[duncan]

Exercises utilising some kind of instability are popular in climbing. Is there anything more to them than novelty and fun? Gymnasts are awesome, so should we train like gymnasts? Are “ instability” exercises better in some way ? I'm interested to hear people’s experiences and if they know of any research evidence to back them up.

From a theoretical perspective I doubt if instability exercises work better for climbers at improving performance or injury prevention than exercises more closely related to climbing. I couldn't find much evidence in a brief search. If you do bench presses (with a trivial 9kg weight) on a gym ball you get greater trunk muscle recruitment https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17530936. You could just increase the weight to achieve the same goal of course...
Exercising with a wobbly support may feel harder for the same weight but means your maximum possible effort won't be as hard: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22692120
Similar results: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20072068
“The findings provide little support (sic!) for training with a lighter load using unstable loads or unstable surfaces”.

Rings and TRX exercises are ‘open chain’, unstable distally. Ring exercises are supposed to increase trunk and shoulder girdle strength and “stability”. I'm sure they can be used as strength exercises, but so can other exercises more specific to climbing. These type of exercises derive much of their difficulty from this ‘wobblyness’. I'm not convinced making the distal point of contact wobbly in training helps when your point of contact performing is rock-steady, for the reasons above.


What about improving stability? We've recently shown long-term intensive instability training (wearing rocker-sole shoes >4 hours daily for 6 months) has no effect on trunk stability when testing on a steady surface. http://bmjopensem.bmj.com/content/2/1/e000170  This seems to me to be analogous to ring training for climbing: training with wobbilness doesn't effect performance when you're not wobbly.

Climbing is a closed chain, distally stable activity, so if you want use gymnastic exercises perhaps use bars and the floor rather than rings?

[TobyD]

Exercises utilising some kind of instability are popular in climbing. Is there anything more to them than novelty and fun?
...
Climbing is a closed chain, distally stable activity, so if you want use gymnastic exercises perhaps use bars and the floor rather than rings?

Good post Duncan, my feeling is that i pretty much agree with you. I think that instability exercise is going to be most useful to very highly trained individuals who may start to see diminishing returns from very specific exercises, and who need a different stimulus to gain any more improvement. Subjectively, i've seen very little crossover from ability on rings to rock performance. I used to climb a bit years ago with a girl who could do full iron cross in the rings without trying that hard; she climbed about HVS as far as i remember.

The thing is, everyone loves a new toy, (I'm certainly not immune) and their popularity is surely partly to do with this. If it is a motivational kick, great, if it takes out time from specific climbing exercise, I'd agree with your contention that they are a pretty ineffectual way to train and callisthenics would be better. Callisthenics are generally quite boring though...
I generally do stuff like this when my skin is knackered, I have an injury, or too pumped  / powered out to do any more climbing. However, I wonder whether easy aerocap or just quitting at that point might be a more effective strategy?

[mrjonathanr]

TRX is good for prehab
Rings aren't just about instability though. Shoulder joints are massively leveraged in most ring positions, that's a question of strength.

[jwi]

Short answer. The exercise ball has worked for me, and some other climbers. When I say worked, I meant improvements that led to an increase in bouldering grade (that's the only measure I find interesting). For some it seems to have worked better than deadlifts/squats. Longer answer coming.

[Oldmanmatt]

I'm at work, shorthanded due to people calling in sick, so a bit ham strung answering.

I'd argue strongly for unstable training from the Proprioception perspective as a complimentary regimen alongside more specific work. I have a Meta on that somewhere that I will look out when I've more than a coffee break available.

I'm not a fan of the TRX except as a progression to ring work.

After my shoulder injury I set about rebuilding girdle strength and the rings gave me an incredible lift in that area. I've always trained hard and been strong but this has given me an edge previously missing. It has translated to an undeniable return to form and recovery for me, climbing wise.

As a side note, and I get the climbing irrelevance of it; but I only train bench press on the rings (weighted press ups), but test in the Gym. I went from BW (75kg) to a PB of 118kg from Jan '16to Sept '16. I credit that to  much improved shoulder stability from the ring work.
Also true for hangs, campus and board work.
I'm still failing outdoors, but at the start of 2016 I was failing at 7A, now failing 7C, so make of that as you will...


