More and more people are becoming serious about their health, their fitness and their performance. With so much information out there, how do you go about spotting the good from the bad?
More and more information...
All you need to do is to look at the increasing number of fitness apps, gadgets, web sites and an increasing, even overwhelming, amount of information on the Internet. If you search the term “sports nutrition” on Google you will get over 105,000,000 hits. The result is mixture of evidence-based information, media interpretations of this information, marketing materials from companies and articles by individuals with no background in nutrition or exercise physiology, but a strong opinion and belief that they are experts. You will also find a significant amount of plain nonsense as well as outright lies. It is not an easy task to navigate this vast amount of information.
If you search the term “sports nutrition” on Google you will get over 105,000,000 hits
How do you find evidence based information?
What is needed is a place to go to, with information that is evidence-based, neutral, and can be trusted. This is why I started this website. mysportscience.com is a place for evidence based information about sport science and exercise nutrition. As a scientist who has worked in this field for a long time (see my bio here), as someone who has worked with athletes of all levels including many world class athletes and with a decent athlete background myself I hope to help fellow athletes all over the world to achieve their goals. If you are serious about performance, this site will give you the foundation and help you to optimise performance. The motto of mysportscience is "Unlock the Power of Science to Optimize Performance".
An expert view
The opinions expressed in mysportscience.com are based on the majority view of the expert community. Experts in this case are the researchers who have spent most of their career understanding that particular area of physiology or nutrition, who are world leaders in this field and not those who have blog about something because they have read something interesting or have eaten something new!
On mysportscience.com I will address questions that are pertinent; questions athletes and coaches frequently ask, and I will highlight new research with interesting results. I will discuss studies with positive results as well as negative results. Sometimes it is just as important to understand what doesn’t work as to understand what works.
Experts are the researchers who have spent most of their career understanding a particular area of physiology or nutrition
Who is the information for?
The site is meant to be for athletes and coaches, for sport science students, nutrition and dietetics students and anyone with an interest in sport science and exercise nutrition. I also hope to provide the reader some tools to help distinguish good information from bad information. I may occasionally use bad articles and poorly conducted studies to illustrate some of the issues. I will also use well conducted studies and well written articles to show good practice. On mysportscience.com I will do my very best to make complicated science easy to understand, by explaining it more, without dumming it down.
Thinking critically
Scientists are constantly making progress. Sometimes slower sometimes faster. The findings often need to be interpreted with caution and knowing the context in which the study was conducted is crucial. Translating the scientific findings into practical applications requires critical thinking and often advanced knowledge of research methods. I hope that you will find a destination in this site for information you can trust. I hope that, by regularly visiting the site, and reading the examples that you will gain the skills to navigate the information that is out there. I also hope that you will enjoy the reading, the information, the graphics and the learning.
Spreading the word
Some of you may want to use this in teaching and I will encourage this. I would ask if you do use materials from this site, please direct people to the web site and acknowledge mysportscience.com. You can help me spread the word and fight a lot of the misinformation that we get bombarded with. I realize that it is not an easy fight, because I will have to write a lot of articles to combat the nutrition advice given in one 140 character tweet by a celebrity. However, as an athlete I have been told to be persistent and give it my best to achieve the goals I set.
If you do like mysportscience.com please share it with your friends, colleagues and other athletes.
