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This article is part of a series:
→ Part 2 — Sleep.
→ Part 3 — Naps.
→ Part 4 — Rest.
→ Part 5 — Nutrition.
→ Part 6 — Magic.
→ Part 7 — How to recover.
→ The Recovery Magic Tool
Recovery for runners and endurance athletes.
→ Part 1 — Eat, sleep, rest, repeat.→ Part 2 — Sleep.
→ Part 3 — Naps.
→ Part 4 — Rest.
→ Part 5 — Nutrition.
→ Part 6 — Magic.
→ Part 7 — How to recover.
→ The Recovery Magic Tool
Going beyond nutrition, sleep, and rest for recovery — is there anything else? Maybe a splash of “magic”.
Thomas Solomon PhD.
26th Sept 2020.
The simplicity in recovery is in its essence of eating well, sleeping well, and resting at opportune times. Since its evolution from a noun to a verb, recovery has become overly complicated with devices, pills, and potions, aka “magic”. Here I delve into the magical side of the recovery universe…
Reading time ~14-mins (2800 words)
Or listen to the Podcast version.
Or listen to the Podcast version.
The online world appears to be full of “biohackers”, people who think they can “play God” and fool their biology. These “short-cut addicts” are folks who want to know which device, pill, potion, or session will make them leaner, faster, and stronger, today. During my days on this Earth, several athletes have asked me what they can take or use to “speed up” their recovery. In every case, the athlete has never considered what they mean by speeding up their recovery. Fortunately for me, only a couple of all the people I have coached in performance and in health have been “short-cut addicts”, which makes my job far simpler. I build people’s fitness by choosing the right bricks and using the right mix. No short-cuts. No snake oil. My athletes focus their time on trying to train, eat, sleep, and rest as best they can.
For each of the “short cuts” I have been asked about, I could very easily have cherry-picked a single published study, albeit very often also a poorly-designed study of a handful of participants, that says “sure, this might work”. But, typically, the evidence doesn’t support the marketed claim of the product. In my experience, the biohacking, get-fit-quick, short-cut addicts always seem so willing to invest large resources in silly things that will have negligible gain while neglecting to optimise the obvious things first.
As a coach, my advice is always simple: eat well, sleep lots, and relax your body and mind. Your expendable resources should first be invested into those three important, non-negotiable, and returnable factors. Consult a nutritionist/dietician, learn to cook, stock your fridge with simple and nutritious food, reduce your p.m. caffeine intake, reduce your alcohol intake, reduce your p.m. screen time, sleep in a dark, cool, and distraction-free room, and dedicate peaceful “me time” to yourself. After you have raised the bar of your nutrition, sleep, and restful habits to “world-class” levels, then you might consider supplemental approaches. A good mantra to learn is Steve Magness’ first rule of training, “the boring stuff is your foundation”. Remember: choose the right bricks and use the right mix… Then throw on the glitter.
Choose the right bricks, use the right mix, then throw on the glitter.
Never assume that something that induces an acute increase in “recovery” (most often measured as a feeling of soreness) naturally extrapolates to long term benefits (or improvements in performance). Some experimental studies have, for example, shown that cold therapy (ice baths), antioxidant supplements, and NSAIDs, might have short-term effects on lowering muscle soreness or accelerating the return to “race readiness” but they might also have detrimental effects on long-term training adaptations when used daily. Yes, some evidence shows that “thinking” or “believing” that something works can actually manifest benefits through the medium of the placebo effect — and the placebo effect is a very real thing — but so is your bank balance, time, and health. That aside, remember that your recovery is not just measured by feelings of soreness but by your readiness to perform again. Soreness is simply an indicator of damage, not a measure of physiological readiness to unleash your maximal potential. Also be aware that reporting you “feel more recovered” when your feelings were framed by being told (perhaps by Lebron or Mo) “this will help you recover”, is not a valid scientific method. I can just as easily frame your thought process and invoke a “nocebo effect” by framing questions like, “this will make you feel terrible for days, how did it make you feel?”... “this beer is horrible, how does it taste to you?”... “this movie is rubbish, what did you think of it?”. Be careful. Measure performance outcomes and evaluate the data fairly.
