No One Ring

The Power Is In The Big Picture

As you develop a relationship with a variety of health metrics, consider that none of them presents the whole picture, no matter how good they are. It's easy to get caught up in single metrics like heart rate variability or sleep and lose track of the larger picture.

No single thing is the thing. Taking nodes out of the larger system not only misrepresents the reality of the journey of performance longevity, but it's not even the individual nodes that matter most. It's the interactions between those pieces—the moving picture they create over time—that matter. For example, adequate hydration, deep sleep time, training history, and training load can all affect muscle and connective tissue behavior at any given time.

Furthermore, any array of gauges, indicators, or metrics we decide to use as representations of our health and performance are best used as devices for capturing our attention. This, in turn, allows us to investigate further when there's a glitch in the matrix. When we practice this over time, we get more sensitive to feedback loops that are occurring in the system, so it's possible to take action on our own behalf sooner.

I like to think of any array we might use as a dashboard or instrument panel—a set of informational gauges that we can access at a glance to get a better idea of how the system is running. In other words, to improve situational awareness—in this case, awareness of what is going on in our mind/body system.

“What gauges do you check most often?”

“Where might you be over-focused on a single number?”

“What system interactions are you ignoring?”

Thanks for reading,

Rob

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Here’s an excerpt from my book Check Engine Light, due June of this year:

In his book Information Dashboard Design, Stephen Few states that situational awareness works on three levels:

• Perception of the elements in the environment
• Comprehension of the current situation
• Perception of future status

In other words, do you know how your “car” is really running?

What information are you using to come to that conclusion? What does your current state tell you about how your car is going to run if you continue to operate it in its current condition? At the risk of being redundant, the process of becoming more aware and acting earlier (with hopefully more accurate information) is a major part of improving performance longevity.

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