Pods: Business, Caffeine, and a lil Frans Bosch.
Hey gang, another mashup of topics this week! I don’t have a fancy intro to tie them all together so let’s just dive in.
The Knowledge Project #105 w/ Seth Godin (1hr 25min) was a recommendation from a buddy and it did not disappoint. It is packed full of unique (to me) ideas and concepts and had me constantly rewinding to fully understand what was being presented. It challenged some preconceived ideas I had about building a business and had me taking the concepts and replaying them in my head with a physio spin.
Some of my favourites thoughts/quotes are:
“process saves us from the poverty of our intentions” - Elizabeth King
The job of the [business] is not to be the biggest or most profitable [business], it is to do their work the way they want to do it.
There are plenty of people you could cater to, but does that help you make the change you seek to make?
Nobody has everyone as their customer.
The goal cannot be to be for everyone…but be for someone…the smallest viable audience…not the biggest possible audience.
Be obsessed with who [your product] is for, those people will find you and tell the others.
You must overcome friction, the force slowing you down and keeping you invisible to others.
In order for something to go forward, something else has to move out of your way.
If you’re going to be a pro you have to understand the state of the art, raise the bar, understand who [it] is for, what [it] is for, and what change you are seeking to make. These are all things that put you on the hook.
Being an amateur is okay, it doesn’t put you on the hook, but don’t sell your hobbies.
Overall, it was a really great listen in a genre I probably would have never found on my own. If you’re looking for a deeper, introspective look at business this might hit the spot. It did for me.
Moving on.
I had a number of ‘quick hitters’ downloaded on Spotify so I chose 2 this week from the Science for Sport Podcast that peaked my interest. #47 Frans Bosch Systems: The Practical Application Critical To Transfer (30min) with Teun Thomassen and #35 Personalize Your Caffeine Performance Plan (18min) with Craig Pickering.
Teun speaks primarily on the transfer from training to improvements in sport performance. (His ideas are based on the FBS approach which seeks to apply dynamic systems theory and motor learning principals to improve transfer of training to specific aspects of performance in ones sport).
Teun leads with “Sport performance is not just a sum of its parts…the human body is a dynamic system, not a machine, and shouldn’t be viewed as one through a reductionistic model.” This made me laugh as many running analogies do this exact thing in relating humans to vehicles to describe different aspects of performance. I will continue to make the analogies for simplicities sake but I do agree there is much more to the story.
This theory plays contrary to the idea that if I just strength train I will be guaranteed to get some % of gains to run faster or throw harder, where as in a car if you put in a bigger engine, you know it will go faster, and by how much, almost immediately.
If it were simply a matter of ‘strength’ everyone could be as fast as Connor McDavid or shoot as hard as Alex Ovechkin, which is obviously not the case. But that doesn’t mean you can’t get better at those skills, it just means that what you’re doing needs to transfer properly to the aspect of performance you’re trying to improve.
Teun describes that you must work backwards from the ‘skill’ to find out the smallest trainable building blocks and build back up from there. He uses the example of throwing; breaks it down, and discusses how he would train an athlete to throw further or harder.
“simplicity has to come from complexity” - Teun Thomassen
This immediately made me think of a concept Chris Johnson discusses which is that just because something is simple doesn’t imply that it is easy. I elaborate on my own thoughts of that quote on a recent IG post.
Craig Pickering just touches the surface of performance enhancement from caffeine in this 18 min pod. He relates that it acts by improving mood, reducing mental and physical fatigue, and reducing pain. All great things in a lot of different sports. The science suggests that between 3-6mg of caffeine/kg of body weight is the average effective dose and 9mg/kg seems to be the upper limit with an average consumption of 60min before competition. Obviously, you can start to build a tolerance to caffeine’s effects, so the bar may be moving in season if you’re supplementing a lot.
This will also be variable between individuals, so Craig suggests to run your own personal experiment and start with 3mg/kg of body weight, 60min before your event and gauge how you ‘perform’ or how you ‘feel you performed’ if you don’t have a lab to test a specific performance variable. Feeling like you performed better may be just as important.
Google tells me a cup of coffee has ~100mg of caffeine, but I have to believe that is quite variable.
The dosage and pre-comp administration time are two important variables but so is mode. Although coffee is a cheap and available option, the amount of caffeine in each cup is quite variable (even if you brew the same bean each time). The other downfall of coffee is the high incidence of GI distress if you’re slugging it back pre-comp.
There are other modes now including gum, tablets, nasal spray and bars/gels that may be worth trying for your own personal reasons.
As always, thanks for reading!!
