Kevin breaks down how our core values in fitness can be shaped by external metrics, from calorie counts to college rankings. He explores how devices and media oversimplify what we truly value, replacing joy and personal goals with data-driven targets. Plus, Kevin answers a listener's question on recovery, explaining the role of biomarkers in understanding when it’s safe to dive back into training.
Kevin breaks down how our core values in fitness can be shaped by external metrics, from calorie counts to college rankings. He explores how devices and media oversimplify what we truly value, replacing joy and personal goals with data-driven targets. Plus, Kevin answers a listener's question on recovery, explaining the role of biomarkers in understanding when it’s safe to dive back into training.
Get-Fit Guy is hosted by Kevin Don. A transcript is available at Simplecast.
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Welcome back to Get Fit Guy, Kevin Don here. This week’s episode is going to define values, explain value capture and provide an example of value capture in fitness and why it could be problematic.
So, what are values, exactly? Well, values are fundamental beliefs that guide decision making. Usually they are ethical or moral in nature. The difference between ethics and morals being that ethics tend to guide right vs wrong in a larger set. So we have medical ethics, which guide right vs wrong in medicine as a whole. Morals are what guide me, personally. Morals are also agent relative, which would mean they are about what is right or wrong to any conscious agent. An agent being in this case, perhaps a rational entity. I’m sorry for using mad words like entity and agency, but language is super important to get right.
So, now we have a base description of what values are, what is ‘value-capture’? It’s a process of your values being captured and changed or for your process of practical reasoning to become dominated by new metrics. Practical reasoning, for a quick example would be something like:
Attaining Goal G is important
Performing Action A takes me closer to Goal G
Therefore, I should perform Action A
So, how does an external metric or external force manage to come to dominate my practical reasoning and capture my values? Well usually its when an agent has a rich and textured set of values. External metrics, or we can say algorithms come along and remove richness and texture and provide a simpler articulation. A great example of this is The University Rankings provided each year by the U.S. World and News Report. To explain this story, we have to go all the way back to 1983. A struggling magazine, the U.S. World and News Report needed something to sell a bunch of magazines. After a brain storming session, they decided that with college application time approaching, maybe they could leverage this by ranking 1800 colleges and universities in the United States. What metrics or data sets would they base this ranking on? Well, initially they simply asked each College president which university they thought was best. In 1983, Stanford received the most votes. By 1988, they had a larger data setting including research papers published by faculty and SAT scores required for entry, GPA and so on. The problem with this was that colleges began to focus on meeting the metrics in the ranking reports, rather than core values. So, this external source, the magazine ranking had value captured educational institutions and fundamentally altered their values of right vs wrong in higher education. Furthermore, prior to these rankings, students, when asked what they valued in a college may have said things like a walkable campus, distance to their hometown, student experience. Subsequently, they came to say: ranking. All that texture and nuance in their values had been removed by an algorithm and replaced with this simplistic view. Both the institutions and the students had allowed their values to be outsourced to a magazine that isn’t even an expert in education.
Values and transparency are incredibly important, otherwise how can we develop trust? Value capture can happen everywhere. For example, I could be a food podcast. I could be invited to a restaurant , who would then sponsor the show. When I go to the restaurant, my meal is burned and the servers were rude. Now, my values in setting up the podcast were to share good things with listeners, to get them excited about food and trying new things. But also to have integrity and transparency. Now I have a problem, because if I say the truth and follow my values, then the sponsor might be upset and not sponsor any future shows. So, I either have integrity and follow my own values, or I allow a value capture by monetary metrics. I know where I stand here, but where is your moral compass?
So, that explains values, value capture and hopefully given some good examples. So, how does this relate to fitness? Well it does and it does so via gamification. Wearable devices and even gym devices like treadmills gamify what is happening and reduce the nuance of your own values around fitness. I can’t tell you what you value, but I can say that I believe values such as enjoyment, social aspects and the ability of a sport or exercise regime to enhance your lifestyle are higher order values than calorie count. And yet, this is what sells magazines. Print media and online media are full of these hooks like ‘top 10 exercises to burn calories’ and then rank exercises or sports by how many calories you burn in an hour. Thats losing all texture to your values. Media, in order to sell copies or get more click through, have gamified this and captured your values. Enjoying something is way more rich as an experience than enduring it is. And now, we have technology companies value capturing. Fitbit, Applewatch, Polar, Garmin and so on. All telling you how many calories you burned and rewarding you for burning more than yesterday or for burning X number of calories Y number of days in a row. Do you know why? And why this wont make you happy? Because these metrics are quantitive data. These data sets can’t run on data like enjoyment because enjoyment cannot be quantified. So, the values that really matter have been captured by tech companies and replaced with algorithms that tell you this simplified set of values, which happen to be the only ones they can measure are the most important ones. Your natural, subtle and rich values are important. Be guided by an intuition, not by an external institution!
