When Nita and I work one-on-one with people wanting to build muscle and/or lose fat the biggest enemy in finding the best workout and eating plan for them is inference error–especially inference error and inference bias on our part.
This tendency in humans to draw the wrong conclusions from data is endemic and often deleterious.
I saw an example of this in an article about intelligence and sleep patterns I read while flying from Kuwait to Washington, DC earlier this month.
The thesis of the article is that people who stay up late have higher IQs than those who go to bed early and can overcome the urge to sleep in the evening because of their higher IQs.
The article states, “Because the nocturnal lifestyle allowed by electricity didn’t exist 10,000 years ago, we must now rely on general intelligence to override our early-to-bed instincts. So those with more of it stay up later.”
The article is based on the work of Satoshi Kanazawa who is obviously very, very smart.
I am not disputing Kanazawa’s thesis, he is probably correct that it is sheer brain power that allows people to stay up late, but there are a lot of other explanations that could cause people with higher IQs to stay up later.
People with higher IQs are likely to work in the professions where the work day begins later than for laborers and blue collar workers and less likely to work weekends.
People with high IQs who are under-employed, at least in terms of brain power, can coast by on less sleep because their job does not require them to use all 125 of their IQ points every day.
Kanazawa, because he is an evolutionary psychologist, looks for an evolutionary explanation to why people with higher IQs stay up later. As the cliche goes…when you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
What does any of this have to do with building muscle and losing fat?
The biggest struggle most people have is in dialing in on the resistance training program and eating plan that will work specifically for them.
Everyone is a little bit different. What works perfect for Nita is not perfect for me. What works perfect for me, probably will not work for you. The systems that a person can use to dial in on an effective workout and diet apply to everyone.
Kanazawa looked at a set of data and interpreted it through his bias when there are many other plausible explanations and rather than testing those explanations, developed a difficult to test “theoretical grounding” based on evolutionary psychology.
In our book Fit for Combat Nita and I instruct people on how to use quantifiable measurements and to make adjustments to one variable at a time. If you are going to change your workout, do not change your eating plan. If you are going to change your eating plan, do not change your diet. If you change your diet, weight training and cardio all at once you do not know which element was effective or ineffective.
To avoid inference error and bias we work very hard at not being dogmatic on what workout works–hence our mantra that you need to take the time to dial in on the workout and eating plan that works for you using quantifiable measurements.
To overcome our own bias in offering a course of action we often tell people to flip a coin on the variable to be manipulated–heads you increase the variable, tails you decrease the variable–or randomly choose the variable to be manipulated.
When thinking about your own eating plan and training, look at all the varibles and possible explanations, use quantifiable mesurements, track them and adjust one variable at a time to test the results of any changes.
Only through testing the possibilites will you be able to dial in with precision on the workout and eating plan that is perfect for you.
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