the dumb thing about applying the skin in the game logic to a topic like this is just because you want to figure out what works doesn't mean you can (reliably). there are so many variables that go into gaining muscle (or whatever other type of fitness you are into) that parsing out what works absent control is nearly impossible. loads of people *think* they have figured it out but they are just overfitting, something of course humans are quite good at. also because the impact of some variables dwarfs them impact of others (e.g. genetic variability in training response versus how long you rest between sets, or whether you are on PEDs) people are frequently confused about why they (or some other person) is or is not high performing. people that are huge or super fit or whatever are much more likely to be high responders to training (or PEDs) and are consequentially much less likely to understand what will make someone else develop.
I was just going to say this same thing! You'd think it'd be easy to tell if you're gaining more muscle or not, but over scales as short as even a few months it can be hard to tell what's due to training, what's due to diet or hydration, quality of sleep, etc. You could feel like you're getting in the same quality of workouts, but maybe you spend a couple weeks a little sick, and suddenly you have no idea whether your training was working. Everything fluctuates all the time and the human body is incredibly complicated.
Yep! The feedback loop is not all that tight. It's a short enough time period between starting working out and seeing a visible difference that people will say, "trust me, this worked for me, look at my before/after pictures, it's proof!". But there's such a huge mess of genetics and diet and a dozen small factors regarding exactly how a workout is structured/performed that drawing a direct causal link between things is really hard and the door is wide open for superstitious thinking.
Also the issue, if you're relying on a source like bodybuilding.com, that your data pool is going to be overwhelmed by beginners. Even if they're not literal beginners, weightlifting is plagued by people stopping for long periods and then picking back up. This is related to what plagued exercise science research methods for such a long time and why so many coaches dismissed it. If all your research is conducted on beginners, basically anything works. Newb effect overwhelms all other differences. Marginal things like rest periods only matter to advanced lifters, but you need to study advanced lifters to figure that out. Then you get confounded by the fact that, up until a few years ago, the threat of being blacklisted by sponsors prevented anyone from admitting they were chemically enhanced, making it impossible to know if you were really comparing valid experiment and control groups if you did manage to find advanced lifters willing to enroll in your study.
All in all, the ground has been fertile for a huge renaissance in research-backed training and it is only in the past few years this can be realized.
Although a lot of this research has also already been done in eastern bloc countries where it was never illegal or taboo to use PEDs and they had the ability to force advanced athletes to enroll in research studies, but most of that work was never translated into English or made available to western scientists.
It's even worse then you say, since what matters here is not absolute gains but marginal gains--how much better or worse is your program compared to other programs you might have done? Maybe you added 50 lbs to your bench over the last 6 months, but could you have added 55 with another program? You'll never know.
As someone who has coached many elite athletes, the thing that separates them from everyone else is genetic potential to adapt to training.
Most of those folks can do pretty much anything in the gym and have horrible lifestyle habits outside of the gym and still become freaks just by working out and trying hard.
Humans tend to blindly copy what the elites do, so it’s really easy for weird “bubbles” of incorrect training - the proverbial “broscience” - to pop up in any fitness culture.
Please do. What I was trying to get at there is that elite athletes don't always show up as obviously "more talented" than others. They just get better faster than everyone else — and seem to continue getting better long after others have plateaued.
Came here to say... something slightly different, so I may as well say it while I approve of the post above and its implications.
Metis is things that's been figured out to work without formal understanding why (or at least formal means of confirmation why) by individuals. There are ways to achieve this, biological evolution found them and cultural evolution sped them up, but it still requires a long process of trial and error and a harsh selection mechanism - the skin in the game being literally one's own, and the matter being survival. And it's one's own survival, not your patients', so it doesn't much affect modern hobbies or even professions. Medical doctors, bodybuilders, etc. only need to be adequately good compared to the best in their field (surely, the field as a whole must prove itself useful or it perishes, but medicine and bodybuilding have crossed that hurdle several generations ago). People don't go out of the gene pool if they don't, e.g., develop enough muscle. Subsistence farmers or hunters/gatherers, on the other hand, die if they don't produce enough food, which makes the heuristic to follow the ways of their surviving seniors much more reliable for them that it could ever be for citizens of the modern world.
Another thing - people will always choose actual understanding over metis, because achieving actual understanding is clearly, obviously better. Corollary - once you get to the point something becomes a subject of scientific inquiry, metis mostly stops playing a role. That's not a takedown of metis, it's still important, it will never cease being important as long as scientific inquiry is hard, difficult and costly. But it's not something that can plausibly coexist, on equal footing, with actual understanding. Not because actual understanding is a more viable goal (thankfully, contemporary scientific practice has accumulated enough metis to understand its own shortcomings and proceeds with enough humility to treat most of its own results and ideas as inconclusive, a vast improvement over enlightenment/modernist naivete, though apparently still not sufficient enough to avoid fuckups like discouraging people from wearing masks), but simply because it's a much more appealing one. If there's a chance to actually understand, people will jump on it and incorporate it into their model of the world, just like the bodybuilders reading scientific studies. Whatever the result, it's just not an example of metic knowledge anymore.
