Dear Sundog,

I started using the fitness tracking platform Strava a few years ago and loved it. I could see my trail running times and distances improve and I pushed myself while ski touring鈥攚ith my friends there to cheer me on. But lately I鈥檝e started to sour on it: the one-upmanship, the preening, the feeling like someone is deliberately trying to beat me just to say they did鈥攏ot to mention getting hit on by cheesy dudes. Now I hear about : users pay someone else (faster) to carry their phone to get them a slot on the leaderboard. It seems nuts and somehow wrong. Should I just quit?

Full-on Krazy Times

Dear FKT,

Paying someone to achieve your achievement is indeed the highest expression of human folly. It may resemble paying someone to write a college term paper. But while cheating in school is clearly unethical, cheating on a fitness tracker is does not have an obvious victim. The stakes are so low that it鈥檚 hard to fathom the motives. It鈥檚 a sort of inverse prostitution: instead of paying someone to have sex with you (to provide you pleasure), you would pay someone to have sex for you (to deprive yourself of pleasure) and then brag about it online (to convince others that you are in fact having pleasure.) If just one person did this, we鈥檇 diagnose a mental illness. But when large numbers of otherwise sane people begin to depart their senses in unison, it鈥檚 worth digging into the cultural moment.

This discussion is about the outdoors鈥攖rails, mountains, canyons, forests鈥攁nd does not apply to those using Strava on the pavement or鈥擥od help them鈥攁 stationary bicycle.

And instead of focusing on the few weirdos who are making Strava a bummer for everyone else, let me examine weather鈥攚hen it comes to the backcountry鈥擲trava is itself an inherently flawed product.

I know that some users use the platform solely for themselves and don鈥檛 share their stats with other. I鈥檓 sure this is useful, but it鈥檚 not really what Strava is. You don鈥檛 need a social app to track your times and distances; you can do that with a GPS watch. Even a fledgling Luddite such as Sundog has started wearing such a contraption as he plods along the local trail, occasionally being passed by an elderly dog-walker, largely to know when it鈥檚 time to turn around before inflicting further damage on his old knees. What makes Strava a sensation is the ability to share your achievements and efforts with others who in the best case scenario will encourage you to go further and faster.

And what could be more American than the insistence that if you try harder and harder you will eventually succeed? Optimizing performance in wild places is the holy grail for the new crop of endurance athletes drawn to ultramarathons, gravel bikes and fastest known times. But let鈥檚 pause there: is the natural world actually the place to go faster and further and harder?

More than half a century ago, when the Grand Canyon was under threat of being dammed, dam boosters claimed that one benefit was the resulting reservoir that would bring untold recreational activities to the masses who would now be able to boat and fish afloat clear blue waters instead of having to descend into the gorge with its inhospitable rapids and currents and mud. The Sierra Club posted a full page ads in newspapers asking: SHOULD WE ALSO FLOOD THE SISTINE CHAPEL SO TOURISTS CAN GET NEARER THE CEILING?

What if I were to suggest that the Pope cordon off running lanes through the Vatican so I might better time my sprints, and install stairs for cardio work leading to Michaelangelo鈥檚 frescoes? One might say: this is a holy place, not one for competitive athletics and recreation. I might say the same about the mountains and canyons.

Do Strava try-hards actually damage the land? Oh, probably there鈥檚 some trampling done by the 24-hour races and days-long sieges of public lands required for an-ultra marathon. But I don鈥檛 think the environmental concerns are major. What about the fact that these overachievers are just a bit, well, irritating to others, such as yourself, FKT? That鈥檚 surely real, but I wouldn鈥檛 call it immoral.

So, no, I don鈥檛 think Strava is unethical. And yet I want to help answer your question, FKT, which is ultimately not about other people鈥檚 behavior, but your own. And in this era of magical, unprecedented, and addictive technologies, yours is a question that we all seem to face: why do I continue to do this thing that makes me unhappy?

