I have been reading the book Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman. One of the insights I would like to lift from the book and apply to training is what Kahneman has labled the WYSIATI rule. WYSIATI stands for “what you see is all there is” and refers to the idea that the human mind can only deal with what it sees. It does not allow for information it does not have. (1) This rule makes for some interesting problems in fitness.
Humans are story tellers. We like stories because they bring logic and order to the chaos of everyday existence. A narrative with a beginning, middle, and end that follows a logical progression feels good, and our brains are busy constructing them all the time. The problem is, the stories we build are normally retrospective, meaning they are built to fit the known facts without regard for other possibilities.
Consider ‘Monday Morning Quarterbacking.’ After a football game there is always analysis about its outcome, which is a good example of story telling. Imagine the following: A team loses miserably in the first week of the month but then wins fantastically in week 2 of the month – that’s a miserable loss in week 1 followed by a fantastic victory in week 2. What story immediately comes to mind? The team, it will be said, was hungry after their loss. They used the pain and embarrassment of their previous defeat to rally themselves, and, after careful analysis of their previous mistakes and the requisite practice to improve upon them, the team was ready to come out hard and redeem themsleves. A tidy story. Now imagine that week 2 was actually not a win, but rather another loss. In this case a new story will develop. The team was so demorilized after the loss in week 1 that they lost their confidence. They no longer believed in themselves and therefore could not bring their best, causing their next loss. Another tidy story. These two versions of the same events work equally well because of the WYSIATI rule. We only know the actual outcome of the game and create our story to fit it, without considering that the game could have gone the other way. (After all, “on any given Sunday…”)
Now think about the stories we tell ourselves in fitness, are they different? When someone begins exercising after a long period of inactivity and has success in losing weight and improving fitness they are immediately tempted to ascribe that change to whatever exercise routine they have chosen. The powerful story that emerges, of a routine that helped transform the individual into their new self, creates a steadfast desciple of the routine. This can be a problem that I have observed often, which is that people get stuck in one gear, training only one aspect of their fitness because of the unreliable story that has been constructed. They become Runners, or Yogis, or Crossfitters, or Spinners, or Body-builders, or whatever else it may be and do not entertain the idea of changing or cycling their routine. The reality that there may have been, and likely were, several factors that contributed to their success, or that they might have just as easily had no success at all becomes burried under a more enjoyable story that is influenced by the WYSIATI rule. This is unfortunate because it can severly limit the potential to reach higher levels of fitness by having a more well rounded approach. (For more on that, see what is cycling/periodization?)
Injuries are even more affected by WYSIATI. As I have written before, while some exercise injuries occur acutely, many more are the result of long processies that have played our over time. “Overuse injuries” tend to be this type. In this case, thanks to the WYSIATI rule the cause of an injury is usually credited to the last thing someone was doing before the injury happened. Deadlifts are an example of this. They have a reputation for being risky on the back and those who perform them and then experience back pain will be very tempted to accept and then spread this reputation. They will do this regardless of the fact that 80% of American adults will experience some level of back pain sometime in their lives, whether or not they ever perform a deadlift. It is simply an easier story to say “my back was fine until I did those deadlifts” rather than “my back was likely ready to give out on me due to a variety of factors in my lifestyle.” With WYSIATI, all that is available is the information that my back was fine until I did the risky exercise. (* This is not to say that deadlifts performed too heavy or loaded too aggresively are not risky, because they are. However, in that scenario it is not necessarily the lift that is at issue, rather the execution. Kahneman speaks to this kind of mental switcheroo as well in his book…)
The take-home here is that we should be wary of the stories we tell ourselves about many things. In fitness in particular, we would do well to take a more open minded approach to what we are doing. I see too many of us – I also once belonged in this category – become obsessed with certain approaches because we have convinced ourselves that the story makes sense, when a step back may reveal an altogether different reality. For more on the subject I highly recommend the book.
1) Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York, NY; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011
Photo – National Eye Institute, National Institutes of Health. license