Category Archives: Emotion Training

To Upgrade Equipment or Not?

I had a masters athlete come up to me and ask, “should they buy a racing suit for upcoming Ontario Masters Provincial Swimming Champs.”  Actually, the athlete asked, “would a racing suit help?”

I answered no.

Why? Because the athlete is a triathlete who decided this year to kick it up in the swimming department, deciding that in order to do that they would join a masters swimming team.  In the course of the year the athlete has improving dramatically in their technique, added breaststroke as a second stroke, and has competed at a masters swim meet.

So why no racing suit?

Wouldn’t it help?

Wouldn’t their times possibly be better with a racing suit?

Probably, but its too soon.

Too soon?

When you go into competitions early in your career what you need to see consistently are improvements made not from equipment, but from training.

If you go into competition too early upgrading constantly to new equipment, you may not consciously think it, but subconsciously you cannot and will not (and maybe never will) attach performance improvements to training.  There will always be doubt as to whether the improvements made were the result of training, or because of the new equipment.  With articles spewing the benefits of everything from aero this to aero that, even encouraging novice athletes that shaving legs leads to time savings (yes, but not meaningful at 25kph), it becomes difficult if not impossible for the athlete to know exactly how and why they are making gains.

But guess which one is more seductive? Results from effort put in day after day, or results from dropping a credit card at your local swim, bike, run or triathlon shop?


Its so seductive, that I believe there is an entire generation of triathletes who believe more in equipment upgrades, in “free speed” as the path to progress, with training a mere add-on, as opposed to training being the primary source of improvement, with equipment being the add-on.

So what?

Because it matters.

There are enough variables in life to make training challenging that adding more variables (i.e. equipment) simply makes it impossible to discern what is working and what isn’t.

New athletes need to learn how to train, need to learn to look for improvements from their own efforts, and become confident in the causal relationship between time spent developing as an athlete, and the results in racing.

Besides, you can guess what is more rewarding… you improved because you trained, vs you improved because you bought a new piece of equipment.

Gee… I wonder which one encourages me to go out and train, and which one discourages training and makes me want to hit the next trade show to pick up the latest tech?

Can you see the cycle that can be created? If you see gains from training, then what are you rewarding? All the effort, all the time you spent training, and it encourages you to train more, it can even encourage you to want to explore even more of your potential, causing you to seek as much information on training, encouraging you to experiment and learn what makes you tick, and how to make yourself tick better. But if the gains you see are not clearly linked to training because this time you bought a new helmet, new carbon rims, lighter racing flats, etc… then what does that encourage? It definitely does not set you up in a virtuous cycle of seeing training as the primary source of your improvement. In fact, you can setup a vicious cycle where to obtain greater and greater gains you have to spend more and more time and money at your local shop outfitting yourself with the newest and greatest.

Athletes can go on for awhile with this mindset, because most are unlikely to have the finances to start off with top of the line everything.  This ‘lack’ of top of the line equipment supplies the answer to every race that doesn’t go as desired… if I had these aero rims instead of these aero rims then, THEN I would have hit my bike split goal, if I had that new thinner wetsuit then, THEN I would have hit my swim split goal, and so on. But what happens when the athlete has all the top of the line equipment, then what?

Instead of doing as Stephen Covey wrote “Put First Things First”, too many triathletes are putting second, third and fourth things first.

Can you see why so many triathletes end up burnt out, frustrated, disappointed, and then financially burnt out, frustrated and disappointed?

The shiny new stuff is sexy, sure, and yeah it would be fun to have, but if you are in search of your potential, then its seduction, temptation you have to avoid. There will be a time to upgrade, but imagine upgrading when you are already able to swim fast, ride long and hard, and run past all the walkers in a triathlon.

You have no idea how fun it is to pass an athlete riding fully decked out in top of the line kit, equipment, you know… a carbon fiber bike, deep aero rims, aero helmet meanwhile you’re on your sisters bike, on a big brothers hand me down, on a garage sale or Kijiji find, especially when they just spent a few thousand to shave a few grams off their bike (meanwhile their arse alone could stand to shed 10+lbs), and you go flying by as if they were standing still.

You want to find out why the pros are having fun? Because the best of the best didn’t get into the sport because of the amazing equipment, they got into the sport because the sport was amazing and now someone is giving them free top of the line equipment.  Now that’s fun.

Read the autobiographies of the best of the best in your sport and the type of equipment they had when they started almost always follow the same pattern… milk crate boxes as baskets or goals, hand me down or left over equipment, or whatever entry level equipment they or their parents could afford to get them started.

If you want to be your best, rise to your best, then make equipment secondary. Invest all the time and money and effort that you would have put into equipment, into training, coaching, and the training tools that you need in order to improve.

Remember the movie Rocky? Rocky trained punching sides of beef, training in old nickel and dime store sweats, running in Converse hi tops, and worked with a crusty old coach out of a broken down gym.  In the 4th installment, Rocky faced Ivan Drago, a Russian boxer who had at his disposal every known technological training tool available to the KGB.  Yet when the illusion of superiority broke down, everything else fell apart, including Ivan.

Who do you want to be?  Rocky or Drago?

We don’t often consider the nuances to why one athlete wins and another loses, and it is for this reason why I believe that athletes should start with nothing other than the basic equipment. Athletes need to learn to train, need to see results from their training, see continued results from adjusting and progressing training, and become confident in themselves. When you race you need to draw confidence, belief, inspiration and motivation from somewhere.

