Informational flood is one side-effect to social media. Football and sports social media are full of pseudoscientific ideas and “magic” training methods that prey on your desire to improve. Generally the more egregious the ideas, the more likely it will pop up on your screen. Click bait sells the easiest and trainers use every trick in the book to grab your attention. Sometimes this is a nice side-effect of speaking on an interesting topic, though often you are being targeted by attention-seekers rather than genuine value-providers.
How do you navigate your boat through the sea of bull**** to improve your knowledge and therefore training?
It is scientific intuition to develop. This results from wide knowledge, practical experience and continuous education - which help to filter the nonsense out.
1. Ensure that you are building on solid foundations. The majority of smart training protocols rely on the same set of time-proven principles. For example, the need for specificity or individualisation. But what if the principles you believe in stink? i.e. you took them from a charlatan or misunderstood what they actually mean. Remember to analyse the foundations for any method of training - is it built on principles that you can be certain are true?
2. While we should all be open to new ideas and methods coming from academia or coaches and trainers; critically evaluate new ideas. For example, increasing carbohydrate consumption can be useful for increasing energy stores and therefore would aid performance. That said, many studies on this fail to adequately bridge the gap between empirical and practical knowledge. Upon critical evaluation, the recommendations are often higher than a player can feasibly keep up with. Without critical evaluation, those studies could easily be ran with and only found to be failing your development months later.
3. If you are happy an idea is both understandable by existing principles and seems reasonable enough to genuinely improve performance or development, shape it to be more practical and remember to individualise it to your needs. You will not always fit the recommended guidelines, while not every method will apply as well to you.
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