As I have discussed before, training is a layer cake of rest-intervals measured in units of time. These rest-intervals in between your exercise stimuli are where your body recovers. I have always been intrigued as to why people choose to invest so much time and money into approaches that are not restful and which, in many cases, cause further stimulus. For example, cold exposure stimulates adrenaline (epinephrine) release into the blood; the same adrenergic response that increases your heart rate during exercise. Deep tissue massage increases muscle damage, amplifying the pro-inflammatory state, and therefore delaying the healing process. Not to say that these practices are never beneficial, but is an athlete’s desire to engage in such practices more related to self-efficacy and autonomy, i.e. the feeling that they are doing something extra to help their performance? Indeed, self-efficacy and autonomy are great traits to possess — the goal of any coach is to empower their athletes to one day lead their own journey — but doing costly and time-consuming things that are proven to have no physiological benefit and, in some cases, proven to cause detriment, might be considered crazy? My guess is that many athletes simply embrace the psychological benefit; the feeling that adding some magic “must be good”... Compression socks feel like a nice hug; hugs are nice... Deep tissue massage feels horrible; that’s gotta be good, right? Well, as we all know, assumptions can be the mother of all f ups.
Muscle soreness is a natural feature of post-exercise recovery. Accelerating your return to performance in a match, game, race, or event that is just a few hours after the hard effort you just laid down, is critical. Alleviating muscle soreness feels great and in the right context, like having another race or hard session within hours, there might even be an acute benefit to doing so. However, blunting muscle soreness, suppressing inflammatory responses, or reducing free radical production after every session will, in the long-term, blunt your adaptations to your training. Seeing stories with headlines like, “Is muscle soreness curable?”, always brings a cheeky smile to my face — a necessary physiological function does not need to be “cured” — remember muscle soreness is a sign that the muscle has been damaged and now needs to recover… i.e. it needs to repair and adapt before further stress is applied. Suppressing the soreness so you can train again may be overriding the feeling that tells you not to train too hard again just yet. Homeostasis needs to be restored and time achieves that goal — you know that — but perhaps you want to switch on the hyperdrive and travel through time to help speed things up…?
There are multiple “magic” remedies available for “reducing muscle soreness” but many other means of recovery magic aim to “increase blood flow”. In healthy people, especially in highly-active healthy people (aka athletes), neither blood flow nor muscle capillarization are impaired — tissue vascularisation and stroke volume are quite immense in athletes. And, in all healthy people, the heart does an epic job of moving your entire volume of blood around your body many times every minute — no device can compete with that, a topic that has been excellently reviewed by no better a scientist than the eminent Dr Mike Joyner (of 2-hour marathon prediction fame and recent convalescent plasma COVID-19 treatment fame).
Other recovery magic focuses on “flushing the bad stuff out of your muscles”. The “bad stuff”, in this case, being lactate, inflammatory compounds, free radicals, and other “toxic” byproducts of metabolism. But, your muscles are incredibly efficient at moving their produced lactate into the blood and even directly using lactate as a fuel. Bicarbonate in your blood does a phenomenal job of buffering changes in acidity. Your lungs do an amazing job of hyperventilating to remove excess CO2, an acidic gas, from your body. While your liver does a phenomenal job of "detoxifying" your blood, and your natural anti-inflammatory and antioxidative responses heroically prevent exercise-induced inflammation getting out of control. In fact, the inflammatory compounds produced during exercise, along with lactate and oxidising compounds like reactive oxygen species (ROS), actually trigger the exercise adaptations that help increase your fitness.
So, in these contexts, there is a thick layer of fog settled on the clarity as to what the magic can really do to help. A post-session cool-down involving a gentle jog or walk will continue to allow “blood to flow” at high rates, thereby "flushing" the alleged "bad stuff" out. But what makes bad stuff bad and why it needs to be flushed out are questions I cannot answer.
