TLDR
Overview
The information dilemma
Chances are, if you’re reading this you’ve been exposed to a wide variety of fitness content and opinions.
Wanting to look lean and toned or jacked and stacked?
- High volume is king but also low volume is optimal.
- Intensity needs to be taken sky high to failure but perhaps two reps in reserve is best.
- High frequency is ideal (except everybody has a different definition of ‘high’).
- Remember to have full range of motion for all your exercises unless lengthened partials are superior.
- And let’s not even get into yoga being the solution to all your body composition problems. Except now it’s Pilates. Or Hyrox.
- High intensity interval training creates an EPOC effect which means we should throw out all other forms of cardio.
Different coaches have different methodologies. Different books present clashing ideas. And of course most of us are getting content from an endless supply of social media, where there are both legitimate coaches and perhaps less qualified fitness influencers.
Who to trust?
We could perhaps sum up the big divides in the fitness space right now into two broad groups.
Bro-science
On the one hand you’ve got classic gym lore and wisdom.
There’s no singular definition but typically this is advice spanning from gym regulars with years of experience under their belt to champions and coaches who have actually won a belt.
More specifically in the hypertrophy space, you’ve got proponents of high volume (with pretty high intensity) from Arnold to Jay Cutler and then proponents of low volume with ultra high intensity from Mike Mentzer to Dorian Yates.
If we look away from world champion figureheads, which I recommend, you might look to more modern day authorities who are famous for their coaching rather than their physiques. Some of the most well known here are John Meadows, Dante Trudel, Jordan Peters, and Joe Bennett, though the list could go on and on.
This ecosystem arguably encompasses everyone down to local coaches with in the trenches experience, and perhaps even experienced lifters in your local gym.
There isn’t one unanimous approach to training with ‘bro science’, and it’s such a broad definition I’m not sure there ever could be.
Is it correct?
Generally speaking, we can observe over the decades that ‘bro science’ has been correct in their practical recommendations much of the time.
Two very simple thought experiments:
- If you look at footage of people lifting two or three decades ago, nothing has fundamentally changed with exercises, form, tempo and so on
- If you dig out old school fitness magazines, often times their actual recommendations are still near identical to today
Why then does it receive so much flak? Arguably there are two significant flaws with traditional, old school approaches.
One, it has a much worse track record when it comes to the attempted explanations or mechanism behind why something works.
For instance,
This doesn’t make the actual practical advice wrong mind you – but it can lead to confusion and a misunderstanding of the mechanisms behind why things work.
Two, also tended to be overly prescriptive with specific, arbitrary parameters.
For instance, for decades it was repeated that 8-12 reps was the optimal hypertrophy rep range. Even now, we still know that 8-12 reps is an excellent place to start. The only issue is the cut off point – now we know the range probably looks more like 5-15 reps, still with a good dosing of 8-12 reps mind you.
This again doesn’t make the actual practical advice wrong. It’s still very much in the range of good advice, we now know can just broaden that range.
How to interpret all this
There’s a few key takeaway here:
There are more agreements than disagreements.
Take note of the spectrum of correctness and what’s not being preached.
For instance, over the decades traditional lore may have argued between free weights vs machines. No one remotely serious was ever suggesting a 2kg dumbbell standing on a bosu ball exercise was the way to go.
Where there are multiple schools of thoughts getting results, both are probably true.
At some point individual genetics, preferences, and variance come into play.
For instance, in the classic volume vs intensity debate there have been elite athletes, knowledgeable coaches and thousands of normal people with success on both sides of the aisle. The logical conclusion is both approaches worked for them as an individual, not that they were all under mass delusion.
Where does this leave us
Reading all this you might now think this is all well and good. What’s not to like?
You could argue this is a results based approach to training. Another term for this might be the ‘scientific method’ – testing A and B, seeing what works and discarding what doesn’t.
Especially in the last decade or so there has been increasing criticisms with this.
Some of it is valid, see the above two points for instance.
More of it are caricatures and a logical fallacy, building on an imaginary trope of ‘meatheads who are stiff, inflexible, and clueless about training’.
Of course, that leads us to the next point.
Science
Over the last decade or so the popularisation of ‘science based’ training has sky rocketed.
You don’t have to scroll very far in your favourite social media platform to see how well ‘science based’ and ‘evidence backed’ training does in terms of popularity among the masses.
But does it really make it more effective?
The premise
Let’s first define the overarching premise.
- In the trenches data is by definition anecdotes and a sample size of one. While a successful coach may have hundreds of clients over the years, how many of them is a brief check-in and how many of them are they working closely with on an individual level throughout the week? And even in the case of the latter, a third party can’t control for all extraneous variables no may how well intentioned or serious you are.
- Exercise science is a discipline where researchers run studies to test one training variable at a time, typically with say around 10-40 people.
- Each individual study doesn’t provide any definitive conclusion, but cumulatively provides pieces of the puzzle.
- Over the years, meta-analysis’s can be run with much larger sets of data, thus being the top of the ‘evidence hierarchy’ in a traditional evidence paradigm.
- This evidence will be much more aligned in practical recommendations than mere anecdotes.
On the surface, this appears to be a convincing argument. As you probably already know (or have guessed by now), there are unfortunately some glaring flaws hidden under the surface.
- Exercise science is a soft science, akin to psychology but with even less funding and rigor in its methodology. This being a fitness self coaching guide, we are starting to veer wildly off topic but suffice to say there are significant replication issues with much of the soft sciences, and a lot of problems with financial incentives for researchers and how scientific journals verify and reward papers.
