Athletes, Exercise, Physical Activity

You cannot be serious!

I have a day off today. I am supposed to chill out and try to avoid work at all costs. There will be few of such days before we get to the Olympics in London so I should make the most of it. 

When I am off work, I read. This is what i like to do, reading and learning. I could read for hours about anything and everything. I never get bored.
Today I decided to scan the press first. My fault. I grew up thinking that journalism was about reporting the truth and/or writing evidence-based opinions. We all know this is not the case anymore. Despite sparse moments of well written brilliance, we are now inundated by a sea of absolute and utter bullshit. As well as non-sense involving celebrities being famous for God knows what.
In the sea of badly written nonsense, I came across this one written by Liz Jones on the Daily Mail. Liz is a British Journalist and writer currently writing columns for the Daily Mail, The Mail on Sunday and British Airways’ High Life Magazine.

Liz is a woman of style. In fact she writes about fashion mostly. This time her column is about sport and physical activity. Her piece on the Daily Mail is entitled:image “Sinewy arms are NOT a good thing – and neither is sport”. It is well written and has style, just like every piece Liz has written. There is only one problem with it: it is so badly wrong and full of nonsense that deserves some serious comments. So serious that I decided to write about this on my blog rather than spending my day off with a good book in hand. It actually deserves a letter, but letters to editors or newspapers most of the times end up in bins, and online comments get lost. So my letter will be on this blog.

I suggest the readers of my blog to read the article and make their mind up. This article on my blog is a reflection of my opinion and I may be wrong, but I decided to put it here anyway. Liz’s article pretty much states that “athletes could have spent their precious time more productively reading or studying maths or helping people rather than exercising” or “ Sport in school is the worst thing you can possibly inflict on children”.

So, here it is.

Dear Liz,
I came across your article on the Daily Mail online entitled “Sinewy arms are NOT a good thing – and neither is sport”. One of the coaches I work with shared the link on twitter (so it’s his fault really!) and I could not resist spending some time reading it. I read it with interest, just like everything I read. However, after few lines of hope, I was hit with your statements and opinions. I am not going to comment on your views about one of our greatest athletes “not being seen as a great advertisement for young women who might be thinking about taking up a sport”. Simply because you totally missed the point. 
Sport is about hard work and sacrifice. I grew up being taught that hard work and sacrifice will always make you a better person. I believe in it, this is what I try to teach my son. Physical exercise and sport are about hard work and commitment. Healthy diets are about commitment and hard work. So when someone develops the “sinewy arm” as you call it, after hard work, sacrifice and commitment, without the help of illegal and harmful drugs should not been condemned about being a bad advertisement for young people. It should actually be considered a positive model.
The above is not what worries me, Liz. It is the rest of the article that worries me. An intelligent woman like you, which clearly spent a lot of time reading, studying maths or helping people instead of doing sport should not have been overcome by emotions when writing the article. You seemed to have had quite a sad experience with school sport. I read about your terrible experiences in running in a sea of mud while playing hockey in the winter or your vomit-inducing cross country efforts. Not something I recommend to anyone. What worries me is you being humiliated in public when running cross country. I am not sure about the quality of the physical education programme in Essex at the time you were at school. But I am not aware of public humiliation being part of a cross-country competition. Also, the vomiting bit is not a mandatory experience in a cross country race. It is something which can happen for a variety of reasons, such as stress, wrong timing and content of a meal and lack of training as well as trying to run too fast. I am sure it was a bad experience, but it was your own. I am sure some appropriate advice on what to eat and when as well as more regular exercise would have made your experience a lot better.
Swimming was outside in the cold, gym on thin rubber mats, and in Netball and you were the small one pushed aside by the “bigger girls”. It was tough for sure. It sounds in fact so bad, I urge you to tell us what School you are talking about. It seems to me that a school with such poor standards in physical education and sport could have done some real damage also to your reading and doing maths experience. Your words reinforce even more what I think. I think there should be more money going into school sport. More money to make sure the swimming pools are warm, hockey is played on astroturf instead of mud and women get more choice than just netball (maybe handball, volleyball and basketball if they are into indoor team sports). Most of all, more money should be invested in improving the PE curriculum, the quality of teachers and the possibilities for every child to practice the sport of choice.
Your avoidance of swimming lessons was a choice. A choice you and your mum made. A choice which has not given you the opportunity to appreciate the joys of swimming and the ability to do it safely.
Condemning school sport and physical activity is dangerous and wrong. Your bad experiences don’t necessarily mean that sport in school is everywhere as bad as yours was. Most of all you should know what the consequences of unhealthy sedentary lifestyle are in order to understand better what could be the  consequences of what you write.
A woman of knowledge like you should have spent some time doing research. You had been spending a lot of time reading at school after all. Hence, you should know where to find the information. Let me help you. Here are some of the stats about obesity and physical activity published by the NHS.
    Thirty-nine per cent of adults had a raised waist circumference in 2008 compared to 23% in 1993. Women were more likely then men (44% and 34% respectively) to have a raised waist circumference (over 88cm for women and over 102 cm for men).

