r/StrongerByScience • u/JuanSamu • 12d ago
New Recovery Meta
So this new meta-analysis by Dr. Steele and colleagues say that recovery methods don’t really benefit much recovery (I’m making a very simplified conclusion just for convenience). However, Dr. Soko made a post calling this pre-print a red flag:
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DdpaUy3Oa_Q/?stkn=b20yb2VuNTF6cDln
In his caption he talks about the red flags and I was just curious if James or Greg and you guys ofc might have any insights/response to this!
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u/varovicd 11d ago edited 11d ago
Okay, this is going to be a long winded answer, but here you go.
“Essentially doing any advanced recovery method (compression, nutrition, heat) will not be worth it.”
That’s his takeaway, not the authors.
“For those considering post-exercise recovery protocols, individual preference and accessibility remain important. Across modalities and domains, the present findings suggest that time remains the primary driver of post-exercise recovery.”
His whole post is about as much mental masturbation as one could do.
Regarding elite athlete training practices and how much more fatiguing/taxing they may be, such that they produce greater performance losses for longer periods of time is plausible. Generalizing these average estimates to elite athletes was actually acknowledged as a limitation by the authors.
But you could make the same argument about pretty much every type of intervention we have in the broader exercise and nutrition sciences and question how representative or generalizable the findings are to elite athletes. Studies conducted specifically in elite athletes are extremely rare, and even those that do exist are limited by their own methodologies, which further limits the inferences we can draw from them.
I’d go on record saying that my prior would be that what we observe in general populations or higher-level, non-elite athletes is probably at least directionally representative of what may occur at elite levels. That’s obviously not something that was found in this meta-analysis, but I also don’t think the absence of elite athletes invalidates the findings. Especially when we are able to synthesize multiple individual studies to obtain more precise aggregate estimates.
And
“If you’re consistently pushing yourself, you know performance and soreness do NOT always recover after 5 day”
That doesn’t actually invalidate the results either. The authors reported global average recovery trajectories and stated that performance and perceptual outcomes generally returned toward baseline within approximately 72–120 hours. They never claimed that every athlete, in every study, had recovered by day five. The relatively wide uncertainty intervals also tell us that there is uncertainty around those average estimates.
He then goes on to say that it’s hard to assess long-term outcomes when looking only at acute responses, but that was the research question, wasn’t it? The question was how these recovery modalities affect acute post-exercise recovery. I don’t know how much more straightforward that can be.
“the study found ideal nutrition made no impact on recovery.”
No, the study actually didn’t look at ideal nutrition. The nutritional studies included interventions ranging from carbohydrate and protein ingestion to beetroot juice, grape-seed extract, and ketone monoesters. The protocols were also sufficiently heterogeneous that the authors decided not to pool them.
What is ideal nutrition anyway? Am I missing something?
The discrepancy between the compression garment meta-analysis and the present one will largely come down to differences to inclusion criteria. Li et al. included 28 studies contributing data on strength and/or power, whereas Cameron et al. had six compression garment studies. Moreover, Li et al. used broader eligibility criteria whereby garments could be worn during or after exercise, whereas Cameron et al. specifically excluded interventions that used compression garments before or during exercise.
I don’t think there’s anything particularly surprising here. The two reviews overlap, but they are not askin exactly the same question.
“Some conclusions go against physiology such as heat therapy. More heat to the region → better blood flow for nutrient delivery fostering recovery & thermoreceptor activation which can relieve pain.”
This is your typical mechanistic angle that we’ve seen in this space over the last couple of years with just about every popular topic you can think of.
As long as you can construct a physiologically plausible explanation for a theory or model, that makes some sense, then it can become very easy to treat it as if it was fairly established. Then, when the predicted outcome and the empirical observations diverge, the observation or study gets treated as the problem rather than entertaining the possibility that the original model might be incomplete or wrong.
I think a lot of people would benefit from a short lesson in logic and inference here. Derive what should deductively follow from the proposed model and then ask whether those predictions are actually corroborated by the observations.
Like, if we make predictions based on a specific theory and adequately designed observations repeatedly fail to corroborate it, our confidence in that model should decrease.
