Should You Ditch Your Wearable Technology?

In this episode we explore the upsides and downsides of data. In a world filled with more and more information about our sleep, heart rate, recovery, and performance how do we filter through to make sure it leads to better performance? How should we approach the world of wearable technology, and what should be our goal in collecting this information about ourselves? Tune in to find out as we take a deep dive into the world of wearable technology and performance data.

Transcript

0:28

Are

Chris 0:28

we going? Can you edit out the first minute? You need

Matt 0:35

Yeah, I'm good with starting. Let me get all set up here. All

Chris 0:43

right.

Matt 0:48

Yeah. All right. I will start. Welcome to this week's episode of the backseat driver podcast. We are glad you've decided to join us, stick through these first five or six episodes and you've ended up here at episode seven, I believe, which will be one that we are very excited to talk about which are things that people. or look at a certain way and have certain connotations around or certain ideas around in terms of their usefulness how needed they are to be successful. And so we want to look at those things and we want to kind of look at how you perceive those things and ask questions about that. Ask questions about your perception, ask questions about how useful they really are and actually look at some of. And

Chris 1:41

one thing I want to bring up, especially with today's topic and really all the topics that we talk about is a lot of them, there's not really a right or wrong answer. And so why don't you go ahead and introduce kind of how we came up with this idea for today something we're both interested in, have experience with. And you had an interesting conversation with one of your friends as well that kind of brought this up.

Matt 2:07

Yeah. So we are desiring to bring nuance to all of these topics. I feel like, I feel like that's a great word to kind of sum up what we're hoping to bring with this conversation. So backstory on this as I was talking to Rich, who's my longtime running partner when I was living on Salt Lake city, the last three years. So we'd have a lot of conversations about these types of things. And he, he actually had brought this up to me this week, as we were discussing last week's podcast. And he was talking about topics he'd like to hear us talk about. And he was saying on a recent run. With a guy he runs with in Salt Lake now that they had got on the topic of wearable technology or fitness trackers, or, you know, kind of all the things in that realm. And it was very intriguing to hear the two different perspectives on that. So Rich and I, I'd say align pretty well, and you'll kind of hear my viewpoint in a second, but the guy who was running with was very much in the pro wearable camp. So he was. The more data, the better we should be tracking everything, you know, including lactic acid, sweat rates, heart rates. Like we should have all this data available to us because it allows us to fine tune things more deeply, allows us to know exactly where we should be, what paces we should be running all these things. And, and I think that kind of was the inspiration for this episode because Chris and I have talked about this over and over. This comes up at our family dinners all the time because there's so many whoops at the freaking table.

Chris 3:29

So,

Matt 3:34

so this is something we've thought about for years, talked about for years. I've definitely been on both sides of this discussion. So I've had a whoop, I've had fitness trackers, I have analyzed all my data and. And that I think has usefulness that we'll talk about. And then you've also

Chris 3:53

to give you a little bit of credit since I've, I mean, this has almost been, Gosh, at least 10 years, maybe even 15 years where you've always kind of been on the cutting edge of the new technology coming out. Yeah, yeah. I love you. You know, you were on whoop before anyone knew what it was. You were on some of the other ones way before they became popular in, in all of these, you know, pro athletes were looking at this sort of stuff. So you know, I think.

Matt 4:27

Yeah, I've, I've been in the wearable space and enjoyed kind of keeping up with that research since I was in high school. So yeah, before loop even kind of started their initial fundraising campaign, I had been following them for a couple of years before they actually came to consumer. So, when they first came out, I was, I tried their product out pretty, pretty soon after they launched, used it for a couple of years. So I think like Chris was saying, I've used Fitbits, Garmin's. So I think we have some knowledge. I've used heart rate variability apps. So I've, I've definitely tried a lot of these things and I think that helps inform this opinion and add some nuance to this discussion. So I think. Hopefully this will bring some value as you're thinking about these things heading into the holiday season, especially what Christmas present you should ask for important things like that. Should you ask for a loop? I saw their 12 months descriptions on sale for one 99 on black Friday. So, you know, we'll kind of talk about what's the value in these things, where the pitfalls and, and what are some things to look out for as you're using this data?

Chris 5:27

Yeah. So, so I'll kind of, I'll introduce one of. The thoughts that kind of came to my mind and when we had initially discussed talking about this topic. So, Sean Allen is a sports scientist, researcher, and she was giving a talk on basically, what do we do with athletes who, in all of this technology that we now have access to? Is it helpful? Is it not helpful? How does it affect them both, you know, physiologically, also psychologically. And that's the part of it that I look at specifically is, okay, all of this technology, it's great to have data. Sometimes, well, it's not always that great data, but sometimes it's great to have data, but really it's what you do with the information that makes it.