Consider two athletes: one athlete draws their confidence from the training they have put forth over the past two years, the other athlete has little training to draw from but believes that their new equipment will get them to the finish. When the race gets into the final miles, when the body and brain are running on fumes, when the athlete has to dig down into another layer of themselves to finish the race… which athlete do you think will have the confidence, the belief, the inspiration and the motivation to finish and finish well?

Start the way you want to finish. If you want to finish because of the belief you have built in your potential, then start by building that belief. You can build belief in yourself, you cannot build belief in equipment, nor will equipment ever believe in you.

Emotion and Peak Performance

Too many athletes and coaches are under the misconception that the energy of negative emotions is useful in driving an athlete to a higher level of performance. Some coaches are under the misunderstanding that the chair throwing, insult spewing temper tantrums they throw in an attempt to motivate their athletes in fact works. Indeed, you can threaten an athlete scaring them to the point that it results in a temporary spike in performance due to the defensive rush of adrenalin, but this is neither physiological nor psychological training and fails to correlate with consistent peak performance of athletes.

The illusion is that initially gains can be made by threatening and causing an adrenalin spike in an athlete. It is an illusion because eventually after repeated exposure to negative energy – no different than Pavlov’s dog – an athlete will become trained, then accustomed, then dependent on anger, hate, or anxiety to perform. It works until it doesn’t. When it stops working, when the adrenal glands cannot be forced to cough up enough adrenalin to cause a larger spike in performance, Icarus falls from the sky realizing it was all an illusion: their performance was an hormonally induced display, not the result of years of training and refining the physiology and psychology to that of a Champion.

Wonder why athletes fail to replicate success in sport to other areas in life?  Wonder why many athletes are one-offs? Wonder why athletes turn to drugs, alcohol, or self abuse? Wonder why athletes commit suicide?  It ain’t from ‘positive’ energy in their lives that’s for certain.

You can beat a dog so that it fights for its life, but eventually the beating that the dog requires to fight once more… kills the dog.

Peak performance requires a rhythmical heart rate, a relaxed state where there is symmetry across physical, mental, and emotional dimensions, where the athlete is focused, able to execute specific strategies. This unity does not occur in a stressed state, in an environment filled with ‘negative’ emotion.

Consider the following…

Undefeated at the ironman distance and 4x Ironman World Champion triathlete Chrissie Wellington always competed with a smile:

chrissie02 6x Ironman World Champion, triathlete Natascha Badmann could be puking one minute, but the next she would be back to smiling. Even while suffering a crash on the bike, being severely injured, and having to be pulled out of a World Championship competition by her coach, Natascha still would have a smile on her face: Kona_Hawaii_Ironman_2007_Badmann06Kona_Hawaii_Ironman_2007_Badmann07Have you ever seen Usain Bolt not having a good time?

Usain_Bolt_001Cells that fire together, wire together.

What thoughts are you firing and wiring today?

Still think that getting angry or anxious in an attempt to boost your performance is the way to go? There aren’t many if any consistent World Champions, repeat gold medal Olympians who approach their sport, their racing or training with ‘negative’ energy. There aren’t any truly successful people in any field who approach business or life with resentment, with hate, frustration or anger. The best of the best are having fun; while working, training, competing.

“No pain, no gain” is a losers mindset.

Gratitude, appreciation, gentleness, and humility are the attitudes of champions.

Talent: Real or Illusion

One phrase I heard over and over during the Rio Olympics from sports commentators to explain the speed, the power, the endurance displayed by an athlete was “talent”, namely that an athlete’s “natural talents” explains their abilities and their success. Repeatedly, the term talent was used to imply that the capabilities of athletes are not obtained through training, but by random acts of the universe bestowing upon athletes the ability to win, effectively choosing who wins, who loses.

Bruce Lee

If Bruce Lee was serious, then that means he could not have believed that he was born a martial art grandmaster, that he was born “talented”. Instead, he would have had to believe that he decided to become a grandmaster, that he started out average but with a laser-like focus became un-average. In so doing – because many do not believe that his level of ability could be learned through training – Bruce Lee became a “natural talent” in the martial arts instead of being respected as a student with the unnatural desire.

According to Bruce Lee’s perspective, anyone, absolutely anyone and everyone is capable of becoming a successful warrior. It is for us to decide, to train, to train to change, to become.

Herein lies the problem…

If the decision is mine to succeed or not succeed, and if I have not succeeded, then what does that say about me? It would suggest that I have failed to decide to succeed, or worse, have decided not to succeed. Who wants to be looked upon as having decided to fail in life? Who would accept that they have decided not to succeed? No one. At least, I hope no one.

So we have a decision to make: either deny that the decision is indeed in our hands and develop a narrative to explain away the success of others, or decide that there is no such thing as “natural talent” and agree that success is a decision, a burn-the-boats decision, but a decision which is fully within our scope. With the polarity distasteful, the reality that the results we have are the results we decided to have, the alternative is to create a compromise which gives us an escape for giving a half ass effort, allowing us to put on a display of having tried, but failing in our attempt to ensure that we get a good at-a-boy pat on the pack.

“When you have exhausted all possibilities, remember this:
You haven’t.”  Thomas Edison

Instead of challenging our narratives, confronting ourselves honestly on our decision not to succeed, we defer to a half truth (i.e. a full lie)… we agree that training is necessary for success, but we disagree to the extent that training leads to success. Hence the ideal escape clause is created. Having earned our at-a-boy pat on the pack for giving it a good ole try at success, we decide to believe that there is an element of “talent” required in order to truly succeed.

