Your Fitness Tracker Is Killing Your Intuition
Frameworks with Carl Hardwick | CoachRx Podcast Network
Frameworks, Episode 48, with Carl Hardwick and James FitzGerald
Measuring the Thing Changes the Thing
A client sits down to eat. Somewhere in the middle of the plate, something lands. Not an alert, not a number. Just a sense that this is enough. In James's telling of it, the client says the quiet part out loud afterward: I was not focusing on what the counter said on the macros, and I was not focusing on these narratives that I would have in my head for years about my identity and what I look like in the mirror. It was all washed away. James says he could talk for hours and write books on moments like that one, and Carl feels the same way about them. They are also getting rarer, and this episode is about why.
Carl opened with no setup at all. He wanted to talk about intuition. Knowing ourselves, knowing our bodies, knowing what we can handle and what we cannot, and how a person actually builds good intuition about their own health. The conversation runs through wearables, orthosomnia, the Enlightenment, a Facebook post James wrote in 2017, a piece of broccoli, and the NBA. What it keeps returning to is a single sentence Carl said early: measuring the thing usually changes the thing, and usually in the opposite direction from the one you intended.
The question underneath the question
Carl's opening question was simple enough to be uncomfortable. How do we get to a place where we just know ourselves really, really well?
James answered with three areas. The first is developmental. Intuition means something different for a young child than it does for a grown adult over time, and that difference matters if your job is helping people build it. The second is chaos. He kept coming back to how we could possibly lose sight of intuition as humans when we do have the capability to pause and reflect, and his answer was chaos plus what we are told about how we are supposed to act in the world.
The third is the one that should change how a coach hears a client's self report. James assumes there is an objective way to measure this, and that everyone performs differently on it. Some people are sitting at an eight out of ten capability for intuition. Some were never given those skills at all, and he traces that back generationally: what their parents gave to them, and what their parents gave to them, and what their parents gave to them.
So you are not working with a room of people carrying equal equipment. Two clients can give you the same words about how a week went and be reporting from completely different levels of access to themselves.
Intuition is a skill, which means it gets practiced
Carl pressed him on the word. What do you mean by skills of intuition, specifically?
James would not define it, but he described it. What comes to mind is practice. Openness in conversation over time, whether that is a parent to a child, a teenager to another teenager, or two adults like the two of them talking about it on a podcast. It is vulnerable for the person speaking about it and inquisitive or reflective for the person doing it. That is practice. And with practice, like all human endeavors, people can get quite good at it.
He was careful about what good means here. Getting very good at it does not turn someone into an elite intuitive or, in his words, some sort of crazy medium personality. What it produces is a massive awareness of yourself. A really good sense of what works for you and what is best for you. Trust your gut, cliche term and all.
That is the piece worth holding onto for the rest of the episode. If intuition is a skill, it can be coached. And if it can be coached, then anything that removes the reps removes the skill.
Then we started measuring the measuring
Carl's position on measurement is not the one the episode title implies. He thinks the instinct to assess is a good instinct. I feel this way, so I want to gather some objective data to see whether my gut is right. He said outright that he thinks that is a great thing.
The problem is what it turns into. You can get addicted to it. There is something psychological at play in gamification, and that is part of what those devices do for us. Can I optimize here. Can I do this. Can I keep seeing increases there. Someone can walk in with a genuinely good intention, wanting to check their intuition against something, and walk out a chronic measurer.
There are words for where that ends up. Orthosomnia, where someone measures their sleep so specifically and gets so neurotic about it that they cannot sleep anymore, because all they are thinking about is getting great sleep. Carl also brought up a randomized trial he wants to link: a few hundred adults followed over a couple of years, one group given wearable devices and all the data they needed, the other group told to go by feel. The group without the devices lost meaningfully more weight than the group with them. Both groups lost some. The gap is the point.
Carl's read on that gap: they got so addicted to the tracking that they lost sight of intuition. They overlooked things that just made sense, and they skipped those things for the number.
James's first reaction was to laugh at the shape of it. It was very meta, he said, that we have got to measure the measuring. Humans are so, and then he stopped and restarted. We are so crazy.
What James did with the wearables, and the post he wrote about it
Back when he was running coach tips on Facebook, around 2017, one of his early ones was about wearables. He does not remember the exact wording and gave himself a little credit for it being short and succinct. The gist of it was this: when you start wearing things, you give up intuition.
He did not write it from theory. He wore all of them. He tried it all specifically to validate the idea, and then he took them off and stopped. He described the pattern as the same one he found doing conferences as the technician. You actually do not get answers there. What it does is validate when you land on these things that you feel really strongly about.
What he landed on was a loss he can name. You really do give up this power, this intuitive power that we all have as to what is right for us, what feels good. And then the larger version of it, which is the thread that runs through the whole conversation. We start losing all of this sense making.