Am I the only one who doesn't see the forum users being all that wrong? They don't quite hit on the right model (what matters is training volume), but "If shorter rests reduce what you are capable of doing, you are probably leaving some gainz in the gym" seems in the right ballpark, right?
That was the point I was trying to make - if I came across as saying the forum users were wrong, please let me know what made you think that so I can edit it.
Right. What I noticed the studies, or maybe just the analysis, didn’t cover directly was that if you lift like a power lifter vs a body builder, your muscle gains and fitness outcomes are going to be very different. You have to control for meal programs and such, but ultimately bulk/cut macros are fairly similar across lifting styles (they’d prob be fairly different if you took the top 1% of BBs and PLs though).
That leaves “time under tension” as the place to look, which is the governing difference bt lifting styles IMO. It seems like the studies covered that in different words - more rest is fine as long as total reps hit are a certain level.
Which then is to say, fitness folks have been bro-science aware of ToT for a while I think. So is that metis in action?
Based on the data I can see, I think maybe the “short rest periods lead to more gains” thing for so sticky because it’s actually true if you only have an hour a day in the gym and need to devote 1-2 days a week to cardio.
If you have two hours to lift, 5-minute tests are superior. If you have one hour you have two minutes max of you won’t be lifting as much.
How tightknit and close is the community really? In my 5 year semi-gym rat experience until very recently most weightlifters didn't publish/youtube their methods or publish books, etc. and many weren't posting their tips on boards - it was and still largely is a verbal tradition. The methods of bodybuilders and powerlifters has changed rapidly recently with more social media exposure and was always a group that experimented a lot but you just wouldn't always hear about the experiment or the results - for n=1 when I got into lifting it was taught to me to take longer rests on most sets and most days...
I also have a complaint about categorizing the bodybuilding community's collective knowledge corpus as metis: the community's not very old. Primitive tribes have been refining their methods for thousands of years, the bodybuilding community for 140 max. And then, as you say Ringo, there is the question of the fidelity of information transfer across generations.
Oral traditions are so lossy that they'd probably stop getting smarter after a few hundred years. Or at least they'd be very close to the asymptote where losses equal gains.
That seems to be about stretching and pain. I was thinking about stretching before doing some athletic event. Which is something I was trained always to do.
From what I've read/seen/ experienced, the key is that you (supposedly) should do "full motion" stretches (moving the body parts through their full range of motion several times(like swinging your arms through a full circle)) to warm up, and only do "isometric" stretches (holding the body parts still in extreme positions (like runner's stretches)) to cool down after whatever you were doing. So it's not the stretching itself that's harmful, but whether you're doing the right type at the right time.
I believe that's correct. Warm up with dynamic stretches (get the blood flowing), and cool down with static stretches.
Static stretches are intended to relax and lengthen the muscle fibers, and studies have shown that this actually reduces their concentric force output. Weakening some muscles just before you're about to require them to produce force is a great way to get injured, and there's some evidence that static stretching before training correlates with increased risk of injury.
OK sure, at the end of the game when your calves cramp up, stretching is only cure I know of. Up above someone posted stretching is bad. Which makes no sense to me. Even pooh bear did some stretches. :^)
That criticism seems a bit overly general. Stretching decreases strength, but it increases flexibility. There are times when you may actually want to move a part of your body over a wide range. I'm not going to bet that stretching prevents injuries. But it has its place.
Gymnastics probably, maybe climbing. Although both those sports depend heavily on strength as well. In practice, all the top competitors in both do seem to stretch beforehand, but it's entirely possible they could be doing it wrong.
I think there is another element in sports where you compete very frequently, like baseball as opposed to powerlifting. That's probably the case with endurance running as well. If you're suffering from a great deal of accumulated stiffness, it might be helpful, though probably more helpful to use massage and dynamic stretching than static.
Stretching only prevents injury insofar as flexibility prevents injury. So you might need a more flexible groin to be able to do deep squats without curving your lower back at the bottom for example. But stretching your groin doesn't actually reduce your risk of pulling your groin.
I think it's important to note that "stretching" here is specifically referring to what's sometimes called "static stretching", the goal of which is typically to lengthen the muscle fibers being stretched.
I think the primary benefit in stretching is increased range of motion. I've found stretching most helpful when trying to correct an imbalance using a stretch paired with a targeted exercise for agonist-antagonist muscles.
For instance, I often stretch my pectorals (antagonist) just before doing some rotator cuff work (agonists), like face pulls. This enables a longer range of motion on the pulling exercise because the antagonist is lengthened and weakened. Longer range of motion is pretty well established as being better for general strength development. So this would be a good approach for something like upper crossed syndrome.