I do not believe in talent.

I do believe in generational momentum which can set an expectation of success, but like Bruce Lee, I believe that laser-like discipline, dedication, commitment and focus are the pivot points.

I believe that what is called talent is nothing more than countless repetitions performed in training day after day, month after month, year after year, with abounding enthusiasm, eagerness, and focused energy.

The problem for many though is that this explanation is far too simple.  Success cannot be that simple, because if it was… the assumption goes…  we would all be “successful”.

Simplicity is no guarantee nor indicator of ease.

We prefer complex explanations.  We want DNA samples, a thorough analysis of our genes, a comparison of power to body weight, arm length to torso ratio, lung volume, max heart rate, lactate threshold, and VO2 values in order to identify who can be an athlete, who should be an athlete, and who shouldn’t. Meanwhile, 2x Tour de France winner Chris Froome’s simultaneously high VO2 and high lactate threshold (i.e. high aerobic efficiency) confounds exercise physiologists as their theories preclude both in the same athlete. Yet instead of tossing out theories that do not reflect observation, we are bent on retaining theories bending observations to fit our theories. The result is that we learn nothing, and prove nothing in the process, in fact it can be argued that we dumb down science by doing so, and dumb our own understanding of our potential.

What I have found reading and studying the lives of consistent peak performers that Bruce Lee is right: we are all born average, with the equal right to become un-average.

Consider a pattern found amongst top track and field athletes, specifically runners:

  1. David Rudisha – 2x African, World and Olympic Champion in the 800m, David Rudisha is a Masai tribesman whose culture involves repeating hopping, bouncing, and jumping as part of ritual dances.
  2. Jackie Joyner Kersee – is ranked amongst the greatest female athletes as a result of her athletic career as a heptathlete and long jumper which spanned 4 Olympics, yielded 6 medals of which 3 were gold, plus another 4 gold medals at Worlds because as a child she jumped from the porch of her house for hours daily. Why? Because it was fun. To see if she could jump farther than yesterday.
  3. Andre De Grasse – is a rising Canadian track sprinter, who won Olympic bronze in the 100m, and silver in the 200m at the Rio Games, played basketball in high school, entering the sport of track and field by racing a 100m sprint in basketball shorts and shoes on a dare from a friend, only to clock 10.9secs and catch the attention of a developmental track coach.

Now consider the number of sprinters who excelled as long jumpers:

  • Carl Lewis won Olympic medals in the 100m, 200m and long jump between ’84 and ’96
  • Tianna Bartoletta doubled in the 100m and the long jump in Rio
  • Tori Bowie won one of each medal in Rio across the 100m, 200m and 4×100 and in college competed equally in the long jump
  • Florence Griffith Joyner’s 100m record of 10.49secs still stands today, even after the Rio Olympics.  She too started her track and field career as a sprinter and long jumper.

To the masses who want to believe that success is complex, suggesting that the repetition of simple activities like hopping, skipping, bouncing, or jumping has anything to do with becoming an Olympian is laughable.

To suggest that simple childhood activities are the basis for Olympic performance would relegate science to the backseat, placing play, fun, and games on the front seat simultaneously destroying the ego of exercise physiologists, biomechanists, sport psychologists, and coaches who have taken to believing that it is their expertise alone which transforms shapeless clay into a world champion.

To all those who believe like Bruce Lee, that success is a decision, that success is the result of laser like focus, that success is the byproduct of simple day-in day-out repetition with unending enthusiasm, then this pattern should motivate you.

Success is tangible, real, and is available to anyone who decides to be successful. Best of all… it says that the journey to success can be fun, provided you make it fun by hopping, skipping and jumping all the way.

Triathlon Legend Mark Allen

“We have to train the physiology so that their body is perceiving that day as low stress. How do you train an athlete so that their mind, their internal emotions are perceiving this day as something they can tackle? And also how do you train their physiology so that inside the body’s going “this is hard, but its not the hardest thing I’ve ever done.” You have to provide them with training that over stresses both of these elements.”

Movement is A Language

I may finally have arrived at a way to concisely and effectively communicate why I hate HiiT (hi intensity interval training)? And when I say hate, I use the word unemotionally, its an authentic expression to the depth at which it hurts when I hear athletes/parents/coaches talk of it.

If movement is a language, then how we study movement should be comparable to the manner in which we study language, to the manner we use language… be it in poetry, in speech, in song.

Imagine if a teacher of language encouraged you to learn only a handful of sounds, not even words, just sounds, and then suggested that effective communication was the mere repetition of those sounds. If the goal of communication is not achieved thru these sounds, the teacher then suggests that the alternative approach is to escalate the intensity of the sounds until a zenith of screaming, screeching, yelling is reached, because effective communication can be achieved if sufficient decibels are put behind the sounds.

Sound familiar?  This is identical to that of a coach prescribing only workouts focused around targets of wattage, speed, or split times (i.e. decibel level), with sport specific technique dumbed-down to a handful of universal principles (i.e. sounds).

There is nothing more moronic, idiotic, ignorant, even evil for a teacher of language to do then to massacre language by dumbing-it-down to a handful of grunts and groans with intensity made the centre piece of communication. It is equally as moronic for a coach to dumb-down peak performance in sport to hi intensity interval training (HiiT).

As caveman grunting is to Shakespeare…
HiiT is to athletic training, to sport, to peak performance.

