Because We Let Them: Part 1

Ok, one more semi-pointless bit of babbling today and Friday to follow up Excluding the Middle and What You Can Control vs. What You Can’t Control. This will actually have a bit of application: for those in the training/coaching field it may give you a different perspective on dealing with clients. It actually as a much broader application, pretty much to all aspects of life. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

What You Can Control vs. What You Can’t Control

Ok, hang on for another (hopefully) brief and pointless piece; the research review I wanted to do won’t come together for some reason and the mega-series I’m writing won’t work scheduling for reasons you’ll see shortly. So it’s going to be more semi-pointless babbling in the vein of Tuesday’s Excluding the Middle. Make no mistake, I’ll try to make it at least somewhat worth reading or apply it in some fashion. As a teaser, just realize that if you keep reading given this introduction, it was your choice to do so. Har har.

Excluding the Middle

This is going to be one of those seemingly pointless posts that doesn’t say a whole lot (and I’ll try to keep it short); it’s mainly just a background type of thing that I want to put up once so that I can just link to it in the future since I’ll be referring to it repeatedly. But most of my readers will still be hungover from July 4th celebration anyhow and won’t really be paying attention or able to focus on anything more detailed.

Talent vs. Work: Part 4

Having looked at some general issues and the concept of what might constitute ‘talent’ in Talent vs. Work: Part 1, then examining the issue of what constitutes ‘work’ along with the talent/work Matrix in Talent vs. Work: Part 2, then losing the plot completely and making some seemingly random comment about asymptotes and progress in Talent vs. Work: Part 3, I’m going to try to stay focused for 30 minutes and actually wrap this up.

Talent vs. Work: Part 3

Today we continue with seemingly random and unrelated issues that tie into this topic just because I can’t apparently stay focused enough to just wrap it up. First I want to go off on a semi-related tangent about how people invariably seem to parse this topic when it gets brought up.

Talent vs. Work: Part 2

But that still doesn’t really answer the original question or address the issue since there is the other half of what I want to talk about, the work issue. Surprisingly, given the amount of verbiage I gave to the issue of talent, I don’t have much to say here. But I will say what little I have before finally getting around to the original question and trying to make some sort of useful answer to it.

Talent vs. Work: Part 1

So what’s the deal? Is talent overrated, is it just about hard work? Can you talk about one or the other and is it true that hard work can beat talent in sports? Well, as usually, it sort of depends on what context you’re talking about. At least one issue of relevance is exactly what you’re talking about. In a sport context, what we’re talking about is winning usually. And that’s the context I’m going to mainly focus on here: winning in competition. Certainly if you pick a different endpoint (perhaps becoming extremely well skilled at an activity), things become fuzzier. Because you’re not trying to achieve the pinnacle of performance.

The Sports, Training and Adaptation Continuums

Ok, for those of you who got a glimpse of an article about Heart Rate Variability on Tuesday, don’t freak out. There’s a problem with it and until I can fix it (to ensure that the information is correct), I unpublished it. It’ll be back. Instead, I want to put this up; this is actually information that is elsewhere on the site, on the sales page for The Applied Nutrition for Mixed Sports Book/DVD bundle but since I doubt most look at that, I wanted to present it a bit more formally. I’m sure I’ll probably add some verbiage to what’s there.

Success Leaves Clues

Among several trite phrases (one of my current favorites is ‘Train like an athlete to look like an athlete’) that often gets thrown around in the fitness community is that of Success Leaves Clues. The premise, essentially, is that by looking at the habits of the best/elite performers, we can determine what does and doesn’t work since, by semi-logical extension, these folks are all elite because of those habits.

Just Do the Program

Today is going to be another hopefully short article/rant about another common mistake I make; in fact, it addresses one of my major pet peeves (folks run into this all the time on the support forum). In a certain sense it’s a followup to the piece on Information vs. Application that I posted on Tuesday.

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