MLM schemes have completely different… names.

After examining the protein supplement from the Fairy Dust article and finding it to be a fairly impressive ripoff, I was emailed ingredient lists from a few other MLM schemes. The first one I looked into was a fatty acid supplement.

The supplement contained 2 grams of flax oil, plus 15 mg each of fairy dusted Coenzyme Q10 and Alpha Lipoic Acid.

It worked out to $1.43 per serving. To be fair, the Q10 is dosed at only half of the recommended dosage for healthy individuals looking for minimalistic heart health insurance, so if you were to double the dose on the product you could hit the bare minimum for Q10 intake. For major benefits or populations who actually need it, it's still dosed at a fraction of what would be required.

Anyway, a 2 gram serving of flax oil can be purchased elsewhere for about 16 cents. (There are a number of good, major websites you can use for this, but my preferred standby is Nutrition Express because they list per dose price breakdowns on just about everything. You can also look into bulk sites like Nutrabio, TrueProtein or Cerebral Health which sell supplement raw ingredients in bulk.)

The lowest dosages I could find available from reputable manufacturers for CoQ10 and ALA were 30mg and 100mg, respectively. These worked out to 9 cents per dose for the ALA and 8 cents per dose for the Q10. That's at just about 7 times the amount of ALA and twice the amount of Q10 found in the pyramid product.

Broken down to equal the same 15mg doses in the pyramid product, the Q10 would cost about 2 cents and the ALA would be less than a penny per dose. This is at retail prices. The manufacturers are paying much less than that.

So, when it's all broken down, you're paying $1.43 per serving for something that could be purchased elsewhere for 19 cents. Since Q10 and ALA aren't actually sold in such small amounts from quality manufacturers, you would have to buy them in the previously listed higher doses, which would have the benefit of being clinically effective for a change. This would put you at 33 cents per serving, which still leaves the pyramid product at an unjustifiable 430% markup.

If you were actually able to purchase Q10 and ALA separately at such small dosages and create an identical product, it would place the pyramid pills at about a 750% markup.

That's plenty of profit margin to sustain an entire chain of pyramiders.

How does this happen? How can a company ever survive by ripping people off so badly?

First, these operations proliferate most in small towns, where people are somewhat more insulated and place a greater amount of trust and reliance on personal social networks. The trusting personal relationship behind these one on one sales is the driving force behind them.

The networking concept is fundamental to these operations. If you follow their business policies you'll constantly hear phrases like "get more people in so you can start making money; recruit, recruit, recruit; join new extracurricular activities to expand your circle, etc."

Generally the sale of the actual products is a close second to the need to "bring other people into the business" so that they can sell the products down the line.

Think about the economics of this. Nobody in the chain, from manufacturing to marketing to distribution would be involved if they couldn't profit from it. The more intermediaries there are between manufacture and sale the higher the profit margin must be to make a product worth selling. With these schemes, you're adding several layers to the sale chain.

There is always a base cost, which is whatever is necessary to manufacture the product. Raw materials, manufacturing, bottling, labeling and transport cost a fixed amount and beyond that is variable. Every time you add a person to the sales chain, the sale price must go up or the manufacturing cost must go down by cheapening the ingredients.

Either way, it decreases the actual value of the product.

If you are being sold a nutritional product, particularly if it's being pitched by your neighbor, who gets it from his co-worker, who gets it from the girl who works at a the shoe store, take a few minutes to break down the actual ingredients, reassure yourself that the words you can't find anywhere else are bullshit marketing terms, and objectively evaluate the worth of the product in question.

What you'll almost always find, in the rather unlikely event that the supplement in question is actually something you need, is that you're much better off getting the same thing elsewhere for a fraction of the price.

(To read and post comments for this entry, visit http://barefootfts.com/)

The Fat Gene

What role does genetic heritability play in body composition?

In his book, The Agile Gene: How Nature Turns on Nurture, Matt Ridley explains the falsehood of the nature versus nurture debate:

"...It is genes that allow the human mind to learn, to remember, to imitate, to imprint, to absorb culture, and to express instincts. Genes are not puppet masters or blueprints. Nor are they just the carriers of heredity. They are active during life; they switch each other off and on; they respond to the environment. They may direct the construction of the body and brain in the womb, but then they set about dismantling and rebuilding what they have made almost at once - in response to experience. They are both cause and consequence of our actions. Somehow the adherents of the "nurture" side of the argument have scared themselves silly at the power and inevitability of genes and missed the greatest lesson of all: The genes are on our side."

Ridley discusses recent developments in genetics and our understanding of the role that genes play in our lives. As he alluded to in the above paragraph, genes aren't a fixed archaic blueprint. They are responsive to our environment and partially affect how we direct our experiences in those environments. It's a dance between nurture and nature and they both play off of each other.

Very little of Ridley's book discusses body composition. He much more commonly delves into how nature and nurture affect intelligence and personality, but there are remarkable similarities which he occasionally highlights.

Bodyweight Heritability: Differences aren't necessarily causes

"In this respect, personality is about as heritable as body weight. The correlation between two siblings in weight, according to one study, is 34 percent. The similarity between parents and children is a little lower, 24 percent. How much of this similarity is due to the fact that they live together and eat similar food, and how much to the fact that they share the same genes? Well, identical twins reared in the same families have a correlation of 80 percent while fraternal twins reared together have only 43 percent similarity, which suggests that genes matter rather more than shared eating habits. What about adoptees? The correlation between adoptees and their adoptive parents is only 4 percent, and that between unrelated siblings in the same family is just 1 percent. By contrast, identical twins reared apart are still 72 percent similar in weight.

Conclusion: Weight is largely due to genes, not eating habits, so throw away the diet advice and let rip with the ice cream? Of course not. The study says nothing about the causes of weight, it only reveals something about the causes of difference in weight within a particular family. Given the same access to food, some people will put on more weight than others. People are getting fatter in western societies, not because their genes are changing but because they are eating more and getting less exercise. But when everyone has similar access to food, the ones who put on weight fastest will be the ones with certain genes. So, variation in weight can be inherited, even while environment raises the average."

Stay with me here and try not to get hung up on the oversimplification of "eating more and getting less exercise."

At this point it's clear that body composition (I hate using the generic term "weight") is affected by genetic factors as well as environment. Not a huge surprise there. But what exactly are those genetic factors and how are they affecting us?

It's hard to say. Studies done on twins and siblings make it difficult to trace down root causes of genetic influence. They show us that genes do stuff, but not which ones, and quite often we're not even sure what exactly they're doing because we only see specific measurable effects.

"Heritability is usually highest for those features of human nature caused by many genes rather than by the action of single genes. And the more genes are involved, the more heritability is actually caused by the side effects of genes than the direct effect."

Early environment, like oxygen, only matters much when it's inadequate.

In many cases, environment becomes an issue only when it is significantly altered from the norm. A comparison is made to vitamin C. It has noticeable negative consequences if you don't have enough, but once your levels are adequate taking extra doesn't do much. This is part of the reason genes play such a significant role in many studies on siblings. The environment is already normalized.

"Recall the heritability of weight. In a western society, with ample access to food, those who put on weight faster will be the ones with genes that nudge them into eating more. But in a desolate part of the Sudan, say, or Burma, where extreme poverty is rife and famine just around the corner for many people, everybody is hungry and the fat people are probably the rich ones. Here variation in weight is caused by the environment, not the genes. In the jargon of the scientist, the effect of the environment is non-linear; at the extremes, it has drastic effects. But in the moderate middle, a small change in environment has a negligible effect."

Again, ignore the over-simplified quantitative focus on the eating part. Feel free to change "eating more" to "eating more processed artificial food made from corn syrup, flour and soybeans" if it helps.

Genetic Influences Increase with Age and Self-Directed Environmental Exposure

An interesting fact coming from this discussion is that genetic influence increases with age while shared environmental factors decrease. Adoptive siblings have predictably similar IQ's as children, but as they age the correlation disappears. Likewise, identical twins raised separately will have IQ's more comparable to their adopted families than to each other, but as they progress into adulthood they become increasingly more identical as similarity to their adopted family drops away. Ridley doesn't mention if this applies to body comp as well, but it seems likely.

