Evidence-Based Fitness is a blog I started back in 2007 in my final year of medical school. Before that I had completed a BSc in Biology from Queen's University, an MSc in Rehabilitation Science (mostly biomechanics) with the School of Physical and Occupation Therapy at McGill Univeristy, and then my PhD in Medical Science (mostly research methods and biostatistics) at the Sport Medicine Centre at the University of Calgary. After medical school (also in Calgary), I successfully matched to plastic surgery (I always thought I would be an orthopedic surgeon, but it just didn't turn out that way) and completed my residency in plastic surgery in 2012. I am currently a fellow in hand surgery at NYU in New York. My main research interests are in the areas of clinical trials design, the development of outcome tools in clinical research, and systematic reviews of existing evidence in medicine, with a particular interest in surgical research as well as fitness/nutrition topics. Most of my current research centers around the hand.

I also sit on the editorial board of the Clinical Journal of Sport Medicine and have been a peer-reviewer for that journal and others for the past seven years or so. Nothing I say in this blog represents the CJSM or its policies or opinions (I suppose that kind of disclaimer is mandatory).

I started EBF because after being a fitness information consumer for almost my entire adult life, I felt that there was something distinctly missing from the entire arena of "conversations" around fitness and nutrition issues. Everything seemed to rest on a sort of mysticism. Every new program, new diet, new fitness fad was based, essentially, on how credible the "expert" could make themselves appear. It didn't matter whether the information was grounded on physiology, or even on tested ideas; the battle for fitness attention and fitness dollars was (and arguably still is) a battle won not only by creating the optimal perception of effectiveness, but also by the willingness of the consumer to simply BELIEVE in the product.

"Mysticism" comes from the Greek word that means, "to conceal". And the very idea that fitness and nutrition decisions should depend on some sort of reasoning that defies normal perception, logic, or standard introspection or even distinct proof speaks more to how desperately some of us want to be better/healthy/fitter/stronger/better looking than it does about the fitness mystic.

I'm definitely not saying that I am the ultimate voice of reason in all of this. I think we all make our own choices and that the motivations for such choices are based on a large number of factors. Sometimes, belief is all it really takes to make a big change. But fitness/nutrition decisions are HEALTH decisions. And if you're not willing to take a sugar pill to fix your headache (though arguably, people do this unknowingly every day, depending on what they're taking), why should you take the sugar pill to lose weight or to get stronger?

Personally, I find it completely incredible that anyone can write in a magazine (or blog, or forum), "You should work out in the morning because it will burn more fat," and cause a normally sane-thinking individual to COMPLETELY flip their daily schedule around, to get up at FIVE in the freaking morning (because he needs to eat and SOMEONE told him that he needs to eat about an hour before his work out) to work out FOR NO APPARENT REASON (true story!).

This is the inspiration for this blog. Most people would never buy a car solely on the basis that someone told them it would go fast. Most people probably think more critically about their coffee than they do about their fitness decisions. Yet thousands, perhaps millions of fitness consumers, every day, spend countless hours and dollars performing mystical rituals of physical/nutrition activity based on the recommendation of something that may or may not have any evidence to show that it is effective or beneficial. It's time to stop the madness.

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