By Alexis Louise Reda
Optimality is a measured, focused effort progressed over time – it is not the most output you can achieve at once.
Achieving optimality is not necessarily doing the absolute best and most you can do – that, by definition, is “absolute optimality”. It is great, but it does not correlate with maintaining desired outcomes such as dependable progress mid-term or long-term. We have other functions that demand energy in our lives, you know. Therefore what is more worth caring about is more often “relative optimality”: the most you can do WITH CONSIDERATION of all the other things you must dedicate energy for in your day, in your life. So don’t feel like you have to hurt after your workout or leave the computer with a headache and eyeache and buttache to have achieved something “optimally”, because that’s a fallacy. Even athletes 100% dedicated to their sport know that they cannot be their best by going 100% effort every session. In intelligent weight training, you don’t push to failure more than I’d say 20% of the time – and those events are programmed at very specific intervals in a training cycle (analogous to a life cycle). They will get you to another level, but never in isolation – never without the prerequisite of doing focus-based, quality repetitions relatively much farther away from maximum effort, around 80% of the time. This is focused action that results in providing just enough of a stimulus to get a positive training effect – an adaptation to the skill you are practicing that will make you better over time. Why not consider this for everything else in life, too?
Continue reading “The Fallacy of Optimality”