- In sports, exercise science is seen very much as a supplementary platform where research may provide ideas but doesn’t replace coaching. You don’t see top tennis players or cyclists firing their coaches and hiring a sport science researcher. They might work in conjunction, but it’s simply a different role.
- Measurements of results and potential inconsistencies. With papers to measure muscle growth, even with the technology now there’s no definitive way of measuring change of muscle in all body parts entirely accurately. Much of the measurements conducted is still reliant on the skill of the individual researcher, and millimetre differences may be changing the results from significant to null.
- Exercise variability. Individual participants will perform specific exercises differently. As you become more advanced these differences matter more and more, to the point where the average of a whole group with slight variances in technique may be void.
- Duration of studies. Almost all studies are 8 weeks in length, as that simply aligns with a university calendar (i.e. when researchers can source participants). Again, we’ve discussed earlier that fitness is truly a multi year and decade endeavour. An 8 week timeframe can detect short-term changes but we know it can’t be sustained indefinitely (otherwise everyone would be bigger than Arnold), so where does the limit lie with how repeatable the findings are?
- Population of studies. As above, the vast majority of participants are university students, likely in their 20s, generally ranging between beginners to intermediates. To put it mildly this is not the most diverse sample size to draw from.
Frankly this list could become several chapters in its own right. This is a topic that has come into prominence given how much folks are enamoured by ‘science based’ training these days.
Further reading can be found in the Resources section; in general there are some level headed researchers in the space that delve into these topics in far greater detail than we can here.
So science should be discarded?
Let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water.
Despite how it may seem I’m actually a big fan of science. We just need a few mental guardrails in place.
- It’s my belief that exercise science is fundamentally a good thing. As I alluded to earlier, we simply need to view it as part of the broader ecosystem with researchers and practitioners (coaches, trainers, and so on). Researchers don’t replace coaches and coaches don’t replace researchers.
- Science has a vital role to play in understanding mechanisms. Over the years and decades researchers are slowly forming a better understanding of muscular hypertrophy, for instance.
- Science also does some things really well. It can suggest a broader range of options than traditional lore and wisdom, and it might be able to point you to one place to start out of several options.
Indeed if you read between the lines, science and ‘bro-science’, or experiential data should actually work hand in hand.
The problem is unfortunately a lot of people being misled in order for the ‘fitness influencer’ to increase their online clout and financial net worth.
There’s a reason why the common phrase ‘art and science of coaching’ rings true.
Lifting, and coaching, is both an art and a science.
A solution
So how does one make sense of all this?
I don’t have all the answers, but here are some nuggets that hopefully nudges you in the right direction.
This is a practical discipline
Let’s establish the obvious first (because in this day and age it needs to be repeated).
Fitness is a pursuit akin to a sport, without the elements of competition. It is not a theoretical endeavour such as philosophy or physics. Heck even comparisons with ‘e-sports’ would be significantly closer in reality.
Now there are certain personality types who may be drawn to the idea of ‘science based’ training or ‘optimal’ training. You tend to see folks from a STEM background, or simply the folks with next to no training experience.
If you take a step back, you realise very quickly you can’t theorise or science your way to applied knowledge.
Watching tennis on tv does not get you good at tennis. Playing tennis does.
Studying the history of Spain does not get you good at Spanish. Speaking Spanish does.
Reading about a Magnus Carlsen win does not get you good at chess. Playing chess does.
This is pretty straightforward stuff and we all know this to be true. But something about the field of fitness occasionally turns our brain haywire and forget this simple reality.
Now let’s take it one step further.
If you’re looking to learn a topic, who do you turn to?
If you’re looking to learn Spanish you might hire a teacher who speaks Spanish. You’re not going to get an English speaker who specialises in Spanish history in the 1500s.
If you’re looking to learn the guitar, you might hire a guitar teacher. You’re not going to find a music composer who writes music but doesn’t play the guitar.
If you’re looking to learn Brazilian jiu jitsu, you find a class taught by a black or purple belt. You don’t find another white belt who has a high IQ.
Unfortunately this appears to be happening more frequently in the fitness space.
The skillset of running exercise science studies on university students does not have a one to one correlation to the skillset of coaching.
The skillset of producing trending social media content does not have a one to one correlation to the skillset of coaching.
Fitness is pretty much a solved equation
Modern day fitness has been around for about a century and nobody is rediscovering a new thing right now. It’s about collating, systemising, and packaging good content and coaching in a language that works for you.
Beware of the charlatan who’s selling you a brand new ‘system’.
Generally speaking, the focus in modern day fitness is refining details and making it more accessible to the masses. Sure there are tweaks and optimisations that come to light, but nothing is ever going to be found like ‘resistance training doesn’t work’.
When seeing opinions and advice, frame it in this light.
Does it purport to promise twice the results at half the time?
Is it suggesting that ‘science’ has proven them to be objectively superior to every other method out there?
Get your information from multiple sources
This guide for instance, draws heavily on existing methodologies and practices (see resources).
Indeed you should pay particular attention to advice that crosses streams. Look into strength sports, powerlifting, bodybuilding, strongman, CrossFit. Look into locomotion such as GMB and Animal Flow. Explore systems such as PRI and FRC.
If renowned coaches from multiple disciplines are saying the same thing, needless to say it’s probably close to the truth.