What is sports science getting wrong in 2026? In this clip from our 400th Fast Talk episode, Dr. Iñigo Mujika, Dr. Stephen Seiler, and Prof. Louise Burke expose some of the biggest blind spots in sports science.
Video Transcript
00:09] Fast Talk Labs Intro
Welcome to Fast Talk Laboratories, your source for the science of endurance performance.
[00:18] Trevor Connor
Well, Chris, hard to believe we are at episode 400.
[00:23] Chris Case
That’s right. Amazing.
[00:25] Trevor Connor
Yeah, we made it. And kind of a unique episode because it’s almost midnight for us.
[00:31] Chris Case
You and I just ate very large pizza, so we’re being like college kids here.
[00:37] Trevor Connor
That’s right. But that is because we have some absolutely amazing names on this show, and they are located in Europe, Australia, and we’re here.
[00:48] Chris Case
Yes, yes. So, big thanks to all of you for joining us for the show. I think we’ve got just about every time of day covered.
[00:58] Trevor Connor
Thank you, guys. It’s a real honor to have you guys on the show.
[01:02] Guest
Good to be here. Four hundredth episode. That’s well done. Four hundred of anything is an accomplishment, I think.
[01:08] Trevor Connor
We appreciate that. So, the format here: we have some questions that we put together. We’re going to hit you with the questions, and then we’re really just going to let the three of you take the questions and run with it.
You know, I would say the science over the last many decades has continued to progress and progress really well. But there are definitely times we look back and make the statement, “Can you believe we used to believe X?”
And I think there’s a certain humility that we need to have, that probably in 25 or 30 years, we’re going to look back on now, and there’s going to be at least one or two things that we’re going to say, “Can you believe we used to believe that?”
So that’s the question I want to ask: what do you think is the thing that we believe right now in the science that 25 years from now we might look back on and go, “Boy, did we have that wrong?”
And Dr. Burke, I’m very interested in starting with you because I think nutrition science, more than exercise science, is something that has reversed course pretty significantly several times in the last 50 years.
So, what do you think we might look back on now and say, “Oh boy, we just didn’t have that right”?
[02:29] Dr. Louise Burke
One would be that scientists work things out so that they can teach athletes, rather than thinking athletes sometimes have worked things out for themselves, and that’s our role to explain why it works or to tweak it.
So, who’s leading the pack, or who’s driving who, would be one issue.
I think the other thing is that we often get things partially right but don’t understand the full mechanisms. And because we don’t, we don’t have the opportunity to tweak it.
At the moment, there’s a lot of interest in these very high carbohydrate intakes during exercise, and all the focus is on how we can train the gut, how much we can absorb, and how much the muscle can burn.
That might be part of the issue, but we’re not thinking about what else the fuel in the muscle is doing. It’s signaling, and it’s also helping us or affecting the muscle response as an endocrine organ itself.
The muscle produces chemicals — myokines or exerkines — which send messages around the rest of the body. So maybe one of the reasons for the interest in carbohydrate now is not that the muscle is actually burning it during the task itself and providing fuel for the immediate purpose, but maybe it’s having other effects on signaling that’s happening in the body as a result of the exercise session and modifying that.
Maybe sometimes the benefits are happening elsewhere, or they’re happening in a different timeframe. Because we’re just looking at it with a single lens, we’re missing something that could be very important.
We might find it points things down the track, where we say, “Oh, we were looking in the wrong place. What we were doing was mostly right, but we just didn’t understand why it was useful.”
And because we didn’t understand it, we didn’t amplify the response or get it quite right.
[04:34] Dr. Iñigo Mujika
Trevor, your question is so complicated that I’m going to turn it around and say, “Wow, I can’t believe we forgot about that.”
I mentioned the lecture I’m putting together before, and I am using some results and some slides from the 1970s and from the 1990s because sometimes I get questions from students or from PhD students, and I think they have forgotten about the basics.
A lot of the basics we have known for 30 or 40 years in terms of biochemistry, in terms of fundamental physiology.
So I think one of the things we should not forget is to look back and remind everybody that sports science didn’t start in 2020. It started many, many years ago. And some of the things we’ve learned since then still apply today.
We need to remind everybody about these things.
When Louise was doing her studies on fat adaptation and whether it was better to eat more fat or whether it was better to eat more carbohydrate, a lot of people were forgetting that we’ve known for a long time that when you rely more on fat, your oxygen uptake is higher for a given exercise intensity.