Let me share my own story. As a mediocre athlete growing up in suburbs, Sundog was repelled by most soccer and baseball鈥攁nd even surfing鈥攂ecause the kids who were good at these sports were already calcifying into a personality type that with the wisdom of adulthood I might call 鈥渁ssholes.鈥� They were cocky, competitive, and quick to lord their superiority over the rest of us. And it worked! I was generally too intimidated and psyched-out to paddle into a wave or take a shot on goal for fear of being yelled out by some jock.

The place I finally found my teenage footing was on the crags and cliffs of Joshua Tree and Yosemite, where I turned out to be a good enough climber. It didn鈥檛 feel like the climbers of the eighties鈥攅ven the talented ones鈥攚ere there to prove their greatness. I discovered my people: misfits, artists, vagabonds and dreamers driven by curiosity more than competition who sought adventure and solitude and the mystical.

And yes鈥擨 actually did want to prove鈥攖o someone鈥攎y greatness, and became obsessed with pushing the numbers, wanting to climb harder routes that anyone else my age. By the time I was 18 I was already jaded and burned-out鈥擨 no longer enjoyed climbing some classic all-day 5.8 multi-pitch route in Tuolumne Meadows. I only wanted to be rehearsing some fifty-foot 5.11c. I drifted away from what I loved and ended up in a small circle of competitive jocks who, with the hindsight of adulthood, I might refer to as 鈥渁ssholes.鈥�

Likely I was one of them. What began as discovery and transcendence ended as vanity and striving after wind. I quite rock climbing by the time I was 19鈥攁nd even though through the next decades I taught climbing and canyoneering, it was at that point a job, and not a passion. I have some regrets. I always wanted to climb at least one grade beyond my ability, and as a result I took a series of lead falls that involved pulling gear, minor injuries, near misses, and scaring the shit out of myself and my partners. I鈥檓 lucky to have survived those years without tragedy. Now I look back and wonder: why did I have to try so hard? Why wasn鈥檛 I content to climb within my skills?

California has hundreds of gorgeous moderate routes that I never climbed because of my ambition. It鈥檚 clear now that through climbing I was trying to work out my own insecurities: I wanted to be great! I wanted other people to acknowledge that I was great! Were the cliffs of Yosemite and Joshua Tree the best places to work this shit out? Probably not.

Back to the comparison and competition that fuels Strava. There is likely a population of enlightened souls for whom this works. For the rest of us, Strava appears to be a product which鈥攍ike all other social media鈥攃ultivates some of humanity鈥檚 worst traits: public boasting coupled with private insecurity as we scroll through the superior public boasts of friends and strangers.

What if the outdoors is simply not the place for competitive fitness? Leave that shit in the gym, or on the asphalt, or on the Peloton. For those who really want to time themselves, compare themselves, and in any other way optimize performance, let me politely suggest a brisk sprint around the ovular track at your local high school. The outdoors calls for far more important things than physical fitness: laying prone in the trail to study a stinkbug, making love in a meadow, watching clouds drift past peaks.

鈥淧raise ignorance,鈥� says Wendell Berry, 鈥渇or what man has not encountered he has not destroyed.鈥� It may be true that what gets measured can then be improved. And yet there are no numbers in nature, no minutes or miles or measurements. When we humans overlay those stats on the untamed land, we likely miss the mystery it has to show us.

Mark Sundeen teaches environmental writing at the University of Montana. Got an ethical question of quandary of your own? Send it to sundogsalmanac@hotmail.com.

The post I Used to Love My Fitness Tracker. Now It Bums Me Out. Should I Quit? appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.

If I told you that NASA has developed a radical new way of monitoring and quantifying your workouts, and that that method outperforms all others, you鈥檇 probably assume that it involves bleeding-edge science. There would be AI, and some sort of wearable or perhaps even injectable technology. It would be very expensive.