The beauty of an effect size is that it is a dimensionless (i.e. unitless) measure of the standard deviation (range) of the change score (or group difference) within a study. Because they are unitless, effect sizes can be compared between studies examining the same intervention on an outcome (e.g. two independent studies determining the effect of ice baths on the recovery of performance; cherry vs. cherry) as well as between studies examining different interventions on an outcome (e.g. a study determining the effect of ice baths on performance and a study determining the effect of sleep extension on performance; cherry vs. apple).
High-quality, robust evidence comes from the best types of cherry, in this case, known as randomized controlled trials. A systematic review that contains a meta-analysis of all known randomized controlled trials (the best cherries), sits right at the top of the evidence-based decision-making pyramid. Therefore, a systematic review of the whole cherry tree is more robust than a single randomised controlled trial — cherry-picking an experimental study to confirm a bias is not a valid scientific pursuit for informing practice.
Right, enough about cherries…
In the world of recovery, there is a sufficient number of well-conducted randomised controlled trials that permits systematic reviews and meta-analyses to be completed, therefore allowing overall conclusions to be made. To help inform your decisions in using the various recovery modalities thrown at you to supplement good nutrition, sleep, and rest, I have created a useful and comprehensive resource for scientists, practitioners, coaches, and athletes that summarises the evidence from systematic reviews. I aim for this resource to bring clarity where there is obscurity in this often snake-oil doused world of recovery magic. To use the resource, please visit:
There you will find the latest evidence for a huge assortment of recovery modalities, including the things you definitely should be doing — eating and sleeping — and the things you are probably not sure whether you should (or should not) be doing — dietary supplements, NSAIDs and painkillers, cool-downs, stretching, cold water immersion/ice baths, hot water immersion, sauna, infrared phototherapy, compression, external counterpulsation, massage, foam rolling, electrical stimulation, acupuncture, and cupping… Phew.
Basically, don’t shoot the messenger!
As described above, your body is pretty magical itself when it comes to repair, recovery and restoring homeostasis. And yet, the massive and pretty darn sexy array of “magic” available on the market continues to grow, which makes it impossible to ignore. So, if you still don’t mind taking the risk of shooting the messenger and insist on playing with fire, then take a systematic approach to ensure you do not get burnt…
Certainly, be open-minded, but also be resilient to hype and marketing and put your magnificent brain into action and be critical with your thought process.
Don’t give in to the fallacy that using 5 different devices, pills, and potions will give you 5-times the improvement in blood flow or soreness.
Be pragmatic and follow the science.
Better still, be the “N of 1” in your own experiment. If you are intrigued and the experimental evidence suggests some support (consult my Recovery Magic Tool), invest in the magic being hyped and test it systematically, measuring a recovery outcome that makes sense to you in the context of your sport — perhaps a return to peak performance following a heavy session or big race…. Try to disprove the alleged outcome of the hyped magic. By doing so, you will be using the scientific method, which is to test the null hypothesis that “the magic” does not speed up your return to peak performance following a heavy session or race.
When you have your experimental data, conduct a cost-benefit analysis, where “cost” includes a combination of the financial cost, time cost, performance impairment, and harm to health:
If there is no benefit, there is no point using the magic.
If there is a benefit and no cost, use it; you’d be foolish not to.
If the cost outweighs the benefit, do not proceed.
Thanks for joining me for another “session”. Don’t forget to make use of my Recovery Magic Tool to help inform your decisions in selecting recovery modalities that might be a supplement to, but never a replacement for, high-quality nutrition, sleep, and rest. I will return soon with a summary of this entire series on recovery. In the meantime, keep training smart...
Eat, Sleep, and Rest. Then, perhaps, consider a splash of magic.
For each of the “short cuts” I have been asked about, I could very easily have cherry-picked a single published study, albeit very often also a poorly-designed study of a handful of participants, that says “sure, this might work”. But, typically, the evidence doesn’t support the marketed claim of the product. In my experience, the biohacking, get-fit-quick, short-cut addicts always seem so willing to invest large resources in silly things that will have negligible gain while neglecting to optimise the obvious things first.