Matt 6:20

So I will go ahead and cut you off right there and just kind of sum up, my philosophy, which is that wearables are helpful in the sense that they match subjective feeling to objective data. So if I had to boil down my whole approach to what I think about wearables, that's what I would say. So I think the, The manifestations though, of what that creates are very important to discuss because I think they're often not brought up, which, which are things like, you know, I'll give a stupid example to get us started here, but when I used to wear a whoop, I would look at my score each morning and it was, it would definitely affect the way that I felt. Going into my run that day or my workout that day, if my recovery score was 15 percent or 5 percent or 10%, even if I had done all the right things and my score was low, I still, feel like that made me feel a little bit more tired or run down or like I was maybe over training and in the one specific example, I remember I was running the city of Oaks marathon in Raleigh. And I think 2019 maybe, and I woke up the morning of the marathon and my recovery score was like 1%, I think, or two, you know, it was so low. And I just remember having this feeling, this thought of, wow, I'm, I'm really not ready to run this marathon. Like I could be so much more recovered, so much more well tapered, all these things. So that's the story that really sticks out to me when I think of the nuance in this discussion. Yeah. That's a,

Chris 7:55

that's a situation. So many people face. And definitely one of the ones that I think makes this somewhat polarizing is, because in that situation, like, is that wearable technology helping you? And I would make the

Matt 8:09

argument. No, it's not. No, I mean, it certainly wasn't. I, it's funny because I have really, this is actually a mantra that I use with athletes I work with or friends that run. I tell them the night before the marathon, you're going to sleep terribly. And that means you're ready to race. Yeah. Like. That mindset shift has been so important. These, the recovery scores are useless. Like you you've done the training, you've tapered, like you're ready to go. You're not going to sleep the night before. And I've realized I've raced enough races now, like enough marathons and longer. What I do the night before does not impact my performance, but a lot of people don't have that perspective or enough experience to realize that. And so they're just looking at their wearable score. Right. And it's affecting their mindset. Like you were talking about, I've actually

Chris 8:56

changed my philosophy on this completely. I used to harp on the fact of make sure you get a good night's sleep before you know, even the whole week leading up, like let's make sure your nutrition and your sleep and everything's perfect. But realistically, the longer I've been around a lot of these. Almost nothing works out perfectly, you know, you have travel issues. You are sleeping in different rooms. If you're traveling like you said, just the cognitive anxiety that comes from having a performance the next day, all of these things are normal. They're natural. They're going to happen. And, and then this is why it's one of my favorite studies we talked about in the perception episode, but there is absolutely nothing that says, Hey, you can't perform at a high level. And really what's actually way more powerful is what you were talking about. And what we talked about in the perception episode is that how you're perceiving those things. Can I perform well with a 15 percent recovery score? Yes. And the second piece of this, which is actually kind of cool. I don't know if you're aware of is, I don't know if all of them, I know who does maybe or ring and things like that. You can actually hide your recovery score.

Matt 10:04

I did not realize that for that

Chris 10:06

morning. So when you wake up, you don't see the recovery score, whether it's good or bad. So that way it isn't necessarily impacting your psychology going into that. Maybe the, you could make the argument that like, not knowing might affect some people one way or the other, especially if they're used to knowing. But for certain people that may be really helpful and I like the fact that they've added that um, so there's all different ways to kind of think about this and manipulate it and, yeah, that's, so that, that was kind of cool. I didn't, that wasn't a feature when I was

Matt 10:38

wearing it. Yeah, I, I remember that was definitely not a feature. So let's kind of start from the beginning, which is when you're working with. You know, a new athlete or someone newer to wearable technology, what are some of the reasons we use it, use it, what are some of the benefits, what are some of the things that like some of the value it does bring to athletes in certain areas. So, the one I'll, I'll kick us off and then toss it over to you. The one in running that I, I find the most helpful when I work with people who have just started running is actually heart rate. So. Because we talked about this in other episodes too, but subjective feeling is very, very important. But if your subjective feeling is not trained and refined, then it can be misleading. So yes. Yes. So where I find these wearables, the most helpful is taking a subjective feeling like, Oh, I'm running and it feels really easy. I'm running and it feels really hard and matching it to a specific number. So that you can create these correlations in your mind between, okay, that felt hard. My average heart rate was X, you know, one 60, and that's right in the middle of the zone. It should be in when it's feeling hard, or, the opposite happens. And you're like, wow, my average heart rate was 180. I was going way too hard, and I was pushing myself way above the zone. I was supposed to be in for the effort level I should be giving for, for whatever session or race distance I'm doing. So I think correlating those. Early on for people when they don't have as refined and they're not as in tune with their body is probably where I find the most value

