300th post: revisitng intuitiveness and sports science

Talk about counter-intuative:



When I was a young'un playing baseball, on the on-deck circle I would practice swinging a bat with a weight on the tip. When I was up to bat, the weight-less bat felt incredibly light and I felt like I could swing much harder.



Well, someone went ahead and actually tested whether practicing with a weighted bat actually made a difference to your swing in the batter's box. It turns out that it actually slows you down rather than speeds you up. If you want to swing faster, you actually have to practice with a lighter bat, not a heavier one.

Now, swinging faster doesn't necessarily mean you'll hit better. It may, for example, be detrimental to your accuracy. But, what I find fascinating is that, from personal experience, it certainly feels like you're swinging a normally weighted bat twice as fast if you've just practiced with a weighted bat. And this is likely why baseball players have practiced on the on-deck circle with weighted bats since... well who knows since when, but they do it all the time (see photo above).

I fucking love science, and I'm especially becoming enamored with Sports Science. I heard on the BBC radio station earlier this week an obituary for one of the first Sports scientists in the UK. A fellow, whose name I forget, who did his PhD in the sixties on how football (soccer) players injure themselves. He was also an expert on altitude effects on athletes, which is on a lot of Europeans' minds these days as the world cup next year will be held in South Africa, where many of the stadiums are significantly above sea level.

Sports science doesn't even have to be psycho-physical or biomedical in nature. It can be about counter-intuitive statistics as the 60 minutes video below will explain:



I suspect there's a general intuition that academics who excel in the science fields are likely to be nerds who care little for sports. Maybe that intuition is accurate of the mean, we'd need more data to find out if that's true, but some of the most interesting things happen when science moves into new territories which are typically not noted for drawing scientists.