Back to the fat genes. How is it that a complex variety of genes can influence body composition through their combined "side effects?" What are those side effects? Surprisingly, a major factor may be in how genes nudge us into different environments and experiences.

Just as much as genes may affect things like insulin sensitivity (and environment factors such as parental eating habits during gestation can affect those genes) they also influence behaviors.

Genes: Agents of Nurture

"The "environment" is not some real, inflexible thing, it is a unique set of influences actively chosen by the actor himself or herself. Having a certain set of genes predisposes a person to experience a certain environment. Having "athletic" genes makes you want to practice a sport; having "intellectual" genes makes you seek out intellectual activities. The genes are agents of nurture.

Appetite versus Aptitude

As a parallel, how do genes affect weight? Presumably through controlling appetite... Is it the gene or the ice cream that that causes fatness? Well, it is obviously both. The genes are causing the individual to go out and expose himself to an environmental factor, in this case ice cream. Surely it is bound to be the case with intelligence. The genes are likely to be affecting appetite more than aptitude. They do not make you intelligent, they make you enjoy learning. Because you enjoy it, you spend more time doing it and you grow to be more clever. Nature can only act via nurture. It can act only by nudging people to seek out the environmental influences that will satisfy their appetites. The environment acts as a multiplier of small genetic differences, pushing athletic children toward the sports that reward them and pushing bright children toward the books that reward them.

Reading this makes me think of my own childhood. As a kid, I loved reading and learning. My older brother brought his schoolwork home with him each day and taught it to me. As a result, I knew how to read before I began pre-school. I remember riding in the car, excitedly reading street signs to my parents, thrilled at cracking the mystery of what those combinations of letters revealed.

My parents bought me children's encyclopedias and I would actually sit in my room reading them like story books. Within a few years I was pulling my parents college books off the shelves and attempting (briefly and unsuccessfully) to teach myself French or Spanish.

It wasn't that I was forced into it; I sought the activity out because I found it inherently rewarding.

Likewise, I loathed organized sports but loved being outside and playing and being physically active. I eventually found my way into the weight room at school. There were no playbooks to memorize, costumes to wear or people with whistles yelling at me. I could structure whatever I did in the gym to suit my own needs and began learning by trial and (lots of) error.

My interests revolved around sports with no strict organization and free form expression, like snowboarding. I trained daily in the weight room, even after football practice. Most people thought that I did this because I wanted the strength to transfer into football or some other organized school sport. I encouraged this misperception because it increased the chances of my getting away with working out as often as I pleased (such as when I should have been in algebra class) but the truth was that I couldn't have cared less about school sports and was interested in lifting weights as an end unto itself.

Nature Turns On Nurture

As a kid, I was physically weak and remarkably skinny. I remember starting my working sets on the bench press with an empty bar because adding ten pounds to either side would have been a one rep max. As an eighth grader, I weighed less than everyone on my football team, including the seventh graders.

I've since spent six years in military special operations, can deadlift just over 500 pounds, have single digit bodyfat and the physical freedom to surf, climb, run, swim or do just about any physical activity I can come up with.

I didn't have "athletic genes" but I had genes that made me want to pursue learning about and practicing strength training and a pretty good variety of adventure sports. I was genetically prone to seek environments and experiences that led me to become athletic. Nature drove nurture, and nurture altered nature.

Since you're reading this and have made it to the end of an article a good deal longer than the typical internet attention span, we probably have something in common in this sense.

Regardless of the physical traits you've drawn in the genetic lottery, your inherent predispositions are leading you to seek information like what's contained in this blog and apply it to your world, creating your own self-directed environmental experiences. If you can find reward and meaning in this process, you have everything it takes to bring your body and physical life to the place you desire.

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Pura Vida Ride - Trips Worth Taking

IF NOT NOW, WHEN?

Very few people should be exercising so they can get better at exercising. The squats, pullups and sprints we do aren't the end goal. They're to strengthen and develop our bodies so that we're free to do the things that bring us meaning in a physical world.

This doesn't mean that we should all be auditioning for Red Bull commercials and spend our weekend jumping a skateboard out of a helicopter into a swimming pool. A physical life exists on a broad continuum and can be expressed through anything from hiking to the top of a cliff in Southern Utah and jumping off it with a parachute to riding a bike to the park with your kids to play tag.

These columns are dispatches on places in the world worth going to at least once. They allowed me experiences that have created little flashbulb memories which I will carry with me for the rest of my life, look back on and think, "that's what it was all for."

PURA VIDA RIDE

When I travel alone, which is most of the time; I often do a bit of research on the place beforehand, write a few notes, email addresses and phone numbers in my little book, and make solid plans going no further than where to stay for the first night.

This process brought me to a small courtyard in San Jose, Costa Rica, trying to decide where I would be by the end of the day for the beginning of a 30-day trip. I had heard of a place on the Northern Pacific Coast with mountain bike rentals and what looked like some really nice singletrack from Nadine Pisani's blog, Happier Than a Billionaire.

I called to make sure that it wasn't raining and confirm that they'd be open, asked for a few ideas on where to stay, picked a hotel more or less at random, reserved a room for the night and started driving.

The first thing that struck me about Pura Vida Ride was that this was not a business run by amateurs on a shoestring budget. The shop was immaculate, with pristine high-end mountain bikes and kayaks on display in the front. This place would exude professionalism anywhere in America. Hidden away in Central American rainforest on a secluded beach, it's even more remarkable.

I chatted with one of the owners, Jake, as he measured out freshly ground espresso beans for the first coffee I'd had in three months and learned at least one of the reasons behind this. Jake is the former CEO of Spyder, and knows more than a little about making a business successful.

The trail system consists of a singletrack loop of over ten kilometers through pristine rainforest, out onto a peninsula overlooking the Pacific Ocean, with a much more extensive network under construction.

I didn't take a camera with me on my first day, wanting to immerse myself in the experience as much as possible without distraction, but still found myself stopping periodically just stand and look in awe at the scenery around me. It was the beginning of the rainy season, which meant that everything was lush and green and that I was the only person on the trail. In two days of riding the only other people I saw on the trail were workers doing maintenance and building new track.

I would carve through dense jungle, past hanging orchids and a rushing creek and then pop around a corner and see the Pacific Ocean glistening below me. The only sounds were the slight breeze, birds calling and my own breathing. How this place is not on the cover of some mountain biking magazine, I have no idea.

Afterward, I ate lunch at Lola's, the restaurant next door, sitting at a carved wooden table overlooking the water. I had been planning on heading South to Nosara the next day for a date with a surfboard, but couldn't bring myself to leave yet. I wanted to do it again. And try the paddleboard.

I came back the next day and rode the trail with my camera, stopping constantly to take pictures. I rolled back in covered in mud, bleeding a little and smiling uncontrollably.

I passed the bike off to Martyn, the co-owner of the shop and he grabbed a stand up paddleboard for me. As we walked it down to the beach he explained to me the best route to take, around the outside of the islands, past the peninsula and into the bay on the other side. Two days before a couple had paddled out past the second island and spent almost an hour watching a whale feeding her calf. Even if I wasn't lucky enough to see one on the surface, he said, if I hopped off the board and held still under the water, I could probably hear them calling to each other.

I paddled for two hours or so, again enjoying being the only human presence on the water and blissfully forgetting myself in a rhythm of paddling and sun. I stopped for a while at the islands, not seeing any whales but diving under the water and hearing for the first time in my life the sound of their singing.

Where:

Pura Vida Ride, Playa Danta, Guanacaste, Costa Rica

Getting there:

Nearest airport: Liberia International Airport (LIR)

Liberia is much closer to the coast and saves you the hassle of navigating the crowded central city of San Jose but typically costs a bit more and often has fewer flight options than the larger Juan Santamaria International airport (SJO). Consider both options.

Guanacaste and the Nicoya Peninsula are pretty remote. There are regular bus schedules, but I recommend renting a car. There are numerous companies available.

A random note here is that hitchhiking is quite common in this part of Costa Rica because people actually trust each other. If you're in a rental car, expect to see a lot of people, both locals and tourists, thumbing for rides along the drive. I use it as a chance to practice Spanish with a new person every half hour or so.

Where to stay:

Hotel Sugar Beach - Located less than five minutes from Pura Vida Ride, this is the closest and most upscale option.