So yes, we are able to burn more fat when we eat more fat, but your oxygen cost is higher. And that is something that people were forgetting about.
Things like that we’ve known for many years, but we tended to forget them.
If you look at the papers that are published by PhD students today, very, very seldom do they use any reference that goes back more than 15 or 20 years. And that is something that I tend to criticize because I usually tell them, “Hey, sports science doesn’t start with you or your supervisor. It started way before that.”
Some of the fundamental things that we have learned should not be forgotten if we want to move forward in the right direction.
And I’m sure Stephen is going to agree with that.
[07:00] Dr. Stephen Seiler
Oh, absolutely. I think I would even go a step further and say — and I will answer your question — but I think sports science, as it has matured, has become more insular and more arrogant in a way.
It forgets that sports science is an aggregation of many sciences, pure sciences if we want to call them that: biochemistry, physics, and so forth. You perform sports science at your peril if you don’t respect that.
Unfortunately, I think we’ve gotten a bit arrogant as a field and forgotten that there’s a heck of a lot of biology out there that is relevant for understanding metabolism, adaptation signaling, and cellular signaling.
For me, an epiphany was to go into the biology and discover something they’ve been talking about for decades, which is the bow tie architecture of cellular signaling in these different signaling processes.
Evolution has equipped us with robust, overlapping signaling streams that use this idea of many inputs, a central knot with a few mediators, and then a large cascade of outputs.
When you first understand that, then it informs a tremendous amount of understanding about how to interpret training intensity zones and other aspects of sports science, where we get quite insular in our little worlds.
So that’s one thing I would say: we’re going to look back in some years and say, “Doggone it, we got a bit arrogant there for a few decades. I’m glad we reconnected to the university campus and its different fields — the biologists, the engineers, the physicists, and so forth.”
That’s one thing.
If I get a little more specific, I have been fascinated because as a student, I was taught, “If the lungs aren’t broken, don’t worry about them. They take care of themselves.”
Lung function — if you don’t have a missing lung or asthma, then you’re always going to have enough air. Your ventilation is never going to be a limiting factor. Breathing doesn’t matter.
Well, I think in some years we’re going to say, “Boy, we sure got that wrong.” Breathing matters.
And like many other things, there are individual aspects. Some athletes need more attention to their ventilatory apparatus, and they may have some weak links.
That’s one area where I’ve been fascinated to reconnect to the literature and reconnect to studies that were not emphasized that maybe do matter — to reconnect to 40-year-old studies and so forth.
So as Iñigo was saying, we also have an immediacy bias that is just dreadful. It’s somewhat driven by the internet, by accessibility, by paywalls, and so forth.
But I agree with you 100% that our scholars, our young PhDs, think the world started in 2001, right after the Y2K crisis. There is an immediacy bias in the literature that is hurting us as a field.
[10:47] Dr. Iñigo Mujika
I think there is this trend of becoming technicians and not understanding the basics.
Some sport scientists are really good at playing with things and playing with the technology. But then you ask them what the fundamental aspect is on which that technology is based, or what we are trying to understand when we measure that with your technology, and they don’t know the fundamental physiology or the biochemistry underlying the measurement.
So that’s a risk, in my point of view, looking at the future: becoming technicians but forgetting about the basics.
[11:32] Dr. Louise Burke
I totally agree with you there, Iñigo.
It’s one of the frustrations of being a reviewer these days that you read manuscripts where there’s data presented to you that is just physiologically implausible, but it came out of a machine to three decimal places, and the students just put it into the spreadsheet and don’t even think about the physiological explanation behind all this.
We are so lucky these days that it doesn’t take us a day to do a full VO₂ max test with all the Douglas bags and all the Haldane equipment and the slide rules and all the things that Ron Maughan used to have to do.
We’re lucky that we can make that so quick to do, but we need to be able to do that while still retaining the underlying principles of how it all works, so that we can question the data when we look at it.
[12:30] Trevor Connor
Yep. That’s a really good point that I would love to ask about.
I remember listening to an interview with an influencer who comes from the science community and has built a big name for himself. He was asked a question — I can’t remember what it was about, I think he was talking about nutrition at the time — and they asked him about the mechanism.
He said, “I don’t care about the mechanism. I never look at mechanisms. I just care about the results.”
Dr. Burke, you just mentioned that. Is it irresponsible to say that? Do you need to say you can’t just look at the results — you need to be able to say, “Here’s a physiological mechanism that explains this,” in order to be able to trust your results?
