In my last post I was reflecting on body sense awareness, a complex topic that seems to me very essential, if you want to be able to retrieve peak performance at a given time. In sports it became normal routine to measure various parameters like heart rate, oxygen uptake, lactate, urea etc. Moreover you have devices like power meters that give you control of your watts output on the bike. The various devices used got integrated programs that pretend to give you more detailed information of your body’s condition (lactate threshold, energy and calorie consumption, basal metabolic rate etc.). Did it ever occur to you that the data you receive are based on algorithms that are referring back to the mean of a sample and not to your individual body condition?
In my opinion, the world of parameters in sports and exercise science often simplifies the problem of interpreting data and drawing the correct conclusions concerning your body’s state at a given time. If you are an individual that does not find oneself within the limits of the variance of the mean then the conclusions made from the measurements taken can be wrong and misleading.
Therefore my plea: not forget about your body sense, to train your body sense and not to rely on devices only, or let devices overrule your body sense.
The problem of interpreting parameters may be compared with knowing nothing else than the height of a mountain and from that trying to draw relevant information for climbing this mountain … impossible! Do you agree?
What does the height of a mountain tell you about its form, its structures, its geological formation, its history … ? I think not very much, it may eventually tell you whether you can climb it with or without oxygen, but not very much more. To be able to assess a mountain you need many more details. The height is only the peak of the iceberg. The same applies to your body. The measured parameters don’t give you any insight into the processes that make these parameters emerge, and our conclusions drawn from such a parameter measured may be so wrong as the argument that mountains higher than 2000 m are made out of limestone, and you need to have a rope for climbing them. The 2000 meters then would be a marker like e.g. the lactate threshold. Does this make sense to you?
Body sense awareness I think is fundamental to successful training and performance and should to be an integral part of training and exercise, … or life even?
