Program Introduction

The comfort zone

If critical thinking is where everything is questioned, a comfort zone is where nothing is questioned. It’s easy to understand why it’s called a comfort zone because you’re always right and everything you do is the very best. Comfort zones build confirmation bias by gathering people who agree on key things. This is how social media works, be it friend lists or groups interested in certain things.  

A cognitive bias is simple where a person believes what is in their head instead of the actual evidence or math suggesting otherwise. Cognitive bias tends to grow stronger with time and repetition, the strongest beliefs being accepted early in life or having been repeated many times. Learning how to pedal a bike requires a person to overcome one of the oldest and most repeated concepts in your head - it’s as easy as riding a bike.

Cognitive bias comes in a lot of flavors.  With everyone having almost constant access to the internet, confirmation bias is growing exponentially.  Confirmation bias is finding supporting information from another source. There are two issues with that. First, if a person is looking to defend their bias, they will look for information that will do so.  Second, source of the data also has the same bias, so the bias grows with time.  To bring this back to cycling, in bike fitting there is a method of setting fore/aft position of the saddle known as KOPS or Knee Over Pedal Spindle.  There is no scientific basis for this, in most cases it doesn’t work well.  If you do an internet search for bike fitting you’ll find this method comes up over 90% of the time…

Most people know about the Dunning-Kruger effect which states that the people at the lowest skill level for any given skill tend to overestimate their level of competence, while people at the highest skill level tend to underestimate their level of competence. They concluded that having the skill is needed to be able to assess one's competence in that skill. I disagree. In a comfort zone that is certainly the case, with critical thinking that problem goes away.

The problem with the Dunning-Kruger effect is that people don’t see it in themselves, which brings me to my favorite cognitive bias.  The Lake Wobegon effect is where people assume that their inclusion in a group (comfort zone) grants them a higher skill or knowledge level than those not in the group. These are not groups with high standards for admission.

The [un]successful program

Coaching programs, fitness programs, training programs - they all work by being comfort zones. They will never question deeply held beliefs because they need to build membership. This site can’t be both critical and successful. I’m going to piss a lot of people off by pointing out the difference between what they think and what really is. This gets even worse with any cognitive bias that has become a human tendency.

Example:  I have been following the research of Dr Stephen Seiler for 20 years. His data on top level endurance athletes was the basis for what has become known as the polarized training plan where most of the training time is spent at low intensity. I have a different theory on why that works, but I’ll get to that later.  Around the same time Chris Charmichael came out with the book “The Time Crunched Cyclist” which outlined a program of less training at a threshold level. This is where cognitive bias and human tendency come in. Almost from birth we have a work ethic beaten into our heads. Actual research can’t compete with that, people want to train hard.  A training program known as Sweet Spot Training emerged, which is still the basis for most training plans.

Then something really interesting happened. Most of the original information about polarized training has been taken down and replaced with newer information. Two important things have changed.  First, they added terminology. People like terminology, it makes them sound smart. It’s not the same as understanding and can’t be used for decision making. Keep that in mind when someone tells you that zone 2 training builds your cell’s mitochondria.  Second, low intensity got redefined, it’s now much harder.

It’s clearly a case where a well researched program has been changed to fit the training desires of the cyclists.   My theory on why the polarized plan has worked so well for so many endurance athletes has little to do with mitochondria or neuromuscular power or ventilatory thresholds, it’s called learning. Musicians practice for hours and hours so they can do the exact same thing in performance. It’s called the autonomous stage of learning. The interesting part of Dr Seiler’s data (which nobody else seems to notice) is that the technique and efficiency of those top endurance athletes didn’t degrade after 5 or 6 hours. It’s not that they could produce more power at the end of a race, it’s that they didn’t have to.