You Aren't Trying Unless You're Giving 110%

Problem:

Any leader involved in competitive sports from football to marching band will tell his players to give 110%.  From a mathematical and purely biological perspective, this is terrible.  The sad part is that it works.

Solution:

You can't fix it and just have to accept it.  Human psychology pretty much makes this a necessity.  But they can't stop me from hating it.

Musings:

The real problem here is people.  People easily confuse their maximum potential when a serial killer is running after them with their everyday normal "trying hard".

I'm not a biologist and I have no idea how you'd measure this objectively.  But this is the internet, so I'm an expert with my own anecdotal evidence.  Let's pretend to have some scientific rigor by listing off the various percentages.

  0% - You're lying on the couch half asleep.
  5% - You are walking around, but the way you do in the morning before you really wake up.
10% - You aren't moving very fast, but you're awake and that's what really matters.
20% - You're functioning at normal human speeds.
30% - We'll call this one power-walking.
40% - A light jog, a healthy person could do this for 30 minutes at least.
50% - A full on jog, casual runner could this this for 30 minutes at least.
60% - A run, a regular runner can do this for 30 minutes at least.
70% - You're a strong athlete who can keep this pace up for 10-15 minutes due to intense training.
80% - You're strong athlete who can keep this pace up for 5-10 minutes due to intense training.
90% - You're an Olympic athlete and see the Gold medal in front of you and are giving it everything you have.  But you lose.
95% - You're the Olympic athlete who got the gold.  But you can't sustain that pace for any longer than 30-60 seconds max.
100% - OMG, you just saw a serial killer heading toward you with a knife and you are sprinting like your life depends on it.  You have full adrenline and if you kept this up for more than 30-60 seconds you'd probably fall over in sheer exhaustion.  The human body isn't designed for this.

So I think you get the point from the chart, I'd say that about 40-50% is the normal human operating capacity, which makes sense.  How often do you redline your car at 6000 rpm because you want to make sure it's giving 100%?  It's not efficient and humans quickly collapse at this rate.  So if that's what people are talking about, I'm down with it.  110% of 50% is 55%, which is perfectly reasonable to ask of someone.  But I feel that most coaches don't say it with this in mind, no matter how much sweat, blood, and tears you give them, they just keep yelling to give 110% more.  If they had a switch on the back of you with these settings in mind, they'd probably as for an 11, even as you're lying in a heap at their feet.  I'm pretty sure that a regular human can go much higher than 70% for any reasonable length of time and they're more likely to get injured at this point too.

I have no fantasies that this will be implemented, just that a small subset of people can agree with me so I don't feel crazy anymore for thinking this every time a coach pulls this nonsense.