Running Performance, $${\rm V}{\rm O}_{\rm {2max}}$$ V
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REVIEW ARTICLE
_ 2max, and Running Economy: The Running Performance, VO Widespread Issue of Endogenous Selection Bias Nicolai T. Borgen1
Ó Springer International Publishing AG 2017
Abstract Studies in sport and exercise medicine routinely use samples of highly trained individuals in order to understand what characterizes elite endurance performance, such as run_ 2max ). Howning economy and maximal oxygen uptake (VO ever, it is not well understood in the literature that using such samples most certainly leads to biased findings and accordingly potentially erroneous conclusions because of endogenous selection bias. In this paper, I review the current literature on _ 2max , and discuss the literature in light running economy and VO of endogenous selection bias. I demonstrate that the results in a large part of the literature may be misleading, and provide some practical suggestions as to how future studies may alleviate endogenous selection bias.
Key Points Using samples restricted (truncated) to contain only elite athletes or highly trained individuals may result in biased results. The association between running economy and _ 2max in truncated samples is at least partially VO spurious. _ 2max on The effect size of running economy and VO race performance in truncated samples is attenuated. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s40279-017-0789-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. & Nicolai T. Borgen [email protected] 1
Department of Sociology and Human Geography, University of Oslo, P.O. Box 1096, Blindern, 0317 Oslo, Norway
1 Introduction Many studies in sport and exercise medicine are conducted to determine what characterizes elite performance, as well as to understand how elite athletes can improve further [24, 25, 28, 32, 42]. For instance, studies examine to what _ 2max ) affects race perextent maximal oxygen uptake (VO formance [30], or if rearfoot striking is more economical than midfoot striking [37]. There is a widespread belief that in order to gain insights into elite performance, researchers cannot rely on studies of all runners. Instead, these studies typically select subjects based on race performance, either intentionally (e.g., studies of Olympic qualifiers) or as a result of convinience sampling. Having a homogeneous sample of highly trained individuals, or even elite athletes, is assumed to be an advantage in the literature. However, it is not well known in the literature that in observational studies (i.e., non-experimental studies), selecting subjects based on prior race performance will likely result in spurious correlations because of endogenous selection bias [10, 40]. The problem is twofold. First, when some individuals in the entire population (e.g., all US citizens) have a higher probability of being included in the population of interest (e.g., elite athletes), restricting the analysis to the population of interest amounts to conditioning on whatever increases the probability of being in the group
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