We already know everything we need to know.

Luckily, we already know everything we need to know. I mean this both as individuals and as a society. We know what’s important to us, what we value and what brings us joy. We probably don’t need anymore data, or studies or tips or life hacks. In fact we probably have too much information already, and that’s the problem.

Part 1: People.

‘I have led a toothless life,’ he thought. ‘A toothless life. I have never bitten into anything. I was waiting. I was reserving myself for later on — and I have just noticed that my teeth have gone.’
-Jean-Paul Sartre, The Age of Reason

I was speaking with Dr. Rachel Kent (AKA Dr Digital - podcast coming soon) last week and she said one of the tragedies about having all this information and data tracking is that we stop trusting our own bodies.

I think the messaging around health and fitness promotes this loss of agency. I see this all the time; people who are capable and confident in most contexts of their life, suddenly feel helpless the moment they engage in formalised exercise. Women who sling heavy bags of potting soil over their shoulders or move tonnes of earth with a wheelbarrow will emotionally crumple when they’re shown an 8 kg kettlebell. There is something about the way exercise is promoted that robs people of their sense of self efficacy. Maybe the entire concept of exercise is to blame.

This strikes me every time I go online and see any claims about exercise. I first started studying sport science some 20 years ago and I was told to read Mel Siff’s Super Training and Zatsiorsky’s Science and Practice of Strength Training. Both books first came out in the early 90s and they pretty much cover everything we know about exercise science.

Sure, new studies come out with updated models and more precise measurements, but the shape is the same. We're mostly filling out details; finding more data points to confirm what we’ve known for generations. It’s not wildly exciting to say that all the new headlines and studies largely exist just to confirm what we’d figured out 30-40 years ago. It’s highly unlikely that some new study is going to come out next week to upend everything we thought we knew about how our bodies adapt to movement. And whatever small differences we observe in optimal training protocols applied to elite athletes have almost no bearing on 99% of the population.

I’m not dismissing new research, but pretty much any serious paper that comes out is more or less strengthening the overall narrative. Movement is good for you.

Follow some form of graded exposure and progressive overload. Balance out the stimulus with recovery. Our bodies will specifically adapt to whatever demands we impose upon them as long as we take our time.

That means if you have the opportunity to move heavy objects you will get better at moving heavy objects.

If you put in time moving quickly over long distances, you will get better at moving quickly over long distances.

If you do yoga, you get better at yoga.

Take rest if your body needs it.

Progress doesn’t happen linearly, but it will happen over time.

The problem arises when people need to spin new angles off what we already know. Influencers require content and hot takes. There will never be enough studies or enough evidence or enough data, because that’s not the issue. It’s not that people are following old studies and doing things less than optimal. It’s that there is something about the structure of our lives that isn’t affording us the opportunities to move and use our bodies. All this extra information just adds layers of hesitation and anxiety that we’re not doing the right thing, or we’re not doing enough of it, or we’re doing it incorrectly.

And the fitness industry just adds to this noise. Influencers need to convince you that you’re not capable of moving on your own or that you’re missing the right tools or supplement or secret knowledge and if you just wait for the right article or perfect hack or new technology then your life will somehow change.

That’s the problem with modern life, the signal to noise ratio is already too high. Stacking more obligations or caveats is not going to help. 

There’s a lie behind all this.

Nobody actually knows what’s best for you.

They’re just guessing.

All those studies and meta analyses just point us in the same general direction of what we knew 40+ years ago. The problem is when we attach numbers to things, quantify things, and talk with a certain amount of specificity or certainty that we don’t actually have.

When a study says we need to lift at 85% of our one rep maxes in order to see this or that benefit, none of that is actually true. It’s generally true, the overall shape is true. But the 85% number is a fib and so is the terminology around ‘1 rep maxes’ and all sorts of other precise sounding edicts. It comes from a good place, but suddenly people are afraid that they’re only lifting 84% or that they might be lifting 87% by mistake and what is a 1RM anyway..?

We would be so much better off if we just discarded all that noise, all that waiting for the perfect piece of information and gave ourselves permission to move - to have a go.

I know this is easier said than done.

We’ve been trained to defer others when it comes to exercise.

When I asked my friend Katie Paterson about starting something new, she said: ‘“Just go out and do the simplest version of whatever it is… go out and do the simplest version that you can do right now, and don’t try to add all the bells and whistles.”

I think that’s a good place to begin.