Tag Archives: complexity

Principles of Training

Eli Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints in running coaching: can we reliably create sustained athletic achievement in runners?

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“Sustained athletic achievement” is a phrase seldom heard when talking about runners. By now, nobody needs to quote the staggering injury statistics in Western running populations: According to an epidemiological study, there are 2.5 to 12.1 injuries for every 1000 hours of running. 20 to 70% of those injuries are recurring, and 30 to 90% of those injuries result in a reduction in training.

Is this because running is inherently injurious? Probably not—and some would argue that we’re in no position to know: the rates of injury aren’t due to the fact that we’re running, but instead due to the fact that we’re running unprepared. In Movement, Gray Cook writes that “many times, the activity gets the blame when the blame should be placed on the poor foundation the innocent activity was placed upon.”

Let’s translate this: are our calves mobile and strong? Are our hips stable? Are our flexors and extensors working well together with our abductors and adductors? These are questions that runners typically only ask themselves after an injury or ten.

Whenever we train an athletic activity such as running, it’s important to figure out what might hold our training back, rather than just going out to hit the pavement and hope for the best. There is a theoretical framework that may provide us with a systematic way of finding solutions to these widespread problems: Eli Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints (TOC).

At the general level, the Theory of Constraints consists of 5 steps:

  1. Identify the system’s constraint.
  2. Decide how to exploit the system’s constraint.
  3. Subordinate everything else to the above decision.
  4. Elevate the system’s constraint.
  5. Find the new constraint.

In Critical Chain: the theory of constraints applied to project management, Graham K. Rand writes: “The system’s constraint is the part of the system that constrains the objective of the system.”

Overuse injuries in running are rarely generalized. In other words, it’s always something specific: either a bad knee, or shin splints, or plantar fasciitis is stopping us. In other words, that’s the constraint that doesn’t let us log more miles.

A lot of us are really good at doing the first two steps. We already identified the constraint (at least superficially speaking)—say it was a tight IT band. Then comes step two: deciding how to exploit the system’s constraint. We roll out our tight IT band, so that we can log as many miles as possible.

But a lot of us don’t get past step 2: we keep logging miles and more miles, until our IT band is so sore that we can’t run at all. Doing step 3 would mean figuring out how many miles we can run without injury. Here’s the problem: if we actually did an honest assessment, the answer would typically be “not many.” Certainly not enough to train for a marathon, probably just enough to train for a 10k.

Which brings up to step 4. We’re trying to train for a marathon—or train for a fast 5k—and this IT band doesn’t let us go far or fast. What do we need to do? Elevate the system’s constraint. Otherwise, that tight IT band won’t let us develop the speed or endurance we need for our event.

When you look at the problem of athletic development broadly, it doesn’t make much sense to spend time and effort developing endurance when a problematic knee or IT band isn’t letting you progress.

In Critical Chain, Eli Goldratt writes: “What property typifies the chain? It is the strength of the chain. If one link breaks, just one link, the chain is broken. The strength of the chain drops to zero.”

This is the tired story of overuse injuries and recurring injury in runners. We often sideline ourselves by running through injury. We break the chain, instead of strengthening it.  We try to increase our endurance, when ironically our present endurance may be greater than we know—but we can’t experience it, given that the system is constrained by a malfunctioning part.

We should always focus on the weak link. “Remember,” Goldratt writes. “You are not really interested in my link. You are interested in the chain. If I made my link stronger, how much did I improve the strength of your chain? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.”

In previous posts, I’ve alluded to the possibility that “the plateau” may be deeply related to the flawed thinking that Goldratt attempts to correct: perhaps the case is that we’re training endurance when the constraint of the system is strength, or hip stability. We don’t see gains in endurance because we don’t address the constraint, and we perceive that we “plateaued.”

What’s the problem? Why did we miss the constraint?

The problem, Goldratt proposes, may be in our ideas and in our personal culture. A typical assumption in project management is that “the only way to achieve good global performance (is through good local performance everywhere.” Although this idea seems to make sense at face value, Goldratt disagrees: “The fact that so many managers and almost all our systems are based on this assumption is regarded by TOC as the core problem…”

Project management and athletic training are not so far apart: the same problem is present in both. Look at your training plan.Most athletic programs look for good local performance everywhere. Chances are that your training plan is similar to many other training plans: do fartlek, strength training, endurance, cardio.  The mainstream philosophy is to hit every side of the problem, all at once. Of course this works, in the sense that the body develops, but does it work well?