The downfall of measurement
James has a blog post coming on the generalized version of this, the downfall of human measurement, and he teased it here. When we started measuring things, we lost this sense making capability. One of our strongest tools is to make sense of the world, and then to make sense of how we act in it and how we respond to things in it.
His theory for why we handed it over is not flattering, and he applied it to himself before anyone else. He thinks humans wanted to give up responsibility. We freely walked into it, because we did not want to take responsibility for becoming over fat, or for becoming crazy, or for being really cruel to people online. He included his own history in that list without being asked to.
He pointed out afterward that he had not used the word intuition anywhere in that argument, and that it belongs there. Intuition is not only about how you are feeling. It is also intuition about how others will feel in response to your actions. With more of that, maybe we pause a little bit and do not get into it.
Knowledge and intuition are not the same thing
Carl thinks in charts, and he drew this one out loud. Over the past few decades, technological advances go up. Knowledge goes up. Access to knowledge goes up. Outcomes, meaning whether we are intuitive and healthy people generally, go slowly down.
The mechanism he named for that gap is interoception. The person who has no real ability to sense their own internal states. They do not know when they are hungry, because they are calculating and following the plan. They do not know when they are tired, because they are looking at a screen to see where their energy and their stress have been over the past thirty six hours. They do not know how hard they actually worked, because they are looking at heart rate and training load data that has nothing to do with their own intuition.
James backed it with a book from a couple of years ago about the perception of progression and what progress was supposed to look like from the mid nineties forward. Internet and computers and technology and wearables, add it all together. His summary of where that landed: the kids are not all right. Body mass index. Incidence of disease. Calculations that measure levels of resilience in humans, immune system function and its subsets. That is not getting better. That is going downhill.
Which makes autonomy a knowledge word
This is where the conversation turns useful for anyone with clients. Carl asked whether intuition and autonomy intersect. James would not commit to intersection or parallel, but he was clear that there is something going on there. A union.
Then he brought the intensity and the large words down, which is where the definition got sharp. When we say that someone has become autonomous, we are assuming they have become all knowing around what works best for them. What we actually mean is that they are not dependent anymore. They do know, capital N Know. And the knowledge they gained does not require them to do all the research anymore, or all the measurement anymore.
Read that backward and it becomes a test you can run on your own client list. If a client still needs the research, and still needs the measurement, they are not autonomous yet, no matter how fluently they can recite what you taught them.
We allow machines to know now
Which makes James's next claim less shocking than it sounds. We actually are less knowledgeable today. He went further and said he thinks we may be less intelligent too, and acknowledged in the same breath how dark that gets and how hard it would be to prove.
His reason is not that information got worse. It is that we shirked the responsibility around knowing. We gave it up. We allow machines to know now.
The funniest and worst part of it is cognitive dissonance. We think we know, but we do not, because we gave it all up to measurements.
His picture of the client end of this is recognizable to any coach: the person who is genuinely afraid to do anything on their own, who wants to rely on the machine, or on the coach, because they are afraid to come over here and be intuitive and be all knowing of what works best for them.
Then he used tobacco as the case study, drawing on a book a friend had recommended. Think about everything that had to happen. All that measurement. Commercials, lungs on television, decades of it. All so that a person could arrive at the conclusion intuition would have offered for free, which is that this amount of tar and nicotine going into my body frequently is probably not going to work out well in the end. But I will wait until they have commercials. And we think we are so smart.
Where measurement earns its place
Carl did not want this to become an anti information conversation, and he said so directly. He thinks measurement is actually an important thing. His struggle is placement. In his brain he intuitively knows where it fits, which is wherever it helps. The work is figuring out where that is.
His framework for it: observation leads to awareness, awareness leads to change. But there is something between the awareness and the change that we are not talking enough about. And information is useful if the information is useful.
His example is deliberately unglamorous. Write down what you eat for a few days. That is measurement. You do not have to be neurotic about it. And sometimes it does not even take anyone on the other side of it saying anything. You write the things down, and on day five you look at the thing and go: I did not realize that I was doing this, or not doing that. Awareness creeps in. Then hopefully some change follows. I am eating broccoli zero times per week. Maybe I should eat broccoli at every single meal.
James gave the origin story for why that is hard for people to accept in moderation. Measurement as we know it came out of the Enlightenment, when people wanted to figure out the material actions of physical consequences in the world. Microscopes were getting better, and so were the scopes pointed the other way. So we looked much deeper and deeper in toward the cell, and we looked further and further out into the universe, but we did a poor job of looking deeper and deeper into our own heart and soul. Compound that with industry and technology and you arrive at today, generations deep in people not knowing. And the reason they cannot is that they are still in their brain thinking it is useless if you do not measure it. We have been taught this.
Assessment to create awareness, not assessment to be good
Then Carl said the thing that reframes the entire assessment conversation, and it is the sentence to take into your next post assessment call.
Why do we care about someone's body composition? Why do we care about their ability or inability to move? Why do we care about their ability to do work over time? Because the means to the end is not to be good at the thing that you are measuring. The means to the end is to bring awareness around your capabilities, your incapabilities, or the truth in where you sit today in certain areas.
He named the split cleanly. An assessment to create awareness, versus an assessment to be good.
James's admission on this point is worth the episode by itself. OPEX got into assessment as an education company because everyone else was doing it. It was not the first thing that came to mind. If he had thought super hard about it twenty something years ago, he probably would not have had any kind of measurement at all. This is the program, here are the principles, get on with it, and then just worry about aligning people in consultations.
He also knows exactly why he did not stay there. Months of the same argument. I think I should have Doritos. I think you should have broccoli. I think I should have Doritos. And then eventually, from the client, unprompted: I feel so mentally acute when I have this amount of fiber. Okay, good. Now get on with it. Do your patterns, do your pacing, do not ever come back. Eat real food, keep learning things, be a kind person.
The sentence that makes measurement worth it
James restated Carl's point in his own language and then added the condition, and the condition is the practical takeaway of the whole episode.
Measurement gives the client an opportunity to reflect. To look back at what is actually happening, at what really is going on. But there is only a positive in the measurement if they say the words. And then he said the words, which is not something you often hear articulated:
I had an awakening, that how I got here and what the screen is showing and what the measurement is showing, I had an awakening that that is my responsibility. And I am glad you confronted me with that. And from here forward, I do not even know if I need to measure anymore. But I do know that I am starting to build those intuitive tools that are going to get me there.
That is the test. They became more knowledgeable about themselves because they used awareness. So yes, measurement can fit into that. James called the territory a gray area and then gave it a name worth borrowing: soft measurement.
Carl's response was the practical one. He said he had never heard a post assessment recap articulated that way, and he read it as a call out for coaches to try to will that in their clients. Images up in your gym. Words in your paperwork or your marketing material. And in conversation, because there are ways to get people there. Then clients start smelling it on their own. I have what I need. I am ready to rock and roll.
Broccoli, walking by
When Carl asked for examples where we already know the answer and are still waiting on a study, James went straight to food, and got specific about the frustration.
We still think there is no answer as to what people should eat. That blows my mind.
He has watched the cottage industry around it up close: years of reading journals and studying processed food and writing books and arguing online about who is smartest and which direction is correct. And here is broccoli over here, just walking by. Out of the ground. Heat it up, put some butter on it. No measurement involved in any of that. Is it enough calories, am I getting enough indole three carbinol and enough fiber.
His alternative is a sequence, not a rejection. How about we do not even enter into it, and we just use intuition on top of knowledge. Meaning chew the broccoli thirty times, and then know that broccoli is real food. That is your starting point.
From there you move into what he calls the interesting categories. How much fowl or wild game or fish is in your diet. Have you ever had organ meats. Whole herbs. Additional salts relative to activity or temperature gradients. Those are genuinely interesting conversations, and every one of them sits inside the real food realm. What they are not is weighing and measuring and a plate diagram telling you the hand size of your portion. We just give up all knowledge when we do that.
Which is the same place Episode 45 landed on nutrition, from a different direction. Eat real food, and do it with rhythm and timing. Everything else is a conversation, not a calculation.
The coach's place, in a world where the computer programs better
Carl wanted to save resilience for next week, but they crossed into it anyway, and it produced the clearest statement of the coach's role in the entire arc.
James believes computers are going to do a better job of nutrition programs and exercise design. He said it plainly and without hedging. And then: I would bet long on coaches being that human that helps a client get to a higher level of resilience, regardless of what they have been given.
The mechanism is the back and forth, which is the part a computer cannot do. Give me an example where you had this food, or you changed your exercise program, or you did this. How did you respond to that? The client has to be vulnerable about what tripped them up, what caused challenges, why they fell back five steps, why they showed up over fat and deconditioned. They have to arrive at it themselves, that it was their inability in these little areas to overcome what was thrown in front of them.
That is the part he would put red around on the consultation printout. He even named the metric he would want: a general resilience score, broken into areas. Physical resilience. Resilience to invaders coming into your body, and invaders coming into your mind. What is it that turns a kind, lovable pacifist into a roaring, adrenaline filled maniac. Media did that. Well then, how resilient are you?
And what the client needs in order to answer that honestly is someone challenging them, so they can become personally accurate in their own assessment of how resilient they are. Which usually starts with a correction. I thought it was the wheat. No, it is not the wheat.
