Good to Go by Christie Aschwanden

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Christie Aschwanden’s Good to Go, is subtitled “How to eat, rest, sleep and rest like a champion” but it could easily have been subtitled as the sports science version of https://callingbullshit.org/

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There’s more than a lifetime’s reading of books on training to achieve better performance as an athlete across sports but there’s not a comparable body of work on recovery. And that’s with good reason - It is really hard to figure out what works and not too many have bothered trying to find out. Should you take that pre-workout drink that all your friends are taking? Should you buy that special set of socks that your rivals are swearing by? What about those post-race ice baths and massages?

Christie boldly steps in where not many have dared to and examines claims from manufacturer of recovery devices and supplements and protocols and practitioners to see what works and whether it makes sense, even stepping aside to explore what works when it seemingly doesn’t make sense!

Along the way, she manages to entertain the readers with humility and humour while raising the reader’s understanding of what sports science has to say on various topics. While she willingly submits herself to various ideas in the interest of sports science, she doesn’t spare herself for trying whatever idea she is examining, in the first place. And she has the inputs of over two hundred people in the area of sports science including Olympic medallists, world class sportspersons across sports as diverse as American football and mountain biking, coaches, sports scientists, even the businessmen behind some of the products and services and fellow authors.

The book is endorsed by two of the very best writers of our times - Alex Hutchinson who wrote the incredibly useful “Which Comes First, Cardio or Weights” and David Epstein who wrote “The Sports Gene, ” and with good reason. Christie is very respected as a writer on science and it will become quickly obvious to her readers why that is so.

The book is an enjoyable read and not just because Christie writes in a simple, lucid and witty manner with chapters titled “The Cold War” while discussing ice baths (and related protocols) for recovery or “Selling Snake Oil” on supplements, but it causes the reader to pause and think for herself why she is  doing what she is doing and whether it really works. The book is worth reading for just a section alone - one on questions for scientists in an early chapter titled “Just-So Science” and how a study on whether beer aids recovery taught her lessons she uses throughout the book.

*This review should have appeared about 3 weeks ago but I had an avoidable mishap with the publisher. This review was made possible due to an advanced copy from the author