Re-evaluating Sports Science

3 minutes read

The last couple of weeks have been a whirl.

Recap

  1. Solomon Nelson1 has published a video essay tearing down Mike Israetel’s PhD thesis2.

  2. Using Milo Wolf3 as a mouthpiece, Mike has made a response video . Mike claims that Solomon has reviewed an old draft of the document. This draft was allegedly—by no one’s mistake— uploaded by Mike to the University’s servers. Milo has read an alleged “much later version” where most of the mistakes were corrected.

  3. Jeff Nippard4 commented on Solomon’s critique with a truly ignorant comment:

    Bro was out here adding semicolons to mikes rough draft from 13 years ago thinking he did something

    – Jeff Nippard

  4. Greg Doucette5 has chimed in (because of course he did) suspecting that the “much later draft” was a forgery.

  5. It turned out that the “much later version” was indeed a forgery and was even older than the version that Solomon has reviewed. Mike Israetel admitted this himself in an Instagram post.

Why does this matter

We could dismiss what is happening here as your Tuesday YouTube drama. However, I think that it has some larger impact.

Sports science peer review is bottom of the barrel tier. The field is already criticised for poor studies due to small sample sizes and bad methodology, while needing to deal with extreme inter and intra subject variance Adding abysmal review standards and the “science” label evaporates.

Jeff Nippard’s behavior also makes it clear that scientific method plays a second fiddle to the protection of the group.

What I’m saying that sports science is useless.

What I’m going to do

With more studies are being published6 disproving previously touted methods for optimizing training7, I am going back to the tried and tested methods of bros. Yes, bros have won.

The new, revised, training recommendations

  1. Consistency – Showing up day after day, month after month, year after year is the only way to build reasonable amount of muscle.

  2. Technique – Can’t lift if you hurt yourself.

  3. Close to Failure – In order to grow muscle, the training has to be challenging.

  4. Volume – The more you train, the better the results. No top end has been found, keep your technique in check so you don’t get hurt.

That’s it. Everything else (e.g.: progressive overload) is corollary of these four basic steps

  1. Solomon Nelson is a fitness coach and influencer, he is in cahoots with Lyle Mcdonald. ↩︎

  2. Dr. Mike Israetel is a sports science fitness influencer with a very large following. ↩︎

  3. Dr. Milo Wolf is a sports science based fitness influencer that often works with Mike. ↩︎

  4. Jeff Nippard is the most influential natural sports-science-based influencer. ↩︎

  5. Greg Doucette is a supplement peddler, fitness coach and IFBB Pro that likes to scream a lot. He hates Mike Israetel. ↩︎

  6. The irony of using scientific studies to dump on science is not lost to me. ↩︎

  7. Recently a study has show that time under tension does not matter. Which means that slow eccentrics are no better than quick ones. ↩︎