3 Sports Science Hacks That Don’t Work

It’s more fun for everyone when a study works. I love writing about research suggesting that, say, drinking beet juice or zapping your brain with electricity or simply smiling will make you faster.

But this weakness—which, to be fair, I share with just about everyone—has a cost. If I only write about positive studies, we get the impression that pretty much everything works. Ten scientists might study a new supplement, and nine of them find it doesn’t work, but if we only read about the tenth study, we assume the new supplement is awesome. This is publication bias in action.

So, in recognition of this danger, I’m sharing here the results of three studies that didn’t work—or at least, where my first reaction to the findings was “Oh, that’s too bad.” In reality, all three of these studies were successful, because they answered a question that researchers were wondering about. There’s some valuable data and interesting insights here—just not necessarily the ones we were hoping for.

Ketones Don’t Improve Recovery

First up is a test of the idea that ketones boost recovery from hard training or competition. I first wrote about ketones back in 2018 when they were all the rage in the pro cycling peloton as a potential performance-booster. That idea has gone out of fashion, but subsequent research (which I wrote about here) has suggested that the real magic of ketones might be in enhancing recovery and warding off overtraining.

The new study, which appears in Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, comes from the same Belgian group at KU Leuven that has pioneered the idea of ketones for recovery. They decided to put their theoretical ideas to the test by having 18 cyclists complete a brutal eight-day simulated cycling stage race, modeled after the Absa Cape Epic mountain bike tour. The cyclists were given either KetoneAid ketones or a placebo after each stage and just before bed each evening.

The researchers hoped that the ketones would accelerate post-exercise recovery, enhance sleep time and quality, and preserve physiological and cognitive function in the face of fatigue. Put all this together, and they hoped the cyclists would go faster on ketones. In the end, none of this happened. The cyclists got tired and slower, but there was no difference between the ketone and placebo groups.

There are a few possible explanations. One is that the sample size was too small to pick up differences. Another is that eight days of racing more than three hours per day didn’t fatigue the cyclists enough for the benefits of ketones to show up. A further possibility is that, despite earlier promising studies, ketones simply don’t make a practical difference in the real world. At this point, we don’t know which of these is correct. But the results should put a ceiling on our expectations: even if ketones work to fight cumulative fatigue, the effect can’t be enormous or it would have shown up here.

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