Overwhelmed by endless exercise advice? 5 tips to overcome “optimidation” and get training
Overwhelmed by endless exercise advice? 5 tips to overcome “optimidation” and get training
This tsunami of advice can make starting your training feel like a puzzle. Sports scientist Charlie Simpson and coach Sean Nicolle help guide us through this challenge.
After a good session on the bike trainer I dismount my sweaty perch. I check my stats to make sure I had been in the optimum heart rate zones. I check my power output to ensure my total wattage is improving. I drink my recovery shake to ensure I get all the necessary amino acids for recovery.
This may all sound a bit much and to many, it is. This effect could be coined ‘optimidation’ (AKA optimisation intimidation) the pressure to endlessly perfect your nutrition, training and even analysis of your training.
If a busy life was not enough of an excuse to avoid getting out to exercise then the abundance of contradictory advice online, can make approaching exercise all the more agonising.
Here we set out 5 tips from sports scientist Charlie Simpson and triathlon coach Sean Nicolle to help you overcome this overwhelm and get back to the simple joy of exercising.
Introduce new concepts to your routine gradually
During 2020 alone over 445 million wearable fitness devices were bought online. But sometimes approaching how to use a device or a new training plan can get confusing quickly.
Triathlon coach Sean Nicolle (letsmustr) spoke about this confusion:
“I do absolutely believe that as a general principle, athletes, including myself, overcomplicate these things … We get hung up a little bit on some of the details … the more experienced the athlete, the more tech that I think you can introduce.”
Introducing one new concept or technique can be very helpful, but introduce them gradually. Take tracking your heart rate, this can show how hard your body is having to work during exercise.
The most important metric: how you feel
With the ability to pick apart every data point from a run, cycle or swim thanks to wearable devices, sometimes athletes forget the most important ‘device’ for exercise: our bodies!
Having our head buried in tech can mean we miss the wider picture. These devices can only tell us so much about how and why a workout felt the way it did:
“Is it because you had a great night's sleep l so it felt easy or you had a bad night's sleep so it felt hard or you've got work stress going on. Getting that feedback from people to be able to do that and making sure they can articulate that feeling.”
Your heart rate data may say one thing but your body could say another. Trust how you feel because your body could be telling you to put a brake on and rest.
Knowing how to sniff out junk science
The best and worst thing about the internet age is the ability for anyone to share their opinions online. It could be a world-leading sports scientist or someone making it up on the spot, but both can appear on our feeds as equal authorities.
Sports scientist Charlie Simpson advised people had a dose of ‘healthy scepticism’ when combing through advice online:
“oftentimes people are trying to sell something either directly to you in the form of a supplement or a training philosophy or a book or whatever happens to be.”
Additionally, if a message seems like a fairly radical approach hold on to that same scepticism:
“People need to stand out from the crowd. If you're just standing up talking about basic standard, everyday messages, nobody listens … you don't do what scientists do. You don't show indecisiveness, you don't show ambiguity, you don't show balance.”
There are plenty of reputable sports scientists like Iñigo San Millán or Stephen Seiler who can provide this balance in videos and articles online. Charlie also advises sources like the BBC who risk assess what they say and are not motivated by profit.
Runner Martin Slevin, with over 40 years of running experience, spoke of how giving more time to reading about training and fitness can be of great benefit:
“you still cannot beat a hardback book or an athlete's biography to look at how they trained and what mistakes they made.”
Any training is better than no training
A 2017 study from Loughborough University of over 63,000 people in England and Scotland showed that even exercising just once or twice a week can greatly improve long-term health outcomes. This is a belief shared by Charlie Simpson that any exercise is a lot better than no exercise:
“The basic feature of any good training program is some degree of ‘progressive overload’, some degree of pushing the body a little bit more than it's currently capable. The body is phenomenal at responding physiologically to any overload stress.”
Even Olympic athletes train differently to one another so our stress about about the ‘optimum’ way to train may be overblown:
“there are variations and yet it will all come to the final competition in Paris in a couple of months, they'll be within split seconds of each other or over the event.”
Getting moving and pushing your body past what it is used to can show great benefits for all athletes, park runners and olympians alike.
Consider getting a coach
If the world of endurance exercise advice persists in overwhelming it could be worth considering getting a coach. Sean Nicolle describes how a coach like him can help:
“The reality is, I think the majority of people who come and get a coach are doing so because there is so much confusion about what they really should be doing and how they should be doing it. They're trying to use a coach in order to help sift through that fog of information.”
Coaches can help get back to the simplicity of getting moving and reaping the benefits of endurance sports. The availability of good coaches is greater than ever:
Martin Slevin - “Coach education through UK Athletics, England Athletics has been excellent there are a lot more people who are qualified in coaching.”