Other than that, I agree that static stretching is nothing more than light, bodyweight exercise.
Funnily enough, that's exactly what the site's writer says. :-) That he still does it because it feels good, but that you shouldn't expect anything beyond that.
"That he still does it because it feels good, but that you shouldn't expect anything beyond that."
Think about that.
You sound young. As you age, you will understand how profoundly important feeling good is. Why, somebody might even do a scientific study of it. But I guess that would take all the fun out of it.
Heard that too. In athletic circles not stretching is seen as taboo. Not stretching signals that you don't take the risk of injury seriously enough, and people generally don't respect the opinion that it's unnecessary since it isn't scientifically proven to make a difference.
I don't think measuring the mass gains is the right metric for bodybuilders. They are going for size which isn't the same thing, powerlifters are denser and stronger but don't win bodybuilding contests
Depends. Maybe you are using a strictly defined version of "bodybuilder" there, such that you are precisely correct among some group who identify themselves as such. But I think part of the trouble in nailing down the answer to seemingly simple questions like optimal rest time, is that the goal isn't universally agreed upon.
Do you want muscles that take up more volume? Or do you want more muscle mass? Or do you want muscles that can lift heavier weights? Or do you want muscles that can more quickly lift the same amount of weight? Or do you want to be able to do more reps before you get tired?
Most of those things are probably pretty correlated, but there's probably not perfect correlation between any of them either. There might be different best practices depending on what kind of "strong" you want to be.
For most people the difference would probably be a minor quibble. If you're neither a bodybuilder nor a powerlifter, just a normal person trying to put on some muscle, then those two goals are in almost the same direction. But the "bodybuilding community" that has supposedly acquired all this metis would be the people who devote their lives to it, right? To them, powerlifters and olympic lifters are apples and oranges, bodybuilders are pineapples, and anybody stepping into a crossfit gym is a stack of pancakes. Elite athletes tailor their training very specifically to their goals.
The scientific studies are mostly not on elite athletes, or even a specific type of athlete, because of difficulties in getting a good sample size. They tend to have samples like "15 resistance-trained males, ages 18-37" where that could mean anything from college football player to amateur powerlifter to wrestler.
Well, our biggest disagreement is on the use of muscle mass as a metric of muscle volume right? Let me show you wants influenced my thinking on this. I'm going to argue that powerlifters should be very concerned about pure size, but the same argument applies in the opposite direction.
The following study examines a bunch of (elite!) Powerlifters and shows that muscle mass is a highly explanatory variable in accounting for relative ranking. So even at the highest level, mass seems to dominate over myriad factors like leverage, neuromuscular coordination etc.
In comparing density volume, I would assume you are talking about sarcoplasmic v myofibrillar hypertrophy? This review comes to the conclusion that the evidence that training style influences the relative balance is quite weak, and other factors like age and training age may be more important. Furthermore, there doesn't seem to be a huge difference in density between the two types.
Finally, elite bodybuilders like Stan Efferding are immediately elite powerlifters on entering the sport. And top powerlifters like Brandon Allen have been successful incorporating higher rep regimes into their programming.
There are definitely huge differences between the sports. But I don't think a focus on volume vs density is one of them.
Stan Efferding is a bizarre choice of you're trying to demonstrate that elite bodybuilders could automatically be elite powerlifters if they wanted to be: the man is a powerlifter who didn't get his IFBB pro card until he was a masters athlete, and who was never a particularly elite bodybuilder. Pick someone like Big Ramy and let's see if he can destroy the powerlifting world with those unbelievable legs - I predict no, but you're welcome to disagree.
Calling him a bizarre choice is a stretch. He trained as a bodybuilder and competed in bodybuilding for years before making the highly successful stretch.
No one's trying to prove that bodybuilders can immediately dominate in powerlifting. I'm showing that the correlation between the two is large, and Stan Efferding is a perfect example of that.
If you're coming here to criticise an example, at least bring one. The real life analogue of the scenario you describe is Dr. Squat vs Tom Platz. And while I have reservations about it, at least it occurred outside of my own head.
If you were using Efferding as an example of an elite powerlifter who also had some decent success as a bodybuilder I wouldn't have objected - it's just weird to hear him used as evidence that bodybuilders are automatically good at powerlifting. Like hearing Michael Jordan used to demonstrate how elite baseball players immediately become elite basketball players as soon as they step on the court.
I hadn't seen the Hatfield/Platz showdown (and it's awesome, thank you for enlightening me) but it went about how I would expect: the powerlifter dominated the 1RM, and the bodybuilder dominated the amrap. Those are different skills which use different types of muscle fibers and those who are good at one aren't necessarily good at the other. I don't think this changes my prediction that Ramy couldn't squat 1000 pounds no matter how hard he tried, even though he's carrying more muscle mass on his legs than anyone in the powerlifting world.