Those who teach that sport is nothing more than HiiT – i.e. caveman like activities of suffering in a pain-cave (no coincidence that a caveman approach wants a cave to hide in to train), via a “no pain no gain” mindset, where hurting oneself to the point of self harm or self mutilation is believed to be the source of strength, endurance or speed – are morons, idiots, ignorami who should be kept as far as possible from sport, especially from children who are experiencing sport for the first time.

Like language, movement is supposed to be beautiful, inspiring, captivating, intriguing, a creative outlet of self-expression, where an athlete – one who studies the language of movement – arrives to competition commanding such presence, attention, awareness that all eagerly wait to witness what awe-someness they will undoubtedly experience.

What does language have?

  • It has an alphabet which represents all the basic sounds of the language.
  • Those sounds, represented by letters are tied together in syllables, and syllables tied together to form words.
  • There are different types of words: nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs and every word has a specific meaning, sometimes multiple meanings.
  • There are rules on how words are linked together to form sentences, how sentences are united to create paragraphs, and paragraphs linked to create essays, short stories, novels, and so forth.
  • There is complexity to language… there is figurative language: simile, metaphor, personificaiton, symbolism, and hyperbole.
  • There is more complexity when language uses literary devices: anachornisms, analogies, foreshadowing, imagery, irony, satire, understatements, etc…

The palette may consist of only 26 colours (letters in the case of our alphabet), but the number of paintings an artist can render from those simple starting points is infinite. Hence movement is limitless, hence sport is limitless.

Why is HiiT the training tool of the ignorant?  Because it is the equivalent of stripping language of all its complexity… dumbing-it-down to grunts and groans, teaching that communication is a simple matter of intensifying the grunts and groans to exchange concepts, ideas, to negotiate, to interact.

What sort of individual would dumb-down the beauty, the sweetness, the creativity, the white canvas that is language into grunts and groans? They would have to be the moron of morons.

Any coach who relies on HiiT… is just such a moron.
A moron you must avoid at all costs.

Because the risk is that their ignorance will get all over you, and that ignorance will take you down… in injury, in illness, in blow out, burn out, or meltdown; far short of your potential, far short of you experiencing peak performance.

Find a coach whose love for sport is no different than that of a teacher whose love of language compels their students to inhale book after book, to fall in love with verse.

Find a coach whose appreciation of movement leads athletes to fall in love with the complexity of the language that is movement. A coach who inspires athletes to explore, to play, to engage in movement encouraging not only self expression, but self discovery so that the potential of the athlete can and will be truly experienced.

To become the highest performing version of you… you need to find a coach who is willing to take the time to teach movement as a language so that as an athlete – a student of movement – you can start to learn how to write creatively, and then to write your own essays, your own short stories, perhaps a novel, maybe an entire series.

When movement is seen as a language, then you will come to appreciate that there truly is no limit to pursuing your potential.  If this was not the case, then long ago we would have decided as a civilization that there are no more combinations of words possible… that every book, song, story, play, movie that could be written has been written and we have reached the pinnacle of our existence, of our creativity. It hasn’t happened with words, it hasn’t happened with music, therefore it has not happened in movement, thus not in sport.

Every World Record that stands today is a single chapter in a novel of that sport… its waiting for you to come along and write the next chapter in the history of the sport. But to be able to write that chapter… you will need more than grunts and groans, you will need a full vocabulary, a thorough understanding of the rules, the patterns, the process to writing and sharing ideas.

I challenge you… become a student of movement so you can write yourself into the history of sport.

“No Pain, No Gain” Deafness

Wonder why athletes – who are supposed to be healthy – end up developing heart arrhythmias, heart attacks, strokes, or worst, end up dying? Part of the reason is because they have become deaf. No, not deaf as in cannot hear sounds from with-out, but unable to hear from with-in.

Think about it this way…

If you train yourself to deny what you are feeling, train yourself to repress feelings of discomfort, soreness, pain, well… how are you going to feel when you want to and need to feel?

If you train with the goal of deadening yourself to the messages your body sends, effectively numbing yourself to yourself, what happens when your body actually sends you a signal that you are in… distress? Numbing yourself so that in competition you can ‘hold on’ and live to survive to see the finish line may seem like a winning strategy… but it isn’t. It isn’t because it does not translate out to real life, as in the life you lead the other 20+hrs a day when you are not training, not ‘an athlete’.

What happens when you are in respiratory distress, cardiac distress, or as the athlete in the Runners World article (click here for link)… having an actually cardiac arrest? That’s right… a runner living an active “healthy” lifestyle that he likely boasts all about on Facebook and Instagram had an heart attack, and continued on his way as if nothing had happened, as if nothing was wrong. So “healthy” that he could not hear nor properly interpret the signs and symptoms that his body was communicating that he was in fact in the midst of an emergency situation, a life or death moment. A moment that he is blessed to have lived through and to tell about is a miracle!

If there was ever a time when the cliche was appropriate: “lights on… but no one home”.

This is how we have been collectively instructed by well-intended (but 100% clueless) trainers, coaches, and fellow athletes to train. This mindset of self denial, self suffering, self inflicted harm of “no pain, no gain”, to the point of self mutilation (i.e. I couldn’t walk for days after that CrossFit session… gnarly!) which is supposed to be building us healthier, is in fact doing the diametric opposite.

Look around… today the average person is unhealthy.