    Using both BMI and waist circumference to assess risk of health problems, for men: 20% were estimated to be at increased risk; 14% at high risk and 21% at very high risk in 2008. Equivalent figures for women were: 15% at increased risk; 17% at high risk and 24% at very high risk.

    In 2008, 16.8% of boys aged 2 to 15, and 15.2% of girls were classed as obese, an increase from 11.1% and 12.2% respectively in 1995. Whilst there have been marked increases in the prevalence of obesity since 1995, the prevalence of overweight children aged 2 to 15 has remained largely unchanged (values were 14.6% in boys and 14.0% in girls in 2008).

    For boys, on weekdays, the proportion who spent 4 or more hours doing sedentary activities was 35% of those who were not overweight or obese, 44% of those classed as overweight and 47% of those classed as obese in 2008. For girls, a comparable pattern was found; 37%, 43% and 51% respectively.
    In 2008, boys aged 2 to 15 were more likely than girls to meet the recommended levels of physical activity with 32% of boys and 24% of girls reporting taking part in 60 minutes or more of physical activity on each of the seven days in the previous week.

    Almost two thirds of children who had attended school, nursery or playgroup in the last week had walked to or from school on at least one day in the last week (63% of boys and 65% of girls) in 2008.

    Among boys aged 2 to10, more met the physical activity recommendations for children if their parents did so for adults. Among girls, the activity level of parents made relatively little difference to the proportion meeting recommendations, but those who had parents with low activity levels were considerably more likely to be in the low activity category themselves.