"No one's trying to prove that bodybuilders can immediately dominate in powerlifting." To this I will cite your first comment: "elite bodybuilders like Stan Efferding are immediately elite powerlifters on entering the sport". If that's not what you meant then fair enough, or that's what I was working off of.
As for bringing my own examples, I understand Mark Bell hasn't had much luck on the bodybuilding stage. I don't have any examples on the mind of elite bodybuilders who tried to switch to powerlifting and flamed out, but I also don't have any examples of the opposite, so it's a wash and I'm back to my priors.
Bigger muscles are stronger muscles. But the person with the biggest muscles isn't the strongest, and the person with the strongest muscles isn't the biggest.
But they're definitely not uncorrelated, either. Some bodybuilders have come from a powerlifting background (Stan Efferding, Franco Columbu). And some bodybuilders are really strong - Ronnie Coleman squatted 810lb twice in wraps and a belt when the world record was around ~900lb, I think.
It seems obviously critical that if you rest 5 minutes between sets you can only do 1/5 of much work in a given amount of time as if you rest 1 minute between sets. Setting the work equal seems like a complete sham.
Someone should correct me if I'm wrong, but I think most of the studies found there was naturally equal work, because if you rest too short, you can't do as many reps before getting tired.
Yes of course holding everything equal you can do less reps in a set if you rest a shorter period of time, but I really doubt the work naturally comes out equal. Furthermore, there are basically an unlimited number of muscles in your body. Nobody exercises every muscle every day to the maximum possible extent. If you rest less, you will be able to work more muscle groups, which are not subject (or, not very subject) to this tiring phenomenon when you are working other muscle groups.
I feel like most intermediate/advanced weightlifting programs attempt to exercise every muscle you care about to the maximum possible sustainable extent. Also if you're auto-regulating in some way, the work should come out roughly equal. Obviously if you care about how long your workouts are there's an advantage to shorter rests, but not everybody cares about that.
I disagree. Only professional bodybuilders do that. They can be in the gym for 6-8 hours a day virtually every day. Even professional athletes are not close to that.
I don't know what you mean about auto-regulating and work coming out roughly equal. I think it's very false that the amount of work would come out nearly equal. Most people have certain exercises that they do in a given workout so your workout is just going to take way longer if you have a 5 minute rest period, and most people don't have time for that so they are going to cut it down a lot if they lengthen the rest.
I'll give an example to illustrate what I'm talking about. Let's say your workout program has you doing bench press or a variation 3 times a week. On each of those days, you go into the gym and you have a target level of fatigue you're trying to hit, based on where you are in that program. Once you hit that level of fatigue, you're done with chest for the day. Doing more would actually sabotage you. If you over do it, you won't be able to recover adequately for your next workout, then you won't be able to do as much work on your next workout, and your total amount of work done over time will actually be less.
If you take 5 minute rests, maybe getting the bench sets done takes 45 minutes, while with 1 minute rests it takes 15. But you absolutely can't just do 3 times as many sets just because you have that extra time. Your ability to recover is what's constraining the amount of work you can do, not the amount of time you have. Yes, elite level bodybuilders who are on PEDs have excellent work capacity and excellent recovery and can handle super-long high volume workouts, but they're still being constrained by recovery, and not time.
In the real world, I get it. I workout in the morning before work and am absolutely time constrained, so I aim for 2 minutes or so in between sets.
This is right. It's why many use total weekly tonnage as a gauge of how much they lift. As you said, if you lift 10% more on a Monday you may sabotage your overall weekly tonnage because you're gonna be too sore to do well on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday for example.
There are body builders who do a full body routine where they work out every muscle they care about any day they lift. And there is a big argument about what's the right split. Should you work out half your muscles, or or a third of your muscles each workout?
Is it better to hit a muscle lightly every day or really hard once a week or something in between?
> Yes of course holding everything equal you can do less reps in a set if you rest a shorter period of time, but I really doubt the work naturally comes out equal.
This might be the critical thing you can get from metis moreso than studies.
The study says that you get more muscle growth with 3 minute rests given the same number of reps. It's true; it's a well-conducted study. What it hasn't told you is whether, given the same hour to spend in the gym, you get better results doing more reps with less rest or vice versa.
Now suppose you do. Then there is an advantageous alternative for the bodybuilders to discover over what the study suggests. Given the same time to spend in the gym, shorter rests yield more gains by increasing the number of reps you have time to do. Metis has a chance to beat the conclusion of the study.
But suppose you don't. The study's conclusion holds even if you're time constrained. More rest is at least as important as more reps. Well then there isn't something for the bodybuilders to improve there. No surprise that they didn't find it if it wasn't there.
The exact definition of "work" is important. In terms of tonnage (weight x reps) or reps, you can do more work per time with shorter rests than longer rests (up to some point where rest is so short you've hit your limit). However in terms of growth stimulus to your muscles, it gets more debatable, since stimulus depends a lot on how "hard" the reps are.