As a coach, my advice is always simple: eat well, sleep lots, and relax your body and mind. Your expendable resources should first be invested into those three important, non-negotiable, and returnable factors. Consult a nutritionist/dietician, learn to cook, stock your fridge with simple and nutritious food, reduce your p.m. caffeine intake, reduce your alcohol intake, reduce your p.m. screen time, sleep in a dark, cool, and distraction-free room, and dedicate peaceful “me time” to yourself. After you have raised the bar of your nutrition, sleep, and restful habits to “world-class” levels, then you might consider supplemental approaches. A good mantra to learn is Steve Magness’ first rule of training, “the boring stuff is your foundation”. Remember: choose the right bricks and use the right mix… Then throw on the glitter.
×
![]()
But what about going beyond sleep, nutrition, and rest... What about all the other recovery “magic”?
Mo Farah’s ice baths. Michael Phelps’ cupping marks. Lebron James’ transcranial stimulation headphones. All these things look cool and are intriguing but celebrity endorsement is not a green-light for scientific merit. Companies sponsor athletes by giving them money and/or free products in exchange for a contractual obligation to promote their brand and products on social media. In this modern era of brand ambassadors, I also know athletes who have agreed to contractual agreements to promote companies’ products in weekly obligatory social media posts in exchange for a discount on said companies’ products — this is incredible marketing intelligence where the company gets free advertising and income from the deal. Anyway, my point is that just because “Dave the Guru” told you it works and Lebron endorses it, doesn’t mean it actually improves recovery. More alarmingly, nor does it mean that its safety has been assessed by your local food, device, and drug safety department (e.g. DEFRA/FSA — the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs or Food Standards Agency, UK — or the FDA — Food and Drug Administration, USA).Never assume that something that induces an acute increase in “recovery” (most often measured as a feeling of soreness) naturally extrapolates to long term benefits (or improvements in performance). Some experimental studies have, for example, shown that cold therapy (ice baths), antioxidant supplements, and NSAIDs, might have short-term effects on lowering muscle soreness or accelerating the return to “race readiness” but they might also have detrimental effects on long-term training adaptations when used daily. Yes, some evidence shows that “thinking” or “believing” that something works can actually manifest benefits through the medium of the placebo effect — and the placebo effect is a very real thing — but so is your bank balance, time, and health. That aside, remember that your recovery is not just measured by feelings of soreness but by your readiness to perform again. Soreness is simply an indicator of damage, not a measure of physiological readiness to unleash your maximal potential. Also be aware that reporting you “feel more recovered” when your feelings were framed by being told (perhaps by Lebron or Mo) “this will help you recover”, is not a valid scientific method. I can just as easily frame your thought process and invoke a “nocebo effect” by framing questions like, “this will make you feel terrible for days, how did it make you feel?”... “this beer is horrible, how does it taste to you?”... “this movie is rubbish, what did you think of it?”. Be careful. Measure performance outcomes and evaluate the data fairly.
As I have discussed before, training is a layer cake of rest-intervals measured in units of time. These rest-intervals in between your exercise stimuli are where your body recovers. I have always been intrigued as to why people choose to invest so much time and money into approaches that are not restful and which, in many cases, cause further stimulus. For example, cold exposure stimulates adrenaline (epinephrine) release into the blood; the same adrenergic response that increases your heart rate during exercise. Deep tissue massage increases muscle damage, amplifying the pro-inflammatory state, and therefore delaying the healing process. Not to say that these practices are never beneficial, but is an athlete’s desire to engage in such practices more related to self-efficacy and autonomy, i.e. the feeling that they are doing something extra to help their performance? Indeed, self-efficacy and autonomy are great traits to possess — the goal of any coach is to empower their athletes to one day lead their own journey — but doing costly and time-consuming things that are proven to have no physiological benefit and, in some cases, proven to cause detriment, might be considered crazy? My guess is that many athletes simply embrace the psychological benefit; the feeling that adding some magic “must be good”... Compression socks feel like a nice hug; hugs are nice... Deep tissue massage feels horrible; that’s gotta be good, right? Well, as we all know, assumptions can be the mother of all f ups.
