Here’s why people don’t take sports “science” seriously

First, watch this video:

Here we have a prime example of someone that doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about. And yet, due to the magic of Internet media, he’s given a voice.

The only good news here is that even the YouTubers largely realize this is bad gumbo, given the one-star rating and judging by the comments.

This guy represents a website called Sports Science Lab. I find it funny that this group hides behind the “science” label, while actively ignoring it – whether it’s actual published research or empirical evidence. There’s also a certain irony behind the promotion of “sport specific” programs while blanketly eschewing the use of a single exercise.

His rationale rests on two points: one, the squat is somehow inherently dangerous, and two, it doesn’t matter anyway because the squat doesn’t match any movement found in sport, such as running or jumping. Allow me to deconstruct these notions with my usual tactfulness.

Firstly, the whole “squats ruin the knees” argument is so 1990s that I chuckle at the idea of anyone still repeating it in 2009. Instead of recycling the old arguments, I’ll just leave a simple request: given all the athletes out there that have back squatted over the years, and continue to do so, you’d think there’d be an equal abundance of clinical research showing that barbell squats lead to injuries of the knee and the soft tissues around it.

Where are they? As per my usual standards of evidence, some guy’s blog with no primary sources doesn’t count. Go to Pubmed and find me the trials that have shown a causal relationship between squatting and knee damage.

Secondly, and perhaps the stronger argument of the two, is the idea that what’s done in the weight room must match what’s done on the field for it to be relevant. Here’s the easy way to destroy this one: how many athletes do any activity that’s not done during a game? I don’t just mean lifting weights. Any sort of conditioning or skill-practice that wouldn’t happen in the game.

What’s that? All of them? The hell you say. How can this be? The man in the video said that weight training doesn’t match up to what’s done on the field, therefore it’s useless. Guess what? If you apply that reasoning to heavy strength training, you have to apply it to everything else.

Weight training isn’t anything special in the repertoire of physical conditioning methods. That is, unless you’re a 150 lb Internet expert. Then it’s dangerous and useless.

At any rate, this is a non-starter of an argument; if weight training had to match what happened on the field, then there’d be no point to doing any physical exercise besides mimicking the actual games.

To those of us that know better, we can actually classify training methods as either general or specific. The specific stuff would be skill training – practices, running plays, sparring – and anything that actually has you doing the things you’d be doing during the game (or competition or meet or whatever it is you do).

General training however is reserved for things that improve your body’s overall ability to perform. This includes conditioning, flexibility work, and pretty much everything else that athletes do that isn’t related to practicing the actual sport.

Guess what strength training is? It turns out, from real research even, that progressive strength training has all kinds of benefits to all kinds of athletes – basically anyone that’s not in a pure endurance sport will benefit from strength training.

Why, you ask? Without getting all technical, the simple answer is that strength training improves both muscle mass and neurological factors of strength. These in turn contribute to improvements in…just about everything else.

Bear in mind that the more technical or skill-oriented a sport is, or the more endurance oriented it is, the less that brute strength will tend to help. Not everybody needs to put emphasis on getting strong. Some athletes may have strength on the back burner, the way bodybuilders have cardio as an accessory training method. Some may not need to bother with it at all.

But that’s where the irony of this guy’s statement comes in – for someone that claims to understand sport-specific training, he sure is hung up on what everybody should be doing. Same goes for Mike Boyle, for that matter, with his “squats are dead” marketing hook.

Funny how these Internets work.