STUFF I ENJOYED THIS WEEK

VIDEO: [Luke Holmes] Structuring a Training Week for CrossFit

Luke coming in hot with the whiteboard video content!

Lots of coaches feel pretty good about writing specific training sessions, but can sometimes get overwhelmed trying to design a full week of training. There’s so many things to work on! Gymnastics! Conditioning! Weightlifting! Shoulder rehab! Hypertrophy! Core work! Maybe even some bench and bis for the guns!

By applying a few rules of thumb, you can start to build weekly templates that have a focus and make sense — without feeling like you’re trying to jam twenty pounds of exercise into a five pound bag.

Check out some high/low training from Coach Luke.

ARTICLE: [Gen] I Biohacked for 10 Weeks to try to Live Forever

I’m going to be honest — “biohacking” content drives me nuts. This kind of tracking and hacking is a perfect example of making the complex complicated. Lots of really smart people come up with very fancy and plausible sounding biological mechanisms for things…that are completely wrong or irrelevant.

To be honest, I don’t really know what to make of biohackers. In some ways, I’m a fan of citizen science since I often think that trial and error is one of the best ways to figure out what actually works in complex (as opposed to complicated) environments. Detailed, top-down, step-by-step plans often fail to adapt to the constantly changing reality of biology. So, “steel man” defense of biohacking is that it allows for iterative trial and error exploration of strategies for improving performance.

On the other hand, it’s really easy for people to get fooled by spurious correlations in their personal experiences, fail to recognize confounders that can affect their results in the gym (changing jobs, changing schedules, etc.), or to start manipulating proxies for what they actually want (if my testosterone transiently goes up, that must mean that my performance is improving over time).

This is where the whole “evidence-based” framing comes in. We can do our best to eliminate the aforementioned biases and red herrings through good experimental design, solid controls, and sound statistical methods. However, experimental design suffers from a legibility problem. Measuring the things that we actually care about is really hard!

So, you end up with studies showing that being good at CrossFit predicts your performance on a CrossFit workout better than VO2 max, strength, or age. Would anyone be surprised if being good at field hockey better predicted field hockey performance than VO2 max, strength, or age?

So, like most kind of annoying things, biohacking takes a reasonable impulse (trial and error with a focus on outcomes in a complex environment) and makes several classic mistakes (focusing on specific metrics in a complex environment without the proper context, misunderstanding noise and regression to the mean, leaning into  spurious correlations).

So yeah. Put your Whoop away and go to bed.

SONG: [Electro Hit of the Week] Strafe “Set It Off“

Rather than writing a little write up of my opinion of this song along with some half-baked musicology surrounding its influences and its descendants, it seems right to just copy and paste the top YouTube comment.

The OG 12” of this actually has Strafe’s phone number (from the time) printed on the label. So when I heard this at El Paso Cantina in Long Beach in the mid ‘80s I went straight to the DJ, wrote down “Strafe Set it Off” but of course wrote down the phone number too!

The next day instead of going to the record store to buy the 12” I called the number and I’ll be damned, Strafe answered! He asked me if I was a DJ or a producer or whatever, and I just told him I heard the song in a club and thought it was the bomb! I told him the truth. That I was a fan and avid dancer and loved the song. So without me even asking if I could have a record, he took it upon himself to write my address down and then sent a 12” to me for free!!! I still have it too!

This is the best song called “Set It Off” from New York — other contenders be damned.

-Todd

PS: Thanks for reading. Please let me know if you’ve seen any articles or podcasts this week that you think that I would enjoy.

PPS: Did you like No Country for Old Men? This was my favorite line.