The Skeptic's Guide to Sports Science

Nov 26 2024 37 ep. 13 mins 20
The Skeptic's Guide to Sports Science Podcast artwork

The Skeptic's Guide to Sports Science podcast is the audio version of a monthly column published in Skeptical Inquirer: the magazine for science and reason. In each article, Dr. Nicholas B. Tiller (exercise scientist, Harbor-UCLA) reframes the health and fitness industry through the critical lens of scientific skepticism. Enjoyed the podcast? Buy the book: The Skeptic's Guide to Sports Science, named one of Book Authority's "Best Sports Science Books of All Time." For more information, visit www.nbtiller.com
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

  Health & Fitness  Science
RSS feed Share
Copy RSS


Subscribe on Podcast Addict


37. Are Saunas Good for You? Yes, But...

Nov 26 2024 11 mins  
Hippocrates was soaking in the Grecian hot baths and advocating their health benefits about 2,500 years before scientists began studying heat therapy in the lab. In the last few decades, the body of evidence has grown exponentially, with dozens of reviews and meta-analyses agreeing that saunas, in particular, confer cardiovascular and molecular benefits. In this month’s column, I

36 "Woodpeckers Don’t Play Football": The Concussion Repercussion

Sep 24 2024 16 mins  
I dislocated my shoulder during wrestling practice in 2015. The nature of this type of injury leaves an indelible mark, and I can still recall it vividly nearly a decade later. I’d toppled backward, arm outstretched and externally rotated to break my fall—an amateur mistake. The pain was instant and searing. I felt a “fizzing” sensation up and down my arm from the nerve dam

35 The Boxer Who Sparked a Transgender Debate without Being Transgender

Aug 27 2024 11 mins  
“It hurt like hell,” said Italy’s Angela Carini to her cornermen. Her welterweight contest against Algeria’s Imane Khelif lasted just forty-six seconds. The pugilists were squaring off in the preliminary rounds of the Olympic boxing competition in Paris. After absorbing a few solid right hands and fearing her nose was broken, the Italian retreated to her corner, and the ref

34. Spring Energy: The Supplement Exposed by Skeptical Athletes

Aug 02 2024 10 mins  
The United States has twice as many supplement brands as it does McDonald’s restaurants. That’s a lot of supplements. Of those 30,000 or so, only a handful have robust evidence for efficacy. Prominent among them are carbohydrate supplements—the drinks and gels of concentrated sugar that cyclists, triathletes, and marathon runners chug throughout their races (ov

33. Back Inside the UFC’s Pseudoscience Crisis

Jun 25 2024 20 mins  
The Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) is to professional mixed martial arts what the NFL is to American football, the NBA is to basketball, and the MLE is to hot-dog eating: the world’s premier organization for hosting and promoting the sport. In fact, in the past three decades, the UFC has had more influence on the evolution of mixed martial arts than any other organization.

32. Health Club Equinox Puts a Price on Longevity: Just $42,000 a Year

May 29 2024 9 mins  
Bryan Johnson has spent tens of millions of dollars on a highly publicized quest to reverse the aging process. The tech millionaire follows a strict diet and fitness regimen, stacks multiple dietary supplements, obsesses over sleep hygiene, and subjects himself to a litany of medical tests to track his biological data. Harnessing his newfound celebrity, Johnson has become a false a

31. The Best Time of Day to Exercise: Another Media Fail?

Apr 26 2024 8 mins  
I was contacted in 2023 by a journalist writing for a major news outlet. In her email—which was written with the terseness that only journalists and famous people seem to get away with—she asked me to comment on a new study that had made a “major breakthrough” in the best time of day to exercise to elicit optimal health. It’s a subject that resurfaces periodical

30. From the Lab to the Layperson: A Pioneering Initiative to Improve the Translation of Science

Mar 27 2024 10 mins  
“If you don’t tell your own story, someone else will tell it for you, and you probably won’t like how they do it.” —Shirley Malcolm, American Association for the Advancement of Science.We know that complex life likely evolved from single-celled organisms. As soon as microbes emerged from the primordial soup, they were shaped by natural selection, ensuring survival of the

29. Why Are We Still Ice Bathing?

Feb 26 2024 15 mins  
David had always found ice bathing after exercise to be intuitive. After all, people had been putting ice on their injuries for decades, and the RICE principle—rest, ice, compression, and elevation—had been a mainstay in the management of injuries since he’d learned it at school (despite questionable supporting evidence for efficacy). He’d also seen athletes on social media

28. Telling True Stories: What Can the Anti-Science Community Teach Us about Sci-Comm?

Jan 30 2024 23 mins  
Most readers won’t be familiar with Clark Stanley. And yet, to those who lived in the Old West, he was a household name. In the aging half of the nineteenth century, Stanley’s theater company was one of several that toured rural towns selling magical health elixirs. For the townsfolk, seeing a Clark Stanley convoy kicking up dust on the horizon would have been an exhilarating s