But you鈥檇 be wrong, for reasons that tell us something important about the quest to transform training optimization from an art into a science. A new study by Mattia D鈥橝lleva and his colleagues at the University of Udine compares different ways of assessing the 鈥渢raining load鈥� of different workouts鈥攁nd finds that a low-tech NASA questionnaire produces the most accurate results. The findings offer a reminder that outsourcing our training decisions to wearable tech algorithms 诲辞别蝉苍鈥檛 always outperform simply listening to our bodies. The research also raises a tricky question: is the workout that makes you most tired also the one that increases your fitness the most?

Why Does Training Load Matter?

The goal of training is to impose a stress鈥攁 training load鈥攐n your body that makes it tired in the short term but triggers adaptations that make it fitter in the long term. Going all-out in one workout isn鈥檛 constructive, even though it imposes a huge training load, because it leaves you too tired to train effectively the next day. The art of training is figuring out what mix of easy, medium, and hard workouts will enable you to accumulate the greatest possible training load over weeks and months without getting crippled by fatigue.

In its simplest form (as I discussed here), the training load of a workout is a combination of how hard you push and how long you push for. But the details get tricky. What鈥檚 the best measure for how hard you鈥檙e pushing? You could use pace, power, heart rate, heart rate variability, lactate levels, perceived effort, or other progressively more esoteric metrics. And how do you combine effort with duration? You can鈥檛 just multiply them together, because effort is nonlinear: running twice as fast for half the distance won鈥檛 produce the same training effect.

The , which is published in the International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance, compares seven different ways of calculating training load. Four of them are variations on a concept known as TRIMP, which is short for 鈥渢raining impulse鈥� and is based on heart rate measurements, using equations that account for lactate levels, breathing thresholds, and other details. A fifth uses heart-rate variability, and a sixth uses a subjective rating of effort. (Most fitness wearables, by the way, likely use a combination of the above methods, though their exact algorithms are typically proprietary.) The seventh method is the NASA questionnaire, which we鈥檒l come back to.

The gold standard against which all these methods were compared is the 鈥渁cute performance decrement,鈥� or APD. Basically, you do an all-out time trial, then you do your workout, then you do another all-out time trial. Your APD is how much slower the second time-trial is compared to the first one, as a measure of how much the workout took out of you. Obviously this isn鈥檛 a practical way of monitoring training, because you can鈥檛 race before and after every workout. But for researchers, it鈥檚 a way of checking whether various methods鈥攊ncluding the seven they tested in this study鈥� correspond to the reality of how hard a workout is on your body. At the end, they were able to figure out which method was the most reliable predictor of training load.

What the New Study Found

D鈥橝lleva and his colleagues recruited 12 well-trained runners (10 men and 2 women) to test four different running workouts on different days:

• Low-intensity training (LIT): 60 minutes at a pre-determined comfortable pace
• Medium intensity (MIT): 2 x 12:00 at a moderate pace with 4:00 easy recovery
• Long high-intensity (HITlong): 5 x 3:00 hard with 2:00 recovery
• Short high-intensity (HITshort): two sets of 11 x 30 seconds hard, 30 seconds easy

The performance test was running at VO2 max pace until exhaustion. When they were fresh, the runners lasted just under six minutes on average. After the one-hour easy run, their APD was 20.7 percent, meaning they gave up 20.7 percent earlier in the post-workout VO2 max run. After the medium-intensity run, the APD was 30.6 percent; after the long intervals, it was 35.9 percent; after the short intervals, it was 29.8 percent.

So how well were each of the seven training load calculations able to predict this APD? The short answer is: not very well. Here鈥檚 a comparison of APD (on the left) and one of the parameters studied, which is called bTRIMP and is based on heart-rate measurements and lactate curves:

In fact, the relationships are completely reversed: the easiest workout according to bTRIMP produces the biggest APD in reality, and the workout ranked hardest by bTRIMP produces the smallest APD. All except two of the training load calculations the researchers measured have similar upside-down relationships. The two exceptions are heart-rate variability and the NASA questionnaire, which look like this:

The heart-rate variability measures, on the left, don鈥檛 tell us much, because they鈥檙e basically the same after each of the four workouts. (You can see some subtle differences, but they鈥檙e not statistically significant.) The NASA questionnaire, on the other hand, bears a striking resemblance to the APD data, and the statistical analysis confirms that it鈥檚 a good predictor. In other words, it鈥檚 the only one of the seven calculations tested that, according to this study, accurately reflects how exhausted you are after a workout.

