In my strength and conditioning class today, my students worked through the ACSM Position Stand “Progression Models in Resistance Training for Healthy Adults“. A major concept to take home from that paper, and something I try to emphasize in the class, is that the basics are important. The basics are what the biggest part of your progress is going to come from. The basics should be the vast majority of the training that you or your … Read more
I’m a sucker for five-dollar-words. Sometimes the monstrous, multi-syllabic words just roll right off the tongue and fight perfectly into what it is that you want to say. In scientific writing, and scientific speech, those extremely specific words often do a great job of making what you are saying very, very clear. The problem is that there is a correct and an incorrect time to use certain types of language. When I am talking to … Read more
Well, it has now been 6 months that I have been using R “regularly”. I set out from the beginning to learn R, and since the last time I attempted it, I need to make sure that I had external reasons for needing to learn it. To do that I told myself that I wouldn’t touch any statistical software that I had used previously (SPSS, SAS, MiniTab). This put me in the position that I … Read more
Now that I am in the home stretch of my PhD, I started reflecting on my experiences throughout. I recently saw a post on Cal Newport’s blog about some of his thoughts on grad school, so I thought I might toss my hat in the ring. Below are two sections. The first section is aimed at ideas for all graduate students, but the second section are ideas geared mostly toward PhD students in the same … Read more
Being able to relay what we do to the public and practitioners as scientists is incredibly important. My field, in particular, is especially applied. Most of what I study aims to improve the methods of practitioners. However, if I don’t take the time to relay this information to the people whose practice I am trying to improve- I’m not doing enough. Here’s a TED talk from Melissa Marshall about how scientists can do a better … Read more