[13:16] Dr. Louise Burke
Absolutely. These days, we’re so reliant on machines, which are a black box to us.
You put something in one end and it comes out the other to 10 decimal places. Unless you can be sure that you’ve calibrated it properly, that all parts of the machine are working, and that the whole premise of the machine itself is accurate, then you should be looking at it with a very close eye and almost look to exclude it before you accept it.
[13:48] Dr. Iñigo Mujika
Trevor, if you don’t care about the mechanisms, that’s when you get people saying, “Oh, I measured VO₂ max of 110,” and they don’t ask whether that is physiologically reasonable or not.
If they consider the literature, either they have the highest VO₂ max ever measured, or there is a problem with the machine.
If you don’t understand the mechanisms, then you don’t know what the problem is with your machine.
Is there air leaking somewhere? Is your CO₂ analyzer wrong? Is your oxygen analyzer wrong somewhere?
So you need to understand what you are measuring and how it is being measured because otherwise, you might get any kind of result and take it at face value. That’s when you get results that don’t make any sense.
[14:45] Dr. Stephen Seiler
There are numbers that have somehow become entrenched in journalistic reporting.
One is the 106 that you talk about. One is the 8.5 liters per minute VO₂ max of a particular British rower that perpetuates. One is the 96 VO₂ of Bjørn Dæhlie, which even the Norwegians said, “No, no, that was false. We just wanted to scare the Swedes.”
So there are these numbers that just live on in infamy. But we know the physiology well enough to be able to fundamentally identify these outliers — those of us who have actually studied the physiology.
But those who haven’t can easily be led astray by these stray numbers that perpetuate.
I find it fascinating. A lot of times sports students, at least in Norway, when I mention numbers and math, they’re like, “Wait a minute. I studied sports so I wouldn’t have to do math.”
And I say, “Well, I’m sorry, but there are some quantitative aspects to sports science.”
Knowing the typical range for some of these variables that we discuss — like heart rate, blood pressure, and VO₂ — is useful to make sure, as a gatekeeper, that the things you’re talking about are reasonable by virtue of the physiological mechanisms behind them.
Again, I think our field has grown dramatically. It’s popular. The interest in measuring the human — the quantified-self movement — pushes people that way.
The influencers show up in my class, and I ask, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” And they say, “Well, I’m an influencer. I’m taking this course because it’ll help me as an influencer.”
And I’m like, “Oh my God, who am I teaching?”
It’s just the modern world we’re living in. For me, as an academic, the composition of the students I’m teaching has changed. Their interests are not maybe the same as they were 30 years ago or when we were studying.
I have to respect that, but at the same time, it can be frustrating because their motivations feel very different and very far away from actual sports science.
So I’m in a state, in my last decade as a scholar and teacher, thinking, “Man, I hope I make it to the end here without blowing my top,” because the students sometimes frustrate the heck out of me because of these issues.
They’re just not interested in the meat of the issue. It’s become a bit transactional, and I fight it.
[18:01] Dr. Louise Burke
One of my colleagues — I was expressing my frustration at the lack of understanding of first principles of measurement and first principles of any of the physiological systems that we’re studying.
They said, “Look, if you’re a lecturer these days, you get graded by the students, and no one wants to learn pathways or understand underlying complicated physiology. They just want it all to be applied. And if I try to teach that in my course, I just get poor ratings, and that affects my tenure.”
[18:36] Trevor Connor
Oh my goodness.
[18:37] Dr. Iñigo Mujika
If I can tell you an anecdote, my partner is an exercise science professor, and she was at the gym the other day doing some exercises. This lady walked up to her and said, “Oh, those exercises that you are doing are so good. What influencer do you follow?”
And she said, “Well, this is my job. I’m a professional. Maybe I should be influencing myself. Maybe I should be the influencer.”
[19:15] Guest/Host
I’m self-influenced.
[19:19] Chris Case
That’s amazing. Fantastic.
[19:21] Dr. Stephen Seiler
When I’m in the gym with these kids — and there are a lot of teenagers in the gym where I work out — what I find is they all have this darn phone glued to their hand throughout workouts.
I find that just mind-blowing. They literally cannot get through a set on a bench press without checking their phone two or three times.
It’s a fascinating world that we live in now. Attention span is equal to about, max, what — 37 seconds or something. I don’t know.