Chris 12:18

with these things. So you're almost teaching the skill of what this feels like is this. Exactly. Yep. Yeah. So I, I agree that that's definitely an advantage to having some of this data. Cause. You know, in some instances, you may be like, Hey, day off is needed or vice versa. Like you're off, you actually haven't worked as hard as you are feeling like. And so that I agree with where I see this where I could find the most use is kind of giving an overall picture of things. So. Kind of looking more at trends, more so than specifics. Trends is a great word. So let's say you wear a loop band for say six months. Okay. I don't really care as much about the day to day interaction of things. Cause there's so many variables that go into it, but over three month period or six month period, you're going to get a pretty good picture of how consistent, your strain levels are. You know, are, are your recovery scores consistently low? Are there trends at certain points in the week that you're struggling to recover? Things like that are kind of where I would say the most use in it is rather than, oh, you know, on Wednesday morning, I didn't sleep well and got a low score. And, but it's like, okay, that's kind of a one off thing. Let's look at a much larger sample size. And then from there, you can maybe start to see and make some adjustments on what you think, like, okay, at the end of the week, I'm really struggling to keep my recovery scores up, like my body's tanking. Okay, well, that's good to know. Maybe we can add a little bit of recovery in the middle of the week or, you know, try to focus on getting a little bit more sleep there, um, in order to adjust that one way or the other or what, you know, whatever the situation is.

Matt 14:15

So I'm going to push back a little bit. I agree with your... Your concept, but I'm going to tell you why I've stopped liking the current wearables we have on the market for that purpose. And it's because the data is not accurate enough to give us good trends, I think. I mean, obviously those companies would argue with me vehemently about that, but when you look at pretty objective studies that compare it to, gold standard and sleep gold standard and heart rate gold standard and all these things, especially heart rate variability, that's the big one, right? Because that's The main thing it's using, using the calculate these readiness scores, recovery scores, things like that. Well, if you look at the whoop algorithm of how it calculates that it takes you to last heart rate variable, like your highest HRV from your last deep sleep of the night, I believe is the algorithm they use. So I personally, if you're going to use heart rate variability to guide your training, one, I agree with you. Trends is huge. It's not as much of a day to day thing because day to day, there's so much stuff shifting, but two. You should use something that is a little bit more refined and more accurate. So if I have someone that wants to use that, I tell them to use something like HRV for training. So it uses a little bit different um, algorithm. So when you wake up in the morning, you actually put on a heart rate strap. And you take a minute of your HRV that's

Chris 15:35

I've heard that as well. So it's like almost sports psychologists who say

15:38

that's

Matt 15:39

the best way. So, and it calculates it through an equation through that minute of your HRV that to me, if you're going to use that, you should be using something like that. This it's because if you're say your loop band slides down to your wrist bone during your last deep sleep of the night, then it's calculating your HRV based on some bogus data because it's. You know, the lights hitting your wrist bone, that's not accurate. And so having a, the most accurate, which is a chest strap for your heart rate for a whole minute, when you're awake, that's really, if you're going to be using this stuff, how you should be using it. And again, the trends is so important. you want to be looking at two weeks, a month, three months, and you can see these huge graphs on some of these apps that, that do use the minute in the morning. And I, I used some of those for a while and I thought they were helpful. I. Could see my trend that it went up during certain times and I could associate like I said earlier I think the associations it comes back to associate it's like, okay I was doing these things are sleeping poorly because I was in this part of residency and I can see how that lowered my ability to tolerate training or to absorb training Well and increase my risk of injury things like that, but you gotta look at the quality of your data,

Chris 16:46

too. Yeah Definitely can't overlook that and I'll kind of Go with a little bit of the personal experience wearing it. So this is not a scientific study by any means, but one thing I really struggled with that was kind of a turnoff for me from wearing it longer than I wore it for about two years. But I was kind of like, all right, at this point, one, I've kind of got what I needed to out of it into, is this really like kind of what you're saying is the data really as good as we think it is

Matt 17:14

about to give your Your spikeball example.

