Utilitarianism and Exercise: Analyzing “It Works For Me”

I’ve been reading a lot of cognitive science and neuroscience related stuff lately, and it’s had me on a kick with updates that seemingly have very little to do with strength training and exercise.

Well, it does, just indirectly; mainly I’m doing what I do best, which is targeting the flawed thinking and decision-making that most people rely on. Which conveniently manifests itself in fitness-related circles.

A recent debate (argument) on a forum got me thinking about how people look at their own thoughts and behaviors. Namely, people really aren’t thinking about how they think. That may sound like a dog chasing its own tail, but there’s something to be said for self-reflection as it applies to problem-solving.

Since program design and dietary strategies boil down to decision-making and problem-solving activities, this tends to hit home in a lot of ways. Read onwards.

Problem-Solving and Utility

How do you go about solving a problem? It can be anything – TV won’t come on, cut your finger, or not dropping fat fast enough?

In other words, when something isn’t working right, how do you go about fixing it? Have you ever stopped to think about that?

I know people all tend to react differently. Some people go by intuition; they “just know” what to do. Others get emotional, “listening to their hearts” – or at the extreme end, going hysterical and completely breaking down.

The last approach is also the ideal way to go about: the analytical approach. Get all the information you can about the situation, figure out likely causes of the problem, and then work down the list of solutions in order of likelihood.

Intuition is fine if you’re an old hat in the matter; if you’ve been a mechanic for 30 years, your intuition towards fixing a car is probably pretty good – but only because you’ve been doing it so long that it’s become second nature. It’s not so much that your “gut feeling” is right, in as much as your experience has become automated.

The less said about emotion-based solutions, the better. Going by what you feel without any sort of objective basis is entirely arbitrary and next to worthless. In some situations, the emotional process is actually counter-productive – just imagine someone at the scene of a car accident that becomes hysterical to the point of being non-functional.

The analytical approach is the only way that consistently makes sense. And it’s easier than it sounds. Say you pop down on the couch, push the power button on the remote, and oops, the TV’s not coming on. What do you do?

What could be wrong here? The batteries in the remote could be dead. The TV might have gotten unplugged. The power could be out.  The TV could be broken. If you brainstorm you’ll think up plenty.

Well where do we start? You start with the most likely solutions. You know the power’s on, because the lights in the house are on, so you rule that out. You walk over to the TV and physically push the power button, and still nothing – to the remote’s probably fine.

Then you check the plug, and aha! Somebody’s knocked the plug out. You plug it in and the TV comes on just fine. Problem solved.

This seems like a mundane example, but it’s a textbook way to go about things analytically. You wouldn’t just assume the TV’s broken and throw it out on the curb, right? That wouldn’t make a lot of sense, although somebody getting upset and having a tantrum might do just that.

In this instance, checking out the remote’s batteries and the power plug have both a very high likelihood and desirability. Not only are the odds in their favor, you also want those things to be at fault.

In comparison, throwing out the TV has a lower likelihood, and I’m going to assume you don’t want to throw your new 50″ plasma out on the curb without at least bothering to check if it’s working.

This is called utility – how desirable a given action or outcome is. Throwing it out has a low utility – you don’t want that to happen, because it’s going to cost you time and resources, as compared to just plugging the thing back in. In contrast just seeing whether the TV is plugged in has a high utility. You can fix that with very little time and effort.

When problem-solving, it’s always most efficient to base things on the expected utility of any given action. In other words, you want to do things that will have the most payoff for the least risk.

Figuring Out What to Do: Axioms & Behaviors

If you boil it down to the basics, all behaviors have a purpose: to move us towards a goal. When we feel hungry, we want to eat to sate the feeling. Hunger is in itself an action that motivates us towards the goal of bringing nutrients into our body. And that, in turn, is a subset of the larger “stay alive” goal that our body tends to put above all else.

Everything has a purpose.

When we’re exercising or dieting for any particular goal, this still holds true. Exercise and diet in one way, and you grow. Exercise and diet in another way, and you drop fat. These larger goals – “get bigger” or “lose fat” – have numerous sub-goals that bring us towards them.