What does “magic” do?
Each of your sessions causes a massive disruption in homeostasis and places you under physical and psychological stress. The stress response is measurable as an increase in free radicals (reactive oxygen/nitrogen species) in muscle and blood (which can cause oxidative stress); an increase in inflammatory cytokines in muscle and blood; immune cell infiltration into muscle; a decrease in muscle and liver glycogen; a decrease in intramuscular triglyceride levels; and increases in muscle damage markers like creatine kinase (CK) and lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) in blood. To you, this stress response is noticeable as a feeling of fatigue and muscle soreness. A disturbance in the force, there has been. And, as all athletic Jedis know, restoring homeostasis is the goal.Muscle soreness is a natural feature of post-exercise recovery. Accelerating your return to performance in a match, game, race, or event that is just a few hours after the hard effort you just laid down, is critical. Alleviating muscle soreness feels great and in the right context, like having another race or hard session within hours, there might even be an acute benefit to doing so. However, blunting muscle soreness, suppressing inflammatory responses, or reducing free radical production after every session will, in the long-term, blunt your adaptations to your training. Seeing stories with headlines like, “Is muscle soreness curable?”, always brings a cheeky smile to my face — a necessary physiological function does not need to be “cured” — remember muscle soreness is a sign that the muscle has been damaged and now needs to recover… i.e. it needs to repair and adapt before further stress is applied. Suppressing the soreness so you can train again may be overriding the feeling that tells you not to train too hard again just yet. Homeostasis needs to be restored and time achieves that goal — you know that — but perhaps you want to switch on the hyperdrive and travel through time to help speed things up…?
There are multiple “magic” remedies available for “reducing muscle soreness” but many other means of recovery magic aim to “increase blood flow”. In healthy people, especially in highly-active healthy people (aka athletes), neither blood flow nor muscle capillarization are impaired — tissue vascularisation and stroke volume are quite immense in athletes. And, in all healthy people, the heart does an epic job of moving your entire volume of blood around your body many times every minute — no device can compete with that, a topic that has been excellently reviewed by no better a scientist than the eminent Dr Mike Joyner (of 2-hour marathon prediction fame and recent convalescent plasma COVID-19 treatment fame).
Other recovery magic focuses on “flushing the bad stuff out of your muscles”. The “bad stuff”, in this case, being lactate, inflammatory compounds, free radicals, and other “toxic” byproducts of metabolism. But, your muscles are incredibly efficient at moving their produced lactate into the blood and even directly using lactate as a fuel. Bicarbonate in your blood does a phenomenal job of buffering changes in acidity. Your lungs do an amazing job of hyperventilating to remove excess CO2, an acidic gas, from your body. While your liver does a phenomenal job of "detoxifying" your blood, and your natural anti-inflammatory and antioxidative responses heroically prevent exercise-induced inflammation getting out of control. In fact, the inflammatory compounds produced during exercise, along with lactate and oxidising compounds like reactive oxygen species (ROS), actually trigger the exercise adaptations that help increase your fitness.
So, in these contexts, there is a thick layer of fog settled on the clarity as to what the magic can really do to help. A post-session cool-down involving a gentle jog or walk will continue to allow “blood to flow” at high rates, thereby "flushing" the alleged "bad stuff" out. But what makes bad stuff bad and why it needs to be flushed out are questions I cannot answer.
But what about the evidence — surely some of the magic works… Right?
