The Skeptic's Guide to Sports Science

Hippocrates was soaking in the Grecian hot baths and advocating their health benefits about 2,500 years before scientists began studying heat therapy in the lab. In the last few decades, the body of evidence has grown exponentially, with dozens of reviews and meta-analyses agreeing that saunas, in particular, confer cardiovascular and molecular benefits. In this month’s column, I won’t dispute the abundance of studies on the health...

I dislocated my shoulder during wrestling practice in 2015. The nature of this type of injury leaves an indelible mark, and I can still recall it vividly nearly a decade later. I’d toppled backward, arm outstretched and externally rotated to break my fall—an amateur mistake. The pain was instant and searing. I felt a “fizzing” sensation up and down my arm from the nerve damage, and my ligaments screamed at being forced beyond their...

“It hurt like hell,” said Italy’s Angela Carini to her cornermen. Her welterweight contest against Algeria’s Imane Khelif lasted just forty-six seconds. The pugilists were squaring off in the preliminary rounds of the Olympic boxing competition in Paris. After absorbing a few solid right hands and fearing her nose was broken, the Italian retreated to her corner, and the referee waved off the contest. “I am heartbroken,” said&n...

The United States has twice as many supplement brands as it does McDonald’s restaurants. That’s a lot of supplements. Of those 30,000 or so, only a handful have robust evidence for efficacy. Prominent among them are carbohydrate supplements—the drinks and gels of concentrated sugar that cyclists, triathletes, and marathon runners chug throughout their races (over 1,500 carb gels were consumed during each stage&n...

The Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) is to professional mixed martial arts what the NFL is to American football, the NBA is to basketball, and the MLE is to hot-dog eating: the world’s premier organization for hosting and promoting the sport. In fact, in the past three decades, the UFC has had more influence on the evolution of mixed martial arts than any other organization. In an article I wrote for Skeptical In...

Bryan Johnson has spent tens of millions of dollars on a highly publicized quest to reverse the aging process. The tech millionaire follows a strict diet and fitness regimen, stacks multiple dietary supplements, obsesses over sleep hygiene, and subjects himself to a litany of medical tests to track his biological data. Harnessing his newfound celebrity, Johnson has become a false authority in the wellness space, touting supplements...

I was contacted in 2023 by a journalist writing for a major news outlet. In her email—which was written with the terseness that only journalists and famous people seem to get away with—she asked me to comment on a new study that had made a “major breakthrough” in the best time of day to exercise to elicit optimal health. It’s a subject that resurfaces periodically whenever the well of fashionable supplements or celebrity ...

“If you don’t tell your own story, someone else will tell it for you, and you probably won’t like how they do it.” —Shirley Malcolm, American Association for the Advancement of Science.

We know that complex life likely evolved from single-celled organisms. As soon as microbes emerged from the primordial soup, they were shaped by natural selection, ensuring survival of the fittest. Eventually, though not inevitably, evolution wou...

David had always found ice bathing after exercise to be intuitive. After all, people had been putting ice on their injuries for decades, and the RICE principle—rest, ice, compression, and elevation—had been a mainstay in the management of injuries since he’d learned it at school (despite questionable supporting evidence for efficacy). He’d also seen athletes on social media lowering their lean, muscular bodies into tubs of cold wat...

Most readers won’t be familiar with Clark Stanley. And yet, to those who lived in the Old West, he was a household name. In the aging half of the nineteenth century, Stanley’s theater company was one of several that toured rural towns selling magical health elixirs. For the townsfolk, seeing a Clark Stanley convoy kicking up dust on the horizon would have been an exhilarating sight. After unloading their carts and setting up their ...

Christmas is a time for giving. For the snake oil salesmen of the world, however, it’s a time for taking. The holiday sees capitalism, the pressures of gift-giving, and dietary excesses coalesce, creating the perfect storm for consumer exploitation. The commercial world swells with baseless claims and pseudoscience. After a year covering political ideologies in professional sports, the health consequences of smartphone ad...

I wasn’t expecting the New York Jets vs. the New York Giants game last month to trigger a traumatic flashback. A commercial for Nugenix’s “total testosterone-boosting formula” appeared during half-time, sending me spiraling through space-time to April 2022. It was the day Tucker Carlson’s documentary The End of Men received its inaugural trailer. The Fox Nation special, written and starring the network’s former ...

The world watched in awe as Michael Phelps—the most decorated Olympian in history—added another five gold medals to his record-breaking tally at the Rio Games in 2016. This he did with conspicuous purple bruises across his back and shoulders, caused by cupping therapy. Today, it’s so common for an elite athlete to fraternize with pseudoscience, it gets lost in the small print of the back page news. But Phelps is no ordinary athlete...

The Gila Monster is North America’s only venomous Lizard. The reptile can grow to twenty-two inches and has a vicious bite that’s as toxic as that of the western diamondback rattlesnake. While studying the lizard’s venom in the 1990s, Dr. John Eng—an endocrinologist at the Veterans Administration Center in New York—discovered a compound with a similar molecular structure to a protein called GLP-1, which regulates blood glucose in h...

When it comes to Grand Slam titles, Novak Djokovic has eclipsed every other male tennis player in history. He’s the only man to be the reigning champion of all four majors simultaneously across three surfaces, and by securing his 23rd trophy at the French Open 2023, the Serbian national perhaps cemented his place as the greatest player of all time. Such prominence invites scrutiny, and in several competitions this past year, it was...

The plot for the epic fantasy series Lord of The Rings centered on, well, a ring. Not just any ring, but a magic ring. The “one ring to rule them all” bestowed immense power on its owner: the power of invisibility, the power to dominate the wills of others, and power over the bearers of subservient rings. But in this month’s column, I discuss jewelry with such extraordinary properties, it’d make even Bilbo Baggi...

How desperate to lose weight would you have to be before you’d let a surgeon slice a hole in your abdomen and remove three-quarters of your stomach? This is “sleeve gastrectomy,” a common bariatric surgery that reduces stomach size and decreases appetite by blunting the release of ghrelin—a hormone that stimulates hunger. More than 1.5 million Americans have elected for bariatric surgery in the last 10 years, having repeatedly trie...

It’s hard work beating people up for a living. A professional mixed martial arts (MMA) fighter typically trains year-round, fusing fighting disciplines such as boxing, kickboxing, wrestling, and Brazilian Ju Jitsu with concurrent resistance and endurance training. They must carefully balance stress and recovery to bring improvements rather than injuries and infections, and then, during fight camp, they complete an intensive eight- ...

I used to be obsessed with martial arts superstar Bruce Lee. I watched all his movies, read his books, and studied his moves (quite ineffectually). Aside from his martial arts skills and philosophies, it was Lee’s physique that distinguished him from other action heroes of the time. Standing five feet seven inches (172 cm) tall, his compact, muscular frame was perfectly suited to his explosive style of combat. And when Lee punched ...