More is not better–when statistics turn bad (it’s just not as entertaining as when animals do)
As with everything, more is not usually better. In statistics, more actually makes you more prone to being accidentally wrong (or, in statistics-lingo, spurious). Today, I’d like to talk about a basic concept that is taught to students in their introductory statistics courses (and hence, you would think, most researchers): The effect of multiple significance testing. Read More...
Beta-alanine revisited: Failing to plan, or planning to fail?
In the past 2.5 years, a few more studies on beta-alanine have emerged. As I’ve written before, my goal isn’t to become the anti-beta-alanine blogger, but I do feel that watching this supplement develop from its relative inception to its current state does provide an interesting prototype for how similar products develop a strong following despite the limitations on the research available to support (or not support) its use. Read More...
Are your fitness decisions fully informed?
Everything we do shapes our opinion of effectiveness. The opinions of others also shapes our ideas of effectiveness. And while your own recall of what works and what doesn’t work likely falls on the side of the majority of the time (if you prescribed intervals vs steady-state cardio for a bunch of clients, and most of them lost more fat on intervals, chances are your recall bias is unlikely to think that steady-state cardio is the way to go), it is nonetheless, biased, because you are also less and less prone to prescribing other things when you think you’ve found the thing that actually works. And sometimes you remember the dramatic cases preferentially, when it’s the other thing that works most of the time. Read More...
Going the extra mile doesn’t always make things better (but then again, it might)
I picked this study for two reasons: 1) It’s actually not a half-bad study, and 2) It addresses a significant fitness issue that has been plaguing athletes, trainers and coaches for decades–to stretch or not to stretch. However, despite the study’s many strengths, it falls just short of making it truly useful in helping active people make the decision whether or not to perform static stretching. Read More...
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...