Fitness Tech Day #3 – Examine.com’s Supplement-Goals Reference Guide
How else can I review Examine.com’s new productwithout being super objective? Kidding aside, when I first heard of Examine.com’s efforts of documenting and reading research on supplements, I cringed – the mere thought of sifting through thousands of documents and articles in order to decipher the “truth” about supplements is difficult to do, let alone imagining the amount of hours spent at night on PubMed made me want to crawl into a fetal position and cry.
The reality of the situation is that if you want to improve or enhance a certain feature within yourself, whether it is psychosomatic or physique related, you might utilize Google and its search engine features. And when you do utilize the amazingness that is the internet, you get several million hits – all contrasting in terms of advice. Run, don’t run. Eat red meat. Go vegan. Don’t eat wheat. Run from this organic broccoli.
Can you imagine trying to distill the amount of noise that is involved with supplements?
As a coach and trainer, I am often sourced for nutritional and dietary advice. While I can give the basics, knowing everything there is to know about every supplement is tasking just thinking about it.
Is fish oil good for you? How much?
Which vitamins should I take?
Is whey protein good to take?
In reality, the purpose of supplementation is to do that – supplement. It shouldn’t be difficult, and the folks at Examine.com developed what seems to be their magnumopus in regards to research on the world of supplements. They have done what no one else has done – created order amidst the chaos that is information overload from the internet and various studies.
Examine.com is an “independent compendium on supplementation and nutrition. Founded in early 2011, they have one goal – to be the unbiased source for supplements and nutrition.
How is Examine’s Reference Guide different than their website?
Straight from the horse’s mouth:
And this isn’t haphazardly thrown together by any means. They utilize human studies and look at research on quite literally every supplement – from alcohol to yohimbine.
The most resourceful aspect of this is guide is two-fold: the prioritization of supplements and their varying effects on the human body, along with the logistical organization of qualities that you may want to pursue in your health and fitness endeavors.
If you’re interested in decreasing your fat mass, there’s a subheading for that. Or if you’re looking to increase memory or the ability to remember things, there is also a subheading for that. This is one aspect that may be the most helpful of the resource, as some of you may be more interested in learning how to lose more fat, as opposed to learning the finer details of creatine on power production.
It might be facetious to believe that every aspect of the human body can be solved via supplements, similar to the snake oil salesmen of past generations. It should be noted that Examine.com goes out of the way to explain what the supplements’ effects are, along with including the studies that determined these effects. No snake oil salesmen are getting through without being researched and dissected by Examine.com.
The Examine.com Supplements-Goals Reference Guide would oust this in a jiffy.
My only very minor complaint is that there is a bit of a learning curve involved with using the reference as the guide, and if you’re like me and you automatically skip directions and get to the meat of the story, the amount of tables seems a bit overwhelming. So don’t do what I did and skip the beginning of the book – read the intro and you’ll save a few minutes of head scratching.
While I’m at it, forgive me for taking things apart and trying to put them back together again without reading the directions.
At the end of the day, it comes down to admitting your strengths and weaknesses. My focus at the moment is on postural adaptations claimed from strength training and its various subtopics. I can’t claim to know everything about nutrition, or supplements in this case, and chances are if you ask me what supplements to take, I’ll refer to this guide to look up the answer.
For only $29, with literally over 700 pages of information backed by evidence and studies, the folks at Examine.com have certainly created a monster project that will shake up the way both professionals like myself and regular folk view supplements.
I will have to be completely transparent: I do get a small commission if you purchase by clicking my link. But at the same time it is alright if you just straight up purchase it from anyone else – good information is good information.
