Science Moves On

All too often we are met with, or compelled to use, outdated ideas. It’s not our fault. Those ideas have been around for a long time and seem to have stuck. This is very much prevalent in the health and fitness world, where outmoded ways of doing things abound along with old science that has definitely moved on but the concepts lag and are still being used. From my point of view this is frustrating and can be detrimental to client progress.

One of the most often misused mantras is that of RICE (Rest, Ice, Compress and Elevate) for any muscle soreness, despite it being retracted by its progenitor, Dr Gabe Mirkin, almost a decade ago. Dr Mirkin first came up with the RICE protocol for icing muscles in 1978, but retracted it in 2015, stating “icing delays recovery”. Our bodies produce swelling and heat to help flush an injured area with nutrients required for recovery. Icing the area may numb the pain, but it causes the blood vessels to constrict meaning that healing slows down considerably. Far better to add a bit of warmth to the affected area to aid healing. However, even our own NHS still follows the RICE principle for injuries. No wonder the public can’t get their heads around it all.

Another thing both the fitness world and the NHS use is the Body Mass Index, or BMI as it is more commonly referred to. This is a very outdated and pretty useless tool for determining body composition as it does not determine between body fat mass and body lean muscle mass. In fact a meta analysis of BMI studies found that the only demographic that BMI could sort of, if you squinted and tilted your head to the side, be used as a determinant of body fat was postmenopausal females in the 60-65 year old cohort. Not really surprising, as BMI was not originally developed as a method of determining fatness in individuals, rather as a quick and easy way to measure the degree of obesity in a general population to assist the government in allocating resources. Oh, and it was developed by a mathematician, not a physician, in the early 1800s. Just throwing that out there…

Another place where science has moved on is with our metabolism. We have had it drummed into us for decades that our metabolism slowly declines with age. There’s a common refrain, “It’s not my fault I am getting fatter. It is my slowing metabolism.” However, there was a very large study published last year that showed our metabolism remains pretty stable between the ages of 20 and 60. After the age of 60 there is a slow decline in metabolism of less than 1% a year (which can be mitigated against with resistance training). So what is really happening is people’s lifestyles are changing rather than their metabolism. Activity levels tend to get less as we age, and life/family/work/other responsibilities can get in the way of being as fit and healthy and active as we once were. That can include your sleep as well as your eating and activity patterns. All of which have an impact on our bodies. 

In the fitness world, there has been a long held idea of different numbers of repetitions and sets leading to different muscular outcomes: 3-6 reps for pure strength training, 8-12 reps for hypertrophy (the building of lean muscle mass), and 15-20 reps for muscular endurance. However, science is now showing that, especially for hypertrophy, any number of repetitions works. So in essence, anything is better than nothing – something that I espouse with my clients: Do what you can, when you can, with what you have available.

These are only four examples of the many out there where science has moved on but old ways of doing things persist. It can all be very confusing, especially when the National Health Service doesn’t even keep up with what science is telling us. How are you meant to do so? 

That’s where I come in: trying to shed some light on these issues and others, and be the voice of reason. After all, the world of health and fitness can be a very confusing place with lots of loud voices shouting from every corner of social media about the best way to do things. 

So if you’d like a sensible conversation about health and fitness and how you can be the best, physically that you can be, please click this link or the gold button right below this paragraph. I’d love to chat things through with you.