Elite football duped by pseudoscience, says top performance director
Dr Claire-Marie Roberts warns that clubs waste millions on unproven recovery methods while ignoring basic nutrition and sleep.
What to know
- Elite football clubs routinely adopt unproven recovery methods like cryotherapy chambers despite minimal scientific evidence supporting their effectiveness.
- Dr Claire-Marie Roberts, a veteran performance director now at McLaren, argues that pseudoscientific marketing exploits players' desperation for performance shortcuts and that proven modalities like sleep and nutrition are being neglected.
- Even established practices such as whole-body cryotherapy may actively harm muscular adaptation rather than aid recovery, yet remain widespread across Premier League and European clubs.
“Most clubs have got cryotherapy chambers – most people cannot articulate to you why they use them, because there's no evidence for them apart from a very slim piece of work that says it might help prevent dementia.”
Dr Claire-Marie Roberts, Director of human performance, McLaren F1 · The Guardian ↗ · Sep 21
Dr Claire-Marie Roberts Performance director, McLaren F1
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Roberts argues cryotherapy may actively harm muscular adaptation
Roberts states that cryotherapy chambers lack meaningful evidence beyond a thin body of work suggesting possible dementia prevention. She contends the practice may actually blunt muscular adaptation and that sleep and nutrition are the evidence-backed recovery priorities that clubs should prioritize instead.
“There's a recent suggestion that cryotherapy might blunt muscular adaptation. When are you using it and why are you using it? If you're using it for recovery, sleep and nutrition are your best recovery modalities.”
— Dr Claire-Marie Roberts -
yeah--it's not a complete departure from treating inflammation, is my understanding. It's more a shift from treating inflammation as an unhelpful process that should be inhibited, to a productive part of healing that may/may not need to be managed.
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Dr Roberts warns of pseudoscience epidemic in elite football
Dr Claire-Marie Roberts, who spent nine years at the Premier League and recently joined McLaren as director of human performance, tells The Guardian that professional football is being systematically duped by unproven recovery and performance methods. She describes receiving up to 50 weekly LinkedIn pitches for dubious devices and supplements, and criticizes the prevalence of cryotherapy chambers that most practitioners cannot justify scientifically.
“It's the science-practice gap, which is widening in my experience. I think it's getting much worse. There's so much sparkly marketing behind all these things. It's bordering on exploitation.”
— Dr Claire-Marie Roberts -
first by Mastodon, 2d ago · also The Guardian Football, Guardian Sport
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