Causality and Correlation In The Fitness Industry

"Would you look like you run marathons?" Trains to run a marathon.


"Will you look lean and muscular, like Usain Bolt?" Train to be a sprinter.


"Do not you want to look long and as big as Shaquille O'Neal?" Train to play basketball.


Question:


Most people will see a problem with the third point, but not two. Too many people assume that because you train like your favorite athlete, would you like him or her. The problem is that learning to play basketball you can not make up as much as sprint training can make you look like an Olympic sprinter champion. How is this possible? Let me show you.


We have confused cause and effect link. The correlation between how the two are related. There is an inverse correlation with a factor increases the other decreases, and there is a positive correlation between where you are moving in the same direction.


Causality (cause and effect) is quite another thing. What often happens is not as lean and muscular, people sprinting trip, but people are often lean and ripped for sprinters! Basketball does not make you taller, but on the other hand, tall people tend to gravitate toward basketball. The same relationship in other areas.


For example, if an investigation shows that a vegetarian diet will increase your life expectancy by twenty percent, because there is no meat involved, we have confused correlation and causation. Yes, the long life correlates with a meatless diet, but they can not cause the other. What makes you probably live longer, have no shortage of meat, but the increase in vegetables!


Yoga is to increase your overall health, or is it more than those who do yoga tend to be middle and upper classes and have access to better food and medicine, and increase their health? This is certainly something to think about.


Solution:


Now I'm not saying we sit all day and think about what a billion possible explanations for everything that is found to be correlated. What I offer is a way to success by skepticism. Do not take everything you hear in the news as fact, because most studies are only observational. They discover that Concept 1 and Concept 2 occur together (correlation), not the concept causes a Concept 2 or vice versa (causality). Make sure when you read an opinion, you dive in over how the study was completed. If you read an article about a study, and it is not a citation, not even bother with it.