The most convincing explanation of the volume/"hardness" distinction I've seen is the "time under (maximal) tension" model. I'm not an expert, so take this with a grain of salt.
Basically the theory is that the stimulus for muscle growth is proportional to the amount of time a muscle fiber (not necessarily the muscle as a whole) is under tension very close to its maximum capability. This mostly happens in the last few reps of each set when you're straining to complete them (fibers can only reach maximum tension when activated as strongly as possible and also moving slowly, so you can't get it on the first few reps by throwing the weight really fast, nor by doing them really slowly). If the weight is lighter but you did more reps, you tire out the muscle so that fewer fibers can be recruited at a time (peripheral muscle fatigue) but that's okay because the ones that are working will get lots of time under tension.
Under this model, the factor that can really screw you up is "central nervous system fatigue," which is where you make yourself feel tired--not just a particular muscle, but tired overall. Then your ability to activate all your muscles decreases because you're subconsciously trying to save energy. Sub-maximal activation means sub-maximal tension in every fiber, so even though you feel like you're straining you don't get much time under tension. This seems like a pretty strong argument in favor of resting between sets pretty much until you don't feel worn out.
The issue which doesn't come into play with controlled studies is that in real life time is a factor. If you allow too much rest and then have to leave the gym before you exhaust yourself due to each set taking 5 minutes, you're hurting your work significantly.
I think the issue wrt assuming a fixed amount of work is many people have time-bound workouts. If you pick a limit of 45 or 60 minutes and stick to that, then doubling the rest time necessarily cuts the total work in half. I think a lot of commenters (here, on HackerNews, and in those forum threads) are assuming people have a somewhat rigid timebox for their workout.
That said, if I think about the lifters who really need to optimize this variable. The lifters where optimizing rest time actually matters. I think that is going to be the very advanced and top-percentile lifters. I think they are likely to approach their workout with a fixed amount of work to do and are willing to optimize the time each day to maximize the output of that fixed set of work. The studies seem to match the perspective of the people who actually need the answer.
The last with=without? I don't think it's true that most people who try to optimize their workouts are professional bodybuilders. I think you have quite a range but the vast majority are probably highly recreational.
Not at all--if the exercise takes you, say 5 minutes, then the comparison is between repeating every 10 minutes versus every six minutes. You don't even get to do twice as much work by cutting your rest time by 80% in this case.
You are of course right about the math, but bodybuilding exercises do not take 5 minutes. 30 seconds might be typical (low reps in a set is common), maybe a minute.
Do you think instead they should hold the amount of time equal?
So people doing 1 set per minute vs 5 sets per minute do 5x at many sets?
The problem here is we already know doing more sets in general leads to greater gains.
There are a lot of dimensions to working out and if you want to find out the right rest time between sets then # of sets seem like a pretty reasonable thing to keep constant.
I could see an argument that maybe they should optimize for something else but "complete sham" doesn't make any sense to me.
Really, it doesn't make sense? Do most people have unbounded workout schedules where they can spend an unlimited time in the gym, or do most people plan workouts to take around an hour? The answer is the latter.
I think if you're setting work equal then you need to be very specific about the results and what they mean and yes I think someone should be investigating it on a time basis because a lot of people want to answer the question "what's the best use of my hour?" and not "If I have unlimited time and don't care how long my workout is, should I rest 1 minute between sets or 5 minutes"
The question set out to answer was whether rest periods influence muscle growth, which is a valid question to ask before you go into time optimization. If it doesn't, you can choose the rest times that optimize the number of sets within your hour. If it does, the optimum might be a lower number of total sets but with better rest times.
scott you're still confused here. two points about metis you're missing:
1. rule zero of bro lifting science has alwas been "stop worrying about RCTs and get your ass to the gym," which contains "if taking short breaks gets you to work out, do that, if taking long breaks gets you to work out, do that". prioritization is contained in metis truth, not in abstract truth.
2. do you think gym bros could do the research deep-dive you did? it's unclear to me whether they could even navigate the landscape of peer reviewed papers to achieve these results. i couldn't and i'm fairly smart. parsing academic lit is its own skill.
The larger point is that metis is good because it captures "attainability/practicality" instead of an abstract, perhaps unattainable form of abstract accuracy. this matter when you want to do things as opposed to simply knowing things.
A lot of gym bros can absolutely parse the academic lit. My brother didn't do great in school, but he knows enough to have a master's degree in exercise science.
That said, I agree that for most people, results from working out hard and eating enough protein absolutely dwarf results from tinkering with time between sets.
parsing a single paper is a bit different from being able to synthesize papers into a unified view of things. former is easier than the latter, though i do agree that lots of bros are surprisingly good at both and can get there with enough time.
Some of the other examples Henselmans gives seem like specific failures that can't be explained by your point 1.