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[Nibile]

Training on unstable surfaces could be good for CNS quick reaction and adaptment, and for propioception, but does little or nothing for strength.
As everything, it can be of some help for climbing, but not much in my opinion.
In any case, I would separate TRX and rings training from BOSU balls and other instability tools. The first two work because they force you to stabilize an unstable tool, while BOSU balls and similar tools work because they force you to continuous micro adaptments to your equilibrium.

[Oldmanmatt]

From a theoretical perspective I doubt if instability exercises work better for climbers at improving performance or injury prevention than exercises more closely related to climbing. I couldn't find much evidence in a brief search.
......

Rings and TRX exercises are ‘open chain’, unstable distally. Ring exercises are supposed to increase trunk and shoulder girdle strength and “stability”. I'm sure they can be used as strength exercises, but so can other exercises more specific to climbing. These type of exercises derive much of their difficulty from this ‘wobblyness’. I'm not convinced making the distal point of contact wobbly in training helps when your point of contact performing is rock-steady, for the reasons above.


What about improving stability? We've recently shown long-term intensive instability training (wearing rocker-sole shoes >4 hours daily for 6 months) has no effect on trunk stability when testing on a steady surface. http://bmjopensem.bmj.com/content/2/1/e000170  This seems to me to be analogous to ring training for climbing: training with wobbilness doesn't effect performance when you're not wobbly.

Climbing is a closed chain, distally stable activity, so if you want use gymnastic exercises perhaps use bars and the floor rather than rings?

As another coffee break thought.

I think describing climbing as a "stable" activity is inaccurate, inasmuch as anything so dynamic and involving such a variety of body positions, tensions, prehensions etc etc (or simply "3D"), requires activation of so many more muscle groups per "session" than a great many sports (in fact I can't think of any sport? Judo?).

Yes, greater strength gains can be achieved through traditional methods, but those gains tend to be within a single plane of motion, surely? Or to put that another way, there is a reason Pull Up strength doesn't convert directly to climbing ability, or FB hangs, or Campusing.

I'd also point out that the reason the rings are so hard to master is that three axis, distal instability, requires a good deal of strength to control. Just as a thought experiment, it seems hard to imagine that as a negative, when transferred to climbing?

I see less correlation to climbing, with all its odd positions, with Muscle-ups, say, or Arm curls. Not that there aren't carry overs from those, just that climbing rarely involves such single plain motions.




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[abarro81]

Useless anecdote but I feel like press-ups on rings are way better for not tweaking the front of my shoulder than normal press-ups.

[Oldmanmatt]

That Meta I mentioned (hopefully) in PDF:

https://brage.bibsys.no/xmlui//bitstream/handle/11250/279729/AndersenBJSM2014.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

Which looks at injury prevention.

In case that doesn't work, their conclusions:

"CONCLUSION
In general, physical activity was shown to effectively reduce sports injuries. Stretching proved no beneficial effect, whereas multiple exposure programmes, proprioception training, and strength training, in that order, showed a tendency towards increasing effect. Strength training reduced sports injuries to less than one-third. We advocate that multiple exposure interven- tions should be constructed on the basis of well-proven single exposures and that further research into single exposures, par- ticularly strength training, remains crucial. Both acute and overuse injuries could be significantly reduced, overuse injuries by almost a half. Apart from a few outlying studies, consistently favourable estimates were obtained for all injury prevention measures except for stretching. "

This suggests to me that the proprioception aspects of unstable training are desirable?
As in controlling a ring has some analogy to controlling a slip, or a swing, whilst climbing?

More so than the ball or wobble table, I would think (applying Engineering head)?

Edit:

I meant to say, would you not think that Instability exercises provide a "short cut" to the Multiple Exposure Programme?

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[dave]

There's loads of very beneficial stuff you can do on rings that you can't practically do on anything else. I'd wager everyone's mate who's "amazing on rings but shit on rock" doesn't suffer from the same recurring elbow/shoulder complaints the rest of us do.

[Oldmanmatt]

The two best people on rock, that I am very familiar with their training regimen; are also shit-hot on the rings. Elis came to climbing from high level Gymnastics and Ed got good on the rings since starting climbing.
In fact, come to think of it, all of the really good climbers I know train extensively on the rings.


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[abarro81]

As a counterpoint, I know lots of very good climbers who don't use them or barely use them.

[Oldmanmatt]

As a counterpoint, I know lots of very good climbers who don't use them or barely use them.