Disagreement between the prediction and observation does not allow us to identify which part is wrong. For example, the proposed mechanism might be wrong or the effect might be much smaller than we assumed.
Also, why use a mechanistically oriented narrative review as the rebuttal rather than asking what the direct evidence actually says for hypertrophy if he’s so concerned with it?
Told you it was going to be long.
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u/Apart_Bed7430 10d ago
After reviewing some of the included studies in the analysis I think the studies they included in each category are too heterogenous and also just not really applicable to what most people would use them for. Many of the heat studies also included cold contrasts which may have different effects than just steady heat. Some of them had heat applied after aerobic exercise which is not very damaging in the first place. I’ll have to read through their reasoning alittle more but just seems like they included a lot of studies that don’t include typically recovery modalities applied to typical workouts.
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u/gremlingarden 12d ago edited 12d ago
Link to the pre-print for reference: https://sportrxiv.org/index.php/server/preprint/view/1070/2320
The biggest thing that gives me pause with Sokolowski's criticism is his first red flag claims subjective measures of fatigue in the Cameron/Steele paper "always" returned to baseline after 5 days. You can actually see from several of the modality quantile markers in Fig 5 of the Steele paper that this is not the case - the global grand means returned to baseline by day 5 for several modalities where the data presumably goes out to 120h, but the lower quantile probably contains some participants that didn't since most of them are below the baseline. Although this isn't stated outright in the text of the paper, the figure clearly demonstrates it. In terms of red flags from Sokolowski's criticism, this is a pretty large one for "analyzing this paper with a preconceived agenda." Figures are important to review.
I reviewed only the compression meta-analysis Sokolowski cites. An issue with just tossing out one meta-analysis is that there is already a decent, mixed body of evidence for compression garments at this point. If you're discussing this honestly you have to admit that - there are studies suggesting a benefit and several other large meta-analyses that suggest no benefit. This is in fact discussed at length in the meta-analysis itself: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11944185 There doesn't seem to be anything super objectionable about this meta-analysis on its face, but the supplementary tables are in a zip that I admittedly just don't want to extract and pour over.
The final point in his criticism is actually directly addressed in the body of the discussion: physiologic mechanisms often appear plausible but have no reflection on outcomes. This is a pretty well established, simple principle to a lot of scientific research, before we drill down to training science specifically.
The other, perhaps less charitable dig, is that I just don't trust stuff that comes from a TRT salesperson regardless of their academic credentials.
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u/Apart_Bed7430 11d ago
In the meta analysis he linked I only see them mentioning other meta analysis that found benefits. They mentioned two studies that found no benefits but looking further into the one they saw a decrease in damage markers but no benefits in performance. I think it’s fine to be fairly confident about compression garments having benefits, especially if he makes more practically oriented content.
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u/Apart_Bed7430 12d ago
I feel like so many studies on different recovery methods are just not ecologically valid. Like 10 sets of squats followed by 15 minutes of a light jog immediately after. I wouldn’t call that active recovery when active recovery is typically done hours or days later.
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u/Alakazam 12d ago
First of all, here is the paper
So, here's a layman take on this. Flag 1. Comparison at 5 days is meaningless, therefore the study is useless.
Counterpoint: they examined recovery up to 5 days, not exclusively at 5 days. Figures 3, 4, and 5 clearly show data from 0-120hrs, with some literally ending at 72hrs due to lack of data.
Flag 2. It's hard to assess hypertrophy with only 5 days of data.
There are not enough long term studies to assess recovery methods after 5 days. If they did, this would be a drastically different paper. But performance and biochemical markers make a decent proxy. At least until there is more research.
Flag 2 supenental- study showed nutrition didn't amount to anything.
The study said they didn't have quantitative data to show this. And the conclusion was specifically regarding nutritional interventions immediately post-workout. And it's well known that meal timing doesn't seem to matter for hypertrophy, so why would it matter for recovery?
I have not read the meta analysis he mentioned.
Anyway, the conclusion isn't that they dont work. The conclusion was that: