Modality Mismatch
Training like an athlete. Undereating to chase a look.
Read Time: 10 minutes
Author: Jamie Scott
Training Like an Athlete. Undereating to Chase a Look.
I will most likely upset many people saying this, but it is born out of my experience in this coaching space over the past 15 years (and especially the last 5), and it is a hill I’m prepared to die on…
Many of those individuals who start the likes of CrossFit/Hyrox, strength training, ultrarunning, aren’t doing so, at least at the outset, for athletic development reasons. They started because they associate the sport/activity with a certain look they admire and desire.
The thinking is “I want to look someone who does Hyrox, so I’ll do Hyrox.”
To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with having aesthetic goals. Motivation is motivation.
But where it fractures is in the fact that these sports are athletic endeavours, not aesthetic ones. And if you want to do any of them consistently enough to actually build the look you're chasing without blowing the doors off yourself in the process, it is going to require an intentional focus on food and fuelling for athletic development.
Not aesthetic development.
Not "chasing a look" and perpetually dieting, fasting, “mini-cutting” and the like.
But here's pervasive and perverse diet culture part: when you see the athletes you admire in these sports, you assume they're [under]fuelling for the look also. Social media has normalised diet restriction as the default strategy. So everyone copies it.
There are three main levers of diet restriction, and may individuals pull at least two, and attempt three, all at once.
Restrict how much you are eating (restrict total calories)
Restrict what you are eating (restrict carbs)
Restrict when you are eating (fasted training and time-restricted eating)
When you apply diet restriction strategies to athletic training demands, well that's when humans start to break.
Athletic training systems are designed to build capability - strength, power, endurance, capacity, durability, and repeatability. They build the ability to keep doing the thing, over and over, without breaking down.
CrossFit programming, for example (at least on paper), is designed to make you strong, powerful, and more durable. When you do it well, and consistently, it will, over time, create a certain aesthetic or look, which is why people are drawn to it in the first place.
But the aesthetic is a side effect. It's not the design target of the training.
The same is true for running programmes built around endurance development, or powerlifting programmes, or any strength training system built for athletic development. The design logic of all the training systems pertaining to these activities assumes something crucial: adequate energy consumption and availability.
Hyrox training is not built on the premise that individuals undertaking it are chronically underfuelled and in a low energy availability state (yet that is how many show up for it). These systems assume you're eating enough to recover, adapt, and build capacity. Because if you're not eating enough, those things don’t happen, and the whole thing (you) eventually collapses.
You don't get stronger.
You don't build durability.
You get tired, you get sick, you get injured, and you burn out.
Here's where the mismatch happens, however: Someone starts this training because of how it looks. They fall into the training. They actually enjoy the process, the community, the challenge.
But the mindset around aesthetic goals remains intact.
They start tracking nutrition more with body composition targets in mind rather than to ensure adequate fuelling. They create rules designed to create a deficit (e.g. fasted training or only eating carbs when certain forms of training are done), because they believe that the only way to get the look they want is to be restrictive about food while maintaining, or worse intensifying/extensifying* the training.
*Extensifying. To extend the frequency and duration of training sessions with the aim of burning more energy and to deepen any energy deficit.
This is where two completely incompatible systems collide on the same body.
Athletic training system: "I need fuel to adapt, recover, and build."
Aesthetic nutrition system: "I need restriction to look a certain way."
These systems are in conflict, are fighting for control of your energy balance.
One will win, invariably restriction, because it's more visible, feels more active, feels safer, and gives a greater sense of control. And when restriction wins, the athletic training system starts to fail.
Recovery gets slower.
The work starts to feel harder.
And then the narrative shifts to something like "I'm not doing the training hard enough" when the actual problem is that the training was never designed to work while in such a chronic deficit.
This is the modality mismatch.
You picked a training system designed for adaptation.
You underfuelled it with rules designed for appearance.