By the best standards, probably not. And if you keep getting sidelined by injury, certainly not.

I hope to have shown that the principles provided by the Theory of Constraints can be easily adapted to create a system for athletes and coaches, by which they can jointly achieve two objectives that are typically at odds with each other: injury prevention/management and athletic development. Applying the Theory of Constraints to athletic coaching may allow us to define athletic development in such a way that these two objectives cease to be in conflict. I believe that on a deep level, this conflict of interests is the likeliest culprit of the staggering running injury statistics. Settling it will benefit athletes, coaches, and the running culture in general.

I’ll devote my next post to fleshing out the details of this conflict of interest (and how to resolve it).

Principles of Training

Deconstructing the plateau: part 1

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All too often, as runners and athletes we hit a “plateau”—a period of time where we don’t improve, and where increased training seems to shove us into a downward spiral of overtraining and injury. Rinse and repeat. Thanks to our own overactive imagination, or to the whispers of the running superego, we conclude that it’s our genes. Our genes just won’t let us. Continue reading Deconstructing the plateau: part 1 →

Biomechanic Issues, Principles of Training

Training starts with an idea. Make sure that idea is correct.

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More and more of the newer science seems to fly in the face of conventional wisdom.

This trend brings into question everything that we know—and more importantly, everything that we think we know.

Sitting in the armchair, this isn’t a problem. If we theorize about the differences between barefoot and shod running, and never actually go out for a run, never actually pushing the system to observe its behaviors, theory seems like a great idea. It seems like all we need to do.

But we don’t do theory for its own sake. The point of theory is for it to help us in practice. So we go out and run, and if our mental model—our suppositions, assumptions, beliefs, and beliefs about our knowledge—is different from how the world actually works, the discrepancies between that mental model and the real world will begin to show up as pain on our knees.

One of the reasons I love running is because out on the road, mental models accelerate towards the ground at 32.2 ft/s2. The collision between our mental model and the ground is as close to truth as we lay athletes are ever going to get.

Writing this was brought on when I read a post by The Gait Guys, talking about achilles tendonitis, and possible solutions to it. Conventional wisdom would suggest that the way to reduce achilles tendonitis is by shortening the achilles tendon, a.k.a. raising the heel on the shoe.

Why? Simple. If you raise the heel of a shoe, you loosen the achilles, so it’s not carrying the weight of the body anymore. By all counts, that should do the trick.

(It doesn’t).

But that’s the problem. This solution was thought up in the armchair, and never tested in practice. Theoretically, it should work. But that’s because a theory is a mental model: a self-contained little idea of the world. Given the rules of that model, raising the heel is an excellent solution. Now, all that has to happen is for that model to coincide with the realities of the body.

In academic circles, those kinds of suppositions are known as “pipe dreams.”

The body isn’t just a series of simple machines put together. It is a complex entity, built from stacks and stacks of systems, each doing a different job. And the job of one of those systems is to regulate impact force by using touch receptors.

Because that subsystem—the central nervous system—is also at play, the behaviors of the body/system will be “unpredictable.” But it’s only unpredictable because the theoretical model doesn’t account for that subsystem.

When we account for this system, its actual behavior seems a lot more reasonable: in order to maintain tension on the achilles, the body raises the foot as the leg approaches the ground. However, this means that the leg can accelerate for a longer period of time, making the initial contact forces that much more powerful.

We need to understand the systems we’re playing with.

We need to go out and test them, and get a feel for their behavior. The phrase “push the envelope” comes from test pilots: every one of those pilots climbed into the cockpit fully aware of the mathematical model that predicted the flight capabilities of the airplane—also called the “flight envelope.” Pushing the envelope literally means taking the plane into unpredicted territory—literally pushing the aircraft beyond what the mathematical predictions say that it can take.

Dangerous? Yes. Necessary? Absolutely. The reason flying such a safe mode of transportation these days is because a few brave and knowledgeable people understood that there is a big discrepancy between the armchair and the road—between the predictive model and the actual system.

Let’s take these lessons and put them into our running. Let’s push our own running envelopes to see what sorts of behaviors our body exhibits—and then modify our training and adapt accordingly.

Thinking in Systems, Training Ideas

Wearable tech stops us from listening to our bodies. That’s a problem.