So what is this questionnaire? It鈥檚 called the , or NASA-TLX, and was developed in the 1980s. It鈥檚 simply a set of six questions that ask you to rate the mental demand, physical demand, temporal demand (how rushed were you?), performance (how well did you do?), effort, and frustration of a task. You answer each of these questions on a scale of 1 to 100, then the six scores are averaged鈥攁nd presto, you have a better measure of how hard your workout was than your watch or heart-rate monitor can provide.

What the NASA Questionnaire Misses

These results don鈥檛 mean that we should all start recording NASA-TLX scores in our training logs. Questions like how hurried you felt don鈥檛 seem very relevant to running, or to training in general. What鈥檚 more significant about the questionnaire is what it 诲辞别蝉苍鈥檛 include: any measure of how long the workout was.

All the other training load measures rely on a combination of intensity and duration. But the effect of duration swamps the measurement: that鈥檚 why the bTRIMP graph above shows the 60-minute easy run (LIT) as the workout with the biggest training load. It鈥檚 really just telling us that it was the longest workout. The NASA-TLX, on the other hand, just asks (in various ways) how hard the workout felt once it was done. That turns out to be a better way of predicting how much slower you鈥檒l be after the workout.

There鈥檚 an implicit assumption in all of this discussion, though, which is that the workout that provides the biggest training load is the one that will improve your fitness the most. Is APD鈥攈ow much slower you get over the course of a single workout鈥攔eally the best predictor of fitness gains? It鈥檚 easy to come up with scenarios where that鈥檚 not true. If I sprain my ankle, my APD will be enormous, but that 诲辞别蝉苍鈥檛 mean I鈥檓 going to be an Olympic champion next month. Similarly, you can imagine workouts that would inflict a disproportionate amount of performance-sapping fatigue鈥攕teep downhill running, for example鈥攃ompared to their fitness benefits.

Perhaps what we鈥檙e seeing here is not so much 鈥済ood鈥� (NASA-TLX) and 鈥渂ad鈥� (TRIMP) measures of training load, but rather good measurements for two different types of training load. The APD and NASA-TLX mostly reflect how hard/intense/fast the workout was. TRIMPs and other metrics that incorporate duration end up mostly reflecting how long the workout was. There鈥檚 no reason to assume that these two parameters are interchangeable. It鈥檚 not just that you can鈥檛 get the same training benefit by going twice as fast for half as long. It鈥檚 that there鈥檚 no equation that makes fast running produce the same benefits as slow running. They鈥檙e two different physiological stimuli, and the smart money says you need both to maximize your performance.

So where does this leave us? I鈥檓 not anti-data, and I鈥檓 open to the idea that some of the newer metrics provided by wearable tech might reveal useful patterns if you collect them consistently. But if you strip training down to its bare essentials, these results suggest to me that there are two separate parameters that really matter: how long and how hard. And for now, I鈥檓 not convinced that we have any measuring tools that are significantly better than a stopwatch and an honest answer to the question 鈥淗ow did that feel?鈥�

For more Sweat Science, join me on and , sign up for the , and check out my new book .

The post Wearable Tech is Good. But Listening to Your Body Is Still Better. appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.

For many endurance athletes, data is everything. Having the ability to track your steps, pace, and sleep via a smart device can be helpful and fascinating. Findings from show about one in five U.S. adults regularly wears a smartwatch or fitness tracker. However, this constant monitoring can also be problematic.

When Do Fitness Trackers Become Problematic?