Higher order resilience
Carl asked the question he already knew the answer to. Does it actually decrease resilience when we create too perfect an environment for the human through data and measurement? Eating at the right time. Sleeping at the right time. The exact number of hours of sleep you require. Doing things based on what your watch tells you. Even the careful cycle based programming that biases certain work toward certain weeks of the month, on the grounds that the system is more prepared to optimize this and not that. There may be real optimization inside all of that. There is also a cost.
James did not hesitate. For sure. And then he named the alternative, because there is an organizing, an orchestrating, and an ordering to it. Higher order resilience. O cubed.
The gray area is the entire craft. It is not like we are sending them out to just trip up and fall over, but we are also not saying right foot, then left foot, then right foot, then left foot. You set them up for challenges they helped create, and they leave the office saying: not sure how that is going to work out, but I am going to give it a try. Then they go and do it. Then they report back.
His model for it is parenting, and he was careful to describe it as willful and low intense. He and Leanne spent years talking about their daughters leaving the nest, and about low intense strategies that hand over responsibility for some actions, so the girls could figure things out through a trip up, but not a trip up that kills them. Then the report back. That is a deliberate prescription, aimed at a generalized level of resilience for them in the world.
Bring that standard back to fitness and the usual approach does not survive it. The template that goes out to everyone. A twenty minute AMRAP, and that physical thing leads to salvation. One out of one hundred people will learn how to become more resilient from that physical action that you prescribed. One percent. Think about how lower order that is.
So you squeeze it down and make it personal, which is why he calls it artistic. You have to thread the needle to get the right level of challenge, one they participate in and report back on and say: that was challenging, but I did it. Okay, great. Guess what is next.
The NBA argument, which is the objective version of all of it
The episode ends in sports, which sounds like a tangent and is actually the measurable version of everything above.
Carl's case is that those guys are not as resilient as they used to be, and he was clear he is not propping the behavior up as good. Rodman in Vegas until six in the morning and on the floor at two in the afternoon in a Finals game. Jordan up in the casinos, then Salt Lake City, then a fever, then performing anyway. Now we are talking about players managing forty five games, being put on a pedestal for it, and postseason award eligibility depending on playing enough. And he has never seen as many injuries as we see now. In the eighties and nineties it was strange to miss any games at all. You went to a Bulls game as a kid and you did not hope Pippen and Jordan would be on the floor. You knew.
James's counter came out of the basement of an NBA team in Phoenix, where he sat with the strength and conditioning department. Their argument is that there is far too much required now in the combination of off court demands, tactical training, and the sport participation itself. What you are watching is a decade of experimentation into how far humans can go inside that ecosystem. He compared it to sprinting in the eighties, and to why Charlie Francis went down the route he did, when the shoes and the technology and the surfaces got rushed and commercialized into entertainment and the spill out was pulled hamstrings on natural athletes. When that happens, you have to change the game.
He also thinks it settles Carl's question rather than contradicting it. It is the truest measure of resilience. More people injured, less able to handle all the rough things off court and then go on court.
Then he made it a programming conversation. Hockey. The rule changes gave professionals a longer runway, partly because of the changes themselves and partly because of the mechanics of the game, including how careful the sport now is about hits to the head. The same conversation exists around quarterbacks. A hockey player can carry mileage from three years of age to eighteen and still get an extended professional career, because of the kind of contractions the sport asks for after that. The contractions do matter. Basketball asks for eccentric loading, and that is where you run into a biological constraint. Something has to change in the sport itself if the modern game is going to stop leaving people on the sideline for four different teams in six years.
Carl added mileage and specialization to it, which connects the whole thing back to last week. Athletes arrive at eighteen and nineteen and twenty with miles that simply were not there in the eighties and nineties, and they are reaching maximum physical potential far earlier than they used to. And the protection argument holds outside hockey. Tom Brady got a much longer career than Joe Theismann could have, and part of the reason is that Brady was not getting hit the way Theismann was at thirty five.
What to do with this before next week
Next week is resilience in full. What this week leaves you with is a test you can run on your own practice without buying anything and without measuring anything new.
Every measurement you take should be aimed at the moment the client stops needing it. That is what James's script is for. Not I hit my numbers. Not the screen looks better. But this: that is my responsibility, and from here forward I do not know that I need to measure anymore.
And then the language that tells you it worked, which sounds like nothing and is everything. That does not work for me. That does not work for me. That does not work for me.
These are all just ways people will language an increased level of intuition.
Frameworks is part of the CoachRx Podcast Network, alongside Marketing for Fitness Coaches and Behind The Design. New episodes weekly.
If you want the assessment and consultation systems behind this conversation rather than the summary of them, soft measurement is what the OPEX Method Mentorship teaches coaches to run, across assessment, consultation, design, and business. The next cohort starts October 13. Book a strategy call with a coaching advisor who has been through the program.
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