Hotel Brasilito - About fifteen to twenty minutes from Pura Vida Ride, Brasilito is a much less touristy fishing community on the beach. Expect fewer gringos, cheaper beer and plentiful seafood.

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Know Your Salmon

Wild salmon consist of five distinct species. Each of those species has different characteristics for taste, texture, color and nutritional content.

I once spent a summer in Bristol Bay Alaska working with Spearfish's Corey Brost on his salmon fishing crew, and learned to quickly identify each species.

Corey and Fisher Brost

King, or Chinook salmon is the largest, least common and most sought after salmon. It's generally only found in high-end restaurants. It has an incredibly high level of Omega 3 fatty acids and is known for its rich, red flesh and firm texture. They weigh twenty pounds on average but can easily exceed fifty. Their migratory habitat covers a surprising amount of the world, even as far away as Japan, but like all salmon they always return to their home spawning grounds in Alaska, usually after 2-4 years.

Sockeye salmon, also known as red salmon, make up the majority of the fish we caught in Alaska. They weigh about six pounds on average, have a deep red flesh, firm texture and their filets are frequently found in upscale restaurants.

Coho, or silver salmon are commonly found in mid-range restaurants and have a distinctive, visually appealing orange color to their flesh. They are the second largest salmon species, with an average weight of 12 pounds and have the second lowest Omega 3 content.

Keta salmon weigh eight pounds on average, have the lowest Omega 3 content and have pink flesh. They are frequently used for canning.

Pink salmon are the smallest and most abundant of the salmon species. They generally weigh between two and three pounds and have light, rose colored flesh. They have the second highest Omega 3 content but are seldom found in filets because of their small size.

Here is a comparison of the Omega 3 content of each type of salmon. Each number is per 100 gram serving.

King - 1,700 mg

Sockeye - 1,200 mg

Coho - 1,100 mg

Keta - 800 mg

Pink - 1,300 mg

Diets high in Omega 3 fatty acids have been shown to improve mood and cognitive function, decrease systemic inflammation (thus possibly warding of heart disease, asthma, arthritis, macular degeneration, and a host of other diseases or maladies), decrease muscle soreness and inflammation, potentially destroy cancer cells and thwart metastasis, improve cholesterol ratios and levels, and increase insulin sensitivity and metabolism, which is a powerful way to decrease body fat.

If you were to go to the health food store and purchase standard fish oil capsules, they would contain 300 mg per serving of Omega 3's. This means that a tiny, 100 gram (3.5 ounce) serving of Chinook salmon contains almost six times the Omega 3 content of a serving of fish oil capsules from the health food store.

Six times the EPA and DHA of a serving of fish oil caps.

Really, who eats a 3.5 ounce salmon fillet? Restaurants typically serve portions in the 6 ounce range, and the ones I cook at home are usually over half a pound. This means that by eating a decent-sized filet of king salmon, you're getting the equivalent of around a dozen servings of fish oil caps. That's going to have some powerful health benefits. Even with the slightly lower Omega 3 content in a sockeye filet, you'd still be getting 2,400 milligrams of Omega 3's from a seven ounce serving.

Now, what about farm raised salmon? It's cheaper and more common in supermarkets, after all. Farmed salmon has almost none of the unique health benefits of wild salmon.

It's omega 3 content is generally only a tenth of what is found in wild fish. Their densely populated pens and unnatural diet of soy protein, canola oil and corn meal predisposes them to disease and parasites such as sea lice to the extent that some states are considering banning them entirely due to the danger of spreading infections and parasites to native populations. In fact, at least one state has banned them already.

Kade Welfl, Bristol Bay, Alaska, 2009

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Food as Status

Stop buying stupid things.

A common form of objection when it comes to eating healthy food is cost. Recently, eating quality food has been referred to as a form of elitism because it costs more than it does to eat comparable amounts of junk food.

I must clarify here that when I refer to healthy food I mean unprocessed food. Yes, there are hundreds of products and significant shelf space at the Whole Paycheck store dedicated to providing consumers with well-marketed crap like organic toaster pastries and cheesy poofs. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about meat and vegetables. Food.

Even in this context, I frequently hear "That kind of stuff is too expensive. I can't afford to eat like that."

"Expensive compared to what?" is my favorite response. It comes down to a matter of priorities.

From the viewpoint of a calorie to calorie comparison it does cost more to eat healthily than it does to suck down a 49 cent Big Gulp while eating something off the value menu at a drive through. Many people theorize that this is the reason why the best predictor of obesity is income level.

A dollar spent in the aisle in the middle of the grocery store can purchase 1,200 calories worth of cookies, soda and miscellaneous junk, while that same dollar will only purchase 250 calories worth of carrots.

Three points must be considered here.

One: The cookies are going to worsen your physical and eventually emotional health while the carrots would improve it.

Two: We live in a country in which two thirds of adults are overweight, and the children are rapidly catching up. We also have one of the most sedentary populations on the planet. Is under-consumption of calories ever really a problem here?

Three: Cigarette smoking also statistically increases at lower income levels. Obviously this is not for reasons of economically driven logic.

Using a strict calorie comparison to determine the value of a food is nonsensical and a terribly short-term perspective at best. Have you ever stopped to consider the long-term implications of a low-quality diet? How much is diabetes treatment going to cost you in the future? What about buying bigger pants every couple of years? How much would it be worth it to you to be able to play basketball with your future kids without risking a heart attack because your body is so feeble?

It has been estimated that if no one in America were overweight the savings on fuel, medical, food and other combined expenses would be enough to give every U.S. household $4,000.

A recent study demonstrated that obese Americans cost their employers approximately 45 billion dollars per year due to increased medical costs, diminished productivity and increased absenteeism.

Health economists from the Milken Institute estimate that if nobody in this country were obese, the gains in added output from workers would provide a 257 billion dollar boost to the economy.

The national and global economies are fairly abstract, though. Nobody is really going to be motivated by the thought of doing something small to benefit a whole bunch of people that they will never meet unless it's in a traffic jam.

How will your food choices eventually impact you, personally?

The psychological principle of the “Halo Effect” has documented that individuals thought to be more physically attractive are also automatically assumed to be more intelligent, honest and dependable. Often, the first and most prominent trait assessed about a person colors the manner in which all other traits are perceived. Physical appearance is one of the easiest things to quickly perceive in a person, and that perception will affect the way all subsequent perceptions are made. First impressions matter.

Research has shown that people who are not obese are paid higher salaries, are more likely to be married, sleep better, are promoted more often and have better sex lives. That’s right; it actually costs you money and a lot more to be fat.

Next time you're at the grocery store debating between the broccoli and the Doritos, apply some long-term thinking to the puzzle. The only way the junk option is cheaper is if you only consider how it will affect you for the next five minutes.

Does this mean that you're "elitist" because you spend more money up-front for quality food because the long term benefits are greater? No more so than would making sound financial investments or any other form of planning. "Intelligent" is probably a better term.

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Chickens and Airplanes

It's Easy: Don't Fall Down

Take a moment to consider a physical skill that you're good at. Snowboarding, perhaps. Or surfing, riding a bike or even slacklining.

Now, think about what you would say if you had to write down a step by step guide for how to perform that skill.

"How to ride a bike: Step one: Start pedaling. Step two: Don't fall down."

Most motor patterns are stored as unconscious subroutines, or implicit knowledge. We know how to do them, but we don't quite know how we know.

I've been on snowboarding trips in which new people would be along riding for their first time. Naturally, they would ask for members of the group to teach them how to snowboard.

The standard practice is to explain the theory of how the board's edges, sidecut and camber work and how that relates to turning and stopping. After that, one makes sure that the new rider knows how to fall without breaking a wrist or tailbone or getting a concussion and then sets them off on their merry way to spend the day falling down every few seconds.

Acquisition of the skill doesn't involve much teaching. It's more about doing. The brain will learn as long as one provides sufficient repetitions for it to develop the necessary predictive patterns based on proprioceptive stimuli.

The process for teaching someone how to slackline, surf or ride a bike is comparable. The instructor provides the basic theory, such as how to pop up on a board, place one's feet, stand with balance and control the board. From there the trainee has to practice that in real time in order to learn what it feels like to do it wrong and, eventually, to do it right.

