First, it’s Stanford, which is the TOP DOG in science. However, they don’t say professor or PhD under anyone’s name, they just put “Biology” which is again very vague. A Biology department is an umbrella for multiple institutes and programs. So again I wonder if this is an exercise science thing.Doing something like this isn’t cheap. Just looking at the equipment they have I can assure you the money to do this is on the order of hundreds of thousands. My guess is it’s privately funded by biotech venture capitalists, who want to sell this. My guess….

Thanks for the insight here!

As a science student at the graduate level, I can speak on a couple other things I caught in this video that everyone should also understand. The older gent, Heller, said extracting heat from one hand can “dramatically improve performance.” This is a phrase which, to be frank, has zero meaning in the scientific world. In science, we look to produce a STATISTICALLY SIGNIFICANT change in the measured variable.  In lamens terms, this generally means the change in performance must be so large that the statistical calculations predict there is less than a 5% chance it happened just by the random nature of life. LESS THAN 5% ! And it’s possible that this type of study might even demand a change  between the control (no cooling glove) and experimental condition (with cooling glove) so great that there is less than 1%, or even 0.5% chance that it was by random chance. In other words, “dramatically improve performance” has no meaning, because the word dramatic means different things to different people. The stats might sound confusing, but they can be explained quickly in a way everyone understands.

The second thing I wanted to mention is the idea that the “rates of conditioning improvement”.. “are much higher” than what’s been published on steroids. On a side note, when most people hear “steroids,” they generally think of illegal/black-market steroids, which are dangerous and can result in permanent changes to mood, personality, metabolism, and sexual viability. So part of me thinks it’s absurd they would even make this comparison. With that aside, it seems like an even more worthless comparison to make, because any good scientific publication would have compared rates of conditioning improvement in natural athletes, and steroid-supplemented athletes. HOWEVER, taking steroids alone does very little without an substantial increase in dietary intake. The body has to adhere to these things called the laws of thermodynamics. Muscle doesn’t just materialize out of nowhere… the body can receive steroid signals to grow, but it still needs the biological energy and physical matter from food to create new tissue. The problem here is that good scientists only change ONE variable in their experiments, so measuring the performance of a natural athlete and an athlete who is taking steroids and a high calorie diet provides uninformative data because there is nothing to say the improve performance was from the steroids or the food. 

I think it’s a cool video and I’m not calling shenanigans… skepticism is a powerful ally in the pursuit of science.