I have a Bachelor’s of Science in Kinesiology with an emphasis in Exercise Science. It’s okay I guess. I knew that I didn’t want to pursue graduate work in this area of study because I wanted to coach, but I wasn’t impressed with the field itself. It’s just so BAD. The exercise prescriptions are ineffective, nobody understands mechanics, and the research is a joke. A lot of people have mentioned how they would like to hear my thoughts on the problems in Exercise Science, and I think it starts with the research.

I’ve had to look at a lot of shitty studies in school, and I can dismantle them all. The articles in various journals, including the NSCA, are usually not very good. Rippetoe and I used to look at several articles and point out how badly they were done. However most studies shouldn’t even be done in the first place because the researchers are asking either an irrelevant question or the wrong question. The majority of studies that are published are irrelevant or easily dismissed because of crappy methodology.

Why am I not doing anything to change this? Because I don’t care. Why would I aim to change the governing boards of organizations that allow bad research on things that don’t matter? I’m busy getting people to perform better and teaching them how to do it. I mean no disrespect to researchers — especially the good ones — but most of them…don’t quite get it. Let’s look at this example.

The title of this news article is, “Squat lifts likely cause of stress fractures in young athletes, study finds”. We’ll soon find why this news article is just as bad as the study itself since this conclusion can’t be drawn. Here is the “press release study abstract” that the shitty journalist used to write the article. I will be directly referencing this piece of information in the rest of the post since the actual article is not made available (this, by the way, is another flaw in the system: let’s charge money to see the shitty research we’re doing so that nobody can debunk it unless they want to spend $30 to see our boring journals).

Abstract TL;DR — The researchers had patients (who were kids) that said that they hurt their backs while squats, so they performed a study to see if squats caused the “lumbar fractures of the pars interarticularis” that they found. The study itself observed the “pelvic incidence and tilt, sacral
slope, and lumbar lordosis while in normal standing posture and then during a front and back squat” in 20 volunteers. Here is a picture of the author, John McClellan.


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