By sub-goal, I mean “action or behavior that brings us closer to the main goal”.

The question is, how do we know what these sub-goals are? Research and individual experience.

As I’m fond of saying, research gives us limits and boundaries. It doesn’t tell us what to do specifically; rather, it narrows things down to a tiny sub-set of all the possibilities. For example, we know that if you want your legs to grow, you probably don’t need to be out running 10 miles four times a week. We know that to build muscle mass, you must apply some kind of progressive tension-time overload to the muscles.

From those established boundaries, it comes down to individual responses and a good chunk of trial and error. But even so, you’re ahead of the game because you know what won’t be effective.

A rational person will think in these terms. Research will provide a starting point, with the specifics fleshed out based on individual responses and even personal preferences. Analytical problem-solving gives us a way to work from that starting point.

Say you’re trying to get bigger. Let’s look at it from the standpoint of utility. In order to grow, you must do some kind of resistance exercise, and you must make some effort to increase resistance over time. These are actions with a very high utility, since you must do them.

On the other hand, we also know that doing lots of running is counterproductive to both mass gains and strength gains. Lots of running is not just neutral, but it will actively move us away from the goal. Further, it requires a very large investment of time and energy. Doing lots of running has a very low utility.

Here’s one a little harder. Let’s say you’re lifting weights four days a week and eating a good bit in order to put on weight. You notice you’re getting a little fat, so you come home and make a thread on the Internet about whether or not you should add in four days of interval training. How do you decide if this is a good idea?

In cases like this you have to ask yourself “what will I gain?” and “what will I lose?”. If the gain is greater than the loss, it’s probably worth it. If not, you should probably avoid it.

What will you gain from doing intervals after your workouts? You’ll improve your conditioning some. You’ll burn up a few more calories than you would have. What will it cost you? You’ll be working your legs a lot more. Depending on how the intervals are done, you could be adding to your CNS stress.

Will this provide a greater or lesser net benefit than the alternatives? For example, why can’t you just eat less food if you’re worried about getting fatter?

Note that there isn’t necessarily a correct answer here; it really will boil down to costs vs. benefits.

All of our behaviors can be summarized in terms of these axioms, or basic rules. Each goal and sub-goal is just a grouping of axioms that govern behavior. Gain muscle: overload the muscles and create a positive calorie balance. Lose fat: create a net calorie deficit with diet and exercise. And so on. Every goal is just a packaged grouping of axioms that define behaviors.

Diet and exercise programs are constructs that emerge from these fundamental axioms – they are not fundamental in themselves. In a rational paradigm, the problem-solver will realize this and select every action based on its utility.

The problem is that a lot of people aren’t thinking rationally. And I just mean in general, although it’s very evident in fitness circles. Rather, they rely on axioms that they like, rather than axioms that are objectively effective. This is a rather unfortunate property of the human mind, in that we tend to heavily bias our thinking towards things that we’re in favor of – and we tend to become in favor of things for reasons that have very little to do with rational analysis.

What if you like running 10 miles four times a week, but you want to gain muscle? This is an obvious conflict between behavior and goal. The emotional type would rationalize the behavior in lieu of the goal; in this case, liking the behavior is more important than the outcome. The person may not even consciously realize this, either. Cognitive biases can be very powerful.

In fairness, plenty of people simply aren’t aware of the cause-effect relationship between their actions and their outcomes, but you’ll still see this kind of thinking in people that are aware of the disconnect. This is why you tend to find people trying to gain muscle (or lose fat, for that matter) that insist on staying in the gym and doing cardio 5-6 days a week.

The analytical thinker would evaluate the options based on utility.

If you keep running, you’re going to be moving away from the goal, and there are no benefits to make up for it. The desirability of this is low. On the other hand, if you drop the running, you’ll be moving towards the goal, and lose nothing in the process. The desirability of this is high. Solution? Drop the running. It all boils down to utility. If the return is high and the cost is low, you do it.