With enough reps, what began as shaky, toddler-like attempts at emulating what surfing should look like begets a "click" moment in which suddenly one knows what surfing feels like and for the first time the rider has control over the process of paddling, popping up and riding the board.

The Secret Lives of the Brain

In Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain, David Eagleman describes two examples of implicit knowledge in which people are capable of skills that they can't actually explain: (Note: The Incognito link above is an affiliate link. If you prefer the non-affiliate link, click here.)"

"The best chicken sexers in the world hail from Japan. When chicken hatchlings are born, large commercial hatcheries usually set about dividing them into males and females, and the practice of distinguishing the two genders is known as chick sexing. Sexing is necessary because the two genders receive different feeding programs: one for the females, who will eventually produce eggs, and another for the males, who are typically destined to be disposed of because of their uselessness in the commerce of producing eggs; only a few males are kept and fattened for meat. So the job of the chick sexer is to pick up each hatchling and quickly determine its sex in order to choose the correct bin to put it in. The problem is that the task is famously difficult: male and female chicks look exactly alike.

Well, almost exactly. The Japanese invented a method of sexing chicks known as vent sexing, by which expert chicken sexers could rapidly ascertain the sex of one-day-old hatchlings. Beginning in the 1930s, poultry breeders from around the world traveled to the Zen-Nippon Chick Sexing School in Japan to learn the technique.

The mystery was that no one could explain exactly how it was done. It was somehow based on very subtle visual cues, but the professional sexers could not report what those cues were. Instead, they would look at the chick’s rear (where the vent is) and simply seem to know the correct bin to throw it in.

And this is how the professionals taught the student sexers. The master would stand over the apprentice and watch. The students would pick up a chick, examine its rear, and toss it into one bin or the other. The master would give feedback: yes or no. After weeks on end of this activity, the student’s brain was trained up to masterful—albeit unconscious—levels.

Meanwhile, a similar story was unfolding oceans away. During World War II, under constant threat of bombings, the British had a great need to distinguish incoming aircraft quickly and accurately. Which aircraft were British planes coming home and which were German planes coming to bomb? Several airplane enthusiasts had proved to be excellent “spotters,” so the military eagerly employed their services. These spotters were so valuable that the government quickly tried to enlist more spotters—but they turned out to be rare and difficult to find. The government therefore tasked the spotters with training others. It was a grim attempt. The spotters tried to explain their strategies but failed. No one got it, not even the spotters themselves. Like the chicken sexers, the spotters had little idea how they did what they did—they simply saw the right answer.

With a little ingenuity, the British finally figured out how to successfully train new spotters: by trial-and-error feedback. A novice would hazard a guess and the expert would say yes or no. Eventually the novices became, like their mentors, vessels of the mysterious, ineffable expertise.

There can be a large gap between knowledge and awareness. When we examine skills that are not amenable to introspection, the first surprise is that implicit memory is completely separable from explicit memory: you can damage one without hurting the other. Consider patients with anterograde amnesia, who cannot consciously recall new experiences in their lives. If you spend an afternoon trying to teach them the video game Tetris, they will tell you the next day that they have no recollection of the experience, that they have never seen this video game before, and, most likely, that they have no idea who you are, either. But if you look at their performance on the game the next day, you’ll find that they have improved exactly as much as nonamnesiacs. Implicitly their brains have learned the game—the knowledge is simply not accessible to their consciousness. (Interestingly, if you wake up an amnesic patient during the night after they’ve played Tetris, they’ll report that they were dreaming of colorful falling blocks, but they have no idea why.)

Of course, it’s not just sexers and spotters and amnesiacs who enjoy unconscious learning: essentially everything about your interaction with the world rests on this process. You may have a difficult time putting into words the characteristics of your father’s walk, or the shape of his nose, or the way he laughs—but when you see someone who walks, looks, or laughs like him, you know it immediately."

Just Drive

The most important concept to extract from that excerpt is the simple "yes/no" nature of implicit learning. With minimal guidance and trial and error, people were able to learn seemingly unattainable skills.

Learning, as it turns out, really can be as simple as trying, getting it wrong, and trying again. You don't need to take notes. Your brain is doing it for you. All you have to do is drive.

Think back to the example of the surfer or the snowboarder, bumbling along on their first day. Every rep, every attempt at popping up on the surfboard or carving down the hill on a snowboard provides an avalanche of novel proprioceptive data to the brain. Over time, the brain begins to sort this data out into auto-associative patterns as it learns to tell the difference between "yes" movements and "no" movements.

Perception: The Active Comparison of Sensory Inputs with Internal Predictions

If the body feels X, and you do Y, the result will be Z. Prediction. This is why there are ten times as many fibers going from the visual cortex to the visual thalamus (the pathway by which incoming visual data is directed to conscious awareness) than the other way around. The cognitive portion of the brain puts a substantial amount of effort into predicting what visual data will be coming in via the eyes. Only the information which conflicts with these predictions is fed forward into consciousness.

When this happens and the visual thalamus sends forward information that was not accurately predicted by the cortex, the cortex adjusts and adds this data to the predictive vocabulary so that it can make a more accurate prediction in the future. The rest of the sensorimotor system works similarly.

The yes movements induce forward motion, balance and control. The no movements create that awful feeling of the heel-side edge of a snowboard catching in the snow an instant before the back of one's head slams into the ground, or the frustrating feeling of a board disappearing out from under one's feet and getting swallowed and tumbled by a wave.

Soon, what began as spastic, awkward movements becomes smooth, controlled and efficient motion. Just the right amount of edge necessary to carve the board from one side before transitioning to the other. A quick pop-up onto the surfboard and a nice turn down the shoulder of the wave.

The cortex of the brain has learned a multitude of sensory inputs and ways of adjusting to and reacting to them appropriately. The predictions sent forth are increasingly accurate and conscious effort is decreasingly necessary for performance of the skill. What was once an overwhelmingly foreign and complex task becomes second-nature.

10,000 Hours of Yes/No

Consider the popular meme that expertise in a pursuit takes roughly 10,000 hours of practice. Imagine a surfer, going from day one in the water to ten thousand hours of paddling, popping up and riding later. He or she will have gone through an unimaginable number of tiny variances in sensory input, mistakes and corrections. Just about every possible yes/no situation will have been experienced and added to the predictive vocabulary. The surfer has become an expert.

The simplicity of yes/no implicit learning does not mean that outside input or a coach is unnecessary. Coaches provide valuable insight and shortcuts, saving the trainee thousands of erroneous repetitions, struggling along through countless "no's" in order to begin finding what a "yes" feels like. Blind trial and error is likely to discourage or injure a trainee before he or she makes it far enough along in the process to happen upon correct movement skills.

In the case of the chicken sexers and plane spotters, the only input the coach could provide was yes or no. There were no other variables. This is why "expert" level proficiency at this task was attained in a matter of weeks.

Like This?

In a physical process, the yes or no is often provided by the environment and the proprioceptive inputs which one's brain must learn are substantially more varied. It's not necessary for a snowboarding instructor to tell you that you did it wrong because your face slamming into the snow tells you.

The practitioner, possibly with the guidance of a coach, provides the input (move like this) and the environment produces the yes/no output. Initially, it's a matter of falling or not falling, or the presence or absence of pain in a movement. Sometimes, such as in entry-level Olympic weightlifting, the student may not even know or be able to see whether the movement is being performed perfectly, and the coach is again providing simple yes/no feedback with each rep.

To have an adept coach provide a cue such as "push your hips farther back, neutral spine, weight on your heels and let the weight load your hamstrings as it comes down and back" while learning a kettlebell swing can provide a much more rapid path to the "click" feeling of a yes repetition, when the trainee suddenly realizes, "Oh! That's what it should feel like" than if they were to simply swing away and wait to hit upon something that felt right.

Conclusion

Learning a new skill takes persistence. You have to endure countless no repetitions in order to eventually figure out what it takes to produce a yes and a thousand no's don't necessarily get you any closer to a yes. Seeking guidance from a professional can fast-forward you through the trial and error process and enable you to produce and learn from yes reps much faster than if you were to go it alone.

The fun part of learning a physical skill like surfing, climbing or snowboarding or even working with kettlebells or Olympic lifting is that as long as you keep providing the inputs your brain is doing the learning for you. Every fall, mistake and small success is another lesson. All you really have to do is enjoy the process.