Chris 17:17

Yeah, no, I am. So, I would literally play a game of, like you said, spikeball in the yard. Or something, just some normal, not super intense sport. In the S for like an hour and it would give me a strain of like 16 or 17 out of

Matt 17:37

21. We used to make fun of you so much, but it would be like, I would go run a marathon and my strain would be like 16. And a game of spike

Chris 17:45

ball would be harder for me, according to this, then your half marathon in the morning. And then what was even more frustrating was I would lift weights a lot. And that would be actually really difficult. I would do a really hard lifting workout for like an hour. It'll give me like a seven strain. And I'm like, that is so much more difficult than going and playing the spike ball game or, you know, whatever, pick up basketball on

Matt 18:14

the pickup basketball, right? And that, and that goes back to the limitations though, of how it calculates. It's all it's doing is taking time times heart rate essentially to calculate your strain and. The problem is again, going back to the quality of the data, the quality of your heart rate data, where you're playing spike ball probably wasn't great. So it's like, it's, you know, it's having faulty high. So it's giving you a higher strain because it thinks your heart rate's higher than it really is. And the time is high while you're playing spike ball. Cause you're standing around, you know, 50 percent of the time. Right. So again, not to beat a dead horse over and over again, this episode, but you know, quality of the data. Matching it to feelings and realizing when the data is not correlating to actual effort, you have to be able to strain that out and be like, okay, this is not useful today. Right. If you are going to use these things. Yeah.

Chris 19:00

So where I want to take this a little bit is kind of extrapolating some of this. So I think it would be dumb and probably lose credibility to say data is not helpful. Okay. But there's a balance to it, right? So if you think about it on a continuum. Kind of the way things were, let's say, you know, in the 1900s, 1950s, when we think about sports, there wasn't really any data, especially in the sports science department. And so a lot of what people decided to do was based off of personal experience or from what someone told them. And that was how decisions were made was, Oh, I had these experiences and I've been coaching for this amount of time. And so this is the trend that I've seen. In my life, and this is what I think is the best decision. Okay, well we know the flaws of that based on confirmation bias, selection bias all, you know, you can run through a million different biases that we have, so we know that that's not the best way a lot of times to make decisions. And it's a whole book on it that I'm currently reading. Myth of Experience, talking about some of the flaws that we have, making important decisions solely based on experience. Now you have, I almost think we've swung the continuum a little bit too far. The other direction where we have so much information that we're making decisions solely based on what numbers say. So, okay. My wearable technology says I should not work out today. Okay. Well, is that, how are you feeling? When's the race or the competition, you know, like there's a lot more context to the situation and. Sometimes maybe I want to practice working out and practicing when I'm not feeling that great. So there's, there's that side of it. I think you've seen this a little bit in um, in football recently with some of the decision making, debates that go on, especially with like fourth downs, because we have all of this information now that says. You know, go forward in certain situations. We'll be in the numbers say, but then you have this, the coaches who kind of make decisions on especially some of the older school coaches and make decisions based off their experience, which historically says just punt, you know, and get support down unless it's a very, very specific situation. And so there's this, this tug of war, but really ultimately to me, whether it's a fourth down decision or kind of deciding what the best approaches for the day. For your workouts and practices and sleep is take the data. Okay. It is giving you some information that could be a value, but also filter it. You know, like don't put too much stock into it, but also don't say it has no value at all, you know, assuming we can trust the data to your point and then make the best kind of like data informed decision that you can. So if I were to put language in this, Okay. You have like experience based decisions would be one side of the continuum. The far other side of the continuum would be data driven decisions where, okay, the data says this, this is what I'm doing, but really to me, what the best is kind of the balance of the data informed decision. I have the information, I'm utilizing it, but I'm also not completely taking out some of the experiences and the context that's important that really only I can see, To help make the best decision

Matt 22:28

for whatever it is. Yeah, I'm going to piggyback off this idea a little bit because I love that language. And I think you, you said the word filter. And I think that's such a good word to kind of describe how the usefulness of these things go. Because I think my example at the beginning with the heart rate. That person's filter, how they filter information is not very refined. It's kind of like a filter with giant holes that just lets everything through. But as they start to run more, they start to understand how they feel on different runs, how they feel different distances, how they feel different paces, you know, for example, like now I know probably within three beats, what my heart rate is at almost any pace. I don't need my heart rate. I look at it after the run just to make sure it's still correlating, I ran a Turkey trot yesterday and I didn't look at my watch a single time. Because, and it's funny because this is, I was thinking about this episode in the middle of my run, because I had the, I actually had the thought of if I was using purely objective data right now, data driven decisions, I would slow the bleep down because I'm going way too fast for how fit I am. And I'm glad that I didn't because I ran a PR by almost 30 seconds because I trusted my subjective feeling. That I, because that's been so refined, my filter now is almost like micro pores. You know, it lets only the most relevant, most accurate information through on the subjective side. So it's so refined.

