The Information Age

Our modern unnatural world offers more information than one could possibly hope to go through in a thousand lifetimes. At the touch of our fingertips, we have access to more information than our forefathers ever could imagine. What deserves your attention? What should you ignore? What should you dive into?

In the world of sports research, we have clinical experience where coaches learn what works with real patients and clients in real-time. These coaches see direct effects of their methods on real athletes. Then, we have laboratory research which takes things into a very theoretical realm. They study muscle tissue and even dissect cadavers.

In my experience, it’s best to combine both but lean on the realities of what world class athletes are doing right now on the field rather than what a 12 week study on untrained college volunteers tells me (which is what a lot of studies are).

Don’t follow the herd

I hear people complain that if this and that were true then everyone would be doing it. These are the people who are too scared to think for themselves and go against the trend. You know that everyone use to think it was safe to smoke cigarettes while pregnant, and doctors were paid to say smoking was healthy.

If everyone knew how to become Ronaldo, then we’d have a lot more of them don’t you think? If hard work was all it took, then why isn’t everyone a pro? If you want to become the top 1%, you can’t expect to get there doing what the 99% do.

You don’t want to be on the bandwagon following the herd…

The Bandwagon Effect

“The pros do this, so you should too!”

When I constantly hear that that’s not what the pros are doing. “All the pros are in the gym lifting weights and getting strong, and you are telling us not to!”

Yes, they are in the gym lifting weights, some more than others, but only because they are told to or made to believe it is helpful.

Firstly, if your fascial connections were like Ronaldo’s or Messi’s then you could get away with gym work; until then work on becoming built like them instead of copying them.

It is also the oldest marketing trick in the book use the authority of status to make a person believe a claim is true.

“There’s no science to prove that!”

You will hear a lot ” Show me the research!” and “Where are the studies!”. While, yes it is of course important to have research of which there is plenty, the modern world thinks itself smarter than Nature. As if we have somehow ascended from primitive animals and think ourselves gods. Make sure to read Superiority to understand deeper. Nature has been doing her own double-blind placebo controlled study for 3.8 billion years and counting. That is why I say there are no lies in Nature. She hides exponential complexity within visible simplicity.

It is also important to understand how business and corruption affects health and medical research. Many studies are paid off, misleading, and misguided. You know that you can literally pay to have a study result in whatever you wish? Most people have never even read a study all the way through to critique the methods used. This is a story for another time, but just understand that performance and medicine are no strangers to corruption.

Many of my critics want to see a PubMed study with a nice comfy headline repeating exactly what I’m saying. They want to be able to press a link, read the headline in 5 seconds, and then hop back into the comment section. If the headline doesn’t say exactly what I’m talking about, they say nonsense.

Lazily, some people call the dozens of resources I offer as not scientific because they don’t actually don’t want to do the work and listen to a doctor and researcher lecture for 45 minutes. There are people who’d rather believe short one-liner conclusions from a study than do the work and research multiple teachers, put their advice into practice, and then see what truly works.

Knowledge is not spoon-fed. It is not given to you by default. It takes time, mistakes, and humility to learn how to know. You have to learn how to read between the lines and put 2 and 2 together.

More below…

Well there is science but you don’t want to believe it

Most people unconsciously choose to ignore information that conflicts with their currently held beliefs because it is less energy-intensive. It requires much more energy and humility to admit you were wrong, especially about things you might have invested a lot of time and money into.

They don’t want to admit to themselves deep down that they were wrong all that time (time that they can’t get back).

Think about the decades of time, the thousands of dollars, and endless toil so many people have gone through to get specialized degrees, build careers, and entire lives centered upon false assumptions made with inadequate information.

For most, it is far too painful a thing to do. So they carry on with the lies and ignore and even attack anything or anyone that would pierce the veil on their ego-investments.

This is why people get so angry and frustrated when I say weightlifting is harmful, doing ball drills all day is useless, or hard work is meaningless without talent.

Free Independent Thinking

All footballers need to think with their common sense (which is not very common these days) and perform rational analysis. Always judge an idea on it’s merit, not on who is saying the idea.

• Does it make more sense that it’s healthier to be in the sun all day rather than inside playing Xbox?
• Does it make more sense to eat fresh local in-season food or processed junk from the grocery store?
• Does it make more sense for football to build the elastic spring we see in gazelles and jaguars or become a bulky robotic tin man on the field?

Check out my services if you are ready to begin working with Nature and stop the endless drivel of lies constantly being fed to footballers!