Aahhh...

But could they?

It's a mystery [emoji317]


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[TobyD]

As a counterpoint, I know lots of very good climbers who don't use them or barely use them.

Indeed. Very good climbers with too much spare time and no jobs may well have time to piss about on rings. I've noticed the ones with proper jobs perhaps don't do so much...

I'm not saying they're useless....

Leaving aide the physiological pro's and con's, for people who want to train at home, a set of rings is a very simple apparatus to locate and install. And easy height adjustability means they can be used for a reasonable variety of strength exercises.

this is the main reason i use things like this.
doing a few ring exercises is probably more beneficial than drinking tea or watching tv, (I have no documentary evidence of this). It's probably not as beneficial to most people as a bit more pulling really hard on some small holds...

[Oldmanmatt]

Toby, you can't just train for a sport by performing that sport. That's not how any high level athlete trains in any sport. Obviously, that's how you get better at a particular activity, but it's also a recipe for injury and imbalance, surely.[emoji6]
I'm expecting you to put down the weights and lock up the bike and Turbo right now! Nothing for you except the board, sunshine! [emoji13][emoji12]🤡


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[Oldmanmatt]

So, got home from work at 22:30 and still awake at 03:00.
Finally read those papers. Overall I don't find it convincingly negative.
No one suggests that such exercise is a replacement for "normal" strength training, (climbing or otherwise) do they? It is something to be used adjunct to surely?

Exercises utilising some kind of instability are popular in climbing. Is there anything more to them than novelty and fun? Gymnasts are awesome, so should we train like gymnasts? Are “ instability” exercises better in some way ? I'm interested to hear people’s experiences and if they know of any research evidence to back them up.

Well, I think the Exercise intervention paper would suggest some significant benefits...

From a theoretical perspective I doubt if instability exercises work better for climbers at improving performance or injury prevention than exercises more closely related to climbing. I couldn't find much evidence in a brief search. If you do bench presses (with a trivial 9kg weight) on a gym ball you get greater trunk muscle recruitment https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17530936. You could just increase the weight to achieve the same goal of course...
Exercising with a wobbly support may feel harder for the same weight but means your maximum possible effort won't be as hard: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22692120
Similar results: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20072068
“The findings provide little support (sic!) for training with a lighter load using unstable loads or unstable surfaces”.

The max were 92 and 93% of the 6RM for the two unstable platforms, with greater core engagement. 6RM is a significant amount, it definitely falls into the Strength training end of the spectrum, will have performance increasing effect and engages core more than the stable platform. This is negative evidence of benefit? Of course, this exercise is antagonistic to most climbing moves, so limited carry over, except in shoulder girdle strength.

Rings and TRX exercises are ‘open chain’, unstable distally. Ring exercises are supposed to increase trunk and shoulder girdle strength and “stability”. I'm sure they can be used as strength exercises, but so can other exercises more specific to climbing. These type of exercises derive much of their difficulty from this ‘wobblyness’. I'm not convinced making the distal point of contact wobbly in training helps when your point of contact performing is rock-steady, for the reasons above.

I think instability is analogous to climbing (personally, I think distal more so) Point of contact might be rock steady, but you aren't. Particularly when things go wrong. Unstable training is aimed more at injury prevention, rather than strength development, no? Again, adjunct to, it would seem useful. Again I think of arresting a swing or similar.

What about improving stability? We've recently shown long-term intensive instability training (wearing rocker-sole shoes >4 hours daily for 6 months) has no effect on trunk stability when testing on a steady surface. http://bmjopensem.bmj.com/content/2/1/e000170  This seems to me to be analogous to ring training for climbing: training with wobbilness doesn't effect performance when you're not wobbly.

Was anyone surprised that those shoes didn't work? Never enough instability for one and people just modified their gait to compensate, surely?
Now, put one of a set of twins on a ship, at sea, in heavy weather, for a month and monitor their core activation and I'll bet it's significantly high than their twin waltzing around the streets of London over the same period. Beneficial to lower back pain. Probably not. Actually used to give me serious gyp after a few days. No, a combination of weighted Dorsal raises, Weighted Wipers, Wtd Toe to bars, wtd Push away flies (similar to IYT's) and levers (various) have kept my back sweet and core solid.

N=1, I know.

