Knowledge is power but only if it leads to understanding. It is in this spirit of creating better and deeper understanding about health and fitness that DAREBEE guides are created. This is a brief explanation of the structure behind them for your own knowledge and awareness. Each guide is designed to be as comprehensive as possible, backed by research and as practical as possible. Each one addresses, usually, a specific question or subject be it abstract, like motivation, or more practical like how to put on muscle.
Like our workouts each guide starts out as an idea generated by a single person and is then worked on by several people, at least. We collect the science literature to see what studies show that back up or dispel the assertions usually associated with health and fitness. When we do look at studies we have some very specific criteria:
- Relevance. Each study we look at has to be as relevant as possible to the subject we are writing about.
- Recency. Though, on occasion, we may look at studies that are over twenty years old we, as a rule, look at the freshest, most comprehensive ones first on the understanding that science, its tools and our theories constantly evolve.
- Peer review. Every study we cite has been peer-reviewed and published in a field journal that has a good reputation and is historically responsible.
- Methodology. We analyze each study's methodology and breadth. A study, for instance, that has no control group (and there are some) or draws data from too narrow a pool to make greater assumptions or draw broad conclusions is of less value than one that has been structured in a more sound way. Having said this we also look carefully at what is being examined. While the tools at our disposal get better and better it is still difficult to ethically examine and test living human subjects so some studies, due to these restrictions, fall short of the methodology criteria we'd like to see applied for that reason but are still of good value.
- Expertise. We cite studies carried out by experts in their field because they tend to have a better grasp of the difficulties involved in studying their subject.
- Conflicts of interest. We tend to use studies that are not funded by special interest groups and are therefore academic in nature. That way we have greater confidence in their approach and they tend to be a lot less biased and stand the test of time.
Where necessary we revisit and update our guides to reflect the latest research. And sometimes, we retire a guide if it it no longer reflects accurate information as we recently did with "Alcohol and Training" for example.
Because each guide can take as long as three weeks to create from start to finish, each one also represents a sizeable investment in time and cost. We have, at the moment, over 130 guides and we have plans to double this number by the end of next year.
I've mentioned all this here so you are all more aware of the process and rigor we put in each one. Because we're not sponsored we can take as a well-balanced approach as possible that places knowledge and practicality above anything else.
If you have any questions or if there are some subjects you think we should cover do not hesitate to let me know below.
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There is a technical reason this happens. In the text of the article itself, when we do link to a source, the link is highlighted in the conventional way you'd expect. If we manage to find a workaround we will sort it obviously.