Re: 2 - this makes sense if you're talking about doing the best they can with limited resources (where ability to read papers is a resource), but my point is that if you can understand research, this will give you an improvement over just using metis.
thanks for the response! haven't read henselmans but i buy that the first point is true.
re: point #2, my main dispute is with the conclusion of "ha, peer-review beats metis!" when it seems closer to "well, over time metis grows to incorporate abstract truth", which, surely means that metis is the true victor, no? surely the ability to read papers is helpful in some way but metis is the only thing that tells you whether it has the highest marginal utility (vs. "shut up and lift this heavy object until it becomes a routine for you")
"In the long run we're all dead." Even assuming metis will catch up eventually, if science can get you ahead by five or ten years that can matter a lot in some contexts.
In re point #2 on gym bros: I think there's a good bit of of systemic sampling error going on. If you limit your search to bodybuilding.com (a website probably more known in the lifting community for an infamous argument about what working out every other day means) or t-nation you're missing a huge chunk of the community, and probably all of the trend setters and thought leaders.
Two of the most popular lifting websites right now are:
Stronger By Science (they publish Monthly Applications in Strength Sport (MASS), a research review by Greg Nuckols, Dr. Eric Trexler, Dr. Eric Helms, and Dr. Mike Zourdos). Has an incredible series of podcasts. For an interesting recent article I would recommend:
Here's a lifting forum of Hanley Normalized Fatigue Metric, one of several methods for attempting to figure out volume equated training vs fatigue generated (which is integral in a lot of training, whether it's called HNFM or RPE or what have out).
>"if taking short breaks gets you to work out, do that, if taking long breaks gets you to work out, do that"
In my experience most hardcore lifters are literally addicts and couldn't stop working out if they wanted to.
I'm probably in that group. I can't stop. If I miss even one day, I feel like my body's withering away. When the gyms closed due to COVID19 I actually fell into depression - no kidding.
If I'm understanding correctly, it seems to me like the science is saying it isn't very important how long you rest. If that's the case, I wouldn't necessarily expect metis to figure that out. Metis isn't built around finding the truth per se - it's built around putting together an internally coherent set of practices that work to produce a desirable result. I wouldn't necessarily expect metis to optimize away all inefficiencies, and in this case having a rule around resting time doesn't even seem inefficient, just unnecessary.
Yeah, the other examples do seem to come out stronger.
It still seems to me though like when we move to reducing metis to individual claims, and then test those specific claims, we're moving firmly into the territory where scientific techniques are going to be dominant. Taking things apart and analyzing the pieces is the whole point of science.
I'm not honestly sure how to make a good comparison though - I don't know if it would even be possible to create a workout regimen that isn't rooted firmly in established metis.
Consider that stuff like gyms, workout clothing, "reps" and "sets", and all the different equipment is part of an overall package of metis. If you didn't inherit all that culture, would you be able to come up with an effective workout regimen based solely on biological knowledge? You could probably quickly get to the idea that lifting heavy weights is beneficial, but you'd have to reinvent a lot of wheels to actually put together a system that gets people gainz.
What DOES seem clear to me though is that, within an established metis, we can often make improvements by applying scientific methods (though the manioc and corn examples show potential pitfalls). But I'm not sure science by itself will get you very far.
Or shoot, now that I'm thinking about it, it sort of feels to me like the more traditional metis approach to working out would be like, whatever sort of training knights were doing back before modern science came along. Maybe the whole modern workout edifice of weights, exercise equipment, etc. is the fitness equivalent of a modern scientifically planned city.
My thinking on this all feels pretty loose though. I might need to let it simmer a bit.
Apparently the Spartans (the actual tiny minority of aristocratic warriors) never trained in combat or martial arts, beyond perhaps some small amount of training for formations. [And now that I think about it, I'd imagine they wrestled too, which very much seems like a martial art, if not a 'combat' art.] Almost all of their training consisted of basic physical fitness (i.e. "the more traditional metis approach"), i.e. doing physical activities that almost every human ever does, e.g. running, throwing things, lifting things.
I ended up writing a lot and rambling, though I think there are those who will find it interesting regardless. My overall thoughts on the metis question as applied to bodybuilding - based on having been involved in the sport since 2005 and having worked with various top coaches over the year - is that 1) the examples Henselman and you by extension of bodybuilding being behind the science are either untrue or expressed in an overly simplistic fashion to the point that they may as well be untrue and 2) bodybuilding since the dawn of the forum age has been a hybrid of anecdote, in the the trenches learning and armchair philosophizing, mixed with formal education in exercise science and leveraging of pubmed. The blend is such that you cannot tell where an idea came from first with any certainty. My overall impression, however, is that practice has been consistently ahead of pubmed on everything from nutrition to training to pharmacology. That is the gain from metis. The cost is that there is a lot of trash out there - the frontier of knowledge is not widely attained. This is why Henselman's exist.
On to the original ramblings...
