What happens when you make the right decisions, do the right things, and your problem only gets worse?
Here’s two examples from the fitness world.
Example 1:
You’ve got a friend who started a diet a few months back. He got good results at first, dropping a good chunk of flab off his belly.
But now he’s hit a plateau.
Plateaus can be busted the hard way. Cut out more calories, add a few extra cardio sessions, or both.
Trouble is, he’s done all that already. His calories are bottomed out. If he drops any more he’s risking real starvation. Plus he’s already training every day, so there’s an upper limit to that angle too.
His mindset is, do more, and do it harder.
He’s doing exactly what he shouldn’t do, and if he doesn’t stop, he’s going to pay for it.
But what else can he do? If he bumps calories and trains less, he’ll put the weight back on.
Example 2:
A friend has gone through a modest strength and bulking phase.
She’s added some decent size and bumped her lifts in the process.
But she’s hit a plateau.
One way to bust a plateau is to boost the calories and add more volume to the weight sessions.
Thing is, she’s already adding more fat than she wants, and she’s looking at hour-and-a-half workout sessions as it is. There’s only so many calories she can add and so many hours in a week to lift.
What else can she do? If she cuts back calories and training, she’ll lose strength and muscle.
Can you spot the common thread in both of these examples?
Here’s my answer:
Both of them are pushing harder on what worked, past tense, to bring them where they are.
They found a pattern that worked, and made real changes in their bodies. Fantastic.
Now that it stopped working, they don’t know what to do. So they do what feels natural for fitness people: double down and do it twice as hard.
Which is precisely 180 degrees opposite of what they need.
What’s the mistake?
They’re both treating symptoms that they can see and measure.
All their attention is on the numbers that show up in their weekly spreadsheets. Body weight, body fat percentage, calories eaten, weight on the bar, volume, total reps, and so forth.
They’re tracking their metrics like a good bio-hacker optimizing his health.
They aren’t giving a single thought to what is causing these results.
Your body works by principles that are counter-intuitive to a micro-management mindset.
The more push to optimize the parts, the worse the overall outcomes.
Both our example friends are making perfectly rational decisions based on the numbers.
But they’re deciding from incomplete information. The numbers don’t give them the bigger picture, which makes their entirely rational choices work against their purposes.
The decision-theory people call this “bounded rationality”. Humans make choices with imperfect and incomplete information.
When we get stuck into that One Important Number, we make decisions that make the number go up.
Your body, meanwhile, gives not a single eff about your pretty numbers.
It responds to what you throw at it, gets good at handling that level of “threat”, and then it taps the brakes.
You press harder and get worse results because your body’s not playing that game anymore.
What really happens inside you looks more like the swing of a pendulum. Back and forth, up and down, moving like a wave.
Your One Important Number only shows you the line going up and to the right.
What your dieting friend should do is eat more food and cut back on his training for a week or 10 days.
What your lifting friend should do is cut back on her volume and intensity for a couple of weeks and dial back on her calories.
The same works in reverse, by the way. When Mike Mentzer and Arthur Jones came out against crazy bodybuilder volume in the 1970s, they had an excellent point. Most people are training with too much volume, too often, and for far too long.
The catch is that you can make a stupid move in the opposite direction by cutting back to training once every 14 to 21 days.
The fallacy of One Important Number works either way, with too much or too little.
Oftentimes the best move, not the rational move but the best move, is instead of slamming the accelerator even harder, take your foot off the pedal.
Instead of going to an extreme and then tripling down… relax and move the other direction.
Here’s the bigger lesson:
Rationality without perspective is another kind of stupidity.
Instead of optimizing your spreadsheets, look and see what is really happening.
Work with your body instead of trying to force nature to make water flow up a hill.
Got a question? Email subscribers can reply to me, or drop it over in this week’s Q&A thread.
Matt Perryman