Chris 24:00

I have a question for you. How long did that

Matt 24:03

take you? That's a good question. I mean, so this is where, this is where the nuance of this discussion comes in. Right. Because there was some value of using things like heart rate data, heart rate variability data, whoop. You know, for sleep and readiness that, because that's helped correlate over time, the subject and objective. So that's where I think the value of these things are. If you are, if you have no ability to have insight into how you feel and how you perform and the correlation between those things, then wearables actually probably provide you some really valuable insight. But I would say in the reason that most people, like you said, you stopped wearing after two years. That's because you got to the point where you are in tune enough with your body where you already basically knew what the score was going to tell you if the data was accurate enough. And I think for me, I mean, it's always being refined, right? We talked about this in the perception episode, but like the pros are, are a thousand times more refined than I am. But the novice is a thousand times less refined than I am. So I think it's, it's on a huge spectrum, but I think in general, if you're really paying attention to it, I'd say a couple of years probably to be, I would say two ish years, maybe two of consistent training to get pretty in tune with if you're paying attention, like you have to do the work of actually paying attention. If you never check in with your body, it's like, you're not going to realize how you feel that day or how sore you are, how tired you feel or the trend, right? Over months of why I feel more and more worn down. I'm missing more and more of the goals. I should be hitting in, in workouts or lifts or competitions. Yeah,

Chris 25:39

I think the way I'm thinking about this, there's a kind of a joke in the sports psychology field of like, our job is to lose our job and, you know, hopefully we do a good enough job that people can self regulate with the mental approach and the mental skills. And I kind of feel like this is where some of the wearable technology is as well. Like it's job is to, what you said, train yourself, use it, use it to, so that you have matched up your subjective with the objective and then you really don't need it anymore other than to maybe check in every once in a while. So that's kind of how I was thinking about as you were talking. And then the second piece to kind of use your example of an elite athlete, and I've heard a story about Steph Curry is very similar to kind of what you said, where sometimes during his workouts, still like his trainer will ask him, like, what's your heart rate at? And he'll just say it. And he's usually like within a beat or two because he's, he's matched it up over time. And so he's obviously trained to keep his heart rate within a certain range. When he's practicing and all of you in, in games as well to manage his energy and make sure you know, he's, his activation or arousal levels are not getting too high or too low so that he's at his consistent best as often as possible. So that was also kind of an example that I've heard from a very elite athlete perspective.

Matt 27:08

Yeah. One, one aspect, this is kind of switching gears a little bit or going back to my last point, but one aspect that the wearables cannot factor into their algorithms currently is life stress. And I follow this guy named Alan Cousins. He's a, he's a huge endurance sport variability, but he only uses the one minute in the morning. And he's all about the trends for heart rate variability and readiness for training, which again, I probably don't a hundred percent agree with him on, but one thing I do agree with him on a hundred percent is he talks about why he loves heart rate variability is not so much for the stress of training, but actually the stress of life. So things like stress at home, stress at your job, stress just with family or other life circumstances and how much that plays into your, your readiness to perform. And so that's why he basically only uses heart rate variability. He's like all this other stuff, it can't really factor in that life stress the same way this can. So, I don't a hundred percent agree with needing that because you feel that, right. When you wake up in the morning, whether you're fatigued from training or from life, you feel that kind of rundown feeling. And most people like we were talking about, you become in tune enough with that over time to realize. This is either from training or life or a mixture, and I need to scale back or kind of change the way I'm training right now because life, you know, if you have a newborn or if you have, a really hectic month or quarter at work, like tax, people that do taxes or people that do end of year sales, things like that, like you have to realize that plays into your, your ability to

Chris 28:43

recover. Yeah. Gosh, this is something that I would actually be so interested in. I just don't really know how we would measure it at this point in time. I actually was... A couple years ago I was helping kind of pilot a... Program with like a UCLA researcher was trying to figure out ways to kind of measure cognitive strain and how to deal with it. And I really, and this is something I talked to my athletes about, which is the, you think of like, think of the whooper or a ring, like, or Apple watch, like strain score or the rings and how it fills up and it's all that's talking about, like this physiological toll. But I think. If we could figure out eventually over time, how to measure cognitive strain and like what you're saying, life or mental strain, and to have kind of a second circle that would fill up over time with that. Because one of the things I, the example I use is, okay who's ever taken the SAT, you know, and if you're over the age of 16 or 17, you probably have, what do you remember from that experience? At least I remember being super exhausted afterwards. Now, did I take a single step? No, but why am I so tired? Because I'm pulling from the same energy source that my body does by using my mind. And so my mental strain or cognitive strain is extremely high after taking the SAT, which then also factors into how I feel overall, even though physiologically I didn't do anything. And then probably the vice versa is true as well. CoachingBadminton. And so not ignoring that, um, aspect of it, because when I talked to some like high school and college athletes that have school and sports, a lot of times the school stressors are actually what is creating a lot of their current problems and not as much, you know, being over trained from a physio physical standpoint, but it's that, like what you're saying, that interaction between the two that kind of creates the overload. Of like, just being everything feeling difficult because mentally, you know, I'm overworked. Yeah,

