It’s Complex, Not Complicated
Over the next few emails, I want to share some of the process behind my coaching approach, in as simple language as I can, getting to the essence of what’s important.
At the centre of my coaching philosophy is a simple but powerful idea: Athletes are not complicated machines, we are complex systems, constantly responding, predicting and adapting. This perspective helps filter information from research papers, books, other coaches and experts and especially the cesspool of social media and youtube. Most athletes especially cyclists love data and models. Like them I find comfort in planning and in a nice neat spreadsheets or a chart showing linear progression. This is why the distinction between the complicated and complex is so important.
Lets define complicated… a complicated thing is like a watch (See Pog and MVDP’s obscenely expensive watches). A watch is intricate, with many tiny, interconnected moving parts, but if you understand the mechanism, you can take it apart and put it back together and expect it to operate in the exact same way it did before. A formula one car is more complicated than a watch, but neither are complex (Unless you start talking about aerodynamics!).
A complex system, like the human athlete, has many more “parts” that all affect each other in ways that aren’t always obvious or predictable. We are more like the environment or an economy than a watch. Using the economy metaphor: if you raise fuel prices, it might cost more to ship food, which could lead to higher supermarket prices, which then affects what people buy, which could influence the health of the individual or mental health or maybe cause them to move country. It's not just the fuel price, its how that fuel price affected other systems as well.
One small change causes the entire system to react and something new emerges. Something we tend to forget is that the human body and mind don’t just adapt by reacting to their environment, they predict how that environment will be in the future and adapt at least partly based on that prediction. That really messes with our ability to predict how an athlete will respond to a training stimulus, work stress, or a change in diet for example.
A training example would be, your maximum oxygen uptake (VO₂ max) does not determine your power output. Your entire physiology, psychology, neuromuscular and cognitive ability, biomechanics, environment, skill, and equipment interface determine your power output. Each of these categories is a complex system on its own. How one aspect affects the other is for the most part not easily measurable.
Essentially, that’s the easiest way to know if you are dealing with a complicated system or a complex system: how easy it is to predict how an input will affect an outcome or response. As complicated as some watches are, you could predict how moving one cog will affect many other cogs down the line.
So how is this relevant to training and performance? This idea that a human is complicated and that we can metaphorically deconstruct the human athlete into its constituent parts, then target specific parts with a training stimulus and predict performance gains is a common bias that, as I’ve found over many years of coaching, works only some of the time and superficially at best.
Knowing this, changes how we look at information from research, social media influencers, how you apply models and testing and AI, and how you generally view performance. It also fundamentally changes how we see the athlete and coach working together. A great quote I like is: “The coach sees what the athlete can’t see; the athlete feels what the coach can’t feel.”
The reason for explaining all this is because, on the surface, a lot of what I do looks like classic reductionist thinking. As a coach I find comfort in numbers and planning and I know athletes tend to like this as well. Data helps us reduce uncertainty and bring clarity. And honestly, you need that. Having an underlying understanding of you as a complex system won’t always change the practical application of training, but it will change how you approach training sessions, and shifts the coach athlete relationship from the coaches knows everything, too that idea of the coach sees, the athletes feels.
Next month, I’m going to pick apart one of the performance models I use most with endurance cyclists: the Critical Power model. It’s a complicated mathematical model that offers a simplified representation of human physiology, specifically, the power–time relationship. It is more complicated than FTP, but still very basic when compared to actual human physiology. The key is knowing how to, and how not to apply a complicated model to a complex system like the human athlete.
Content Worth Consuming
Book - The Nature of Training
Before reading the Nature of Training I had read the Norwegian Method which is a good book, but it's popular because of a relatively small group of athletes who did incredibly well on the world stage, following a particular well thought out training process. These types of training methods go in and out of popularity constantly, based on which current athletes are doing well at the time. The Nature of Training is much different. I think it's one of the best books on endurance performance, I have read. It rips down the idea that there is one perfect method out there. It does a great job of articulating complexity and nuance in this area.
Article - Lactic Acid Doesn't Actually Cause That Burning Feeling
Feel the burn! I think most people know by now that lactic acid is not the main culprit. This is a great article. Read this right to the end!
Article - How a Need to Prove Yourself in Practice Can Ruin Race Day Performance.
Many athletes struggle to perform their best on race day, even when they are physically fit. This often happens because they focus too much on proving their fitness during practice instead of preparing for the race.
Podcast - Most Sports Science Research Is False
Science is a process to reduce human bias, but it never really succeeds due to the fact that its being done by bias humans in the first place. I think a lot of people will find this discussion surprising. It is definitely worth a listen!
Article - Shimano Dura-Ace Review (June 1991)
Hot take from 1991 "Because of these pros and cons, it seems unlikely that STI will ever completely replace downtube levers"
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If you got this far, congrats! That's a wrap!
Cheers Team!