Now, its been a while, so let’s do a listener email.
Hi Kevin,
I’m writing as a (sprint) triathlete. I like to keep up training year round and try to spend 6-10 hours a week training. Usually that means run, bike, or swim 5-6 days a week. I just finished my fourth race of the season (June-September). Other pertinent details. I’m a woman in my early 50s and during a race I go quite hard for a little over an 1 hour and a half. During a race, My heart rate is at or over max pretty much the whole time. I have no idea how I manage it since I never hit those levels for such sustained periods in my training except maybe a small percentage of a single session or if I’m doing HIIT. Aside from being tired and famished after a race, I have mild to moderate soreness the next day and then it usually goes away. But I definitely find that even when the soreness is gone, any attempt to start training again is unpleasant because it is as if all the power, strength, speed have left me. For days after a race, If I attempt anything strenuous at all, I can’t get anywhere near my usual output and it requires a lot more recovery than it normally would. In sum, I feel and am pretty weak post race and this lasts for at least a week or two even though I don’t feel sore.
All this is to ask the question : how do I know when I’ve recovered adequately to get back to doing my disciplines? Should I be taking a full week or two off? A month? I also worry about damaging my heart, arteries, or lungs as well and have no idea how to tell if I’m overdoing it and should take a longer recovery period and also what to do in that recovery period.
Thanks in advance for your help.
Rachel
Hi Rachel, thank you for the email. So, the real answer to the question probably won’t take you by surprise as a regular listener, but you will know when you are fully recovered from competitive exertions if you have your individual biomarkers of hard physical exertion measured. Let’s talk a little bit about epistemology, or the study of knowledgestudy knowledge and how we know what we know. There are two types of knowledge we can have about the world. Apriori and aposteriori for my number one fan out there that emails me to say I think I’m smarter than all the listeners and that’s why I use Latin or Greek terms, no doubt you’ll be loving my intellectual ego massage today. That’s not just one use of big words, but two. I’ll have to go for a lie down after this, I feel so superior. lol.
Apriori knowledge is that which we can know without experience and aposteriori knowledge requires experience. So, an example of knowledge we can know without experience would be: all bald men have no hair. You can work this out analytically. Aposteriori knowledge requires our experience to make inferences. Since humans are moving through life experiencing the world around us, then we can only really have aposteriori interactions and this whole question is one. You require some experiential data. But within that data set, although none of it would ever be true knowledge, it would always be inferred, we can still look to minimise error. What this looks like is testing. So, me saying I have a sore back after judo is less powerful than me having an MRI that confirms tissue damage after judo.
So, in the case of your question, bloodwork to look at biomarkers would still fall on the side of aposteriori knowledge, but it would be more compelling than your feelings or sensations. Biomarkers you would look at would be:
Cortisol levels
Creatine Kinase
Creatinine and eGFR
CRP
I might do another show in the near future on what those are, but I’m limited by word count today. If you were to go have bloods done at the doctor post race, then they will know what those are and the appropriate ranges. I’d love to say to everyone listening that you’ll know when you are fully recovered when you wake up in the morning full of vim and vigour, but by now, you’ll know I have integrity and won’t come on here to lie. Could it be that you’ll know when you are recovered when you can go out and nail a performance? Maybe. But you could also go down the road and see a car accident and deadlift a car off a victim. That doesn’t mean you’re ready for the world powerlifting championships. There are so many variables in mood, desire, impetus and so on that anything less than bio markers is total guesswork and even biomarkers are contingent.
If you have any questions or would like to just say ‘hi’, please email me on getfitguy@quickanddirtytips.com
Get-Fit Guy is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast. Thanks to the team at Quick and Dirty Tips Morgan Christianson, Holly Hutchings, the director of podcasts Brannan Goetschius and Davina Tomlin. I’m your host, Kevin Don. If you have a question for me, leave me a voicemail at 510-353-3104 or send me an email at getfitguy@quickanddirtytips.com. For more information about the show, visit quickanddirtytips.com, or check out the shownotes in your podcast app