How do you think that after training day after day, training not to hear from within, that what… by magic you will hear from within, become self aware of significant health issues when necessary. How?  How will you discern between what you have trained yourself not to do (i.e. hear), when you need to hear in order to take affirmative and possibly life saving action?

You cannot.

You won’t.

If you train yourself to deny what you feel, then guess what… you are training yourself to be an expert in not hearing what your body and brains want to tell you, needs to tell you so that you can make healthy decisions… at work, at home, at the grocery store, at the gym, when out on the town.

That is why we all have heard from family, from friends… stories of people receiving diagnoses of heart disease, dementia, cancer yet absolutely and unequivocally blindsided by the fact that they are sick, they have a disease, they are ill, even terminally ill.

As if cancer is one day not there and then poof all of a sudden you have a golf ball sized tumor, or your arteries just overnight clog up, or your neural connections just all of a sudden deteriorate, or your endocrine (i.e hormonal) system is fine and then next day breakdowns as if abused for a decade or more.

It doesn’t happen that way.

Guess how ‘good’ decisions are when you are missing vital information to make a ‘good’ decision? They are random, and they are not decisions, because without all relevant info they are at most gambles of hope [that you are making a good decision].

Imagine running a business where the CEO refuses to listen to anyone, and I mean anyone in the entire company.  What if the CEO refused to listen, not just listen – has trained themselves not even to hear – the corporate lawyers, accountants, the other C-level executives, to the Board of Directors, to the shareholders? How long would that company last?

Well… that is exactly how we are running our bodies.  We are CEOs of our body and brain, and with “no pain, no gain” we train ourselves stupid because we train ourselves to not only not hear and not listen to, but we train ourselves to purposefully ignore the messages, the signals, the communication that millions and billions of years of evolution have programmed into us in order to keep us healthy.

Yet, we wonder in amazement… how did it happen?

How did I get 50, 80, 100lbs overweight?

How did I get heart disease, end up with a stroke or cancer?

Meanwhile, its back to the gym, pounding the s#!t out of ourselves believing that working out hard, harder and harder still is the right course of action.

Yeah, right.

I do not know how to say it, or how many times to say it… hi intensity training is stupid. HiiT should be reserved for highly trained athletes under the direct and watchful and caring supervision of a coach, or a team of coaches ensuring that nothing stupid happens to the athlete when they are pushing themselves to their limits. HiiT should never have been popularized due to its inherent risks, but that’s industry for you… screw you, all that matters is their revenue and profit targets.

If you are not a highly trained athlete – i.e. an athlete who has thousands upon thousands of hours of appropriate physiological and psychological base training – then there is absolutely no reason for you to be doing HiiT (hi intensity interval training).

If you are a highly trained athlete, then only if you are in a state of health (i.e. no injury, no illness, not recovering or still in rehab) should you perform HiiT.

If you are a highly trained athlete, only if you have developed and trained a profound sense of self awareness, a keen sense of intuition, or are being coached by someone who is well trained and well versed in evaluating and training athletes who are riding the red-line of peaking to perform in competition should you perform HiiT.

Peak performance, and exploration of your peak potential happens only in the condition of consistent training, not peak training. If you do not train consistently, then there is no reason to peak… for you have nothing to peak.

Find and work with a coach who can evaluate where you are at, can progress you in an healthy manner by developing capacity, skill and technique, and refuses to spike performance using HiiT in order to pacify your or their ego, a coach who places health as the priority. There are few such coaches, but taking the time to find one may mean the difference between life and death.

Most Intense & Most Diseased

As a follow up to the prior post [titled “Most Advanced & Most Depressed] I thought it would be appropriate to shed light on the tactics used by trainers, coaches, heck… the entire sport and fitness industry regarding “getting you healthy”.

The tactics used by the entire sport & fitness industry are NO different than the addictive “persuasive techniques developed by propagandists and the gambling industry” used by tech companies like Facebook and platforms such as Twitter, Snapchat, and Instragram to addict their users to get the average consumer to check their phone 150 times a day (at last count, and rising).

In the world of tech, the addiction is created by users seeking another and another hit of dopamine which comes with every ping, ding, like, follower, swipe and star.

In the world of sport & fitness, the addiction is created to endorphins where the trainer or coach teaches a trainee or athlete to suffer under the guise of “no pain, no gain” so that every workout becomes a quest for ever more self inflicted pain and suffering.

The epitome of achievement in the world of sport & fitness is when you obtain “beast mode”, a level of such self hate that you are willing to push your body til you cough or pee blood. Trainers & coaches revel in the limelight of being able to ‘hurt’ trainees and athletes, with those who can hurt you the most feared for the level of punishment they can push you to cause yourself.

It’s absurd.

It’s juvenile.

It’s bulls#it!

If we are wondering what on earth we are doing to children’s brains through the addiction to technology, and especially social media apps, then perhaps the sport & fitness industry can shed some light…

In a time when health and fitness clubs mark almost every street corner and strip mall, a time when trainers have become TV celebrities, interviewed as if experts on all things health, placed in positions of authority when it comes to health and wellness… then surely there must be some evidence of success. Is there? Is there any evidence of success of all this endorphin seeking high intensity interval training?


Even the godfather of HiiT himself – Trainer Bob Harper of Biggest Loser stardom – has had his own heart attack proving that what he has preached adds up to a big fat ZERO! Review the aftermath of Biggest Loser contests, the stories shared by contestants while on the TV series and you will read that the weight loss on the show was exactly that… a show, with most unable to keep up appearances once out of the spotlight.