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Signaling and Biases

I Have Wings!

The appeal of a can of Red Bull does not lie in its materials. It did not become popular because it contains 80 milligrams caffeine plus some sugar and amino acids. It took off because the brand was associated with freefalling skydivers, cliff-dropping mountain bikers, weekend loonies launching homemade gliders off a pier and heavy-drinking partiers. Anyone willing to pay three dollars for the tiny can is able to purchase a status symbol associating themselves with these activities and send the message that they might just be on their way to jump out of an airplane on their way to a Hollywood party.

In the book Spent: Sex, Evolution and Human Nature, Geoffrey Miller opens with a question:

"Faced with the unfathomable, we could start by asking some fresh questions. Here's one: Why would the world's most intelligent primate buy a Hummer H1 Alpha sport-utility vehicle for $139,771? It's not a practical mode of transport. It seats only four, needs fifty-one feet in which to turn around, burns a gallon of gas every ten miles, dawdles from 0 to 60 mph in 13.5 seconds, and has poor reliability according to Consumer Reports."

Like a can of Red Bull, people purchase it as much for what they think it says about them as for what it actually is.

Signaling: What Kind of Dining Set Defines Me as a Person?

Further into the book, Miller elaborates on this phenomenon:

"The problem is not that marketing promotes materialism. Quite the opposite. It promotes a narcissistic pseudospiritualism based on subjective pleasure, social status, romance, and lifestyle, as a product's mental associations become more important than its actual physical qualities. This is the whole point of advertising and branding - to create associations between a product and the aspirations of the consumer, so the product seems to be worth more to the consumer than its mere physical form would possibly warrant."

The main character in the book Fight Club is discussing his growing disgust with his own involvement in this process when he says, "I flipped through catalogs and wondered: What kind of dining set defines me as a person?"

This use of brands as a means of self-definition and signaling extends beyond physical goods.

In the fitness world, people use the types of workouts they do, the name of the gym they attend, the style of eating they follow and the specific food they eat to define for themselves who they are and tell the rest of the world about it.

"I'm a kettlebell guy. I'm an Olympic lifter. I'm a Crossfitter. I'm a vegetarian. I eat paleo." These reductionist statements, at least as much as they are descriptions of workouts or eating styles, serve as signaling mechanisms to tell other people how one defines oneself.

Omitting and Embellishing: Self-Serving Propaganda

In The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Steven Pinker writes about an experiment in social psychology:

"...Stillwell and Baumeister controlled the event by writing an ambiguous story in which one college roommate offers to help another with some coursework but reneges for a number of reasons, which leads the student to receive a low grade for the course, change his or her major, and switch to another university. The participants (students themselves) simply had to retell it as accurately as possible in the first person, half of them taking the perspective of the perpetrator and half the perspective of the victim. A third group was asked to retell the story in the third person; the details they provided or omitted serve as a baseline for ordinary distortions of human memory that are unaffected by self-serving biases. The psychologists coded the narratives for missing or embellished details that would make either the perpetrator or the victim look better.

The answer to the question, "Who should we believe?" turned out to be: neither. Compared to the benchmark of the story itself, and to the recall of the disinterested third person narrators, both victims and perpetrators distorted the story to the same extent but in opposite directions, each omitting or embellishing details in a way that made the actions of their character look more reasonable. Remarkably, nothing was at stake in the exercise. Not only had the participants not taken part in the events but they were not asked to sympathize with the character or to justify anyone's behavior, just to read and remember the story from a first person perspective. That was all it took to recruit their cognitive processes to the cause of self-serving propaganda."

From this we know that as soon as we associate ourselves with something we naturally fall into a trap of self-serving bias and will no longer evaluate it objectively. We tell ourselves and others that whatever is associated with us is better than anything it might be compared to and subconsciously deceive ourselves into thinking that this is true.

Arbitrary Group Selection: Boundary Loss and the Need for Dominance

Pinker elaborates on this:

"A part of an individual's identity is melded with the identity of the group that he or she affiliates with. Each group occupies a slot in their minds that is very much like the slot occupied by an individual person, complete with beliefs, desires, and praiseworthy or blameworthy traits... These and other contributions to the group's welfare are psychologically implemented by a partial loss of boundaries between the group and the self...

The dark side of our communal feelings is a desire for our own group to dominate another group, no matter how we feel about its members as individuals. In a set of famous experiments, the psychologists Henri Tajifel told participants that they belonged to one of two groups defined by some trivial difference, such as whether they preferred the paintings of Paul Klee or Wassily Kandinsky. He then gave them an opportunity to distribute money between a member of their group and a member of the other group; the members were identified only by number, and the participants had nothing to gain or lose from their choice. Not only did they allocate more money to their instant groupmates, but they preferred to penalize a member of the other group (for example, seven cents for a fellow Klee fan, one cent for a Kandinsky fan) than to benefit both individuals at the expense of the experimenter (nineteen cents for a fellow Klee fan, twenty-five cents for a Kandinsky fan)..."

Even when we are arbitrarily divided into different groups we will act in ways that favor our own group and even spite the other at no benefit to ourselves, and based on what we know from the previously mentioned study, we will then craft illusory reasons to justify doing so.

Self-Serving Bias: Confirmation Bias, Web 2.0 Filters and Naive Realism

In The Filter Bubble, Eli Parisier discusses an interesting human tendency for self deception called confirmation bias, which is the tendency to believe things that reinforce our existing views and disregard things which conflict with them."Philosophers call this naive realism," Parisier says, "and it is as seductive as it is dangerous. We tend to believe that we have full command of the facts and that the patterns we see in them are facts as well."

Not only do we bias our own intake of outside information to match our pre-existing beliefs, Parisier's book illustrates several disconcerting ways in which the internet mediums we rely on do the same thing for us. A surprising amount of information about you is archived by internet companies (The company Acxiom, for example, has information on 96 percent of American households with data point lists up to 1,500 items long) and is used to filter information based on your preferences.

This means that when you search something on Google what is returned and the ads displayed will not be the same as those displayed to your neighbor who has a different political affiliation, income level or hobby. Likewise, Facebook gradually learns which stories and items you are likely to click, share and spend time reading and preferentially displays similar items to you in the future; preventing you from seeing what may be new information or ideas. The disturbing part of it is that you'll never really know how much you aren't seeing. The most important books in your library are probably the ones you haven't read yet, and in this case, they're being taken off the shelves.

Putting It Together

We now know several interesting facts about human behavior:

- We purchase and associate ourselves with things not only for their actual utility, but because of the messages we want them to signal to others.

- These things can be material goods, groups such as professional sports teams or groups which we are actually involved in like political parties, gyms, people who really like Ipods, practices like veganism or activities like playing lacrosse. (Take a moment to recall all of the bumper stickers you saw on the way to work today)

- These things become a part of our identity and this happens remarkably easily.

- Once it does, we tend to tell ourselves that our groups and the things we associate with (like our Ipods, Red Bull and kettlebells) are chosen for their superiority to other comparable things. This bias prevents us from making truly objective comparisons between the things we attach ourselves to and we feel an unconscious need to promote our own groups and things while minimizing or ignoring others regardless of their actual value.

- This process perpetuates itself due to confirmation bias, Web 2.0 filter biases, and naive realism.

Ultimately, this process leads to arbitrary divisions, a disconcerting closed-mindedness and a stagnation of the flow of useful information.

False Dichotomies

A common culmination of these processes is a reaction called a false dichotomy in response to competing or new information, groups or objects.

A false dichotomy, as defined by Wikipedia, is logical fallacy which involves presenting two opposing views, options or outcomes in such a way that they seem to be the only possibilities: that is, if one is true, the other must be false, or, more typically, if you do not accept one then the other must be accepted. The reality in most cases is that there are many in-between or other alternative options, not just two mutually exclusive ones.

Zero sum means that there is a finite amount of value in a given exchange and that for one side of an equation to gain the other must lose an equal amount. It's the opposite of a "win-win" situation in that in order for one to win, the other must lose. When new information is viewed in the context of a zero sum relationship with an established idea, any value attributed to the new idea is perceived as damaging to the current one.

The two terms are similar and almost interchangeable in many circumstances. Illogical zero-sum precepts tend to drive false dichotomies.

