����Ӱ��

Smart recreational athletes listen more to their bodies than their sport watches, says Kristjan Port, a sports biologist and the director of the TU Institute of Health Sciences and Sports Sciences.

Recreational athletes, whether they are doing sports to improve their health or quality of life, have to make decisions concerning their bodies. We consider smart choices as the result of logical thinking and intentional activity. We call this rational thinking and talk about evidence based thought. Naturally, we feed this process with information.

There problem here is that we are gatherers by nature and we keep every piece of cheap information we can get. At the same time, we fail to see that most of this is dry data without any significance or value. This means we will not make important decisions; we postpone the decisions, we ask someone else to make them or end up with a result that could have as well been made without any data. Ironically, we then try to solve the problem by gathering additional data. In effect, we work with data, not ourselves.

At any given second, there are probably hundreds or thousands of people gathering data from their workouts, with the only result being the conviction to gather more with every new session. We never stop to ask how it was possible to work out before all that data. Earlier this year, a book called “Eesti jooksjate lood” (Stories of Estonian Runners) read that people with various backgrounds and possibilities learned to know themselves, making them smarter and allowing them to reach their goals. Back then, there was not a lot of data available, gathering and analysing it was expensive, which meant analysing ourselves was inevitable. This emphasises the point that we have to avoid the situation we have today, whereby we are drowning in cheap data and hope for smart decisions made by some machine. Data merely gives us the chance to learn to know ourselves. Data is not wisdom in itself!

Try to distinguish between data, (valuable) information, knowledge and wisdom. Data becomes information, if we give them meaning. Part of this, the bits we do not forget, is stored within us as knowledge. Information in valuable if it changes our decisions, and wisdom is equal to personal experience, which comes from using said knowledge. This brings to us the recognition that even though data from pulse watches and other wearable measuring devices describe us; we fail to recognise what is happening to ourselves and focus on gathering data and comparing it to programmes. We forget ourselves and exercise our pulse curves. Wisdom cannot be given, it can be gathered personally!

Experience and research shows that a specialist in any field can make the right decision with a surprising swiftness and little data. They say he or she uses their experience and trained intuition. Like a doctor, who cannot wait for new data and has to make a difficult decision on the spot. These situations are usually routed to older colleagues, since the time hidden in one’s age is a premise to gathering wisdom.

Another premise is the ability to connect data with the real world and learn from it. Most data gathered during a workout does not describe what happened to your body, but what was done in general. No machine, coach or doctor could describe this, only you can.

Turn data into valuable information! Learn to listen to your body and use the time you spend working out for gathering wisdom – give the accumulating data a meaning. If you decide to deviate from your training plan, this means you have discovered valuable data and have become smarter. It is great to work out with wise people!