HiiT is a bunch of smoke and mirrors, selling cosmetic health as a proxy for true health.

If all this ‘health & wellness advice’ was accurate in anyway then we – collectively – would not be the most diseased, most overweight, most obese, most medicated, most depressed, most anxious, the most addicted and sickest society ever!

If there is anything more indicative of the health of society then it must be the state of our children… but unfortunately they are as overweight, obese, and addicted as their parents.

A recent study predicts that 57% of children today will be obese when they hit 35!  Think about that… just for a moment. If 57% of the population is obese, and obesity comes after being overweight… will anyone be of healthy weight?

We are nowhere close to these stats, meanwhile my daughter has already been bullied at school for being too thin, aka too healthy! Now, that is sick.

For one child to look at another, and instead of hoping and wanting health, instead wants the healthy child to become sick like them… now that is a sick mindset. It leaves me wondering… where are the parents? Do they not see the suffering they are inflicting or perpetuating upon their own flesh & blood? Do they not care? Or, does their social media avator have them so desperate for attention and acceptance that the health and well-being of their child has become secondary?

And this is the the outcome of the most technological and medically advanced society! So whats gonna happen when we become even more technological and medically advanced?

Let’s cut the crap…

HiiT… is bulls#it.

“No pain, no gain”… is the bulls#it that started this whole mess.

“An endorphin high” as a measure of a ” good “ workout…. is bulls#it.

Health does not come by slapping 30mins of exercise as a bandaid to cover day after day of intense stress, of toxic relationships, of unfulfilling work, of improper eating, drinking, where insufficient rest, recovery and sleep, are made up with “sports nutrition” products along with prescribed or over the counter medications to keep both ends of the candle burning brightly for at least one more day (hopefully, fingers crossed, knock on wood… as if that makes any difference).

You want health, then it must be the priority, not a close second.

You want health, then all decisions need to be made through the filter of the impact they can have, will have, even may have on your health, on you and/or your family.

That is the price of health, and that IS the truth.

Anyone telling you otherwise is bulls#iting you.

Most Advanced & Most Depressed

“The term “addiction” is no exaggeration. The average consumer checks his or her smartphone 150 times a day, making more than 2,000 swipes and touches. The applications they use most frequently are owned by Facebook and Alphabet, and the usage of those products is still increasing.”

Roger McNamee – The Guardian, to link click here

“In an interview this week with Axios, Facebook’s original president, Sean Parker, admitted that the company intentionally sought to addict users and expressed regret at the damage being inflicted on children.”

“He [Parker] said that he, Mark Zuckerberg and others understood this, “And we did it anyway.”

Mike Allen – Axios, to link click here


Sean Parker quote from Mike Allen/Axios interview

“God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains”

Thuy Ong, The Verge, to link click here

“The sad truth is that Facebook and Alphabet have behaved irresponsibly in the pursuit of massive profits. They have consciously combined persuasive techniques developed by propagandists and the gambling industry with technology in ways that threaten public health and democracy.”

Roger McNamee – The Guardian, to link click here

“The US, the most technologically advanced nation on the planet is also the most depressed: 3 in 10 Americans will battle depressive illness at some point in their lives, an estimated 10 fold increase since WWII.”

Stephen Ilardi – The Wall Street Journal

“The addictive pull of social media: the idea that we can substitute a carefully controlled social-media substitute (avatar) for our less-than-perfect real-world self.”

Charles Hugh Smith – of two, to link click here


Wonder why we are uneasy, down, depressed, wonder no more… every time we reach for our smartphone – 100 or more times a day – we toy with neurotransmitters and hormones that have a profound effect on our mental and emotional states, hence our overall well-being and health.

So what matters more… your health, or the online status of your social media avatar?

If its your online status, then when your health, the health of your family, your children, your grandchildren deteriorates then at least you will know who is responsible… you are.

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google may be guilty of toying with your physiology and psychology in the name of corporate profits, but now that you have been informed of their agenda, you have the ability and the responsibility to decide whether or not to continue to use them to the extent that you have been, or at all.

Again, what matters more… your health, or the online status of your social media avatar?

Worst Meme in Triathlon



“The Crawl”





























Reference and Links:

Is VanderLinden Healthy?


Stress is the basis for 80-85% of all diseases and medical diagnoses. We cannot eliminate stress in life, therefore it is the inability to manage the  stress of life that is the source of almost all major ailments, injuries, illnesses and diseases.

The corollary is that health is the ability to manage stress: physical, mental, and emotional stresses under varying circumstances and durations.  Health is a level of robustness, a type of flexibility that allows us to rebound from stress. It is a state of anti-fragility achieved by balancing training and rest, while developing and rehearsing strategies in preparation for the next time that we do engage a stress/stressor.

It stands to reason then that a professional athlete should be an expert in health as the entire focus of a pro athlete is to develop themselves to handle the physical stress of training, the mental stress of competition, of competitors, of juggling their sport organizations, sponsors, of home and work life, and the emotional stress of failing forwards in order to achieve their goals.

For a professional athlete to be unhealthy, to have failed at managing stress is a contradiction of states, its an incongruency. To be an athlete and to be unhealthy is to fail at the exact skill set that you are supposed to excel, to model. For a pro athlete to compromise or sacrifice health to achieve performance goals contradicts the very meaning of athleticism. To be a pro athlete means to be equally adept at planning and laying out appropriate timelines for goals, preventing over-reach, ambition, desire, and covetousness from taking over.