The unfortunate consequence of this is that once a product is associated with one's identity in such a way the self-biasing cascade sets in and new information is kept outside of conscious awareness.

Take for example the common debate between whether one should use Olympic lifting or powerlifting (bench press, squat, deadlift) for athletes.

It's almost always presented in a zero sum pretext as a false dichotomy, with either side citing examples of world class athletes who train using either method.

The reality is that both methods develop different capacities of similar movement patterns (with the exception of bench pressing) and that proficiency in one would not undermine the benefit derived from the other. In fact, they're likely to be mutually beneficial when used appropriately in conjuction. Both methods will be ideal in certain situations, but not others. A truly knowledgeable person is capable of ascertaining how and when either would be most effectively applied and understands the nuances of both.

The Limitations of Exclusionary Either/Or Perspectives

The next time you hear people arguing over things like Olympic lifting versus powerlifting, paleo versus Precision Nutrition or aerobic conditioning versus HIT, break down the actual points being made.

You'll often find it coming down to two sides with opposing self-serving biases, strongly attached to the brand image with which they've chosen to identify and using zero-sum driven false dichotomies to make the case that their sport, eating style or conditioning method is superior and that the merits of the other are barely mentionable.

When things are debated in this exclusionary either/or manner, both sides are restricting themselves to a myopic perspective and ultimately limiting their understanding of their chosen field.

In most cases both sides being discussed will have valuable and unique benefits. Understanding and benefitting from the positive qualities of one does not diminish from the value of another.

That Olympic lifting produces greater gains in rate of force development than powerlifting does not mean that one should never perform another squat to build maximal strength. The fact that properly performed intervals result in higher net fat loss and better glycolytic pathways than aerobic dominant training doesn't mean that one should ignore the aerobic foundation necessary for mitochondrial density, left ventricular hypertrophy and recovery capacity.

In any of those examples, one must surrender the tendency to associate a particular method or group with one's ego and sense of identity in order to best evaluate each one for their respective positive merits and understand how and when each should be implemented.

Only by doing so will we be truly capable of progressing, evolving and sharing useful information with those around us.

(To read and post comments for this entry, visit http://barefootfts.com/)

Two a Days

Playa Guiones

A common request I get is for workout tips while traveling. Many people have a good routine going at home and are able to eat and train consistently in their familiar gyms and in their own kitchen or at the restaurants they know well, but aren't sure what to do once they're away from that.

Physical fitness wasn't meant to be confined to a gym. Very few of the goals one has in a gym setting can't also be attained in the real world, yet most of the meaningful experiences you can have under the sun, in the water or in the mountains can't be replicated anywhere else.

Ultimately, what we do indoors should be a means to facilitate the physical life that we lead outside. You train indoors to build strength, rehab injuries, correct imbalances and develop the capacities that you know you'll need on the other side of that door. It's a portion of what is generally necessary for a happy, healthy, fulfilling life.

It's like the auto body shop where you take your car for maintenance, to get it detailed or to upgrade components. There's not much point if you don't actually take the car out on a real road and see what it can do.

Most of the movements people should be doing in a gym merely imitate what they would be doing if they didn't live in Cleveland in February anyway. It was never meant to be the other way around. Gym life should reflect real life.

Forget about what you would do if you could bring your gym with you and understand that your gym is everywhere. It's a physical life and a physical world.

Get outside and do what your body was meant to do. Swim, surf, run, jump, climb, play.

You don't need a someone with a doctorate to explain to you the subtle nuances and theories of what your body is doing. You don't need to read a book. It will work itself out. Just go.

Same with nutrition. How did we ever go so wrong that people actually need an expert with ten years of education to tell them what to eat for breakfast? Your ancestors weren't out hunting and gathering Pop Tarts and there's a reason you get diabetes when you take up the practice. Do what would come naturally if you weren't living in a cage being fed corn and soy pellets and you'll be fine.

Here's a sample of my "workouts" for two days while traveling through Costa Rica on the Nicoya Peninsula.

Day One
Workout One - AM

Lower Body - Quad Dominant
Energy System and Capacity - Primarily aerobic with periodic maximal effort sprints which are generally short enough in duration to remain in the alactic range. Develop local vascular networks, mitochondrial density and improve cardiac output and left ventricular hypertrophy.
Required Equipment - Kona Kahuna 29'er mountain bike, single track trail.
Method - Ride the entire Pura Vida Ride trail system through the rainforest overlooking the Pacific Ocean.
Duration - Approx 90 minutes.

Workout Two - PM

Upper Body - Back Dominant (horizontal/scapular retraction) and Lumbar Anti-Rotation (abs)
Energy System and Capacity - Primarily aerobic, approximately 20-30 reps per minute at a high force output to develop oxidative capabilities of fast twitch fibers in the upper back musculature and anterior core.
Required Equipment - Stand-up paddleboard, ocean.
Method - Paddle a stand-up board around the furthest island in the bay in front of Pura Vida Ride, pause for several minutes to dive underwater and listen for whales, then paddle around the point into the adjacent bay and return.
Duration - Approx 90 minutes

Day Two
Workout One - AM

Lower Body - Hip Dominant
Energy System and Capacity - Develop high-threshold fast twitch oxidative capacity, primarily in the lower posterior chain. Develop aerobic recovery capacity between maximal effort bouts. Secondarily develop upper body anterior chain (horizontal pushing/scapular protraction) fast twitch oxidative capacity and lumbar spine anti-extension stability.
Required Equipment - Wristwatch (I.e. G Shock) or stopwatch with countdown timer and a beach with enough space for ten second sprint repeats.
Method - Maximal effort barefoot sand sprint for ten seconds. Allow heart rate to recover to below 135 bpm. Perform eight explosive pushups, followed by a twenty second pushup position plank. Allow heart rate to recover to below 135 bpm and repeat for up to 20 reps.
Duration - Approx 45 minutes

Playa Guiones, Nosara Costa Rica. Also a good place for a sprint workout.

Workout Two - PM

Upper Body - Back Dominant
Energy System and Capacity - Develop anaerobic threshold with local emphasis on oxidative capacity of fast and slow twitch fibers in the upper body posterior chain (vertical pull, scapular upward/downward rotation/depression) and shoulders. Improve thoracic spine extension and the ability to maintain high levels of T-spine extension for extended periods during a fatigued state. Secondary emphasis on hip mobility and proprioception.
Required Equipment - Surfboard, ocean.
Method - Find the guys from Nosara Tico Surf School. Rent a board and go along to whichever beach they're heading for that day. Bonus points for sessions at the secret break (4x4 access only) outside of town.
Duration - Until sunset. Approx 90 minutes.

I know it's not always possible.

But it's not always impossible either. And "workouts" like this can be found almost anywhere in the world.

I know there are reasons you've never tried most of the things you sometimes think about late at night when you can't find sleep and start to wonder what else is out there. Those mental forays are pretty easily quashed though. You've got a job, you've got offspring, you've got a mortgage and you need save up for that sweet 52-inch plasma and get your car paid off so you can buy a shinier one.

Stop it. You're going to die soon.

And this will never be as good as what it's trying to simulate.

Go.

(To read and post comments for this entry, visit http://barefootfts.com/)

The Healing Power of Lard

If you've paid much attention to nutrition in the past few years, you'll know that the saturated-fat is-evil-eat-more-wonderbread-food-pyramid lipid hypothesis has been pretty solidly disproven. Yes, there will always be a few diehards clinging to what the USDA taught them in grade school, but not too many people are still convinced that cholesterol and saturated fat will steal your lunch money and say mean things to your mom.

One of my favorite examples of this is a food that has been maligned for decades: Lard.

Lard is the fat, both rendered and unrendered, from pigs. For centuries it was (and still is) a staple ingredient in the cooking of people from a vast array of cultures, none of whom regularly had toddlers with type 2 diabetes.

The highest grade is called leaf lard and is made from the visceral fat surrounding the kidneys and loin of the pig. Leaf lard has little pork flavor and is preferred by bakers because it produces moist, flaky pastries.

The second grade is called fatback and is from a source much like bacon. It's from the subcutaneous fatty layer between the skin and muscle of the pig.

The final grade is made from the soft fat around organs like the small intestine, known as caul fat. It's commonly used as a sausage casing and is a component of several traditional British, Italian and French foods.