Matt 31:01

there's no wearable that's going to tell you you're. Life strain score, you know, right. And

Chris 31:08

that's what, that's what I'm saying. I'm saying this more in a hypothetical sense. Like I wish

Matt 31:11

it existed. No, no. And I'm right. And that's exactly my point is in the world we currently live in, even if you have all the data in the world, you still have to be able to be in tune with your body from a subjective perspective. Right? Like I have to be able to look at my own body and scan it and realize how I feel. So regardless of if I have a wearable or not, because it cannot take that into account. And so this is like, no matter what you're doing, whether you love wearables, cause you love data. Like I love data. You can ask Chris, like I'm a data nerd. I love it. It's fascinating to me, but I realized that it can't replace my own subjective feelings. So the example that Rich and I were talking about this week is we were kind of talking about this topic is. When I run at five 30 in the morning before work, even if it's an easy run and I'm recovered, it still feels way harder than if I run at like 7 a. m. So if I use just objective data of my heart rate, I'm going to train harder than I should that day because what feels hard at five 30 a. m. is really different than what feels hard at 7 a. m. So you know, I'm out there. I'm jogging very slow comparatively to where I normally run normally run. My heart rate is way lower than what it normally would be on an easy run, but it still feels hard. Yeah. So if I'm just driving myself based on objective data, then I'm pushing myself way, way harder than I want to on those sessions where I'm supposed to be recovering and running easy. And I think this is the part where objective data can actually lead you astray because If, if it feels hard, it feels hard, right? It doesn't matter. I don't care what your lactic acid is. I don't care what your recovery score is I don't care how much you slept. It's like, if it feels hard, it feels hard. You know, you're getting

Chris 33:07

like RP, like greater perceived exertion.

Matt 33:10

and this goes into what you were just talking about, that cognitive strain. And they've done studies on this. I know, I can't cite a specific one, but I know this has been done. You give someone a cognitively tiring task, you go ask them to do a hard physical activity, their time to giving up is significantly higher. I mean, significantly shorter than the people who have not been cognitively loaded. And you see that you have to be able to take that into account and, and I'm sorry, but your wearables just not going to give you that you have to be in tune. With yourself to be able to make those decisions accurately and correlate those things over time. Right. For some people, like for me, school, wasn't really that mentally taxing, but there are other things that are mentally taxing and for other people, like you were saying, school's really mentally taxing and you know, other things aren't.

Chris 33:58

I'll give, I'll give him an example where recording this Thanksgiving week, Thanksgiving was yesterday.

Matt 34:04

We're, we're in our OG place where we used to have these conversations where my parents playroom, which is where we. This, I feel like the original idea for this started many, many years ago. So it's kind of fun.

Chris 34:16

So like yesterday at Thanksgiving, we had 12, 13 people over all kinds of different people between the ages of one to 83. And so you can imagine, and they were, everyone was over and it was a great time, but it was six, seven hours of constant social interaction, constant stimulation. Toys banging in the background, music playing, you know, trying to hold conversations with all different types of people. And it hit about 17 o'clock yesterday and my whoops score, if I was wearing one would have told me I hadn't done anything. I hadn't really worked from a cognitive standpoint, very hard that day. But man, was I exhausted. Right. And I'm kind of a little bit of a introvert in the sense that like social things. Tire me out like I like them, but they tire me out and my social battery was Completely gone by the end of yesterday and I just wanted to close my eyes Get away from people and just like throw on the football game and not have to talk But what I've been what I've been productive in a workout at that time, even though my strain was love No what I've done well on any cognitive task. No, right so The wearables wouldn't have told me that, but like you said, subjectively, I knew I was done. Yeah,

Matt 35:37

I think part of that was probably Luca was just having an absolute Meltdown of a day in the afternoon. So his cognitive load on all of us was quite high But the other part that's really funny as you see that our family after Luca went to bed literally all just sat in a circle in our living room and And didn't, didn't do anything, you know, no one moved, no one talked for like 30 minutes, everyone was just kind of like sitting there and yeah. And so I think that's a huge part of

Chris 36:11

it. Just to show kind of the word you use earlier, like the nuance and really the complexity of all of these interactions and how they affect one another is something that I just don't think can be overlooked. You have the physical aspect, you have the mental aspect, you have the emotional aspect, you have the social aspect. How your sleep certainly over time affects you, you know, it's like, there's so much that goes into this. Which is kind of why we're talking about this, where it's like, okay, data can be helpful, but it's not taking in everything and only you can filter and recognize all of these different factors and how they interact and how that, impacts your decision making for what you want to do. Do