As a coach, to have an athlete who is unhealthy is to have failed in the role of teacher, mentor, advisor. It is to have overexposed your student to stress without appropriate preparation, with insufficient training and/or rest. It is to have demanded too much of your apprentice too soon.

I believe that we have forgotten what it truly means to be an athlete, what it truly means to coach.

To be an athlete used to mean pursuing your potential through exploration, learning, skill acquisition and development. Now the objective seems to be all about sourcing the short cuts which will deliver desired goals, where the attitude is anything goes, including the sacrifice, compromise, gambling and leveraging of health to cut the process to a minimum regardless of consequences and repercussions. We go so far as to call this approach active, healthy, balanced living.

As a health professional, a coach and athlete, I see swimmers, cyclists, runners, and triathletes all trying to achieve ‘healthy’ using this mindset, but instead of developing robustness, flexibility and capacity, they have become brittle, fragile, rigid, inflexible, chronically injured, ill, and overweight. Instead of gaining and enjoying freedom, they have become jailed and debilitated by their training and racing. The belief at the root of this dysfunction is that if we only try harder, push harder… the health which has eluded us will finally arrive.


In a 2016 Triathlon Magazine Canada article, pro triathlete Alex VanderLinden shared that this summer he dealt with ” low energy, poor recovery, lack of motivation” and having some blood work done was informed that he had a B12 deficiency and low testosterone.

Pro athletes who are unhealthy tend to make it seem as if their issues are mere inconveniences, ‘flesh wounds’ as in the Monty Python Dark Knight skit, not an indicator of anything significant.

To be injured, to be ill, to be unhealthy is a state that a pro athlete cannot be in. It is no different than a bank going bankrupt… its not supposed to happen, banks are supposed to be impenetrable institutions, no different than the body, mind, and spirit of a pro athlete.

When things don’t go as planned, we should stop.  We don’t.
Instead we resume training, typically training even harder.

To progress, an athlete must honestly evaluate training, recovery, competitions, appraising the value of each and every aspect to adjust upcoming cycles. When an athlete begins to suffer pain, dysfunction, injury, illness, or ends up developing symptoms to a syndrome, or a full blown medical condition training should come to an absolute halt so that a thorough autopsy is performed to ascertain what went wrong.

In Formula One, Indy, and World Tour racing, the cars and bikes used by the athletes are routinely stripped down to the frame. Every screw is examined, regreased, and retightened exactly to spec. Cables and fairings are inspected, repaired or replaced, and engines or gears and chain are taken apart, then put back together. Nothing is left to chance, absolutely nothing.

Apparently we respect cars and bikes more than we respect ourselves, more than we respect our bodies, minds, and spirits because how often do you hear athletes taking such care of themselves? How often do you hear of coaches analyzing training and racing to such a degree to improve performance while preventing over-training, injury, burn out or blow out by their athletes?

Instead, we have set our narratives of athlete and coach precluding us from seeing what needs to be seen, preventing us from stopping. Our narratives as they stand now:

  • Athletes are models of health, of vitality, of physical, mental and emotional capacity.  To be an athlete is to be healthy.  Athletes achieve this health, by training. Therefore, to be an athlete is to train. It follows then that not to train, implies that you are not being an athlete, that you are not pursuing health or are not healthy since you are not training.
  • A coach is someone who is educated and experienced to train athletes, hence coaches are reservoirs of information and wisdom in how to achieve health: physical, mental and emotional well-being. To coach is to train athletes. If a coach is coaching, then their athletes are training. It follows then that athletes who are not training, are not being coached.

See the problem? These narratives preclude stopping, resting, recovering.  As a result, athletes cannot rehabilitate fully, cannot rest, recovery or heal completely, because not to train means not to be an athlete.  We have cornered ourselves where we cannot stop even when continuing on causes us pain, causes us injury, causes us illness… we are driving ourselves into disease and cannot stop because we are trapped in a negative spiral, a doom loop of our own creation.

We can be on a handful of medications, need regular medical appointments, require taping, bracing, medical grade compression stockings, receive regular adjustments, massages, and therapy, we can ever suffer a heart attack or stroke, but as long as we get in our training… because of these narratives, we are convinced that we are truly healthy.

In psychology, a state of contradiction is called: denial.

Bent on upholding that our lifestyle, our training, our coach, and our lack of recovery is healthy, athletes will injure themselves, drive themselves to extremes of over-training with the resulting physiological and psychological chaos written off as bad luck, bad genetics, or just bad timing.

Bent on upholding our narratives, by refusing to question the status quo:

  1. Training is never questioned, never doubted, never evaluated to ascertain if it is truly delivering desired goals without undesirable consequences;
  2. Coaching is never questioned, never doubted, never assessed to determine if the philosophy is capable of delivering desired goals without undesirable consequences; and,
  3. Rest, napping, sleeping, downtime, real recovery including appropriate pre-hab & rehab, total rejuvenation, full healing are all impossibilities because none exist in the narratives we use to define health, wellness, well-being.

As an athlete or coach, to have your training methodology questioned is one thing, but to have to consider your training methodology as wrong… well, that’s just not going to happen, and if it does happen then there will be no admission to being wrong.  Too much rides on being right despite the risk of harm that we refuse to admit ignorance or incompetence when it comes to our own health, hoping that ‘good intentions’ will insure us against unwanted side effects.