Lard is used in much the same way as butter and has been experiencing a recent surge in popularity, particularly with high end restaurants and the paleo community, which in some areas (Europe, mostly) is actually producing a supply shortage.

But why has this product been so disparaged in the past? The very word conjures images of people and activities that are anything but healthy.

A strong factor in the original reason for the replacement of lard with trans fat laden shortening products like Crisco is that the real thing was heavily rationed during World War II and a replacement was needed. Once it was realized that the replacement was cheaper to produce and sell for higher profit margins, the incentives for convincing the public that it was good for them began springing up.

This coincided shortly with (although didn't produce) the beginnings of the lipid hypothesis. Soon, Americans began replacing animal fats in their diet with hydrogenated vegetable oils.

The main reason is lard's saturated fat content. Even with the fallacy that hydrogenated vegetable oils are anything but poison well past, lard is easily dismissed as being too high in saturated fat and inferior to oils like the champion of heart health: olive oil.

The thing is that lard, as well as just about any other animal fat, isn't much different from olive oil when it comes to its nutritional profile.

Here's a fantastic explanation of why this is, from the blog of Mary Dan Eades:

"Now let’s compare lard to that darling of the disciples of the Mediterranean diet: olive oil. Olive oil contains 71% oleic acid, that heart-healthy, monounsaturated fat that we’re supposed to get more of. Lard contains 44% oleic acid, which is more than sesame oil (41%) and double or nearly so the amount in corn oil (28%) walnut oil (28%), and flaxseed oil (21%), more than double the amount in cottonseed oil (19%) and sunflower oil (19%), and nearly triple that in grapeseed oil (15%) and safflower oil (13%). The oleic acid content of lard also exceeds that in beef tallow (43%), butterfat (29%), and human butterfat (ie the fat of breast milk at 35%).

Lard also contains a fair amount (14%) of the 18-carbon saturated fat, stearic acid, which has been shown in clinical testing to lower cholesterol. Important, of course, only if that’s actually a valid cardiovascular health parameter when it’s all said and done, which is looking more and more doubtful with each passing day. Certainly there are many who still think it so. Consumers spend an annual $14.8 billion on statins in an effort to lower cholesterol–a sad commentary, when stearic acid is a whole lot cheaper and safer.

Like olive oil, lard contains 10% of the omega-6 fatty acid linoleic acid, again, roughly the same as human butterfat (breast milk) at 9%.

Lard contains 2% myristic acid, a 14-carbon saturated fat that has been shown to have important immune enhancing properties. Human butterfat contains about 8% myristic acid, as a booster for the newly minted and incompetent infant immune system. Other animal milk fats also contain a fair amount. By comparison with the exception of cottonseed oil (1%) and the tropical oils, coconut oil (18%) and and palm kernal oil (16%) vegetable oils have zero.

The big bugaboo with lard, then, must come from the last component of its composition: palmitic acid a 16-carbon saturated fatty acid that is believed by some to be Beelzebub, Barlow, and the Bermuda Triangle all rolled into one. Lard contains 26% of the stuff and olive oil only 13%. Aha! There it is. The smoking gun! That must be what makes lard so bad and olive oil so good!

There’s one fly in that explanatory ointment, however: human butterfat contains 25% palmitic acid, just a silly 1% different from lard. Are we to believe that nature would have designed a food for human infants that contained too much?

So let’s now compare lard’s basic fatty acid composition to the real gold standard, the butterfat of human breast milk and see how it stacks up.

                   Saturated    Monounsaturated           Polyunsaturated
Breast Milk 48%            35%                      10%
Lard            42%            44%                      10%

Note: the numbers don’t add up to 100% because of rounding and other small constituents not listed in the fats and oils of common edible foods table. That said, however, even if all the unreported 7% of the composition of breast milk were monounsaturated fat and all unreported 4% of the lard were saturated fat, the composition of lard would still be less saturated and contain more monounsaturates than human breast milk.

Now tell me again why lard is bad for our health."

A less scienc-ey, yet highly apt illustration of the same concept comes from the book Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes:

"The observation that monounsaturated fats both lower LDL cholesterol and raise HDL also came with an ironic twist: the principal fat in red meat, eggs, and bacon is not saturated fat, but the very same monounsaturated fat as in olive oil. The implications are almost impossible to believe after three decades of public-health recommendations suggesting that any red meat consumed should at least be lean, with any excess fat removed.

Consider a porterhouse steak with a quarter-inch layer of fat. After broiling, this steak will reduce to almost equal parts fat and protein. Fifty-one percent of the fat is monounsaturated, of which 90 percent is oleic acid. Saturated fat constitutes 45 percent of the total fat, but a third of that is stearic acid, which will increase HDL cholesterol while having no effect on LDL (Stearic acid is metabolized in the body to oleic acid, according to Grundy's research.) The remaining 4 percent of the fat is polyunsaturated, which lowers LDL cholesterol but has no meaningful effect on HDL. In sum, perhaps as much as 70 percent of the fat content of a porterhouse steak will improve the relative levels of LDL and HDL cholesterol, compared with what they would be if carbohydrates such as bread, potatoes, or pasta were consumed. The remaining 30 percent will raise LDL cholesterol but will also raise HDL cholesterol and will have an insignificant effect, if any, on the ratio of total cholesterol to HDL. All of this suggests that eating a porterhouse steak in lieu of bread or potatoes would actually reduce heart-disease risk, although virtually no nutritional will say so publicly. The same is true for lard and bacon."

Remember to keep that quote handy the next time someone tries to guilt trip you about your impending coronary disaster because you're enjoying a grilled ribeye with veggies.

The best place to find quality lard is likely from your local butcher. With any animal fat product you need to be careful about quality because fat is a repository for a wide array of toxins like heavy metals, pesticides and antibiotic residues. Play it safe by requesting organic, naturally produced lard.

If you opt to purchase it in the grocery store, make sure you know where it's coming from and avoid the containers of it that you'll find sitting on the shelf alongside things like Crisco. Industrially produced lard goes through heavy processing and is bleached and hydrogenated, destroying much of its nutritional value.

Don't buy this kind.

(To read and post comments for this entry, visit http://barefootfts.com/)

Implicit Knowledge

Translating subconscious skill into conscious action

A substantial portion of the knowledge one acquires over the course of a lifetime is implicit, meaning that is stored and recalled subconsciously.

This includes most motor patterns used throughout the spectrum of physical activities, from pedaling a bicycle to shooting a basketball.

In his book, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain, David Eagleman gives several great examples of implicit skills used in our daily lives.

Try this one: Hold your hands up as if you are grasping a steering wheel, driving your car. Imagine that you are on the highway in the left lane and are merging one lane over to the right. Make the necessary movements with your hands as you picture it. Have a friend observe you to help verify what you do.

This is a simple task and one which you perform repeatedly almost every day. And most likely, you just did it wrong.

Most people, when asked to do this drill, will move their imaginary steering wheel about a quarter turn to the right, and then return it back to the center.

If you think about this carefully, this action would actually result in driving the car off the right side of the road. In order to turn into the adjacent lane and then straighten back out and continue moving down the highway, you would have to turn the wheel to the right, and then turn it back an equal distance to the left before centering it.

You can flawlessly perform this skill without conscious thought - and only without conscious thought - easily, and yet when asked to demonstrate it consciously, you're incapable of doing so. You know how to do it, but you can't explain how you do it.

This is why being a good athlete doesn't necessarily make someone a good coach. Performing a barbell snatch, swimming or running a competitive 40 yard dash are arguably more complicated skills than changing lanes in a car without careening off the road and they are also stored largely in the form of implicit knowledge.

This means that a good coach must be capable of "translating" his or her implicit knowledge into explicit, actionable steps and instructions. Being capable of doing something is a different matter entirely than being capable of explaining how to do it.

The job of a coach is to break down "simple" movements into easily understood steps before the athlete performs them. This way, via both proprioceptive feedback and input from the coach, the athlete's brain tags the action in a yes/no manner and slowly builds the necessary prediction software to perform the action in the future with increasing reliability.

This is how we develop skills that we "just know" when it comes time to recall them in the future.

In the imaginary car drill, the environment is too lacking in the abundant flow of visual, auditory and proprioceptive data for your mind to make accurate subconscious predictions and you're left with surprisingly ineffective conscious thought as your guide.

