Broscience and the Sample of One

After asking Eric Cressey to write a piece for my site on how to make mad duckets through blogging, and his subsequent refusal, and follow-up decision to write said piece on his site (whatever, I’m not bitter) HERE, he mentioned something known as ALEXA rankings to determine popularity, and how it can be a measure of the success of a site. Since then, I’ve downloaded the toolbar and become addicted to tracking the rankings of every site I happen upon and laying judgement based on an arbitrary number showing a conglomeration of how much value is attached to specific sites, specifically my own. Happily I’m able to say that I’ve cracked the 1 million mark for the first time, so I’m pretty happy with that. How happy?

Now normally I don’t think it would be possible for me to give less of a ____ about rankings, as most of the time they don’t mean a single thing. I always figure that if rankings meant anything, then it wouldn’t matter if we played a game to determine the outcome. If rankings mattered, Vancouver would have finished off Chicago in 4 instead of 7 games, and we’d be watching the Lakers in the NBA finals instead of Dirk’s lumbering awkwardness, and it would be a cold day in hell before Winnipeg was able to land another NHL team. I guess the temperature dipped on the prairies this week.

Now I’m sure you’re asking what the sweet holy hell this has to do with fitness or exercise or getting your swole on in any and every way possible? Well, we as a society like to rank things, and we tend to follow trends like lemmings, even if it leads us off a cliff. We always look to find the best, be the best, or strive to be better and improve our rankings in whatever we’re trying to do or be, in any way possible. The minimal percentage of any population that can become number one in anything makes us forget about the rest of the pack in that population.

Not to go all stats geeky on you but there are a few terms to remember when we think about any population, specifically the mean (average), standard deviation (difference from the mean that encomapsses a specific percentage of the population as a whole, both above and below the average), and Outliers (those crazy anomalies that make us say “What the hell happened there??”).

Let’s look at an average marketing campaign for any type of workout program, fat loss solution, or other ploy by some underqualified “expert” in fitness and diet. They will typically show the outliers who have done the program and seen the biggest fat loss, muscle gain, crazy before and after pictures, and most jaw-dropping numbers.

I lost 92 pounds in three weeks, and still ate all the cheesecake I wanted!!

What no ad campaign would dare show you is the average of the people on the program or taking the diet to heart. Let’s say 20 people enter into a program. Of those 20 people, one person managed to lose considerable weight of more than 40 pounds in a three month period, however the average for the population was a weight loss of 2 pounds, with some on the lower end actually gaining weight. Would this be a viable program to follow or a complete waste of money? Does a bear….

This is the basis of the scientific method. Any research paper put out will have to have some considerable scrutiny of their results in order to show that their intervention had an effect on an outcome. The average is commonly given, along with the standard deviation to show how much weight would be lost on the program, as well as how far apart the results were in the given population. The bigger the standard deviation, the bigger the range of results away from the mean. So if you see a study showing results of 2 pounds of weight loss over 3 months and a standard deviation of 4 pounds or more, you have to question what the hell they did and whether they could actually say it was an effective intervention.

This is one of the problems with anecdotal evidence showing a result from an intervention. This is the common bro-science explanation of someone saying “Well, I did this and it worked for me.” Sure the results may be apparent because the guys biceps are bigger than Texas, but let’s say we do the same thing with someone else of the same age and gender, and then again with someone older, younger, male, female, diabetic, busted knee, jacked and dieseled out, or with a spinal chord injury, and see if the results are the same. If they are, congratulations because you’re a freakin rock star!! Here’s your badge.

What’s the point of this little post? Take what you read and hear about the world with a grain of salt, because pretty much everyone out there is looking to find an easy way into your wallet. If a specific program has had some scientific backing on it to show a noticeable and statistically significant improvement, it’s probably going to work for you to get similar results. If a program has no scientific backing or rhyme or reason, and is essentially a jumble of exercises, reps, and questionable logic…

 …odds are it may be worth less than the paper this blog is printed on.