2016-12-27
Michael Lewis’ 9 rules for storytelling.
Michael Lewis’ 9 rules for storytelling.
With the year coming to a close, many people are starting to think about new year's resolutions. If 2017 aligns with decades of years previously researched, 'getting in shape' is likely to remain high on those resolution lists.
The fact that the same resolution tends to crop up, year after year, points to an ugly truth: the vast majority of people fall short of their annual get-in-shape goal. There are lot of reasons why they do, and I’ll try to look at a few of them in the days and weeks to come. But one problem that’s increasingly prevalent is that most people focus on ‘working out’ in stead of on ‘training.’
Training is something you do to achieve a specific performance goal or a physiological adaptation. To train, you start with that goal or adaptation in mind, then work backwards to construct a carefully-designed, science-backed plan that will take you, step by step, to where you want to end up.
Whereas working out is an end in and of itself, something you do regularly with a vague sense that it will get you to a nebulously-defined better place. And because you’re not clear on your plan, nor on metrics that will let you measure the effectiveness of your efforts along the way, you default to more subjective evaluations of your gym session. Did it seem super hard? Where you lying on the ground after in a pool of sweat? Are you painfully sore for days to come?
All of those seem like reasonable heuristics. If you’re sore, then certainly the workout did something. And if you toss your cookies midway through, then clearly the workout must have pushed you to the max.
But, in fact, neither of those are reliable signposts. Your sore muscles (or DOMS – delayed onset muscle soreness) simply mean you exceeded your current capacity for safe eccentric contraction. Your mid-workout cookie toss? Just a sign that you built up lactic acid systemically faster than your body could flush it out. Neither necessarily means your fitness level is improving. And it’s perfectly possible to get fitter, faster, without doing either one.
Elite coaches refer to this kind of pointless destruction as ‘monkey stomping’ their trainees. And, indeed, a lot of the GloboGym personal trainers I see seem to design workouts specifically to hit that sort of monkey stomp, knowing that clients want to feel like they left it all in the gym, are more likely to come back for a second session if they just got pushed to their limits in their first. CrossFitters, SoulCyclers, Barry’s Bootcampers, and others thrive on the monkey-stomped feeling. It’s the unspoken core selling point of most group exercise classes: we can kick your ass harder than anyone else.
But, it turns out, getting monkey stomped repeatedly is pretty unpleasant. And once the start-of-year drive towards righteous self-flagellation peters out, people tend to abandon those sorts of ‘take it to 11’ approaches in droves. Whereas people following an actual training approach, who don’t hate every single session, who can start to see meaningful progress from checkpoint to checkpoint and milestone to milestone, tend to increasingly build their commitment over the course of time, intrinsically motivated to further cement the training habit.
So, in short, if your plan for 2017 involves getting into shape, consider searching out professional advice from someone who can help you figure out a training plan rather than just a series of workouts. Ask them what the big picture of their approach for you would be, and how you’ll know if an individual session is pushing you forward. If they can’t answer that – or, worse, if their answer involves some variation of the monkey stomp – then turn and run (or, depending on Thanksgiving-to-Christmas binge eating, waddle) the other way. Make 2017 the year you cross ‘get in shape’ off your resolutions list for good.
[Obligatory deeply self-interested plug: after a bit of scaling up, Composite now has room for a handful of new clients, in NYC and elsewhere; shoot me an email if you’d like our take on what training – rather than just workout out – could mean for you.]
Another great, accessible tech talk from Maciej Ceglowski, this one on the future of AI.
This would have saved me a ton of headache: Gust Launch provides single-point legal, accounting, and financial set-up for startups.
“Life can be much broader, once you discover one simple fact, and that is that everything around you that you call ‘life’ was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.”
— Steve Jobs
When I was a kid, I was obsessed with the He-Man and the Masters of the Universe cartoon. I had nearly all of the action figures, as well as a plastic Castle Grayskull. My best friend Phillip, conversely, had Skeletor's Lair, and our parents would often kindly help us drag those back and forth whenever we went to each other's houses to play.