If you cannot be bothered reading the NHS data, read the summary above and the last point very carefully. 
As you can see Liz, kids are getting bigger and bigger. And they are more likely to get overweight if their parents don’t do any physical activity. This is not bad news for how they will look like. It is incredibly bad news for their future health and the taxes you and me pay. If you are interested in serious science (the one you can find in a University library) you should look at this work published on Lancet (one of the most prestigious medical journals). But I am a generous man. I will do the work for you. Here is what you need to know: “the combined medical costs associated with the treatment of obesity are estimated to increase by £1·9-2 billion/year in the UK by 2030″.
That’s a lot of money Liz. Money that me and you will have to generate paying taxes.
I like to pay taxes to improve the quality of life, not to fix errors made in policies and choices. I would like to think that the money I pay provides better libraries, better schools, better roads, safer environments for kids to express their talents and better sports and exercise facilities and coaching. Better medicine, better access to arts. Are you keen to spend your taxes on kids that did not do any physical activity at school, Liz? Are you seriously happy for young people not to understand the importance of a healthy lifestyle, physical activity and diet?
Liz, sport, exercise and diet are all part of a healthy lifestyle you should learn in school. Just like reading and maths. Schools should educate young people not only about using one organ of their body (the brain) but the rest of it as well. We humans, in fact have bodies. This is what we use every day. We use our bodies to move, communicate, work and express ourselves. Bodies are not only a means of transport for the brains. We need to take care of them in order to have longevity and quality of life. Sport and exercise don’t do good only to your body. They do a lot of good to your brain as well, in particular when combined with healthy diets.
Schools and parents can accomplish amazing things if they work together. A recent paper published by Swedish scientists has shown that it is possible to promote a healthy lifestyle and a normal weight development among children from low-income districts with relatively limited efforts involving parents.
Unfit kids are bad news not only for their bodies. A recent study published on Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise suggested that lower-fit children showed poorer recognition memory performance than higher-fit children in some memory tasks. And you should also read a recent review which clearly summarises currently published research in stating that moderate physical activity is important for youth whose brains are highly plastic and perhaps even more critical for young people with physical disability. Or this one which suggests that evidence shows small but consistent associations between sedentary screen time and poorer mental health. Physical activity and sport also have a positive influence on self-esteem, Liz (again for a scientific review, see here). So, what you wrote about avoiding sport is dangerous and wrong.
I have a kid Liz, and I care. This is why I am writing this. When I leave him at the school door every morning, I hope his teachers will ignite his passion for many things. I hope he enjoys every minute he is using his brain and his body and I hope he develops as a confident, competent and most of all healthy individual. I hope he competes in sport to learn about winning and losing, to learn about respect and hard work, to admire other people’s abilities and develop his own to his maximum, to make friends, to travel and see the world and to meet other people which share his passions. This is what sport gave me and I never got anywhere near winning an Olympic medal as an athlete.
In the last part of your article you then state that today you have to be huge, focused, boring and sponsored to the hilt. I am not sure how you can get it so badly wrong. Allow me to help you again and direct you towards useful information. Your reading abilities will come handy when learning about the athletes training every day with no financial support or sponsors in many Olympic sports (here, here, here, here). 
Finally, you state that “The Government and Seb Coe might want us all to run around of a Sunday morning, freezing, but these extremes of excellence are not good for us, surely?”. 
Liz, the extremes of excellence give us the inspiration we need in every field. I am sure at some point you must have admired an excellent writer. Someone able to win the Pulitzer prize.
I am not sure where your passion lies. I hope you like arts. Just like the extreme of excellence of Picasso or Leonardo Da Vinci tell us that we will never be as good as them in painting, we should still enjoy doing it and be inspired by them as well as admiring what they accomplished.
In sport, in this country, we are blessed with talent. People who work hard every single day to reach excellence. Excellence which inspires and will inspire our children to work hard every day to be best they can be in every field and in everything they do. So, Liz, if you don’t fancy running in the cold mornings (I don’t do it either!), there are lots of other things you can do which will do a lot of good to your health.
However, if you can’t be bothered to exercise or have problems with sports, don’t demonise it, as our health bill is soaring already and we don’t need further incentives.
Lastly, it is probably worthwhile letting you know that many athletes don’t only exercise a lot their bodies. They exercise their brains too and do reading, maths and help people. If you are short of examples, read something about Katherine Grainger and Tim Brabants. You will find out that their “sinewy” arms have been also used for studying and helping people.
Sports Science

Great talk

Dr. Ross Tucker, the author of blog “The Science of Sport” gave a great talk at UKSEM in London yesterday.

I could not attend sadly, but the slides and the relevant information are available  on his blog.

Sports Science in 2011 UKSEM on Prezi

He used a fantastic tool to deliver his presentation called Prezi. You can check it our here. It is free if you share your presentations online. It looks like a brilliant software, I have decided to learn how to use it to prepare my next presentations.

science, Scientific publication, Sports Science

Science, scientific papers and the Internet universe
The Internet is a wonderful place, where everyone can freely communicate and write and discuss pretty much about everything. Freedom is a great thing, sadly it also poses its risks. In fact pretty much everyone can put up a website and become a self proclaimed expert in everything as well as writing about sensational theories and claim they have invented something. Last but not least, a website can also be a place where you can pretty much claim you know it all and everyone one else is wrong as well as claim magic effects of applications of your theories. I came across few of these, where self-proclaimed experts with no qualifications try to sell everything, from miraculous training methods, to super-foods and supplement to amazing exercise machines as well as selling their own pseudo-expertise.

Self-proclaimed expert Vs Real expert. The self-proclaimed expert claims he's good while the real expert doesn't have to prove he's one.

(This image is copyright of Ben Tremblay, read his wonderful blog here)

This is all possible simply because everyone can write whatever they want on a website or blog without undergoing the peer review process which is the basis of a scientific publication. I can use this blog in fact to write whatever I want and I totally control the content. However my aim is to write and discuss scientific matters related to sport providing my views on particular issues and/or reporting some interesting (to me) findings published in the scientific literature.
I don’t propose wacky theories, I don’t claim to be the only person on the planet with all the right answers and I don’t plan to build some cargo cult science following unlike so many individuals on the internet.
Some people in fact have websites where they criticize everything and everyone, they claim to have the right theories and they claim to have made inventions as well as stating that scientists (the ones that publish on scientific peer reviewed journals!) don’t get it, are wrong and don’t understand what they are talking about. But such people have never published anything anywhere, have never patented an invention and most of the times do not even have a basic degree in the field.