Climbing is a closed chain, distally stable activity, so if you want use gymnastic exercises perhaps use bars and the floor rather than rings?

It's only closed chain when in a stable, multi contact condition. As soon as it becomes unbalanced by releasing a point of contact (slip) or during a move, it becomes very unstable.
I think this is where there is closer analogy to the distally unstable exercise. In a bench press, on either a stable or unstable surface; the hands are "locked"  together by the bar and so always act in concert and there is no (less, to be fair) requirement to hold/correct lateral displacement  (in the Sagittal plane) of the load.
When moving or slipping in climbing, loads must be controlled in all three planes, Sagittal, Coronal and Transverse. This control is exerted over a point of contact distal to the body, for all practical purposes it matters not if the body moves relative to the rock or vice-versa; it is a relative motion. This is analogous to, say, Dumbbell presses or Press ups on the rings (also because in both cases, the load is brought across the body to meet at the Sternum line). The fact that these are "Pushing" exercises is less important than the rapid engaging and disengaging of the deep muscles around the principle joints as they act to steady the load?

Please note the question marks in the above and take any apparent assertion as suggestions to be debated.


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[duncan]

Climbing is a closed chain, distally stable activity, so if you want use gymnastic exercises perhaps use bars and the floor rather than rings?

It's only closed chain when in a stable, multi contact condition. As soon as it becomes unbalanced by releasing a point of contact (slip) or during a move, it becomes very unstable.
I think this is where there is closer analogy to the distally unstable exercise. In a bench press, on either a stable or unstable surface; the hands are "locked"  together by the bar and so always act in concert and there is no (less, to be fair) requirement to hold/correct lateral displacement  (in the Sagittal plane) of the load.
When moving or slipping in climbing, loads must be controlled in all three planes, Sagittal, Coronal and Transverse. This control is exerted over a point of contact distal to the body, for all practical purposes it matters not if the body moves relative to the rock or vice-versa; it is a relative motion. This is analogous to, say, Dumbbell presses or Press ups on the rings (also because in both cases, the load is brought across the body to meet at the Sternum line). The fact that these are "Pushing" exercises is less important than the rapid engaging and disengaging of the deep muscles around the principle joints as they act to steady the load?

[duncan]

Climbing is a closed chain, distally stable activity, so if you want use gymnastic exercises perhaps use bars and the floor rather than rings?

It's only closed chain when in a stable, multi contact condition. As soon as it becomes unbalanced by releasing a point of contact (slip) or during a move, it becomes very unstable.
I think this is where there is closer analogy to the distally unstable exercise. In a bench press, on either a stable or unstable surface; the hands are "locked"  together by the bar and so always act in concert and there is no (less, to be fair) requirement to hold/correct lateral displacement  (in the Sagittal plane) of the load.
When moving or slipping in climbing, loads must be controlled in all three planes, Sagittal, Coronal and Transverse. This control is exerted over a point of contact distal to the body, for all practical purposes it matters not if the body moves relative to the rock or vice-versa; it is a relative motion. This is analogous to, say, Dumbbell presses or Press ups on the rings (also because in both cases, the load is brought across the body to meet at the Sternum line). The fact that these are "Pushing" exercises is less important than the rapid engaging and disengaging of the deep muscles around the principle joints as they act to steady the load?

Thanks for taking the time to answer Matt. I'll follow up some of your other points later after I've done some real work.

I totally agree with your (and Lore's) point about climbing being highly unstable and the importance of muscles 'switching on and off' rapidly (slapping, foot slips). Rings don't really encourage this though do they? The movements are relatively (compared to latching a dyno) slow and controlled. Scuttling around on all fours might encourage switching on/off better but it's deeply uncool and will never catch on! 

[mctrials23]

Thanks for taking the time to answer Matt. I'll follow up some of your other points later after I've done some real work.

I totally agree with your (and Lore's) point about climbing being highly unstable and the importance of muscles 'switching on and off' rapidly (slapping, foot slips). Rings don't really encourage this though do they? The movements are relatively (compared to latching a dyno) slow and controlled. Scuttling around on all fours might encourage switching on/off better but it's deeply uncool and will never catch on!

They train the stabilising muscles that would normally be ignored in a more linear training motion. These are the muscles that allow you to halt the progression of momentum in a lot of cases, whether it be a foot slip or an intentional cut loose.

