Is diet 20% or 80% of your results? If you could only do one exercise, what would it be? You’ve almost certainly had these questions come up when talking shop. But what does it mean that diet is 80% of your results? How do you express that in real-world terms? What does it mean to say there’s a “best” exercise? How would you begin to measure that?
In real terms, you can’t. Those questions don’t make sense. You’d think you would be able to give a simple answer to a simple question, but it isn’t like that.
Your biology classes might give you the impression that living bodies are like a squishy version of Mr. Potato Head. Add a nervous system and a circulatory system and a skeletal system together and the result is a functioning human being. Just put the pieces and you get a living organism.
We expect the world to add up like an arithmetic equation. The tiniest parts add together like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle and always give you the same predetermined result. Finding the answer is simply a matter of understanding all the little pieces.
If you’ve ever lived in a hurricane zone during the warm months, you’ll be familiar with the whirling vortex shape of a cyclone. Between June and November every year, the whole east coast of the United States keeps a nervous eye out toward the Atlantic.
Hurricanes begin as humble thunderstorms off the coast of Cape Verde in Africa. As they make their way across the warm oceans, something happens to the clouds. Fueled by the heat of warm seas, wind speeds pick up, pressure drops, and before you know it, you’ve got a spinning death-cloud in the familiar shape.
What is a hurricane exactly? You know it when you see it, to be sure, but what is it? The simple answer, which applies to any cloud, is “water”. Zoom in down to the tiniest level and a hurricane isn’t anything but ordinary water droplets, made up of ordinary H2O molecules. It’s the same stuff you drink and bathe in, yet I can’t recall a time that a glass of water knocked over a city. There’s something different about the hurricane.
Take a rug on your floor and look at it up close. Use a magnifying glass for extra effect. Rugs are woven out of hundreds and thousands of threads. Up close, you can see those strands criss-crossed into the repeating pattern that makes up the whole object we call “rug”. How much does any one of those threads add to the “rug” object? 10%? 50%? Would it ever occur to you to ask that question in the first place?
Probably not. The rug forms out of all the threads woven into a pattern. You could take out one, or two, or ten threads and not affect the thing we call “rug”. You wouldn’t ask about the relationship between thread and rug just as you wouldn’t think about a hurricane by asking about the water droplets.
Over the last few decades, science has slowly come around to the understanding that biology is more like a hurricane than Victorian clockwork. It doesn’t make any sense to ask whether any water droplet is 10% or 60% of the whole storm. Reductionism, the point of view that says we can understand a thing by breaking it down into the tiniest pieces, is gradually being replaced by the science of complexity.
molecules, if you zoom in even further). The droplets are just plain old water droplets, no different from the condensation on a cold drink in the summer. It’s only when kicked up into a specific pattern that we get the object we call “a hurricane”.
The pattern is what matters. A hurricane persists despite the turnover of tremendous amounts of water, which it pulls in from warm seas and dumps out as rain. If you look at the hurricane as a lot of water droplets, you leave out something very important.
Individual droplets don’t just add up to a cyclone the way gears and springs add up into a watch. It’s the relationship between the water molecules, not just hundreds or thousands but millions upon millions, that matters. When they’re arranged in the right way, you get a hurricane.
Think patterns, not pieces.
Your body can be considered in much the same sense. What’s most important to live: the heart, the brain, or the kidneys? The correct answer is “all of them” (or, more confusingly, “none of them”). You can’t live without any of those organs; none of them is “most” or “least” important.
Simple cause-and-effect thinking has no place in the study living beings. Causes and effects smear out over networks where each piece effects, and is effected by, tens, hundreds, or thousands of other pieces. The patterns that define our bodies are complex.
Complexity is a challenging concept, and even the scientific community is still coming to terms with it, so don’t beat yourself up if bells aren’t ringing right now. The important thing to remember is that individual pieces of complex systems aren’t the big deal.
Think big picture. What matters is the pattern, not the little parts that make it up. Rugs will survive children pulling out some of their threads. A hurricane will absorb and drop many tons of water and we still identify it as the same storm.
Is your diet 80% of your results? Are squats better than deadlifts? Does cortisol eat up your hard-won muscle or lead to a flabby gut? The only correct response to questions like this is to unask them: forget this line of thinking, as it makes no sense.
Squats or deadlifts? Yes. Does the bench press train chest or shoulders? Yes. What’s more important, diet or training? Yes.
Complex systems have some interesting properties. Their patterns are inherently unstable, intrinsically variable, having no easily identified chains of causes and effects as we would expect in a factory. Despite all this volatility and uncertainty, these patterns can remain stable over long periods of time and are resilient in the face of all kinds of perturbations.19
These are all features that have obvious implications for how we train, let alone how we eat and live our lives. Unfortunately recreational exercisers, bodybuilders, and let’s face it, most strength & conditioning experts and athletes, love to get hung up on details. We still think of the body as a collection of linear systems that we can tug on and pry apart. Every time someone asks what’s most important or worries about whether a hormone is optimally stimulated, you’re seeing reductionist thinking in action.
We have to get over the Mr. Potato Head biology. You can no longer consider muscles as dead pieces of meat that receive orders from the brain and have no other contact with the rest of your body. Muscles – like glands, heart, lungs, brain and everything else – are elements in an on-going storm of biochemical activity.