And correct me if I’m wrong but it doesn’t sound like you know the scope of sports science? It’s a combination of the fields that I made an example of above plus physics, too, and many more (such as business and psychology), but oriented specifically for the purposes of sport and recreation.
Part of it is the subconscious figuring out what works, and hanging it onto the closest known concept. The other half is that false beliefs are practical and helpful sometimes.
He said she was 20 years old, and his second 20+ y/o one. His said he went by:
- a balance of positive + negative reinforcement
- regular dog food, nothing fancy
and that
- if she was a seeing-eye dog she'd have been dead by 10
My takeaway is that mental stress is a killer. He was letting her have her "dog-nature". Roam around, sniff things, unburdened.
But the #1 has to be people. Everyone withers away alone + takes cues from our environment. The dream is having people around who make it feel natural to be healthy.
Physiology of Sport and Exercise by Kenney, Wilmore, and Costil.
Strength Training Anatomy by Delavier, though this is more like ExRx and is far less exhaustive
And the above should be more than enough but it won’t harm to read NSCA’s Essentials of Strength Training and Conditioning.
I'm sorry, I don't mean to be uncharitable, but 'exercise science' is not an empirical scientific field like physics or chemistry. It's very difficult to conduct genuine experiments or isolate causes in the human body. It's pretty well-known that lots 'exercise science' studies that prove X were conducted with relatively untrained undergrad volunteers, who would probably gain on any program because they're a) young and b) exercise newbies. Political science has 'science' right in the name too, but I think everyone understands it's not an actual empirical field either (which is fine!)
I'm certainly open to hearing contributions from exercise scientists, but I weight folk wisdom from say the bodybuilding or powerlifting fields at least as heavily
But the broader reason why this analogy doesn't work is that most medical treatments (medical devices, drugs, etc.) are subject to a really stringent approval & evidence of efficacy process. As they should be! But there just isn't anything similar in exercise science. Studies that prove, like, plyometric wall bounces make you more explosive or something are just incredibly underpowered versus the level of evidence required for the FDA to approve a medical device or drug.
If ES studies were somehow conducted with that same level of funding & rigor, I would take them a million times more seriously. In practice, it's an n=10 or 20 study with a bunch of undergrads for a p value of .0501 or something
On a more on-topic note: I’ve never consciously held ExRx in high regard, but considering how exhaustive and encyclopedic its curation of exercises is, perhaps I should have. One also couldn’t argue that it contains false content because it merely collects exercises instead of prescribing them (unless of course they’ve added some section where they do, which I don’t know of and cannot comment against).