In this post I want to explain what is a scientific publication, what is the process needed to get a paper published and how a scientific paper looks like.

Scientific literature comprises scientific publications that report original empirical and theoretical work in the natural and social sciences. Scientific research on original work initially published in scientific journals is called primary literature. Patents and technical reports, for minor research results and engineering and design work (including computer software) can also be considered primary literature. Secondary sources include articles in review journals (which provide a synthesis of research articles on a topic to highlight advances and new lines of research), and books for large projects, broad arguments, or compilations of articles. Tertiary sources might include encyclopedias and similar works intended for broad public consumption.

A blog or a website is not considered (quite rightly) scientific literature or a scientific publication. None of the articles I write on this blog can be considered scientific literature.

What is the process to get a paper published on a scientific journal and how long does it take?
The process is quite long and sometimes it can take years from the idea to the publication on a scientific journal.

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The basic criterion is that there is a formalized process of peer-review prior to publication – so this presents a barrier to publication that acts as a quality control filter. Typically, the journal editor will give a submitted paper to a small number of qualified peers – recognized experts in the relevant field. The reviewers will then submit detailed criticism of the paper along with a recommendation to reject, accept with major revisions, accept with minor revisions, or accept as is. It is rare to get an acceptance as is on the first round.
The editor also reviews the paper, and may break a tie among the reviewers or add their own comments. 
The process, although at times painful, is quite useful in not only checking the quality of submitted work, but improving the quality. A reviewer, for example, may point out prior research the authors did not comment on, or may point our errors in the paper which can be fixed.
This is not a perfect process but at least creates some filter to information. I am and have been a reviewer to hundreds of manuscripts submitted for publication to various journals and always strived to provide a fair and constructive review as well as rejecting work which was not of the right quality.
The value of a scientific publication goes beyond the simple benefit of being filtered by peer review. It’s also a way to communicate your ideas to your scientific peers, and invite them to express an informed view as well as using your findings to advance knowledge in the field.
Peer review is not always perfect. Peer review is often represented as some kind of policing system for truth, but in reality, some dreadful nonsense gets published, and mercifully so: dubious and low quality material can sometimes get published; then the academic readers of this literature, who are trained to critically appraise a scientific case, can make their own judgement. This is the real stage of review in my view.
After publication other scientists will decide. If there are flaws in your case, responses can be written, as letters, or even whole new papers. If there is merit in your work, then new ideas and research will be triggered and your work gets cited. That is the real process of science.
Structure of a scientific paper

The first part is normally an abstract; this is a short summary of the work, and is intended to serve as a guide for determining if the articles is pertinent, and to furnish subject metadata for indexing services.
Abstracts should be read only when trying to find pertinent articles. The real information is NEVER in the abstract. If you only read abstracts you have not read the paper, you don’t know anything about the details of the experiment.
The content is  presented in the context of previous scientific investigations, by citation of relevant documents in the existing literature, in a section called an “Introduction“.
This section helps the reader in setting the scene, presenting current state of the art and leading the reader to the hypothesis of the research project,
Empirical techniques, laid out in a section usually called “Materials and Methods“, are described in such a way that a subsequent scientist, with appropriate knowledge of and experience in the relevant field, should be able to repeat the observations and know whether he or she has obtained the same result.
The methods section allows the reader to understand what happened as well as read the research design and the statistical techniques used.
The results of the investigation, in a section usually called “Results”, are presented in tabular or graphic form (image, chart, schematic, diagram or drawing) as well as text.
Interpretation of the meaning of the results is usually addressed in a “Discussion” and/or “Conclusion” section. The conclusions drawn should be based on previous literature and/or new empirical results, in such a way that any reader with knowledge of the field can follow the argument and confirm that the conclusions are sound.
Conclusions must not depend on personal authority, rhetorical skill, or faith but should be based on the results.
Finally, a “References” or “Literature Cited” section lists the primary sources cited by the authors in the format required by the journal.

Lessons

When reading information on the internet try to understand where it is coming from. When you want to know and understand more, always go to the primary sources. Don’t read only the abstract, try to get the full paper and read and study each section to understand the details. Make your mind up and read again, sometimes you might miss important points or relevant papers cited.