Living Forward, Measuring Backward

The Balance of Action and Insight

"Life can only be understood backwards, but must be lived forwards."

-Soren Kierkergaard

More and more I spend my time talking to athletes, coaches, and clients about data. I'm not a data analyst by trade but I have spend quite a bit of time looking at metrics of health and performance with the goal of deciphering how inputs I recommended effected the quality of life or performance for a living human being I was interacting with. As I've worked with people more and more something has become glaringly obvious about all of us. This something is baked into us. Into our very nature. It helps us save energy up front but boy can it cause confusion. What is this something?

We like things neat and tidy. We like the linear and easy to explain. We like to listen for a few minutes, brush our hands together with a dismissive nod and a "got it". It feels good to feel like our work is done and there's no more thinking to do. Off we go, no need to embrace the complex mess of reality that we're really dealing with.

In the world of health and performance the desire for simplistic answers manifests itself in ways that are not only less helpful to those professionals are trying to serve but very often create complications that increase the difficulty in managing individual health. The opposite of what health technologies are supposedly designed for (although I'm more convinced now than ever that much of the tech race is nerds trying to prove to each other who's degree is less worthless).

The last couple of articles I published here on Substack were a bit more in the weeds. I wrote on simple breathing cues in Fill the Bucket and some environmental management strategies in Kettlebell in the Kitchen. This week let's zoom out a bit and look at the bigger picture in using the newly abundant access to data.

Attunement Not Scores

When you watch your HRV or get bloodwork drawn both offer a deeper layer of insight into the effects of our choices on our physiological health. Heart Rate Variability is generally monitored on a continuous basis and can apprise us to trends in the way we deal with stress over time. Bloodwork is drawn much less frequently and instead offers a snapshot into how aspects of your chemistry is dealing with the interaction of your genetics, lifestyle, and your environment.

Both of these are important parts of a comprehensive approach to managing health and performance but we often think in terms of what values do we achieve and maintain so that the work is over? To use Heart Rate Variability as the example again people often want to know what the "right score" is-there is no such thing. Both are valuable components of managing health and performance. Yet, people often approach them with a flawed mindset, asking questions like, "What’s the right HRV score I should aim for?" Spoiler alert: there is no such thing. Companies selling these devices perpetuate this myth because it’s easier to market simple solutions—"Push harder" or "Rest today"—than to explain that these systems are tools for long-term self-attunement. If I was on the marketing team I know which one I'd say. The problem with that is-it's not true. (Maybe that's why I suck at marketing).

Measuring yourself should be a continuous process that provides you with opportunities to attune yourself to what's going on within you and what things you might change if you want to. I want to key in on a word in that last sentence-attune. To be attuned means my antenna is up and able to receive relevant information so that I can take action. In other words, watching your HRV over time may not tell you what you can do day by day but what it can do is help you to align more clearly with the effects of your life on your ability to deal with stress and then take action.

Action vs Analysis

One downside I've seen for some of my clients is that the attendance to data can in some instances take focus away from execution. Sometimes it's just time to do the thing without worrying too much about the outcomes it may create. A simply illustration of this if you are constantly worried about much weight you might be lifting in a day rather than focus on the effort you're putting into the reps you're doing. It's much harder to measure qualitative aspects of behavior but they are no less important.

All of that to say when you're acting, just act. When you're measuring, measure. I hope that doesn't sound like a trite and cagey Zen koan. Metrics we use to help us understand our health and performance are to help us develop insight into the big picture, not to turn us into health helicopter parents that attempt to control the outcomes of every interaction we have with our environment. In my experience, this is a futile effort.

Reflection on what has taken place is for after the fact. It is a misuse of metrics to instantly modify behavior we deem untidy. Just because your HRV is a few points lower today doesn't mean you need to change anything today. That type of shortsightedness fails to take into account the nature of our physiology and can create a new feedback loop that makes something that is already very complex and make it even moreso. All under the assumption that we can account for all of the moving parts in the first place, which we cannot.

It's Wabi Sabi

Much of the fallacies that we see in the use of metrics speaks to a fundamental truth of life. It's not perfect. We are not perfect. No amount of mathematical values assigned to the ever more granular data sets we use can change the "mess" that is found in living humans. Normative values that represent stable ranges of physiology are good know because they give us something to aim for.

But it's important to realize that when a thing has been measured it is by definition in the past. We are always reacting to measurements we take and so the best we can do is to use the more precise information we have to inform our experience moving forward.

Sometimes I wish it weren't like that too. But then sometimes I appreciate how beautiful the mess is.

Thanks for reading,

Rob

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