Broad concensus has been for at least the last couple decades that I've been involved in strength training and bodybuilding circles (I was a national competitor at heavyweight in bodybuilding, now jiu-jitsu), is that your rest periods are as long as needed until you are "ready" and this in turn is dictated by a range of factors. Some examples:
-How conditioned are you? If your cardio is trash, then you may find that it necessitates a longer rest period than your muscles do. Conversely, if you are well conditioned, you might need to force yourself to wait longer so that your muscles are ready.
-What movement did you do? It takes longer ot be ready after a 20 rep set of breathing squats compared to some tricep kickbacks. Did you use intensity techniques? When did this take place in your workout - beginning, middle, end?
-What is the role of this movement at this point in your workout? If you look at many of the best trainers - an example would be John Meadows - you will find that bodybuilding training days consist of different segments. In the beginning you introdue blood into the muscles but try to limit fatigue - a warm up. You then typically go to a compound movement where you are going to work with heavier weights with a more explosive rep cadence. This is generally where you would be trying to increase the weight used over time. The rest of the workout is then focused on doing volume, hitting different angles and introducing tension at different parts of the stretch - that is focus on peak contraction versus loading the stretched position. The latter tends to come at the end of the workout because you can't express much strength after what amounts to weighted stretching of the engorged muscle. Etc. Rest periods are different throughout these phases. So that is best practice and while there are tons of folks who are pubmed warriors, the metis angle has produced what I've just described, which would also describe a lot of what you would have seen in 70's, 80's, 90's etc. weight rooms. That isn't to say that there wasn't always a diversity of debate. Consider volume training (e.g. Lee Haney, Gaspari, Arnold...most professional bodybuilders) vs. high intensity ( Mike Mentzer, Dorian Yates, Doggcrapp Training).
Going back Henselman as schmuck, things like workout frequency are intermixed with these considerations. Doggcrapp (or DC) Training came about in the late 90's ealry 00's but was being developed in the 90s. One of it's key insights was specifically the frequency aspect: it is better to introduce the minimum necessary stimulus for adaptation and do it as many times a year as possible. DC argued that the way to do that is with an A/B split done 3x a week and to use triple rest pause sets to quickly innervate all the fibers in the target musculature. He also told folks they needed to eat a lot of protein. I trained DC style for years, including under DC's protege. As one becomes more advanced, the frequency comes down so that you can do a bit more volume focusing on muscle imbalances. The notion is that you are compromising overall growth in exchange for greater focus and conserving recovery capacity for more stubborn bodyparts. This principle is also commonly applied to higher volume approaches. For example, my legs were always a strong point and my back and chest were weaker. Accordingly, I trained legs fairly easy and hit back and chest twice a week hard and everything else once a week. My point is that this was, is and will be standard stuff. Nothing groundbreaking. It can be supported by studies, but is has long been well known through trial and observation. This isn't to say that there aren't a lot of dumbasses at your gym or on bodybuilding.com, but the group as a whole has continuously had tremendous practical knowledge.
Miscellaneous related thoughts:
-7 sets of 3RM and 3 sets of 10RM are not the same thing. Most studies are not adequately controlled and moreover most don't use trained individuals.
-7 sets of 3RM is vastly more dangerous over time compared to 3 sets of 10RM. From a bodybuilding perspective, you need to find ways to increase progressive overload over a long period of time which in combination with your nutrition and supplementation will drive growth. Things like the "hypertrophy" range are really more about, this is a rep range where you can safely and continuously increase loading. These are also ranges where you can lift like a bodybuilder and not like a weightlifter. What does this mean? A weightlifter wants to lift the weight and will explosively do so, making use of whatever neurological patterns are most efficient at doing so. The bodybuilder goes into every set with the goal of maximally stimulating particular muscles and even particular parts of muscles. This is the art of bodybuilding training. It doesn't work very well with very high intensities. This comes on top of the safety issue.
-A few others have mentioned this, but time is definitely a thing. It also plays into progressive overload whereby density of training is one of hte many variables that can be used to generate progressive overload. If you are approaching a contest, you may actually prefer to use this variable vs. load for injury avoidance purposes, though most trainers advise that you try to keep your weights as close to off-season weights as possible as the best insurance against muscle loss.
-If you or anyone is really interested in bodybuilding traing, I highly recommend digging into DC training, John Meadows, Scott Stevenson. Also, go and look at how athlete and powerlifting trainers think about adding size - they are typicaly looking at moderate rep ranges with subfailure sets to accumulate volume. Westside barbell calls i the "repetition method" while Jim Wendler emphasizes that it is really just about doing "the work" after you've hit your strength goals for that day on the main movements. Also compare to german volume training a la Charles Poliquin.
"On the other hand, some of their failure seems to have come from taking past scientific studies too seriously."
I think you might be running into something that's pretty specific to the bodybuilding community, which is a widespread and intense interest in reading scientific studies, but a lack of sufficient training to read them critically and synthetically, given the detail and the volume. So some of this is people trying to overthink things and doing badly because of it.
