What we have to understand is that complex problems are never going to be the sum of its parts. Meaning that if we worked backwards from the end, and break down into individual segments, they will never be able to fit perfectly back together at the end. Establishing a working knowledge of everything we do works under the premise of being categorized as chaotic. This practically means that nothing has an absolute answer. Which makes training decisions hard to make. 

In a lot of ways we have built our entire existence as an industry of polarizing statements. ‘All you have to do is get strong’, ‘Train slow, be slow’, or my favorite ‘Only an idiot would think that’. What I have come to realize is that although these phrases are nice, they make the world in this convenient binary place. Unfortunately, the world is not black and white, it’s mostly gray and very rarely close to black or white. Again, nothing is as simple as we want it.

I want to examine the idea of saying all or nothing statements. It makes complex problems seem simple. Confidence in spite of ignorance is intoxicating for the person that just wants an answer. Either the person with incredible confidence saying that all you need is X is ignorant (not knowing) or negligent (knowing, but choosing to not tell the truth). People come to experts or perceived experts looking for answers. The more definitive that answer, the more they will believe that expert. That does not solve the issue of saying things out of term that are not helpful to the person that needs help.

This is the paradox we are all facing everyday. We need athletes and clients, they need guidance, it is a perfect marriage. But imagine when that person that has thrown their hands up and said I can’t do it anymore, this all so confusing and hard to understand, goes to that expert only to get the answer ‘well it depends.’ Its devastating. We never want to let someone down in need of help. In actuality we are not lying, we could be true or least partially true. Living in a world of absolute statements is simply easier.

The result of this dynamic is a world of zero follow through. The fitness industry is filled with concepts that have awful compliance and low retention rate. Why this is relevant is because someone invests money into their health and does not finish the intervention, we cannot tell the quality of the intervention or claim. A gym can therefore guarantee something, because the likelihood of the person finishing is almost zero. So having these absolute statements of full proof plans is completly based on the fact that we cannot check if that is true, all the subjects are not complying nor finishing.

On the other hand we see this with less voluntary situations like team settings. A S&C coach can latch onto a philosophy and say that what they do is the panacea. They can do this because they can manipulate the outcome measures. Testing training outcomes and not connecting that to overall performance outcomes is somewhat manipulative. Think about saying you did your job of improving performance and testing something regardless if was unrelated. If we improve in areas related to what we are training, but that improvement does not impact sport performance or someone’s direct goals – it is therefore ineffective. But we did improve, just in an irrelevant way.

We will be better at what we repeatedly do. This does not mean we are better. The term ‘confusing activity with accomplishment’ is really important. We were busy, we worked hard, but we in a sense may have wasted a ton of time. Saying all you need is this and only testing for that is not the same as making someone better overall or directly related to their performance. It just means we are better at something that a S&C coach may value. 

I say all this knowing damn well I use polarizing statements. I am not a hypocrite, I just use the disclaimer ‘results may vary.’ I can say what I am doing will be incredibly effective directly related to this metric. That metric may have a connection to what you are looking for. We have to test to see if that hypothesis was true. Because regardless of taking this cerebral approach of anti-reductionism, we still need to actually do something. Everything we do is just an educated guess, the difference is was that actually educated actually tested against itself or not?