At that point in the early 1980's, He-Man figures were about as stereotypically 'boy' as toys got – enough so that He-Man creator Filmation subsequently spun out the parallel She-Ra: Princess of Power to drive similar sales of toys to little girls.
Some of my other toy choices – from GI Joes to Tonka trucks and Matchbox cars – were similarly gendered. Yet I also often carried them around the house in my mother's old patent-leather purse, perhaps a bit less of a gender-normative choice. As my parents were good Baby Boomer Bay Area liberals, they did everything they could to avoid reinforcing sexist or gendered ideas about toys, or careers, or anything else.
Thirty-some years later, it seems that concern has spread well beyond the Palo Alto "quiche & Volvo" set. I see most of my parent friends around the country – and, indeed, even my own brother a few blocks away from me with his 18-month-old son Dylan – similarly trying to be thoughtful about the potentially sexist messages they send to their children. (You can spot a similar national-level concern in the plot of the last half-dozen Disney films: “the princess doesn't need to wait for a prince to rescue her; she can rescue herself!”) Yet, unavoidably, nearly all of those kids seem to eventually begin to steer themselves towards certain stereotypical toy-sets nonetheless.
Obviously, there's a large role for culture here – and even for the messages parents unconsciously send to their children. But there is, at the same time, a reasonable 'nature plus nurture' question: are there ways in which some aspects of things like gendered toy-choice might be more deeply biologically engrained?
I was thinking about that recently, in the holiday toy-buying run-up, and was therefore glad to discover two great studies in the world of our close primate relatives.
First, in 2009, a research team led by Janice Hassett of the Yerkes National Primate Center at Emory reported on experiments in which they followed toy preferences in a group of 34 juvenile rhesus monkeys. One by one, they let the monkeys go into an outdoor play area that had both a “masculine” toy (eg., a truck, a car, a construction vehicle) and a “feminine” toy (eg., a Raggedy-Ann doll, a koala bear hand puppet, a teddy bear), and camera-tracked the behaviors exhibited.
Long story short, the monkeys closely paralleled human children, with male rhesus monkeys clearly preferring wheeled toys over plush toys (using them more frequently, and for longer duration), and with female rhesus monkeys spending more time with the plush toys (though also, like human girls, spending substantial time with the wheeled ones; research has long shown girls are more open to ‘cross-gender’ toys than boys are).
Hassett’s team concludes there appear to be “hormonally organized preferences for specific activities that shape preference for toys.”
That lines up well with a parallel paper from Sonya Kahlenberg of Bates and Richard Wrangham of Harvard, which followed the Kanyawara chimpanzee community in Uganda for 14 years, cataloguing how they interacted with play objects. They observed that juvenile female chimps would carry around small sticks for hours at a time while they engaged in other daily activities (like eating, sleeping, and walking) in a manager suggestive of rudimentary doll play. While the same chimps used sticks as tools for specific purposes, the researchers were unable to discern any practical reason for the doll-stick carrying.
Ultimately, and after observing a bunch of related behavioral changes (i.e., females stopped stick-carrying when they had real babies), they concluded that “sex differences in stick-carrying are related to a greater female interest in infant care, with stick-carrying being a form of play-mothering (i.e. carrying sticks like mother chimpanzees carrying infants).”
So, there you go. As with any other topic involving gender, genetic disposition, etc., this one’s fraught with caveats, dangers in over-generalization, etc.
But, if nothing else, I do feel a little less guilty about buying Dylan an awesome Chanukah-gift truck set.
(Though, if they can find it somewhere in a box in their garage, I’d also suggest my parents dig out that old purse. It would be totally perfect for carrying around those trucks.)
“Art should be like a holiday: something to give a man the opportunity to see things differently and to change his point of view.” – Paul Klee
Exercise is great for your health, but (at least by itself) it’s a terrible way to lose weight.