For the 50th Training121 Blog article, we give you an insight into what exactly we do here and our philosophy when it comes to health and nutrition science communication.
Introduction
Since September 2022, we’ve been working hard to provide you with health, exercise, and nutrition science content that you can rely on. Since then, we have accumulated many articles aimed at providing you with information that can either improve your health, performance, or critical thinking skills. Owing to my diverse background in sports science, public health, and nutrition, we cover quite a wide scope of topics (Figure 1).
Figure 1. A snapshot of the topics we have covered on the blog thus far.
While we will continue to provide a range of content, the main focus will always be nutrition science, as this is the field in which I work and am an active researcher.
A Public Service
This blog was formed, first and foremost, as a public service for our Training121 community. Every article is free to read, and it will stay that way. One of the pillars of our business is to provide value in everything we do, and the blog is a way for us to repay the loyalty shown by our members. A secondary aim of the blog is to provide value to people beyond our close community, to those who may have never worked with us. We want to be a beacon of clarity in the often confusing online health and nutrition space.
The Training121 Blog is a public service for our community.
We aim to achieve this by offering evidence-based ways to improve in many aspects of life. Whether that’s by improving your health or performance through diet, improving your sleep, or even your mental health, we’re committed to providing a go-to resource for the public good.
Our Philosophy
Our approach to communicating science is very much centred on the three following principles:
Accessibility
Usefulness
Criticality
Accessibility
It’s crucial that you can understand the information that we share. There’s no point in sharing potentially useful information if it’s not understandable. Therefore, we try our best to communicate in the language of you, the reader. And where complicated terms are introduced, we define them in our ‘Technical Terms’ section at the end of our articles (after 'References').
Usefulness
Once the content is understandable, we always strive to ensure that it’s useful. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the information is directly practical, or implementable into your daily routine. But what it does mean is that you can take away something new from each article, be that a better appreciation of a topic, a better understanding of how to interpret science, or, indeed, something practical that can change your health or performance for the better.
Criticality
We always try to impart a critical thinking mindset through how we share scientific information. In essence, we want to teach you how to think, not just what to think. A good example of this is last week’s blog, where we armed you with tools to better interpret whether a food can be thought of as ‘healthy’ or ‘unhealthy’. To paraphrase the Nobel-prize winning physicist, Richard Feynman, knowledge gained through rote learning is fragile; instead, we want to impart a robust set of skills, and knowledge, to our readers.
Our Promise to You
As long as you keep showing up here to read, we’ll keep writing. We’ll always aim to ensure that our content is created in line with our guiding principles and is science-based and transparent.
Summary
We are so grateful for everyone who checks in here week after week—thank you for supporting what we do. We are committed to continue to arm you with the tools to be healthier, perform better, and think more critically. If you want to show further support, we would be grateful if you signed up to our mailing list so you never miss our articles.
As always, if you want supplemental football training to improve as a footballer, reach out to our team of expert coaches at [email protected] to get started.
That’s it for this week, we’ll see you here next week for another learning opportunity!
Patrick Elliott, BSc, MPH
Health and Nutrition Science Communication Officer at Training121
Instagram: @just.health.info
Twitter: @PatrickElliott0