Great couple of paragraphs, and great paper as a whole: Professional health and fitness organizations, such as the American College of Sports Medicine, and the sports science community advocate evidence-based exercise prescription, in which exercise programs are based on the current best available evidence, including peer-reviewed scientific studies and professional reasoning (e.g., Refs. 2, 38, 59, 68, 82, and 93). While evidence-based exercise prescription is a noble goal, achieving it in practice is challenging. Collegiate strength and conditioning coaches, for example, rely relatively little on the scientific literature when devising their training programs (29). Resistance to evidence-based practice stems partly from many coaches and fitness professionals lacking the education to critically evaluate the scientific literature (37). Figuring importantly, however, are the impediments that exist to translating laboratory-based research, which is the principal source of scientific evidence, into real-world practice (12, 68). Such impediments include a dearth of longitudinal studies to guide long-term training program designs (12) and difficulties with comparing the efficacies of different interventions because many training studies feature only a single experimental group (68). In the study of athletes, interventions are often added on top of their “normal training,” which often goes unreported and/or is poorly controlled during the study (68), as are each subjects training status at the beginning of the study and their states of rest or freshness, nutrition, and hydration during the performance tests (12, 68). Issues can also exist with the subjects. Training studies often feature too few subjects to be adequately statistically powered (68). Moreover, the subjects that are included in the study may not be representative of the population with which the practitioner works, in that studies examining untrained subjects may not generalize to well-trained athletes and vice versa. Collectively, these deficiencies cause even the basic elements of training program design, such as volume, intensity, and periodization, to remain controversial in the literature (62, 68). Therefore, the scientific literature inadequately addresses critical aspects of training planning such that knowledge must be derived from other means. Such means include anecdotes and experiences of other coaches or trainers, the internet, textbooks, past experience, and trial and error (29). None of these forms of knowledge pass through the rigors of peer review such that their veracity is less assured. Even if published studies were more easily translated, their conclusions would still be based on averaged data, such that an omnipresent obstacle to evidence-based exercise prescription is the interindividual variability with which people respond to exercise (101). The individuality of the responses to exercise means that a training program deemed optimal in a published study may not be optimal for all individuals. Ultimately, therefore, exercise prescription is a single-subject experiment whose optimization requires trial and error.
Posted on: Sun, 04 Jan 2015 23:48:16 +0000
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