Matt 36:52

you have, do you have any ways that you talk to your, uh, clients that you work with about how to associate this data more effectively? Like, I'm just thinking there's so much data, but most of it's pretty useless. Is there a way that you're like, Hey, let's try to correlate these things. So you, or, or you could even talk about how you do body scans or I don't know, trying to help people be able to, More effectively evaluate kind of what they're subjectively feeling and why they're feeling and how to use that information in a useful way Do you have any like examples of that or is there anything that you do with people in that type of realm?

Chris 37:30

Yeah, I mean The first thing that comes to mind isn't you know, super groundbreaking, but I think journaling about different things that you did that day and how you're feeling and how it's affecting you is, is a great way to kind of force yourself to check in and be aware of different things and different aspects of your life. Another thing, so that's kind of a personal thing from an organizational standpoint. One of the things that I have seen that I really like is they'll have a lot of like the coaching staff or whoever, like the strength coach will have the data, but they won't tell them players the data unless they really feel like they need to know. wHich I think is pretty that's probably how I would recommend going about those things. Cause like we talked about how just the presence of seeing data about yourself can impact your psychology and perception. And so it's like, if there's something relevant, like, you know, a troubling trend that we're seeing, maybe we check in with the player and tell them, Hey, you know, just wanted to let you know, but if things are going well and the player seems. You know, fine about how they're feeling and nothing about their data is alarming one way or the other. Then why do we need to have them constantly being fed that information? So, so that's kind of another thought on it as well. Yeah,

Matt 38:52

you, you said something about feeding people information only when they need it. And that made me think of an aspect of this. We haven't talked about a ton. We kind of touched on at the beginning, but. There is a significant anxiety that I've seen with patients that have too much data that don't know what to do with it. You know, they started getting more and more data from either the Apple watch or their whoop or these sleep scores or these recovery scores. And, but they have no context of like how to use it. And so they come to me really stressed because there's some set reference range or some. Guy told them they need to be getting eight hours of sleep. And if they don't get that, they're not optimizing. And so they're stressed when they're sleeping seven and a half hours, right? There's stress when they're asleep. So there's actually almost a data anxiety for some people that are not. Able to recognize the data for what it is and use it for what

Chris 39:47

it is, right? I mean, people study how to interpret the state. Like you have to get degrees and certifications in this stuff in order to correctly understand and interpret. And so like you said, and I agree with you, just having data and not knowing what to do with it is probably more harmful

Matt 40:13

than good. Yeah. I, I a hundred percent agree. The other part of this too, cause this, you know, we try to talk about performance, high performance. You work with really high end athletes. I would argue that, you know, I think that, you know, I think that Having too much objective data actually probably contributes more to underperformance than overperformance. And what I mean by that is similar to the example I gave earlier, which is if you have a bunch of objective data as you're trying to perform, it often is going to hold you back because to have a truly breakthrough performance, most of the time you're going to have to be pushing over what the data say says you should be doing in that moment. So for example, like let's say in a theoretical world, I could look at someone's lactic acid live on a screen. As they were running a race. So that burning feeling you get in your muscles, normally we would say for a marathon, that's going to be between two and four for most of the race. That's like the zone you can hold. I think it'd be fascinating if. If you could see that live and I think that technology is in development right now. I wonder if people, because there's a reference range of like, Oh, if I go over my second lactate threshold and go above four, then I'm running too hard. And that means I should slow down. And then your brain's processing all that. I seriously think sometimes people, as they look at their heart rate, especially this happens where they see, Oh, my heart rates over my zone three. Like I need to slow down. And so they slow down because they're like, But subjectively, they actually feel good enough where they could keep pushing it. And so they hold themselves back from a breakthrough performance because of objective data. And I, I feel like I have not that much data to back this up, but I feel like that is where data and in the high performance realm gets really off the rails.

Chris 42:12

I'm actually completely, completely agreed with this because I feel like my job, a lot of times with people is to actually get all of the junk out of their head and sometimes too much in numbers can create junk. I, I think of the example of like Tiger Woods, obviously an incredibly naturally gift, just one of the most natural golfers ever.

Matt 42:40

We haven't even talked about golf and numbers. So this is a great example.

