Abstracts! Huh! What are they good for?
I think it’s a pretty safe statement to say that most fitness end-users, and even trainers, do not have the time or the interest (or, in some cases, the access) to read full papers. Most people tend to have easy access to PubMed abstracts, and are quite happy to read the “chunk-style” format of an abstract (thanks, Lou) because they’re generally short, and fairly easy to understand (because brevity forces simplicity most of the time). Read More...
Beta-alanine: The Harris Study (this is what grad students are actually used for)
I was going to write a review of the Harris study on beta-alanine, but after reading it in detail, I realized it wasn’t a randomized controlled trial at all, but rather a physiological study, with biochemical outcomes, but no “functional” ones. And despite the fact that one of their experiments was a “quasi” randomized controlled trial, I haven’t got a lot to say about it because this was not a study to look at the effectiveness of BA, but rather to profile its effects. On the up side, there was a rather nice recipe for chicken broth–which is where they got their beta-alanine for one of the experimental groups: Read More...
Another beta-alanine study. Don’t buy the hype.
Some day, I’m going to preface a review with a sentence like, “Today’s study was really well done. I was impressed by the comprehensiveness of the reporting, the concise data analysis and the practical relevance of the trial.” Read More...
Follow-up on the PWCft
In my last post, I said I would defer to an EMG expert with regards to the PWCft test. So, I did. Read More...
Beta-alanine vs. um…stuff. No one really wins.
Ok, I’m behind the times. By about 3 months. But you know, it’s ’cause I have to go searching for this stuff all by myself! Maybe we should consider this a bit of catch-up, since the blog was started only a month ago. If you see a good study, or mention of one, send me the freaking reference! Some “cutting edge” blogger I turned out to be, eh… Read More...
Gymnastics makes you short.
Bias. It’s everywhere. But one of the most annoying biases I’ve seen in a lot of the popular fitness publications, including websites, blogs, as well as paper magazines is what I call the “sport causality bias”, or “elite athlete selection bias”. Read More...
Whey vs Casein. Who will win?
Ok, I lied. I couldn’t find the creatine study in MSSE that we reviewed years ago as part of the Sport Medicine Journal Club. But I did find a more recent study on supplementation timing, which, after reading the article, I noticed was sponsored by AST Sport Science. And while the study on supplement timing was interesting, there was this glowing ad on the AST site that drew my attention. AST Sports Science has a product called VP2 Whey Isolate. Read More...
My blog disclaimer (and the potentially offensive stuff that follows)
I was driving back to Calgary from Lethbridge this morning and listening to a few things on my iPod (thank God for the iPod FM transmitter! And thank you, Kevin Larrabee and the Fitcast for making my long drives tolerable), but before I gush on about some of the observations I made, I just want to write a disclaimer about this blog: Read More...
What are the trends in your part of the world?
First off, I just wanted to say thanks to everyone who has supported this blog in its infantile life: JP, Bill Hartman, Lou Schuler, and all the people who have wandered on by. According to the statistics collected on this site, there are about 50-70 hits per day, 17% of which spend possibly more than one hour in a visit! Read More...
Different kinds of important.
In clinical research, there are two kinds of important–the important kind and the unimportant kind. Read More...