It seems that numbers are all the rage these days! In fairness they’ve been fairly important since the early days of human civilisation. Pretty much everything from architecture to farming relies on numbers. But what does this have to do with Sports Medicine?
Science and modern medicine wouldn’t have got very far without the decimal number system, without numbers it wouldn’t be possible to conduct large scale studies and find statistically significant evidence for anything from the causes of injury to the effectiveness of treatments and preventions.
BUT numbers seem to be the basis of everything I hear in clinic, it’s all the podcast ‘experts’ base their arguments on and all quantitative research papers have numbers at their core. But is basing everything around numbers always as good as it sounds? I’ve had healthy clients told they’re obese due to their BMI, then been advised to monitor the number of calories they are consuming each day and contrast them with the number of calories they burn through exercise.
I understand on one level why that makes sense when dealing with huge population groups, but on an individual level it’s at best useless and can be quite harmful. It’s true that without evidence (which requires numbers) what do you have, just opinion, but sometimes common sense, intuition and expert opinion (as provided at VPSM) can be far more helpful than relying on pure data.
Telling someone to reduce their food intake by 1,000 calories a day is pretty meaningless. If the calories come from extra virgin olive oil and wild sardines it’s doing hugely different things to the body than a slice of chocolate gateau, they just aren’t comparable. In my opinion it’s virtually meaningless to talk about calories or BMI purely in numerical terms.
Slave to strava?The same can apply to training regimes, including running. I know many friends and clients who will run through the pain so they can make their 100 km week or run at 7 min miles pace for their recovery run, because that’s what they have read is recovery pace (even when everything in them tells them they should be running slower). Watches, training plans and weekly mileage have their place and all the elite athletes I’ve worked with follow them religiously but if long term health and love of running is your aim then it may be better to ditch the watch and run to feel. Just a thought….