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We seem to have an ingrained cultural notion that technology solves everything. Got a problem? Throw some tech at it. Is that problem still there—or did it get worse? That’s okay. Some more tech should do the trick. This is what the wearable tech corporations like FitBit have been telling us. Wear a wristband that tracks the amount of steps you’ve taken, or the calories you’ve consumed, and that’ll make you fitter. Which launches us into a serious dilemma: we begin to think that we have control of our fitness like we have control of our thermostat.

Just change the little number and the temperature will change. The little number says how fit we are. But the body is a complex system, and as such, it is hostile to our attempts at simplification. If we try to “describe” fitness in such a simplistic way, we will find again and again that we are becoming overtrained and injured. As Albert Einstein said:

“Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.”

That is exactly the claim that wearable tech purports to let us make: that we “know” how fit we are because the little digital monitor says so. We can say “this is our fitness”—a claim about knowledge (or even worse “this is fitness”—a claim about truth). And our bodies, and our fitness, will be shipwrecked accordingly. The gods will be laughing at our disdain of the fact that the body is a dynamic system.

Continue reading Wearable tech stops us from listening to our bodies. That’s a problem. →

Thinking in Systems, Training Ideas

Increasing the body’s percentage of liquid assets is how we accelerate athletic development.

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The human body is an economic system. If only we treated it that way. The ways in which the magazines and the latest trends compel us to go about exercise and physical development just don’t observe this reality.

Because the body functions like an economy, the surest way to achieve any goal is creating the conditions for growth in that direction. This is why I speak in terms of liquid assets: assets which can be sold very quickly and without losing market value in the process. Increasing the liquidity of our body’s relevant nutrients—fats and carbohydrates, to name two—is the very first step towards entering a cycle of investment to drive the body’s economy in the direction we want—even when “growth” corresponds to growing in the direction of a lower body mass.

Even when we’re talking about running for the sole purpose of being skinny, constraining calories just won’t cut it. By forcing the body to implement austerity measures (through dieting), we destroy its ability to grow in any direction. Even though we’ll achieve skinniness in the short-term, doing so will compromise the body’s ability to maintain it. In systems-speak, this is a classic example of Shifting the Burden.

Continue reading Increasing the body’s percentage of liquid assets is how we accelerate athletic development. →

Thinking in Systems

Let’s embrace complexity—and work to understand it.

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Some of the posts on this blog will be highly technical; others will be tailored for the beginner athlete and the layman in systems. One of my most deeply held beliefs is that for a western athlete, performance is achieved through knowledge.

Therefore, my mission for this blog is to acquaint the casual athlete with technical concepts in systems thinking, sports psychology, and biomechanics. As I alluded to in this post, the vast majority of us don’t have the necessary upbringing and the cultural surroundings to “simply run.” It must be learned. It is vital that we not only learn the knowledge of how to run, but that we internalize two ideas: firstly, that we must learn to run uninjured and free—that for many of us this freedom will not just “appear”—but also that learning, that is, developing ever greater and more complex knowledge of running, (and not just stronger muscles), is where true speed lies.

After all, the body has limits. There are limits to muscle power, and lung capacity—genetic ones, even. But limits to learning? Not so much. Our brains, and our creativity, are the greatest equalizers. He or she who can rely on pure muscle power born from genetics, go ahead. But for the rest of us mere mortals, well, there are many, many variables that we can manipulate: food, energy, sleep, hormones, love, how our feet strike the trail, the sharpness of our mind, the ferocity with which we speed by a fellow competitor—all these are fair game. The physical, the mental, the emotional, the spiritual.

There are systems aplenty to manipulate, if we want to achieve excellence.

But we must learn how to use these systems. We must step outside of our comfort zone, and allow ourselves to transform by the weight of our knowledge, coupled with the weight of our training. And with enough time, dedication, and attention, we too will become exemplars of speed.

Let’s not be overwhelmed by new knowledge. Let’s not back away, and let’s not stick to the familiar. Let’s embrace the complexity of the body. Let’s become comfortable with it—and get to know it. The body is a system, and as such it is highly sophisticated. But that sophistication is built out of astounding simplicity. The more that we get to know how sophisticated the body is, the more its predictability, and its hidden simplicity, will stand out to us.

But there is no way to that end, except through knowledge.

(And perhaps through meditation—but that’s another story).

Ultimately, the purpose of this blog is to make complex systems and biomechanics concepts amenable to the layman, and to the beginner athlete. But excellence is not achieved through sound bites. Performance is not achieved through inspirational remarks. It takes time, deliberation, and attention.

And most of all, in my opinion, it takes an understanding of, and a comfort with, complexity.