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In my latest post, Universal Truths: The Holy Grail of Fitness Frauds, I described how the Internet has allowed fitness pseudo-gurus to flourish. Whereas 15 years ago they would have been limited to spreading their half-baked theories to their immediate circle of friends and clientele; now, they can easily cast a wide net through cyberspace to build “power of consensus”, which they believe legitimizes their claims.
Assuming these pseudo-gurus toss in enough of the right exercise science jargon, they can present themselves as an authority and the naïve are reeled in, hook, line and sinker.
[BTW - I'm not using naïve as a negative connotation. I admit to being naïve about many things: matters of high finance, car repair and nanoparticle physics to name but a few. I'm merely pointing out that when you lack expertise in a domain, you are more inclined to believe something if it comes from an "apparently" credible source.]
My last post also discussed two sources of faux-expertise popular among fitness pseudo-gurus:
- An over-reliance on anecdotal evidence or self-reports.
- Referencing scientific studies to legitimize unscientific claims.
Pseudo-gurus love using one or both of these techniques to “prove” their point of view as correct. Yet there are numerous errors in both approaches.
Anecdotes and Self-Reports and Case Histories… Oh My!
We’ve all encountered individuals claiming that the key to a better body is as straight-forward as drinking “one glass of Açai berry juice a day”, performing “500 crunches a day to get washboard abs” or that by adding “a TBSP of apple cider vinegar to every meal, you’ll melt body fat”.
Right…
Even if we suspend our disbelief and accept that these strategies worked for the individual preaching these solutions, there is very little to suggest that these interventions are appropriate or even effective for the vast majority of the population.
The over-reliance on case histories tends to lead pseudo-experts into preaching a “one-size fits all” mantra. As a result, they come up with all kinds of interventions that are wholly inappropriate for the populations they are dealing with.
For example, I can’t count the number of times I’ve walked into a commercial fitness center and witnessed trainers making their 60 year-old clients, who are 50 lbs overweight, do leap-frog bounding drills up and down the hallway.
Seriously!?!
Look, I know these trainers may have been “taught”, or possibly even experienced firsthand, the benefit that plyometrics can provide; however, this doesn’t make plyometrics even remotely an appropriate tool to employ with a largely deconditioned population.
Sadly, the “one-size fits all” mindset is not found exclusively amongst pseudo-gurus, it is just as prevalent in academia.
In my opinion, when academics display this type of thinking, the resulting damage can be far, far worse.
Stubborn Science
As I’ve alluded to earlier, the use of published data to legitimize fitness “truths” is not without it’s own set of problems. Frankly, I view the singular pursuit of attempting to categorize a universal exercise and diet response for all humankind as the major reason so much bad exercise science has evolved into universal fitness truths*.
*My next blog post will deal with this in greater detail.
Among University trained science professionals (and I am one of them, so I’m also criticizing myself here), I’ve noticed a couple common personality traits:
- They tend to promote their viewpoint as being superior to all others (guilty as charged…).
- They consider “placebo controlled, double-blind” studies the gold standard for evidence.
To all my non-academic readers, the aforementioned “placebo controlled, double-blind” type of study is one where you compare your experimental condition, to a reference standard and neither the investigator, nor the subjects know which intervention is being given to which group of subjects.
To explain how this works, let’s imagine you wanted to test the effectiveness of a drug, you would make your drug the identical colour, shape, smell, texture of your placebo (often a sugar pill). Then you would ask an investigator to track what happens after they give both pills to two separate groups of individuals. However, you’d make sure the investigator wouldn’t know which pill is being given to which group. You do this to help ensure the investigator can’t bias the results (i.e. looking harder to find the desired outcome in the experimental group, than in the placebo group).
Obviously, having these traits as root values tends to put scientists at odds with practically-minded individuals.
Scientists are quick to scoff at any idea they can’t “prove” works. For a scientist, proof often means compiling published research that has identified statistically significant differences between the variables and populations in question.
Of course, many statistically significant findings are not clinically relevant, just the same way many non-significant findings have real-world applicability, but that’s a discussion for another day.
In contrast, practical folk tend to think as long as something works for them, it must work that way for everyone.
I think we can all recognize the limitations in the latter approach, but what is so troubling about the former? Shouldn’t we always require data to support our theories?
Absolutely; however, it’s the presumption that worthwhile data is only found in research labs where scientists really go wrong.
To be fair, most scientists understand that correlation DOES NOT imply causation when using data to substantiate their claims (an error in reasoning frequently made by pseudo-gurus). Unfortunately, the stubborn insistence on dismissing data that is not “placebo controlled, double-blind” often results in the condition where scientists “can’t see the forest, for the trees”.
“I could’ve sworn there were more of these out here yesterday when I looked…”
In the context of exercise nutrition, we have many examples of how the oft myopic focus of researchers has waylaid progress for years.
Exercise and the Ivory Tower
Take our recommendations for exercise. Ever since government agencies started publishing exercise guidelines, what have they been recommending as the primary form of exercise?
Steady-state aerobic training.
But how did our policy makers arrive at this conclusion? It probably had something to do with the fact that ever since the middle of the last century, the exercise science literature has been replete with publications demonstrating the cardiovascular benefits of steady-state aerobic training. In addition, there have also been a substantial number of papers published showing that steady-state aerobic training can produce fat loss.
Well if that’s what the data says, then what’s the problem?
It’s a problem because at no point did investigators give equal time or attention to investigating alternate exercise modalities. Although this is mere conjecture on my part… I’m betting this was primarily due to the fact it is far easier to track changes in physiological variables (heart rate, VO2, blood pressure, cardiac output, etc) when someone is sitting on a stationary bike, than it is when they are moving all over the place.
