Should You Copy What Pro Athletes Do?
We get a version of this question constantly. It sounds like: "[Pro athlete] does [thing]. Lots of elites do [thing]. Should I do [thing]?"
Sometimes [thing] is a supplement. Sometimes it's a recovery protocol. Sometimes it's a fueling strategy that would require you to spend roughly your car payment on powders. The structure never changes: a successful person does X, therefore X is probably worth doing.
So, should you copy what pro athletes do? Usually not, and the reasons why tell you almost everything you need to know about evaluating performance claims in general.
We get the appeal. Watching someone move through the world with exceptional speed and efficiency, and thinking what are they doing and how do I get some of that, is a completely human response. But "pros do it" is weak evidence. Here's why.
Why copying pro athletes is weak evidence
Start with the difference between experimenting on yourself and recommending something to other people.
When you experiment, you bear the consequences. When you recommend, you inherit some responsibility for everyone else's decisions: people with different budgets, different medications, different health histories, and different contexts than the athlete the original advice was modeled on. The bar for "I tried this" is legitimately lower than the bar for "you should try this."
Pro athletes are almost always doing the first thing while their audience treats it as the second.
Survivorship bias in sports: the Michael Phelps cupping problem
In 2016, the Olympics gave the world a gift: Michael Phelps, draped in circular bruises, winning gold medals, launching a thousand cupping appointments. Within weeks, sports medicine clinics were booked out. Amazon backordered suction cups. Athletic trainers across the country started fielding questions about whether they offered it.
The evidence for cupping is, charitably, underwhelming. A systematic review of randomized controlled trials found that the studies are small, methodologically shaky, and far from conclusive about any performance benefit (Bridgett et al., 2018). The mechanism is unclear. And yet: Michael Phelps. Therefore: cupping.
This is survivorship bias in sports, and it's one of the most pervasive logical errors in performance reasoning. We see the athletes who made it. We see what they do. We do not see, because we cannot see, the athletes who did the exact same things and didn't make it. The sample is pre-filtered for success in ways that make attribution almost impossible.
Phelps also famously ate something in the neighborhood of 12,000 calories a day in training. You can find people who'll tell you that's the key. You can find people who'll tell you it was the cupping. Neither person is handing you useful information.
LeBron James reportedly spends over a million dollars a year on his body. Cryotherapy. IV drips. A full-time sleep specialist. A private chef. When he credits something for his longevity, the honest question is: which of the seventeen things he did this week was the variable?
The context gap: why pro routines don't transfer to you
Even when pros are doing something that genuinely works, and sometimes they are, it may not work for you. Because you are not them.
Athletes at the highest level have often maxed out the fundamentals. Sleep: optimized. Fueling: dialed. Training load: managed by a team of people whose entire job is to keep them healthy and fast. When every other variable is already world-class, an edge-case supplement might actually move the needle. That's what marginal gains means: small returns on top of a fully optimized base.
For the rest of us, people with jobs, stress, inconsistent sleep, and the occasional dinner that is bagged salad with a side of couch potato, the marginal gain from a $90 bottle of whatever is almost certainly smaller than the gain from going to bed earlier. This isn't a judgment. It's just math.
Then there's the medication and health history problem. A 24-year-old with no underlying conditions, a sports medicine physician on speed dial, and nothing else in rotation is operating in a context that looks nothing like yours. What's fine for them may interact very differently with your blood pressure medication, your existing iron supplementation, and the three other things you read about on Instagram last week.
The halo effect: being great at a sport isn't expertise about your body
Here's a logical fallacy at play here that we see all the time in endurance sports: the halo effect.
The halo effect is the cognitive shortcut where we assume excellence in one domain implies competence in adjacent ones. He's a great quarterback, so his method must be legit. She's a world champion, so her supplement stack must be doing something.
But elite athletic performance is specific expertise in a very specific thing. Knowing your own body, how it responds to load, how it signals fatigue, when to push and when to back off, is real, hard-won knowledge. Pro athletes have that about their bodies in ways most of us never will. That's legitimately impressive.
It does not make them experts about your body.
A pro athlete recommending a supplement is roughly a Nobel Prize-winning chemist recommending a restaurant. Maybe the restaurant is great. But the Nobel Prize is not the evidence.
Follow the incentives behind pro athlete endorsements
Pretending incentives don't exist is its own form of bad epistemics.
A lot of pro athletes and content creators have financial relationships with the products they promote: sponsorships, equity stakes, ambassador deals. That doesn't make them liars. It doesn't disqualify their work. It does mean they have a material reason to be more enthusiastic about something than the evidence alone would justify. That's worth factoring in.
We have sponsors too, and we try to be honest about how that shapes things. You can read our full policy here. It's one reason we drew a hard line around supplement partnerships specifically: the category is largely self-regulated, we can't independently vet what's in the bottle, and any signal of support from us would read as an endorsement we can't honestly offer. The US dietary supplement market runs north of $60 billion a year and is almost entirely self-policed (Grand View Research, 2025). That's a lot of money with very little gatekeeping.
A better way to evaluate performance claims
If you're curious, our evidence ladder runs roughly: mechanistic plausibility, then anecdote, then observational data, then randomized controlled trials, then systematic reviews and meta-analyses.
"Pros do it" sits near the bottom. It's not nothing. It can be a useful prompt for what is even worth investigating. It is not a green light.
There's also opportunity cost, and not just the money. Supplement-seeking can feel like optimization while functioning as a distraction from the things that actually move the needle: consistent fueling, adequate sleep, managed training load. It keeps people oriented toward products instead of behaviors. That has a real cost.
We'll cop to a genuine difference in philosophy here. Some people are comfortable with "it feels like it works for me" as their threshold, and that's a valid individual choice. For us, the bar is "the best evidence we have says this works." Not because feelings don't matter, but because feelings are unreliable, placebo is real and powerful, and when we recommend something to a lot of people, we'd rather not steer anyone toward spending money on a placebo when something evidence-backed might actually help.
This is the kind of question we work through constantly on the podcast: take a claim everyone repeats, follow the evidence, and see what's actually holding it up.
The bottom line: should you copy pro athletes?
Probably not, at least not because they're pros. "A successful athlete does it" is one of the weakest forms of evidence there is, undercut by survivorship bias, the context gap, the halo effect, and incentives you usually can't see. None of this means pros are wrong, or that we're right. It means a recommendation is a different thing than a personal experiment, and you deserve advice built with your context, your resources, and your body actually in mind.
Your body is yours. Experiment with it however you want. Just hold "an elite does it" to the bar it deserves, which is a low one.
Want to nominate something for the "pros swear by it, science shrugs" hall of fame? That's exactly the kind of thing we dig into with our Patreon community, where the questions come from members and the rabbit holes get deep. Come hang out.
References
Bridgett, R., Klose, P., Duffield, R., Mydock, S., & Lauche, R. (2018). Effects of cupping therapy in amateur and professional athletes: Systematic review of randomized controlled trials. The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, 24(3), 208–219. https://doi.org/10.1089/acm.2017.0191
Grand View Research. (2025). U.S. dietary supplements market size, share & trends analysis report. https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/us-dietary-supplements-market-report