You would be correct to point out that my above narrative is somewhat dismissive of recovery magic. You might recognise that I clearly have a bias in believing that the use of eating well, sleeping well, and resting adequately are the major drivers of your recovery. But, for me to say that “all recovery magic doesn’t work”, would be an ill-advised sweeping statement. If that was my opinion, I could easily spend a few minutes “cherry-picking” experimental studies to support that sentiment. You could just-as-easily do the same to support your view. But, in the world of science, we have a tool that examines all the cherries in a standardised way. This tool is called a systematic review. When the studies included in a systematic review are of high enough quality, a meta-analysis of all the available evidence can be completed, and an overall effect size can be calculated along with a confidence interval (which tells us how confident in the effect we can be) and a heterogeneity score (which tells how variable the effect is). In simple words, a meta-analysis evaluates all the cherries simultaneously to produce a summary statistic based on all available evidence which enables overall conclusions to be made to inform decisions in changing practice.The beauty of an effect size is that it is a dimensionless (i.e. unitless) measure of the standard deviation (range) of the change score (or group difference) within a study. Because they are unitless, effect sizes can be compared between studies examining the same intervention on an outcome (e.g. two independent studies determining the effect of ice baths on the recovery of performance; cherry vs. cherry) as well as between studies examining different interventions on an outcome (e.g. a study determining the effect of ice baths on performance and a study determining the effect of sleep extension on performance; cherry vs. apple).
High-quality, robust evidence comes from the best types of cherry, in this case, known as randomized controlled trials. A systematic review that contains a meta-analysis of all known randomized controlled trials (the best cherries), sits right at the top of the evidence-based decision-making pyramid. Therefore, a systematic review of the whole cherry tree is more robust than a single randomised controlled trial — cherry-picking an experimental study to confirm a bias is not a valid scientific pursuit for informing practice.
Right, enough about cherries…
In the world of recovery, there is a sufficient number of well-conducted randomised controlled trials that permits systematic reviews and meta-analyses to be completed, therefore allowing overall conclusions to be made. To help inform your decisions in using the various recovery modalities thrown at you to supplement good nutrition, sleep, and rest, I have created a useful and comprehensive resource for scientists, practitioners, coaches, and athletes that summarises the evidence from systematic reviews. I aim for this resource to bring clarity where there is obscurity in this often snake-oil doused world of recovery magic. To use the resource, please visit:
There you will find the latest evidence for a huge assortment of recovery modalities, including the things you definitely should be doing — eating and sleeping — and the things you are probably not sure whether you should (or should not) be doing — dietary supplements, NSAIDs and painkillers, cool-downs, stretching, cold water immersion/ice baths, hot water immersion, sauna, infrared phototherapy, compression, external counterpulsation, massage, foam rolling, electrical stimulation, acupuncture, and cupping… Phew.
What can you add to your training toolbox?
Very few recovery studies focus on the psychological aspects of recovery, i.e. asking questions like, "How do you feel?", or "How ready do you feel to go again?". In race-phases of your training block where you may have races on back-to-back days or even heats and rounds on the same day, then yes, it may be a good thing to promote the feeling of being ready to go again — some lines of magic can even help speed up that feeling of being ready for an effort later that same-day. But, during general base-building phases or specific fitness-building phases of your training cycles, it does not make any sense to “speed up recovery” by attempting to reduce muscle soreness (or the feelings thereof) because you will be blunting the very things that are causing you to adapt, grow, and strengthen.Basically, don’t shoot the messenger!
As described above, your body is pretty magical itself when it comes to repair, recovery and restoring homeostasis. And yet, the massive and pretty darn sexy array of “magic” available on the market continues to grow, which makes it impossible to ignore. So, if you still don’t mind taking the risk of shooting the messenger and insist on playing with fire, then take a systematic approach to ensure you do not get burnt…
Certainly, be open-minded, but also be resilient to hype and marketing and put your magnificent brain into action and be critical with your thought process.
Don’t give in to the fallacy that using 5 different devices, pills, and potions will give you 5-times the improvement in blood flow or soreness.
Be pragmatic and follow the science.
Better still, be the “N of 1” in your own experiment. If you are intrigued and the experimental evidence suggests some support (consult my Recovery Magic Tool), invest in the magic being hyped and test it systematically, measuring a recovery outcome that makes sense to you in the context of your sport — perhaps a return to peak performance following a heavy session or big race…. Try to disprove the alleged outcome of the hyped magic. By doing so, you will be using the scientific method, which is to test the null hypothesis that “the magic” does not speed up your return to peak performance following a heavy session or race.