Imagine researchers trying in vain to wheel a metabolic cart behind someone sprinting around a track at top speed or having a bunch of wires attached to someone while they perform an explosive set of power cleans. You quickly get an appreciation for why steady-state exercise has been the research focus from an exercise science perspective.
As any good scientist will tell you, if you can’t track variables, then you don’t have any material worth publishing.
But additional logic errors have emerged as a result of exercise scientists’ reliance on steady-state exercise as a research tool.
Most of the research done showing steady-state aerobic training to be beneficial for fat loss has been conducted on young, university-aged males (because they are the easiest subjects for researchers to recruit). This also happens to be the segment of the population that has the easiest time losing weight. The data on other segments of the population is not nearly as convincing.
A young lad showing how he stays lean: drop sets of 12 oz. curls.
So it stands to reason that much of the initial science was done on steady-state aerobic exercise simply because it was a logical modality to study in light of the tools of the era, not because researchers necessarily viewed it as being inherently superior.
Unfortunately, this message got lost in translation and over time our universal truth became: steady-state aerobic training = best way to train.
Fast forward to today and the fitness industry has been ablaze citing “new” research showing high-intensity interval training (HIIT) to be more effective for fat-loss and potentially producing comparable cardiovascular benefits as traditional steady-state aerobic training. All this in a fraction of the exercise duration!
Based on how the media and scientific community is fawning over this research, you would think scientists have stumbled upon the greatest invention since sliced bread!
Incidentally, I actually consider sliced bread a horrible invention since it helps propagate the spread of obesity, but I digress.
Not to take anything away from the researchers who have invested considerable dollars and time into publishing numerous papers investigating HIIT over the past 10 years, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that had they could have saved themselves all the trouble had they only asked any track coach from the past 50 years what is the quickest way to get an athlete lean. Had they asked that question, I’m pretty sure they would gotten the answer, “have people run repeated 200 – 400 metre sprints”.
Obviously track coaches wouldn’t have had a clue why making athletes run repeated 200 – 400 metre sprints results in the greatest fat loss, but they could care less. All they know is that the athletes who train for these distances typically have the best muscle to fat ratios on the entire squad. When your success is dependent on getting the best results in the shortest amount of time, you just do what works. Athletic coaches have been doing so for decades.
Yet if we were to listen to exercise scientists, training intensely has only been “proven” to be a superior way to train for the past 10 years or so.
The tale that is emerging is that when you exclusively rely on published data, you may very well be missing out on critical data that will undermine your success as a practitioner.
Moreover, we must acknowledge that there still are many biological variables science cannot yet adequately measure. Just because our instrumentation isn’t sensitive enough to detect these variables, doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
Protein Prejudice
Case in point: dietary protein needs for athletes. In the early 1980′s my graduate supervisor, Dr. Peter Lemon, did some of the pioneering work discovering that athletes have increased dietary protein needs, primarily for tissue repair.
Did that mean that prior to that point athletes needed less protein? Of course not. But before the 1980′s, no one really looked into the question nor did they have the right methods for quantifying protein turnover.
Strangely enough, body builders had been suggesting for years that they “needed” more protein to induce the kind of growth they sought. Did they quote scientific studies to back up their claims? No, bodybuilders are meatheads. But through trial-and-error, they discovered that ingesting large amounts of protein worked so they kept doing it.
Once again, we have examples of people involved in the practical domain having identified optimized strategies well before scientists ever caught whiff of the idea. This doesn’t mean everything that practical people do is right, far from it; but it does highlight how far ahead of the science curve the more enlightened practitioners tend to be.
Despite all the lessons from our past, I am still dumbfounded when I run into academics who point to the data and claim, “an athlete can only use 1.6 g of protein/kg for protein synthesis, therefore an athlete never needs more than that”.
Sigh… sure, if the only reason we eat protein is for protein synthesis. No one will dispute that the human body has an upper limit to how much protein can be used to build new tissue, however that’s not the sole benefit derived from eating a higher protein diet.
What about the ample data showing that individuals who consume more protein than our current athlete recommendation derive a tremendous benefit in terms of body fat control? Somehow many classically trained dietitians, research scientists and doctors seem blissfully unaware of all those studies… I just don’t get it.
Where does science fit in?
Although it sounds like I’m totally bashing scientists, I’m not at all. I’m bashing narrow-mindedness for sure, but definitely not science. Without great scientists, we’d have no way to confirm hypotheses or elucidate the underlying biological processes that permit experts to develop theories in the first place.
However, It never hurts to remind everyone that conducting research occurs towards the end-stage of the empirical cycle. Looking at the chain of events, we can see that most of the work done on confirming mechanisms and whatnot happens AFTER repeated observations of the particular phenomenon have been made.
If we never saw it happen, why the hell would we bother studying it?
In short, my goal today was merely to point out that individuals who exclusively rely on published literature to form opinions or validate their claims often have as incomplete a knowledge base as do the individuals who exclusively rely on self-report.
Clearly, true expertise can only be present in those who understand and correctly interpret the science, but who also carry the powers of astute observation.
As the field of exercise science evolves, let’s embrace and acknowledge the ideas brought forth by true expert practitioners, but also insist these ideas be grounded in science.
In the immortal words of the great German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer:
“Every truth passes through three stages before it is recognized.
In the first it is ridiculed, in the second it is opposed, in the third it is regarded as self-evident”
I couldn’t have said it better myself.
Till next time, train hard and eat clean!
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