How do we use this information to make better decisions about our health, or indeed anything else in our lives?
Not sure which training methodologies to follow? Coach Kevin Don breaks down lower and higher-order thinking to allow you to make the best decisions.
Get-Fit Guy is hosted by Kevin Don. A transcript is available at Simplecast.
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Hi, I'm Kevin Don, the Get-Fit Guy, and I'm here to share my accumulated decade of knowledge in the strength and conditioning industry with you to help you become the best version of yourself!
I’m sure we have all been there: we read an inspiring article or watch a well-made Netflix documentary and suddenly, we change our diet and training protocols and are telling everyone we know about this amazing new thing.
The problem with this is that: you may be totally incorrect in your recommendations.
If you take a quick scroll through social media, you will see that a low-carb diet is good for you, a high-fat diet is good for you, squats are potentially deadly, deadlifts will damage your back, children shouldn’t lift weights and so on. If you keep scrolling further, you will also, though, find posts stating the exact opposite.
Now, since the nature of reality is that two opposing ideas cannot both be correct, how do we use this information to make better decisions about our health, or indeed anything else in our lives?
To start, I have to tell you that over the course of time, I have done all of these things myself. I have tried every new diet and exercise regime. I’ve foam-rolled and Kinesio taped and bought every bit of new-fangled equipment to improve my health that has come to market.
I no longer do this. I take everything I see, read, or hear and run it through a hierarchy of thinking called Bloom’s Taxonomy. Benjamin Bloom was an educator who published a taxonomy of educational objectives between 1956 and 1964. At a very basic level, it splits our cognitive or thought processes into lower and higher-order thought processes.
There are 6 levels to Bloom's Taxonomy. They run from the lowest order to the highest order of thinking and are:
Let’s now look a little deeper into the different levels and what they mean.
Knowledge: You have memorized some facts and can repeat them.
Comprehension: You can discuss or explain the ideas you have memorized.
Application: The ability to take the concepts you have remembered and explain and apply them to a situation
Analysis: You can experiment with the ideas in new situations and test their validity.
Evaluation: The ability to defend, argue, or critique the ideas compared with other ideas.
Synthesis: You can use the data you acquire from analysis and evaluation to create and develop new ideas.
What does this mean for how we approach decisions? Well, if you watch a documentary or read an article and remember some of the main points, you are at the lowest order of thinking: you have some knowledge based on your memorization of something you have seen, read, or heard. However, you have no idea if it’s true or not, no idea how to apply this knowledge, and haven’t compared it to any other data sets or researched the validity of the claims.
So, in my situation, where I make my living by helping others by giving recommendations, it's very important to be able to move myself away from the lower orders of thinking and push myself into analysis, evaluation, and synthesis. This is the only way I can make sure I don’t have a biased understanding of a situation and make the best recommendation in each situation for each person.
When it comes to looking at health and wellness, we would do well to remember that if we simply go and tell someone else about something we read or listen to, we have fallen victim to “knowledge,” which is the lowest cognitive process we have as human beings. I would encourage everyone to take on new concepts with an open mind and experiment with them to see how and if they work—and that includes the advice you hear me give on this show!
It can be difficult because when we are passionate about an idea that resonates with us, we want to confirm our own biases. But only by following higher-order cognitive processes can we push for the unveiling of the truth.
Get-Fit Guy is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast. 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.