In 2009, Christopher McDougall published Born to Run, a book claiming that running barefoot was the silver bullet solution to prevent running-related foot injuries. During his press tour for the book, McDougall just-so happened to be recovering from a foot injury he'd sustained while running... barefoot. Despite this, Born to Run isn't totally useless, but it shows the obvious pitfall of doing a sports science experiment with one subject — it's not a science experiment at all, but a What I've Learned Along the Way-style travelogue that sometimes unintentionally disproves your point, as McDougall's foot did.
Sportswriter Christie Aschwanden’s Good to Go, released in February, is chock full of similar one-woman experiments, with one key difference: They’re just there for narrative purposes, and her takeaways from the products and processes she tests are based on actual studies. The result is a classic that illuminates how the mega-industries aimed at selling pills, products, and techniques to casual and serious athletes are almost entirely fraudulent.
The premise of Good to Go is investigating what works and what doesn’t for athletes at every level — from, like, me to your average NBA professional — trying to recover from exercise. The idea of a massive industry existing to ameliorate the pains of having worked out sounds like the setup for a hacky standup — wouldn’t it just be easier to exercise less? But the basic idea behind working out, whether building endurance or muscle or skill, is that improvements don’t take place while you’re actually working out; they happen between sessions, as your body is adjusting to all the stress you’ve put it through. If this weren’t the case, then you could get better at sports by playing them for 12 or 16 hours a day, which doesn’t work.
Teach a man that Tom Brady’s infrared pajamas don’t make you better at sports, and he can make fun of Tom Brady, a perfectly noble thing. But teach a man why TB12’s IRPJ’s don’t work, and he’ll never get suckered by athletic quack science again. Last year, Aschwanden and Mai Nguyen wrote a piece for FiveThirtyEight titled “How Shoddy Statistics Found A Home In Sports Research,” in which they laid out how the powers that be in sports science — who are often in bed with traditional science companies desperate for good marketing — decided to deviate from the strict statistical and experimental techniques required in other scientific disciplines.
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Sportswriter Christie Aschwanden’s Good to Go, released in February, is chock full of similar one-woman experiments, with one key difference: They’re just there for narrative purposes, and her takeaways from the products and processes she tests are based on actual studies. The result is a classic that illuminates how the mega-industries aimed at selling pills, products, and techniques to casual and serious athletes are almost entirely fraudulent.
The premise of Good to Go is investigating what works and what doesn’t for athletes at every level — from, like, me to your average NBA professional — trying to recover from exercise. The idea of a massive industry existing to ameliorate the pains of having worked out sounds like the setup for a hacky standup — wouldn’t it just be easier to exercise less? But the basic idea behind working out, whether building endurance or muscle or skill, is that improvements don’t take place while you’re actually working out; they happen between sessions, as your body is adjusting to all the stress you’ve put it through. If this weren’t the case, then you could get better at sports by playing them for 12 or 16 hours a day, which doesn’t work.
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