You can probably type your name on a keyboard quickly without looking at the keys, but if someone were to draw a blank keyboard and ask you to write the correct letters onto each key to spell your name without putting your hands into the typing position you would be almost certainly incapable of it.

Brazilian Jiu Jitsu is one of my favorite examples of this type of knowledge. In most BJJ schools, there is a constant demonstration and feedback dialog occurring between the instructor and the trainees, as well as between the trainees themselves as they work through the sessions.

Commonly, if one is grappling with a partner and they need clarification on the performance of a move, one will stop and walk his partner through the process. This is interesting to watch, because even experienced grapplers explaining basic moves will often have to physically act out the drill because they can't verbalize each step of the action without physically doing it at the same time.

This is a distinction between a good coach and a trainee who is simply showing his buddy how to do an armbar better. The trainee will have to physically act out the process, while the coach who is much more adept at translating the implicitly stored language of that skill into verbal, conscious instructions will be able to stand over two grapplers and walk one of them through the process without moving.

(To read and post comments for this entry, visit http://barefootfts.com/)

Self Herding

"Such as are your habitual thoughts, such also will be the character of your mind; for the soul is dyed by the thoughts." - Marcus Aurelius

In The Upside of Irrationality, Dan Ariely talks about a concept called self herding.

Herding refers to the tendency to act based on the behavior of other people whom we don't know well. Self herding is when rather than doing what a bunch of other people in a public place are doing, we refer to our actions in the past for subconscious guidance.

In a chapter titled, The Long Term Effects of Short Term Emotions, Ariely provides the following example:

"Imagine that something happens that makes you feel happy and generous - say, your favorite team wins the World Series. That night you are having dinner at your mother-in-law's and, while in this great mood, impulsively decide to buy her flowers. A month later, the emotion of the big win has faded away and so has the cash in your wallet. It is time for another visit to your mother-in-law. You think about how a good son-in-law should act. You consult your memory, and you remember your wonderful flower-buying act from your last visit, so you repeat it. You then repeat the ritual over and over until it becomes a habit (and in general this is not a bad habit to fall into). Even though the underlying reason for your initial action (excitement over the game) is no longer present, you take your past actions as an indication of what you should do next and the kind of son-in-law you are (the kind who buys his mother-in-law flowers). That way, the effects of the initial emotion end up influencing a long string of decisions."

The Emotional Cascade

Ariely and his colleague Eduardo Andrade refer to this tendency for transient emotions to affect long term decision making as the emotional cascade.

It's unsettling to consider how many of our inalterable past decisions were likely affected by passing emotions. Even more disturbing is to consider how many of our current and future choices are influenced by feelings we don't even remember.

Andrade and Ariely wanted to test the potential for the emotional cascade to induce self herding behavior.

The Ultimatum Game

To do this, they used a game known as The Ultimatum Game. In this game, two individuals are paired up and a fixed amount of money, say twenty dollars, is given to them to be shared. The catch is that the money is given to the first person who gets to decide how it will be split. The second person chooses whether the deal is acceptable and either accepts the amount shared by the first person or decides that they both get nothing.

Rationally, the second person is getting free money no matter how much the first person keeps, so it would make economic sense for him to accept any offer presented rather than walk away empty handed just to punish the first person for being selfish. Humans have an inherent sense of fairness though, and it's been found that most people given twenty dollars will keep about twelve and give the remaining eight to the person receiving the money. If the sender keeps more than that, it becomes increasingly likely that the receiver will choose for them to both get nothing.

Irritated or Happy?

In order to determine the effects of emotional state on this decision making process, the subjects were split into two groups. The first group was made to watch a short clip from the movie Life as a House in which a man is unfairly fired from his twenty year job as an architect by his asshole boss. The man is incensed and uses a bat to smash a series of intricate model homes he had built for his former company.

After watching this video, the subjects were asked to write several paragraphs about a time in their lives in which they had felt similarly.

The second group watched a clip from the sitcom Friends in which a group of cheerful cohorts comically solve a variety of interpersonal dilemmas and everything works out nicely.

In this version of the game, the subjects were to split ten dollars. Unbeknownst to them, the person deciding the amount to be shared, the sender, was one of the researchers and he always chose to keep $7.50 and give the subjects $2.50.

Predictably, the subjects who had watched the Life as a House clip and been asked to recall an emotionally vengeful state were much more likely to reject the offer than those who had been primed for happiness and goodwill.

Next, the subjects were given sufficient time for their emotions to return to baseline, tested to confirm this, and asked to play the game again.

Despite the absence of an emotional component, the subjects continued making choices in line with what they had done previously under the influence of either hostile or happy feelings. The group that had been irritated by the Life as a House clip was substantially more likely to continue turning down unfair offers.

General vs. Specific Herding

Self herding can manifest in either general or specific manners.

Specific herding is when a past decision is referenced when repeating a near-identical scenario, such as being the same player in an ultimatum game.

General herding is when past behavior is used as a reference for a wider range of circumstances. The example that Ariely gives is, "I gave money to a beggar on the street, so I must be a caring guy; I should start volunteering in a soup kitchen."

In order to determine if a small emotional trigger was enough to also influence general herding behavior, the experiment was continued with some changes. This time, the subjects were asked to play the game in the role of the sender; the person who decides how much money is offered to the second person.

If the emotional cascade here were limited to specific herding, then this new situation would be unaffected by past emotional states because the subjects were in unfamiliar roles. They would be unable to just do what they did previously, because there was no precedent.

If general herding were in play though, the individuals would be more likely to recall their emotionally driven decision and base their division of the money on that basis.

For example, the irritated group of people would recall that they were likely to reject low offers and assume that someone else in their position would do the same. The people in the agreeable Friends-watching group would recall that they had amicably accepted low offers and assume that other people would follow similar patterns.

As it turned, this held true. The people who had been irritated in the past experiment made offers substantially more fair than those who had been in the happy group. The people in the happy group had misattributed their past responses to the nature of the offer instead of the affect of their emotions and had flawed expectations of others who were now in their position. They ended up getting most of their offers unexpectedly rejected.

This series of experiments illustrates that general self herding is most likely playing a significant role in our lives. The decisions we make not only affect us in the moment, they can also have far-reaching consequences on our behavior in the future.

Quit Tomorrow

In SOF selection we used to have a saying: "Finish out today and quit tomorrow."

Selection is essentially a period of months or weeks in which a large group of people are tormented until most of them quit and what remains is a much smaller group of people with an inordinately high tolerance for being f**ked with.

It was incredibly tempting to tell yourself that the run was too far, the water was too cold or you just couldn't do another pushup. Many days you would want nothing more than to make it stop. One of the ways we coped with this was to promise ourselves and each other that we would never quit in the middle of an evolution. If we did, it would be at the end of the day once it was all over and the intensity of the moment had passed.

What happened for most guys is that they would look back on the evolution that made them want to quit, realize that it wasn't really that bad and be damn glad that they had waited to make a permanent decision.

Did you just start eating paleo and give up pasta, bread and cookies? Here's some news: It's going to suck, and there is nothing you can really do about that until your body adapts.

You're going to have moments of weakness in which you want nothing more than to eat a bagel slathered in cream cheese. Doing this once over the course of your first month won't really set you back too much and your mind is remarkably adept at coming up with reasons to justify any action. Maybe you had a bad day at work, you're in too much of a hurry to cook anything or it's a special occasion.

We know, however, that this one decision will not stand on its own. Each one is laying neural groundwork that will bias future decisions and eventually you are the summary of your habits.

My advice for when you want to give up and crack for just this one meal? Quit tomorrow. Eat what you know you need to today and if you're still craving a pop tart tomorrow you can have it then.

Most likely tomorrow will come, you'll feel just a little bit healthier, a little less dependent on sugar and you'll have strengthened your self herding tendency towards good decisions, making the next temptation just a little less imposing. You may still kind of want that bowl of chocolate frosted sugar bombs, but you can always eat it tomorrow.

Same thing in the gym. In the middle of a horrible set of high rep squats, you're going to want to come up with any reason to stop early. Don't. You can quit the entire workout once that set is over, but finish that one set. Once it's over, you'll probably find that you have it in you to finish another.

With conscious control, you can affect your actions today and establish the habits which you'll rely on in the future.

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