Chris 42:44

So everything he did was. You know, so artistic to watch. And then he started working with this coach in 2013 ish, somewhere around that time. And he was, the coach was very much, you

Matt 42:58

know, in the Lord Voldemort, he who shall not be named. And,

Chris 43:03

but, but Tiger started to fall in love with that stuff and like hit on this, what they call like a track man, which is basically just the tool that's used to. Give you all the analytics of each shot you hit, you know, the distance, the launch angle, the spin rate, et cetera, et cetera. And so you have all of these numbers that go along with each shot and what happened to, and it wasn't just Tiger. It was a lot of players, especially when this technology was coming out and kind of being popularized is players would start to obsess over it because there was a certain launch angle that combined with the correct spin rate would give you the perfect distance. You know, perfect amount of distance to your driver and stuff, but like that's not how they became a good player. It became a good player by being like, all right, how do I get the ball from A to B with this shape on it? And they would learn how to feel that shot and what it felt like, how they could see it in their mind. And, and that's what I like to say. A lot of really good athletes are more artists than scientists. There are definitely some scientists out there. That succeed, and that's certainly fine as well, but I think one of the things that I see is when we try to make artists too much of scientists, and those are the type of people that it's like, okay, you almost want to have someone separate, look at all the data and then simplify it into one kind of objective thing of like a work on this, but not actually give them the data, if that makes sense. So that's kind of a specific area I've seen it. You talked about the running example, I think is really good as well. That if you're just not aware and careful of how these things are being utilized, it can get into your mind and certainly affect it. You know,

Matt 44:56

for sure. Yeah. I think the golf example is so good. I'm so glad you brought that up. As you said, that was like, Oh yeah, this is a perfect example of this in a little bit different realm. I Was thinking of this kind of, that kind of brought me back to the original conversation that rich had been having with this other guy is running with who said more data is better. It gives you a competitive advantage, right? Is, is, you know, they were talking about trail running. So trail running is early in its professionalization. So you can get these huge performance advantages over people by doing things that professionals do. But I think the example you just brought up captures how easy it is to take something that you think is going to give you an advantage and it actually leads to a disadvantage. So you were like, Oh, we ha we have more data for golf than we've ever had. And it made a lot of those guys worse players than they've ever been because they had all this data and it was driving their decisions, how they swung their swing planes, their launching, like all of that was being driven by. And they weren't using the things that had got them to that very point to continue to get better. I would, I

Chris 46:08

would alter that statement of more data is better of more correct interpretation and application is better. Right. I

Matt 46:18

was not, no, no, no. I

Chris 46:20

know you're not agreeing with it, but I'm saying what that guy said, like, that's how I would modify

Matt 46:24

that statement. Right, right. And. And that's the important thing to realize is that nuanced difference because he's like, Oh, if we, you know, you know how much you sweat and then you can hydrate correctly and have the correct amount of electrolytes at each aid station for these long trail runs that trail races that he, he covers. And it's like, yeah, that, that can be helpful, but it also can lead to you switching up how you feel in a way. So now you have more stomach issues. You're taking in more calories than you can tolerate because your body intuitively is going to get you pretty close to where you need to go most of the time, especially as you become, like I said, a better and better filter. So if that filter is pretty refined and you kind of know what your body feels with different things, usually you're going to get yourself pretty dang close to where you should be. And I think sometimes we, we take this new. Ability to collect data and we try to change everything because we're like look the data says you should be able to do this But when you do that, it creates like an absolute train wreck

Chris 47:30

Yeah, this has been a Hopefully a thought provoking discussion for you guys. Like I said A lot of nuance to it. We're not going to tell you. Yes, you should definitely wear something. No, you should not You know, our answer is probably somewhere in between like yes, there's some useful But also, like you said, there, you know, if correctly interpreted, if correctly applied, some of this stuff can be helpful and yeah, I mean, any, any final thoughts from

Matt 48:05

you? Yeah. I'll just kind of summarize kind of my two or three main points here at the end. Just so it's very clear. Like I, I think, you Taking subjective feelings and correlating it with objective data is probably the most helpful use of a wearable. I think over information is a huge pitfall that you should try to avoid. And I think the most helpful thing that you can do to improve your performance long term is not getting more data, it's actually getting more in tune with your feelings, your subjective feelings, and how they match to different areas of performance, different areas of... Over training different areas of like days you do well, days you do terrible. And how does correlate to different things going on in your life? I think being more in tune with that is ultimately the, the biggest performance enhancer, not more data from a wearable. So

Chris 48:56

I think it's an excellent summary as always send in thoughts or comments or questions that you guys have on any of this stuff, as well as leave us a like, or a review on, We're on

Matt 49:08

Spotify. I guess I usually say that part. Yeah, I

Chris 49:12

didn't know. Whatever. You get the point and thank you for listening, hanging out with us. Hope you enjoyed it and we will see you next time.