When you have your experimental data, conduct a cost-benefit analysis, where “cost” includes a combination of the financial cost, time cost, performance impairment, and harm to health:
If there is no benefit, there is no point using the magic.
If there is a benefit and no cost, use it; you’d be foolish not to.
If the cost outweighs the benefit, do not proceed.
×
![]()
Disclaimer: I occasionally mention brands and products but it is important to know that I am not affiliated with, sponsored by, an ambassador for, or receiving advertisement royalties from any brands. I have conducted biomedical research for which I have received research money from publicly-funded national research councils and medical charities, and also from private companies, including Novo Nordisk Foundation, AstraZeneca, Amylin, A.P. Møller Foundation, and Augustinus Foundation. I’ve also consulted for Boost Treadmills and Gu Energy on their research and innovation grant applications and I’ve provided research and science writing services for Examine — some of my articles contain links to information provided by Examine but I do not receive any royalties or bonuses from those links. These companies had no control over the research design, data analysis, or publication outcomes of my work. Any recommendations I make are, and always will be, based on my own views and opinions shaped by the evidence available. My recommendations have never and will never be influenced by affiliations, sponsorships, advertisement royalties, etc. The information I provide is not medical advice. Before making any changes to your habits of daily living based on any information I provide, always ensure it is safe for you to do so and consult your doctor if you are unsure.
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About the author:
I am Thomas Solomon and I'm passionate about relaying accurate and clear scientific information to the masses to help folks meet their fitness and performance goals. I hold a BSc in Biochemistry and a PhD in Exercise Science and am an ACSM-certified Exercise Physiologist and Personal Trainer, a VDOT-certified Distance running coach, and a Registered Nutritionist. Since 2002, I have conducted biomedical research in exercise and nutrition and have taught and led university courses in exercise physiology, nutrition, biochemistry, and molecular medicine. My work is published in over 80 peer-reviewed medical journal publications and I have delivered more than 50 conference presentations & invited talks at universities and medical societies. I have coached and provided training plans for truck-loads of athletes, have competed at a high level in running, cycling, and obstacle course racing, and continue to run, ride, ski, hike, lift, and climb as much as my ageing body will allow. To stay on top of scientific developments, I consult for scientists, participate in journal clubs, peer-review papers for medical journals, and I invest every Friday in reading what new delights have spawned onto PubMed. In my spare time, I hunt for phenomenal mountain views to capture through the lens, boulder problems to solve, and for new craft beers to drink with the goal of sending my gustatory system into a hullabaloo.
Copyright © Thomas Solomon. All rights reserved.
I am Thomas Solomon and I'm passionate about relaying accurate and clear scientific information to the masses to help folks meet their fitness and performance goals. I hold a BSc in Biochemistry and a PhD in Exercise Science and am an ACSM-certified Exercise Physiologist and Personal Trainer, a VDOT-certified Distance running coach, and a Registered Nutritionist. Since 2002, I have conducted biomedical research in exercise and nutrition and have taught and led university courses in exercise physiology, nutrition, biochemistry, and molecular medicine. My work is published in over 80 peer-reviewed medical journal publications and I have delivered more than 50 conference presentations & invited talks at universities and medical societies. I have coached and provided training plans for truck-loads of athletes, have competed at a high level in running, cycling, and obstacle course racing, and continue to run, ride, ski, hike, lift, and climb as much as my ageing body will allow. To stay on top of scientific developments, I consult for scientists, participate in journal clubs, peer-review papers for medical journals, and I invest every Friday in reading what new delights have spawned onto PubMed. In my spare time, I hunt for phenomenal mountain views to capture through the lens, boulder problems to solve, and for new craft beers to drink with the goal of sending my gustatory system into a hullabaloo.
Copyright © Thomas Solomon. All rights reserved.