I think the biggest gain aside from that is obviously injury prevention however.

[Fultonius]

Guys - I'm noticing a lot of "I think this, therefore that" and  "I did this, then this changed"...but not a lot of hard evidence for some of the claims such as:

• Injury Prevention
• Climbing Grade Improvement

I suppose there can't be any argument against "availability"  -i.e. you could train your shoulders using, for example, weights, to the same level as you might achieve with rings - but rings are less faff than having a full weights set in your shed and if they "float your boat" then you are much more likely to use them. Whether they are objectively "better" than other methodologies seems unproven (Caveat, I have done no research on this - just noticing the lack of references form the "pro" camp).

[Oldmanmatt]

There was something else though. Both of the Electromyography papers cited, have some major limitations.

Both used Surface Electromyography and therefore only saw activation of the superficial muscles.
My understanding of Unstable exercise was it's intention to increase activation of the deep, stabilising, muscles. In these cases (and in general for our discussion of "climbing" benefits) the muscles of the Rotator cuff? None of which can be monitored by this method, being masked by the Superficial prime movers?

Both studies were "one off" sessions, they looked only at a single session per subject. There was no progressive monitoring or attempt to progress using unstable exercise over time etc. No indication of how much the subjects had trained for the exercise and no indication of how discomfort in the exercise, due to unfamiliarity, might have influenced the effort engaged, ie were they nervous hold a weight on an unstable surface.

There are better studies of the overall effects, here's one Meta:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3325639/pdf/ijspt-07-226.pdf

With findings such as:

"All mea- sures improved over time for both the unstable and stable trained groups. In the Sparkes and Behm study,15 there was a trend (p=0.08) for the unstable training group to increase unstable forces to a greater extent. In other words, the instability-trained subjects could exert greater forces when experiencing an unstable environment. "

Or:

"Based on the near linear force-EMG relationship, muscle activation correlates well with force output.27 If with moderate instability, force is depressed but activation is not substantially affected; according to the force-EMG relation, there must be a force compo- nent missing. The similar extent of muscle activation accompanied by decreased force with instability exercises when compared to traditional RT exercises suggests that the dynamic motive forces of the mus- cles (the ability to apply external force) may be trans- ferred into greater stabilizing functions (greater emphasis on isometric contractions).4 "

Although again, it's not an attempt to correlate two (or more) training regimen over time and contrast the results in terms of both absolute strength gains, susceptibility to injury and overall rate of performance increase (ie, would those on the unstable variant(s) learn how to activate and move more resistance/increase prime mover activation etc).
That would seem to be the real nub.


As regards the rings, the stability and therefore switching is a function of your ability to control the load. If it's easy to control, the load is too low (press ups in particular).

But, again, I think there is no one magic bullet and personally, in my own N=1 trials; I know my shoulder strength and (therefore) my all round ability has improved from where it was pre-injury. I have a long road ahead to recover finger strength to my prime, but that's not the discussion. The principal difference in my programme now is the introduction of ring work, otherwise it's made up of all the same old Callisthenics and bar work, that it's always been.
And I'm serious about progressing rapidly in bench press performance, simply by doing ever increasing resistance press ups on the rings. So there must be an increase in absolute strength.


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[slackline]

Both of the Electromyography papers cited, have some major limitations.

Common problem in all of these studies is the tiny sample size and the effect sizes (differences) that are estimated from them are also often small, repeat the study in a similarly small sample size and your just as likely to see the same effect size......but in the opposite direction.  This stems from sampling from a population and the only useful way to address it is to conduct larger studies because as useful as meta-analyses are they suffer from variation being introduced between the studies using different protocols.

"All mea- sures improved over time for both the unstable and stable trained groups. In the Sparkes and Behm study,15 there was a trend (p=0.08) for the unstable training group to increase unstable forces to a greater extent. In other words, the instability-trained subjects could exert greater forces when experiencing an unstable environment. "

P-values should only ever be reported after the size of the effect being quantified is stated, which can be found in the table of the meta-analysis but its damn lazy to write the above as a p-value alone does not quantify in anyway an effect or trend in any direction.  For more on p-values see Statistical tests, P values, confidence intervals, and power: a guide to misinterpretations.

Whilst sample sizes are small in all the included studies, the summary table makes the mistake of treating them all as equal rather than using a weighted (artihmetic) mean.

