Misc

A paper published last year in the BMJ carefully considered the evidence underpinning sports performance products. It concluded:  'The current evidence is not of sufficient quality to inform the public about the benefits and harms of sports products. There is a need to improve the quality and reporting of research, a move towards using systematic review evidence to inform decisions.' Despite this, health and fitness magazines continue to  proclaim that I and others should embrace supplementation. These adverts are particularly prevalent for whey protein and creatine.* Creatine is a naturally occurring substance that helps supply energy to all cells in the body. Of course, oxygen is also a naturally occurring substance that helps supply energy to all cells in the body, but it doesn't mean I carry an oxygen tank while running. Not yet anyway. There remain colossal problems behind research involving the use and effectiveness of creatine and other supplements. Companies suc...

Sport produces a lot of data that pundits generally ignore. Somehow, they manage to spend hours debating how a season of football was hampered or improved by the actions of a few individuals. Usually referees. My gut feeling has always been that success for any English Premier League football team is highly dependant on financial management. This varies considerably between clubs. Curiosity got the better of me on this one. In statistics, linear regression is an approach to modelling the relationship between a scalar dependent variable y and one or more explanatory variables denoted X. It was the first type of regression to be studied seriously and the first to be used extensively in practical applications. In this instance, my dependant variable is league points awarded this season, and my predictors are turnover, profit/loss before tax, net debt, interest owed on any debt and the club's wage bill. These predictors were all taken from the previous season.* Multiple r...

Wimbledon, Euro 2012, The Olympics. The Great British summer of sport has already arrived, but I am sad to say that my sport of choice will not be represented in any of these events. I can't do anything about that, but what I can do is attempt to see where my own game could use some improvement. I regularly play games against my friend Josh (@bain_josh) and most of the time, these games are pretty close. My own gut feeling is that when I win a match, I am overreliant on gaining points when serving. When Josh wins, this doesn't seem to happen. I should add at this stage that you  do not  need to hold serve to score a point in squash. Points are awarded based on who wins a rally. The winner of that rally then goes onto start the next and so on. Basically, I think amongst the many things we could both improve on, one of those is our return of serve. After filming two games - I set out to try and answer how important this ...