Who I am and what this blog is about

 Hi, I'm Alex Young and I'm pursuing a Master's Degree in the Kinesiology department at CSU, Chico. My undergraduate degree was a Bachelor of Science in Exercise Physiology, and I have research, coaching, and personal training experience. I also have 2 years of experience as an amateur powerlifter and am planning to return to competition this spring. I began much of my fitness journey by learning from what I had seen on social media, and over time learned that many of the practices we were seeing on social media were not reflective of the evidence-based information I was learning in school. During the 2010s (2010-2019), there was a large burst of information across the internet that helped provide information about weight lifting, sports science, and health practices to people across the world. Some of this information originated on forums such as t-nation and the old bodybuilding.com forums, and then those forums basically died as Instagram, Twitter, and Youtube grew. Unfortunately, with the rise of faster sources of information (social media), we also saw an increase in disinformation that wasn't reflective of the science, and was based on people trying to sell quick fixes to hopeful people than were looking for instant results or health miracles. Some of these people took the money that came in and quickly left the scene, while others stuck around and continued to promote health interventions which are not backed by evidence (such as the carnivore diet, dry fasting, cryotherapy, etc.) in order to continue making money.

Today, the fitness space on social media is probably more saturated than ever with pseudoscience and misinformation. At the same time, there are many good sources of new information if you know where to look. Some researchers such as Eric Helms, Brad Schoenfeld, and Menno Henselmans post on Instagram with short summaries of current research. There are many more as well since exercise and health science is a vast field. In addition to this, people such as Layne Norton help identify people who are promoting products and health interventions that aren't science-backed and don't work. My goal with this blog is to help better inform readers about evidence based health science practices, and which social media accounts are providing reliably good information. I also plan to document my return to powerlifting with this blog. Thank you for reading

Alex

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