鈥淭racking devices have the potential to reinforce negative behaviors by fostering obsessive tendencies, leading to anxiety and disordered eating patterns,鈥� says. 鈥淧erfectionists, individuals with a history of eating disorders, and those prone to overexertion should exercise caution with tracking devices, as they may amplify existing issues.鈥� She adds that you may become goal-obsessed鈥攐ften at the expense of your overall well-being.聽

The issues may even extend beyond yourself, affecting your relationships and work performance, says an associate professor of integrative wellness at Point Loma Nazarene University and director of health and wellness coaching at UC San Diego Health. Research published in in 2017 found that calorie and fitness tracking devices have been linked to characteristics synonymous with eating disorders.聽

Additionally, in a 2023 study published in the, participants who had their Apple watches unknowingly manipulated to show a lower step number at the end of the day were more likely to demonstrate unhealthy behaviors, including reduced self-esteem and increased blood pressure. This is compared to participants whose step count remained accurate and untouched.

Even being unable to wear the device鈥攚hether it鈥檚 not charged or is misplaced鈥攃an lead to frustration or anxiety, according to a 2019 study in聽According to, a licensed clinical psychologist and certified behavioral sleep medicine specialist, stress can become exacerbated by not meeting a tracking goal. Take sleep, for instance. Troxel says athletes can suffer from, an obsession with pursuing optimal sleep, driven by sleep tracker data. But this mission, to get good sleep at any cost, often ends up causing more anxiety鈥攁nd even leads to a greater loss of sleep when you end up missing the mark. As a result, your athletic performance can suffer.聽

How to Develop a Healthy Relationship with Your Fitness Tracker聽

It鈥檚 OK if you lean on your tracking device or enjoy studying the data it collects. However, understanding where to draw the line is key to maintaining a healthy relationship with it. Perlus recommends following these four guiding principles.聽

1. Moderation

You should use your fitness tracker to gain insights and motivation, but you shouldn鈥檛 feel compelled to monitor every activity or constantly check your stats.

2. Enjoyment

You should genuinely enjoy your workouts and activities, regardless of whether you’re wearing your device or not. 鈥淭he tracking enhances your experience, but doesn’t define it,鈥� Perlus says.

3. Flexibility

You should be able to adapt your training plan based on how your body feels鈥攔ather than strictly following what the tracker dictates.

4. Stress Management

Tracking shouldn鈥檛 cause you undue stress or anxiety. 鈥淚f a missed goal or low data reading upsets you excessively, it might be a sign of an unhealthy attachment,鈥� Perlus says.

If your thinking 诲辞别蝉苍鈥檛 align with these principles, you may have an unhealthy relationship with your tracker.聽

How to Change Your Behavior

Instead of constantly looking at your stats, Matthews recommends turning to daily journaling. 鈥淪ubjective data can actually be just as beneficial as tracking more objective data from a smartwatch, as this information can paint a more complete picture of not only one鈥檚 progress, but one鈥檚 overall health and well-being,鈥� she says. The practice of recording workouts, including how you felt during and after each session (think: mood, soreness, stress) can help you reflect in a healthy way, she explains.聽

Perlus also recommends paying attention to physiological cues like your heart rate variability, sleep quality, and energy levels. If you鈥檙e still looking for external feedback, consider finding a training partner or joining a workout club. By looking to others for support and motivation, you鈥檒l work toward your goals鈥攁nd build a new community.聽

Stop Suppressing Your Pleasure

When it comes to fitness feats, such as running a marathon, cycling a century, or climbing a mountain, the overemphasis on metrics can actually steal your joy and your sense of accomplishment. Instead, you may feel a greater sense of performance pressure, triggering anxiety or fear around falling short of your goals, Perlus says.聽

By tethering yourself to tracker stats, you may be setting yourself up to miss out on all the exciting things that make up an endurance event: your surroundings, the course, the camaraderie of fellow participants. And being present鈥攏oticing, without judgment or expectation, the thoughts that arise and the physical sensations experienced in your body鈥攊s a big part of engaging in physical activity of any kind, Matthews says.聽

While using fitness trackers can be motivating, make sure that doing so 诲辞别蝉苍鈥檛 override your ability to rest, recover, or engage in other forms of self-care. If you鈥檙e feeling mental anguish or pressure to meet certain goals and numbers, it may be time to ditch that tracker.聽

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