It is completely unsurprising to me that there is an amount of energy use that makes one feel clearer and more productive compared to the sedentary graduate student, and that that can vary from person to person and over time in the same person as their physiological state adapts and changes.
I don’t think that anybody here is surprised by this. What’s surprising is not that there is an amount of exercise that is required for me to feel alert and productive, it’s that the relationship between my mood and my exercise seems to follow a single, simple, specific rule. You explain the reasons why this should be surprising in your first paragraph. To illustrate why this seems surprisingly simple, here is a list of things that seem not to affect my productivity, holding total work constant:
The last three of these are metrics that are part of a physiological model. The model is somewhat simplistic, given the complexity of humans that you have mentioned, but the metrics have proven to be useful for athletic training (anyone who is interested in a more detailed description, which is still written for the layman, should check out Training and Racing with a Power Meter by Coggan and Allen). More to the point, there’s no particular reason (that I can see) to expect total work to win out over any of the other things on this list.
But I do notice two things, having actually written down this list. First, each of these does seem to have a small non-zero effect. As I already mentioned, doing a little more than 1000kJ over a longer duration does seem to be okay, and my FTP does seem to shift my ideal amount of work a bit. Second, these are tightly coupled to each other. You can boil duration, average power, total work, normalized power, TSS, and FTP down to four variables, one of which is total work, and another of which will usually be 90% determined by total work. Furthermore, fatigue and how much I eat will have an effect on how much of a work I’m able or willing to do on a given day. This all means that it would be very easy to mistake a more complex relationship between some or all of these factors and my mood/cognition as a simple one, especially a simple rule that is bent slightly by external factors. I feel like this eliminates much of the confusion for me (the lesson here being that when I’m confused, I should stop, write down my confusion, and stare at it). However, it does not offer a strategy for venturing too far from the 900kJ rule without consequence.
I don’t think that anybody here is surprised by this. What’s surprising is not that there is an amount of exercise that is required for me to feel alert and productive, it’s that the relationship between my mood and my exercise seems to follow a single, simple, specific rule. You explain the reasons why this should be surprising in your first paragraph. To illustrate why this seems surprisingly simple, here is a list of things that seem not to affect my productivity, holding total work constant:
-Heart rate
-Duration
-Time of day
-Eating before or during the ride*
-How fatigued I am from the day before**
-Average Power
-Normalized power
-My functional threshold power at the time (a measure of fitness)
-”Training Stress Score”
The last three of these are metrics that are part of a physiological model. The model is somewhat simplistic, given the complexity of humans that you have mentioned, but the metrics have proven to be useful for athletic training (anyone who is interested in a more detailed description, which is still written for the layman, should check out Training and Racing with a Power Meter by Coggan and Allen). More to the point, there’s no particular reason (that I can see) to expect total work to win out over any of the other things on this list.
But I do notice two things, having actually written down this list. First, each of these does seem to have a small non-zero effect. As I already mentioned, doing a little more than 1000kJ over a longer duration does seem to be okay, and my FTP does seem to shift my ideal amount of work a bit. Second, these are tightly coupled to each other. You can boil duration, average power, total work, normalized power, TSS, and FTP down to four variables, one of which is total work, and another of which will usually be 90% determined by total work. Furthermore, fatigue and how much I eat will have an effect on how much of a work I’m able or willing to do on a given day. This all means that it would be very easy to mistake a more complex relationship between some or all of these factors and my mood/cognition as a simple one, especially a simple rule that is bent slightly by external factors. I feel like this eliminates much of the confusion for me (the lesson here being that when I’m confused, I should stop, write down my confusion, and stare at it). However, it does not offer a strategy for venturing too far from the 900kJ rule without consequence.