Our vision

Our vision

Welcome to The Science of Sport!

This site was 'born' at the end of April 2007 as our attempt to give Sports Science and Exercise Physiology a broader appeal, while at the same time providing a site where people could be educated and learn about physiology and exercise performance.

Science without application is really nothing more than stamp collecting, and so we really wanted to give everyone the opportunity to appreciate the physiology and science of performance in a real sense. The aim was to take relevant and interesting (to us, anyway!) topics in sports science and apply them to every one who has every taken part in sport at any level.

We quickly evolved into a news site, and as we stand today, we have two distinct categories of posts:

One is our physiology series, where we try to summarize sports science literature and make it "conversation-worthy" for you. Hopefully, it helps your training, or at least ignites your interest in physiology and science.

Our second type of post is a news story, where we try to add our insights into sports events and current affairs. Our method is to take sports news and try to give you the second, third and fourth level of insight that you can't get from the popular media. These posts are necessarily opinionated, for they reflect our view of sports, based on evidence, which is where we'd like to think we differentiate our coverage from the news sites. Their purpose is to apply a more intellectual approach to debates, to seek discussion and clarity, and to peel away the "mystery" and explain why things happen the way they do.

In other words, you can pick up your local paper or read the sports news on the internet, and they will tell you WHAT happened. Our aim is to fill in the blanks, and try to explain HOW, WHY, WHERE and WHEN it happened, to give that level of insight that we hope can't be found anywhere else!

We're both very interested in cycling and running, in particular. You can read our bios here. We try to cover the range of sports and events, but we do have a natural bias towards these two sports.

I (Ross) have always been a "big picture" thinker (or try to be!), and I think it's really important to pull together interests and information from a wide range of sources. My other qualification is sports management, and the marriage between business, science and sport, especially as applied to sports performance, is my own particular goal. If scientists tend to look at only one square of the chess board, and business another, my goal is to step back and show you the whole board.

We are also both active and qualified coaches, Ross for running and Jonathan for cycling. Our ultimate goal is to apply the science and physiology, and there is no better means to do this than through coaching.

We look forward to much debate and discussion on our posts this year!