The emotional thinker doesn’t do this. These people go by what they like, not by what is effective. The main goal of our thought process then should be to get away from that kind of biased thinking and aim for rational analysis.

Facing Zealots: Set Theory and Dogma

Rationalization is an action that’s heavily favored by our brains. Our internal narrative tends to skew our thoughts and our memories in a way that’s favorable to us, despite objective reality. Humans are literally wired to be impartial, and to actively dismiss information that disagrees with our notions of reality.

So now I tell you that your world-view is wrong. What can I expect the outcome to be?

1) Calm acceptance and an attempt to rationally understand the disagreement

2) Defensiveness and hostility for daring to challenge the truth

I wouldn’t put money on #1, even with concrete, irrefutable evidence.

People get invested in ideas. They invest themselves in their thought processes to the point that a criticism of a belief is taken as a criticism of the person. Human minds like the memes they’re exposed to, and don’t always want to let them go.

Thus we have the fanatic, the person so invested in an idea that s/he absolutely will not let go of it no matter what. When you’re dealing with a fanatic, you’re dealing with a two-pronged issue. Firstly you have the cognitive bias that causes them to tune you out; then you have the lack of rational/analytical thinking, which is a big part of why they’re a fanatic in the first place. It’s two sides of the same coin, really, and a self-sustaining cycle.

In other words the fanatic is not a good person to debate with if the goal is persuasion. They simply don’t tend to have the mental ability to see things any differently than what they already “know”. You can convince others that may be reading or watching the debate, but your odds of convincing the True Believer are minimal.

The thing that’s most perplexing is that, at least in the fitness industry, a lot of these guys get hung up on specific programs rather than considering the larger picture.

There’s a branch of mathematics called Set Theory that deals with this kind of thing. You may have seen a Venn diagram before, with the interlocking circles that show how things relate to each other. This ties back into what I said earlier about axioms and goals – any goal you name has sub-goals that lead to it. Specific programs and diets are just sub-sets of a larger goal, as they’re collections of axioms that lead to specific effects.

This leads to the idea that any program or diet you may do is just a sub-set of a larger goal. If you drew a Venn diagram that said “eat less food”, then everything that makes you eat less food would be a sub-set of that goal.

Case in point, low-carb diets are a sub-set of the behavior “eat less food”. The low-carb fanatics like to claim that there’s some magical “metabolic advantage” to eating very low carbs on a daily basis. Is this really true, or do low-carb diets just encompass a set of behaviors and outcomes that lead to the goal of “eat less food”?

If you’re familiar with Occam’s razor, you can see why the magic of “metabolic advantage” is not likely given this situation. The simple fact that people can still successfully lose weight and body fat, by using other approaches to reach the “eat less food” goal, is enough to disprove this.

Low-carb diets work because they lead you to eat less food, not because they’re innately superior.

This goes for anything of this nature – training programs, diets, it doesn’t matter. Any specific program is just a collection of axioms that emerges from the larger goals at hand. These programs and methods work because they lead you to the larger goal, not because they’re special.

This becomes an issue with some people because they just aren’t thinking in these terms. When you point out that there’s nothing special about it, the zealot will point you to many successes and therefore demonstrate that it certainly does work!

I’m rarely disputing that it works. What I’m disputing is that the LC diet is working because it’s low-carb. What my argument is in this case is that the LC diet is a sub-set of the goal behavior “eat less food”.

What happens is that the zealot turns it into a strawman argument (sometimes unintentionally) because s/he simply doesn’t understand things on this level; the zealot only hears “you’re wrong” and proceeds from that platform, without considering the larger scope.

This is a classic example of emotional reasoning.

My solution is just to approach things rationally. Why rely on arbitrary actions just because you “like” them? I don’t know about you, but I prefer to get to the point. Why develop a pet ideology and spend your time and energy defending it, instead of being open to evidence and basing your outlook on known data?

It’s easier – and more productive – to integrate  your thought process into a larger model, rather than taking the narrow road and excluding anything that doesn’t agree with you.