[Paul B]

(Caveat, I have done no research on this - just noticing the lack of references form the "pro" camp).

I'm not sure what's expected here much beyond anecdotal evidence?

Like others have said, a set of rings gives  versatility in terms of exercises (offset pull-ups / dips / rows) that you simply can't get without a fair amount of bars/equipment (unless you fancy getting all Bartendaz at a local kids playground). They're easy to mount and easy to transport. Also, like bands or cables, you can subject a muscle group to sustained load rather than a bicep curl with a traditional dumbbell.

Personally, I started using rings as my shoulders felt very unstable on steep ground; anecdotally it helped. However, at the time (and the source of much amusement to a few people on here), whilst I was climbing well on (steep) boards, I couldn't hold a basic L-sit in a support which has always led me to question how transferable many of the exercises are/were. I've found walk-downs (pinching two good holds on a steep board and walking feet progressively lower on poor footholds) seems to work better (for me) than level progressions (pointing your feet at something unsurprisingly doesn't seem to be the same as pushing through the feet).

[Oldmanmatt]

(Caveat, I have done no research on this - just noticing the lack of references form the "pro" camp).

Gimme a break! [emoji12]
Have you seen how many papers are cited in that last Meta I linked to? I'm gonna be reading for the next month, then I need a few days for my Confirmation bias to select the ones I want to cite...

🤡[emoji56]


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[Oldmanmatt]

Ok starting with the cited paper from the quote above...



"Instability devices are popular training modalities; however, their training effectiveness has not been well established. The objective of this study was to determine differences in physiological and performance measures after stable and unstable resistance training. Eighteen subjects (10 men and 8 women) resistance trained 3 d wk21 under either stable or unstable conditions for 8 weeks. Pre and posttraining measures included chest press isometric force and electro- myographic activity of the triceps brachii and pectoralis major under stable and unstable conditions and 1-legged throwing distance, balance, countermovement jump (CMJ) and drop jump (DJ) heights. There were no significant training group effects found with any measure. However, there was a tendency (p = 0.06) for the unstable training group to improve the stable to unstable chest press force ratio to a greater degree (24.8%) than the stable group (10.8%). There were significant overall pre to posttraining improvements in maximum voluntary isometric contraction (MVIC) force (13.3%: p , 0.0001), unstable/stable force (18.2%: p = 0.0005), bench press (11%: p , 0.0001), squat (14.9%: p , 0.0001), CMJs (11.2%: p = 0.002), and DJs (3.3%: p = 0.001), wobble board contacts (12.4%: p = 0.03), and wobble board on–off ratios (62%: p = 0.005). There was a significant (p , 0.0001) 42.2% greater MVIC force and 43.2 and 33.2% greater triceps (p = 0.003) and pectoral (p = 0.005) neuromuscular efficiency with stable vs. unstable isometric chest press. It appears that instability resistance training, which reportedly uses lower forces, can increase strength and balance in previously untrained young individuals similar to training with more stable machines employing heavier loads."

Which seems quite good to me?
Link to the above.

http://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/46029029/Training_Adaptations_Associated_With_an_20160528-7866-mk8x3x.pdf?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAJ56TQJRTWSMTNPEA&Expires=1483460016&Signature=SME2Nwxxu1bWmD%2B9TDpHmw%2FRhtc%3D&response-content-disposition=inline%3B%20filename%3DTraining_Adaptations_Associated_With_an.pdf

And another:

  Cowley PM, Sforzo GA, Swensen T. Efficacy of instability resistance training. Int. J. Sports Med. 2007;10:829-835

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Tom_Swensen/publication/274969970_The_Effects_Of_Resistance_Training_With_A_Stability_Ball/links/5641fec508ae24cd3e42aaf1.pdf

Though, essentially, my crack about confirmation bias is unfortunately far from inaccurate. I think you could "prove" whatever you want here.
My gut, then, is to go along with that Meta I linked to (Behm et al), Slackers points not withstanding, and remain unchanged in opinion.

But the Jury aren't done hearing evidence yet, let alone out.

In the best traditions of internet science discussion, I feel like it's good.

Hey! That's good enough for the Homeopathy, Antivax, Theistic crowd; so why not?
(That couldn't be more sarcastic if it was delivered by Tim Minchin, on speed, on a bad hair day).

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