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just because you can measure something doesn’t mean it’s answering your question.
“If you can get an endorsement from an athlete that everybody recognizes, then who needs science?”
The Irish have a saying, “An umbrella accompanies the rain but rarely causes it.” The same could be said of product endorsements and athletic greatness. Still, our minds are quick to connect the dots in the wrong direction.
most performance tests used to assess sports drinks have never been validated,
Lab tests can advance scientific knowledge, but they can also direct our attention to the things easily measured, rather than the things that really count.
There’s never been a case of a runner dying of dehydration on a marathon course, but since 1993, at least five marathoners have died from hyponatremia they developed during a race.
the early symptoms of hyponatremia are very easily confused with those of dehydration—weakness, headache, nausea, dizziness, and lightheadedness.
“People always worry they’re going to be dehydrated, when the reality is, it’s much easier to over-hydrate, because our bodies are so good at conserving water,” Hyndman says. “Being a little dehydrated is not a bad thing. Our bodies can handle it.
(The latest science on cramps suggests that they have more to do with neuromuscular fatigue than with hydration or electrolytes, Hoffman says.)
excessive salt consumption during exercise doesn’t help and may even make overhydration and hyponatremia more likely.
The latest research shows that protein will help recovery whether you consume it before or even during exercise. There’s nothing magic about the 20, 30, or 60 minutes after a workout. The benefits come from the protein itself, according to Schoenfeld, not the exact timing of its consumption.11
Glycogen does seem to get replenished rapidly if you take in carbs immediately after a workout, says Schoenfeld. “But here’s the rub. If you’re not going to train again until the next day, there’s zero relevance.
Science is a process of discovery much like the game 20 Questions, except that there are always more than questions and you can never answer more than one at a time—and that’s if you’re lucky.
one of the most fundamental skills athletes can develop is the ability to listen to their bodies. And just as it does for hydration, the body has some built-in intuition to help—hunger.
for a decrease in pain to make a real difference in everyday life, it needs to be on the order of 14 to 25 percent.17
“postmassage soreness and malaise” (PMSM), which produces a set of flu-like symptoms.
it seems possible that very deep massage can cause tiny tears or injuries to the muscles that release myoglobin and lead to “rhabdo.
There’s fairly good evidence that people who do foam rolling after exercise report less muscle soreness afterward, but whether the difference is merely a change of perception or whether it’s really changing something in the muscle remains unclear.
one of the simplest and most effective ways to increase blood flow is with exercise.
“Any fool can go train more. It takes courage to rest.”
To master recovery, I had to learn to chill out.
“How am I supposed to hallucinate with all these swirling colors distracting me?”
“Your training isn’t just, go out and do your run. It’s what you do after your run too,”
I couldn’t change what was happening, but I could change the way I responded. That shift in attitude instantly reduced my stress levels.
the solution is to change how you relate to the stress.
“Learning to respond to that kind of stress is about changing your relationship to the stressor,”
rather than turning away from a source of stress you can’t eliminate, it’s more effective to turn your attention toward it.
The benefits of sleep cannot be overstated. It’s hands-down the most powerful recovery tool known to science. Nothing else comes close to sleep’s recovery-enhancing powers. You could add together every other recovery aid ever discovered, and they wouldn’t stack up. Going to sleep is like taking your body to the repair shop. While you doze, your body’s recovery processes ramp up to fix the damage you did during the day and get you ready to perform again.
Skimping on sleep is like showing up to the game drunk.
people who’d only spent six hours in bed were as impaired as those who’d consumed two to three beers, while four hours of rest was equivalent to about five or six beers. Staying up all night was like throwing back ten to eleven beers and then trying to function normally.
If you’re forced to pick between some extra shut-eye or an extra workout, it’s wiser to pick the sleep, Singh says. Sacrificing an hour of sleep to make a morning workout is totally self-defeating.
how you feel matters a lot more than a number on some device.”
orthosomnia.
“The first thing is, supplements don’t help you if you don’t have good nutrition in the first place,” she said, by way of caution. “You’re not going to fix anything. Your supplements can’t be your food. That doesn’t work.”
“One, sleep. There’s a lot of data that you just need to sleep a lot.” He also suggested 20 to 40 grams of protein postexercise, and some carbohydrates to replenish muscle glycogen if you’re an endurance athlete. “If you stick to the basics you’ll do fine. The problem is, most people can’t even do the basics. People are like, hey, what’s the secret? I’m like, well . . . you train really hard, you sleep a lot, you eat well, and you repeat it a lot.”
“One study doesn’t prove anything. One study is just part of a larger body of work. You have to look at the entire body of work,”
The idea that exercise creates extraordinary nutritional needs doesn’t make a lot of sense when you consider that the body was made to move (being sedentary is what throws our nutritional needs off-kilter).
studied a small group of athletes who’d developed fatigue so deep that they couldn’t recover for at least two to three years.
A blood test is not guaranteed to tell you anything at all,”
information isn’t the same as knowledge.
“Not everything that counts can be measured, and not everything that can be measured counts.”
subjective measures trump objective ones when it comes to measuring recovery.
Her body decides what she can do—not outside pressures.
blood tests revealed that ibuprofen takers actually experienced greater levels of inflammation than those who eschewed the drug.
“There is absolutely no reason for runners to be using ibuprofen,”
using ibuprofen and other nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) prior to exercise may actually impede tissue repair and delay the healing of bone, ligament, muscle, and tendon injuries.
people are quick to reject evidence that contradicts their personal experience.
placebos can be effective medicine even when people are told they’re inert.
“If they choose it, they back it 100 percent, but if I tell them they have to do it, it doesn’t work,”
If they were shown the creams and then assigned one, the creams were deemed less effective than when they were offered the selection and allowed to choose. Something about making the decisions themselves enhanced the placebo effect.