In psychology, the term describing the refusal to challenge and confront narratives, thus to live in contradiction (i.e. denial) is: cognitive dissonance.

Cognitive Dissonance:  The mental stress or discomfort experienced by an individual who holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values at the same time; performs an action that is contradictory to their beliefs, ideas, or values; or is confronted by new information that conflicts with existing beliefs, ideas or values.[1][2]  [From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia]

Cognitive dissonance regarding our health and the resulting lack of health is our new normal. How else do you explain the popularization of the adage “no pain, no gain”? We deny the deep pain we live in, we normalize inner turmoil to the point that we inflict harm to ourselves to override the divide, to deaden the inner conflicts we struggle with when we refuse to deal with our fears.

OVER-TRAINING in the best cases, DEATH in the worst.

Ask athletes or coaches if their athletes over-train, are over-trained and the reaction will be… get outta here, no way, never! There can be no such thing as over-training because by our own narratives over-training is synonymous with being over-healthy. No one would admit to being ‘over-healthy’ therefore over-training is an impossibility.

Physical injury, mental impairment, and emotional fragility should suffice as clues to an athlete and their coach that something is wrong. But nothing is ever wrong in a society where “no pain, no gain” is the reigning mindset towards life: you weren’t wrong, you just didn’t suffer enough, you didn’t try hard enough. Its a society where crawling across finish lines is heroic (instead of mindless), where inflicting and tolerating pain is a testament to manliness or womanliness.

Where does it end?

Stage 1 Over-Training ends typically with an injury, an impairment, or illness of some sort. If proper rest and recovery or rehab are provided, then the athlete can return to a balanced state, a state of being healthy, truly healthy, but these days the mindset is screw that, get adjusted, get taped, foam roll, wear compression clothing, add a brace, get a prescription, pop the pills, get back out asap to training as these imply health. Its cosmetic health, but hey, cosmetic health is good enough because at least you look healthy. As a result we skip Stage 1, and we speed right along into Stage 2.

Stage 2 Over-Training is marked by weight gain or weight retention due to increasing and/or unmanageable levels of stress and the subsequent flooding of cortisol into our blood. The availability of so-called sports nutrition products (i.e. candy for adults) gloss over the signs and symptoms of Stage 2 leading most to continue along, unaware of the damage they inflict to their physiology and psychology. The fueling with gels, sports drinks, and every other sugar laced product power the adrenalin-cortisol hyped workouts and state of mind, ushering the athlete onto Stage 3.

Stage 3 Over-Training starts with diminishing or negative returns from training as the credit account of health is nearly depleted, leaving nothing further to leverage. Stage 3 is when athletes start to suffer from issues such as metabolic disorders, food sensitivities and intolerances, hormonal imbalances, neuro-endocrine fatigue, arrythmias, anxiety, insomnia amongst other signs and symptoms. Whereas in Stage 2 athletes start to underperform in competition, in Stage 3 athletes start to dislike, even hate competing. The stress of competition simply overwhelms them, but being so far gone these athletes come to the conclusion that they are simply bad at racing, good at training, so they train even harder as a compensatory reaction. Stage 3 makes its presence known in a myriad of ways which is why it confuses athletes, coaches, even health care professionals: multiple signs and symptoms develop over a period of time dilute connections. Signs and symptoms pop up across all 3 dimensions: physical, mental, and emotional, and to further confuse the matter, pop up in combinations. Stage 3 asserts itself when the individual finally breakdowns, often ending up with a physical or mental medical diagnosis (a diagnosis that they fall on as a crutch to explain their condition, as opposed to realizing that how they have trained has resulted in this condition). In the worst scenarios, the individual never makes it to an health professional until after they suffer a heart attack, a stroke, fall into severe depression or worse, skip right to the final scene: dead.

I encourage all athletes to consider… if your training, if the coaching you are receiving is not moving you towards your goals and improving your health, then what is the end game of the path you are on?  Think about it now, before you end up any farther down the path, and hopefully long before you end up in an hospital Emergency Room.

Here are links to a series on the topic of Over-Training from the website

  1. Part 1 – Overtraining Can Kill You: The 3 Stage of Overtraining
  2. Part 2 – Overtraining Can Kill You: The 3 Stage of Overtraining

VanderLinden isn’t the only pro triathlete with health issues… fellow pro triathlete Cody Beals shared that he faced similar issues earlier in 2016, and now pro Matt Bach wrote an article on these exact same health issues. Question is how many more pros are there who are not healthy, but are training and racing as if they are? How many are pressing on like Monty Python’s Dark Knight believing that “tis only a flesh wound” and that they are fit to fight? For their own sake, and for the sake of all those that these pros serve as role models… I can only hope that they are awakened to the fact that they are hurting themselves by how they are training, that how they train is what is inflicting the damage. Health and returning to training and racing healthy is possible, but not on the path that they are currently on.

P.S.  An acquaintance shared that they heard of a young guy, 40’ish, a husband, a father of two who recently played a game of shiny. After the game he had an heart attack and died. What would we have said if he was 70? Likely, sorry, that is sad, but considering his age an heart attack is not entirely unexpected.  If he was 60 we would have said, oh, that is unexpected. If he was 50, we would be shocked, saying wow, that is young. So what do you say when a 40 year old dies of a heart attack? It says our definition as a society of health, of being healthy, of exercise, of being active and fit are wrong, totally wrong wrong wrong. It says that how we are pursuing health, fitness, performance is incorrect. Think about it. Know anyone who was too young to die?