Reconnecting with classical work

I love travelling because it allows me to spend time reading and thinking. Long flights are perfect as you cannot receive calls/emails, your desk cannot be hijacked by colleagues and you have time to chill, think, reflect and most of all read in peace. I landed last night in San Diego to attend the ACSM conference and to speak about technology in sport in a symposium. While I was looking for material, I came across this fantastic book thanks to a link provided by my dear friend (and sprint coach) Hakan Andersson:

Health by exercise. What exercises to take and how to take them, to remove special physical weakness. Embracing an account of the Swedish methods, and a summary of the principles of hygiene

by Taylor, Geo. H. (George Herbert), 1821-1896
Published in 1880

I started reading it, and it is an amazing book. I have a small collection of "ancient" exercise physiology books at home in Italy as I am always interested in history and a bit of archeology and to me reading the past serves the purposes of reminding us to be humble and be inspired to continue the journey of discovery. As I have already written on this blog, many times in the sporting industry people try to sell old ideas as new. They rebrand things already well known, package them with fancy terminology and cool campaigns and as of sudden, before we know it, may athletes/coaches/sports scientists are suddenly hooked. The new generation suffers form what I call the "PDF" syndrome. This is a syndrome caused by the fact that very few people these days spend time in a library. In the old days (I am old school after all you know...) you had to spend a lot of time to find information in print in shelves. 

And sometimes while looking for a specific paper you stumbled across a book or a paper or a collection of journals you had never heard about before and you started reading and taking notes. One of my favourite/saddest places when I go in Italy is the library of the Olympic training centre in Formia. Nobody uses the library anymore. Somebody years ago wanted to throw away the collection of articles and books because they said it was pointless to keep them. There are some amazing books and collections of papers form the 50s and 60s there as well as photogrammetric analysis of athletic performances done by a coach in the 60s (This is pre-dartfish era for the newbies, Nicola Placanica's photogrammetric analyses are still fascinating to see). Many things are still relevant today. But clearly nobody reads these days. Or better, nobody reads meaningful things. In this day and age, coaches (and strength and conditioning, personal trainers specialists, physicians, sport scientists not working in academia, physiotherapists, nutritionists) don't need to visit a library. All they need is a wi-fi and a device to connect to the Internet and as of sudden they can come across tons of information. Pubmed is easily accessible as well and it is easy to look for papers. However, despite all this, many only read "recent papers" thinking that recently published work is all new and relevant and unfortunately many don't put much effort in finding papers they cannot access in PDF form. So knowledge suddenly becomes biased by availability rather than quality and accessibility. We also "consume" a lot of crap information about the latest training fad/equipment/nutritional advice and are always sold old things as new. The example from the book I read this morning is a great one. I came across a picture and a description of what is known as "the nordic hamstring" exercise and decided to put it on twitter.

Marco_Cardinale "New" exercises for the hamstrings from 1880 https://t.co/Fmu8EuMi2Z @RodWhiteley 😅 http://t.co/IMhfWgOHeW 25/05/2015 18:39

In the same book, there are also numerous examples of exercises nowadays sold as "new" approaches to train "core stability" whatever that is (maybe a topic for another blog). 

Then I also looked at this one which I dowloaded few weeks ago:

Athletic trainingby Murphy, Michael C., d. 1913; Bushnell, Edward Rogers, 1876- ed
Published 1914

which contains a lot of interesting concepts which are still used today.

Finally, I also liked the following ones, I am amazed how many things are still valid today, but also how much our understanding of the human body has improved.

1860, Longmans, Green, and Co.

Athletic and gymnastic exercises

in English

1899, The Outing Publishing Company

Practical training for athletics, health, and pleasure.

in English - 2d ed.

1904, Churchill

Diet and Food: considered in relation to strength and power of endurance, training and athletics

So, sometimes when the new "craze" comes out, make sure you read some old stuff, maybe the training method you are sold as new is not that new after all.

In the next few days I will be listening to the talk on the Basic Science of Exercise fatigue, remembering one of the most fascinating books I have ever read :

La fatigue intellectuelle et physique: intellectuelle et physique 

by Angelo Mosso (1908)

Available here.