(I would note, as someone who listens every week to the clinical updates on microbe.tv/twiv, that — according to their lead clinician — highly trained doctors immersed in evidence-based western medicine apparently continue to recommend COVID treatments that have been shown to be ineffective or counterproductive, because they too have trouble synthesizing and tracking what research has shown to be most effective)
Bodybuilding/powerlifting metis for the strongest, largest people I know doesn't actually take the form of knowing how to get bigger: it takes the form of *how to not get injured.* One of the biggest guys I know at the MIT gym — I think he's a postdoc in physics — usually spends at least 60 minutes stretching before he begins lifting. When I asked him why, he said something like "well, I love lifting weights, and I want to do so for the rest of my life, so I don't want to get injured. Over time, I have learned to be able to pay attention to my body, to notice where I'm tight or stiff, and to focus on that rather than on just lifting heavier stuff all the time."
It's super easy to get bigger through quantitative approaches: lift progressively heavy things, eat more. What you're quoting above is really fine grained optimization at the margins on these things that lend themselves to analysis.
The metis stuff is how not to get injured, I think, which is much harder to quantify and involves more of the intent listening, focus, craft, and mentorship.
Funnily enough, I think the consensus among the evidence-based fitness community is that stretching *before* lifting isn't beneficial and probably increases the risk of injury.
I'd really give doctors a lot of benefit of the doubt w.r.t. COVID treatments. My experience of reading COVID related papers is that they're a staggering mess. Not only conflicting in every imaginable way but many of them have severe methodological or logical errors. I don't think anyone could synthesize coherent view out of them - it definitely feels like one of those areas where the more you read the output of academic peer reviewed papers, the dumber you're likely to get, and the "metis" of doctors swapping tips on Twitter is likely to do better.
Lifting weights for hypertrophy is in fact a primarily anaerobic activity, though slow twitch relies on oxidation. Glad that was mentioned. When you start adding rest time variables, what youre really doing is simultaneously working your metabolic and cardiovascular efficiency. Might recommend mike mentzer and dorian yates’ “Heavy Duty” and “Blood and Guts” respectively. Among other details they advocated just 1 working set to failure. Anything beyond that seems to be superfluous for bodybuilding.
I'm going to suggest a good comparison of Metis to the peered reviewed study in two different populations. Priests and Rabbis have been helping people cope with depression, loss, sadness forever. Do they get formal training, what does that training say, is it different than what a therapist would do? Is it better? I mean priest have been doing trauma counseling for 100s of years, are they any good at it, better than our grief counselors or shrinks?
It seems pretty obvious to me that you probably want both. Intuition, selective pressure, and imitating successful people can only get you so far, and the same is true of measurements, numbers, spreadsheets, and abstractions.
It seems like a lot of people want to fall _really hard_ on one side or the other: either you go all in on your intuition and grandmother's recipes, trusting the tried and true methods - or else you're all numbers and spreadsheet and toe shoes and soy lent.
This seems to be a general, pattern, too, in different modes of cognition: some people are great at saying 'no' to ideas but have a hard time saying yes to anything remotely creative. Others are creative fountains but can't constraint themselves to just pursuing a few ideas that are relatively close to feasible.
It seems that wherever tradeoffs exist, a lot of people want to just rest entirely on one side or the other. Anyone else notice this?
Enjoyed this article, which bridged two of my interests.
I've a couple of thoughts.
1. The fast feedback and personal experiments of metis are real and their results are tangible and positive. People who train almost always slowly gravitate towards the correct information and make progress. Very few people in their 3rd year of bodybuilding are doing long distance roadwork and bodyweight exercises.
2. However, the road is long, the local optima plentiful and the configuration space is huge. So past a certain point it becomes really hard to find the optimal program.
3. As Scott discovered, broscience is very diverse. Sure there are some common opinions, but there is loads of contradictory and contrarian stuff. I suspect this is the case with all metis. The value of science is cutting down the weeds so more flowers will grow.
4. There's no clear point where the science kills the metis. If you trained based on the science in the 90s you would have constantly plateaued as you gambled everything on studies of untrained unmuscled individuals. Now there are studies that deliver BRUTAL routines to elite level trainees.
5. The process of incorporating the science into the metis is the snake that eats its tail, as the latter will inform your ability to sniff out the quality studies in the former. For this reason Menno Henselmans himself says the process must be BAYESIAN. How's that for full circle.
I would disagree with the claim that "peer-reviewed academic studies still seems to be the way to go" for fitness; my general impression is that academic studies lag best practices known among informed athletes and coaches. Academic studies often have a lot a limitations especially with advanced athletes over long time periods, because very few study participants are advanced and very few studies are over long time periods. Indeed, I just wrote a comment in the last open thread about how I got screwed in my own training by putting too much stock in a couple academic studies, which had correct conclusions about how beginners can train, but it's incorrect if you're not a beginner.
As for rest periods, there is indeed a lot of unsupported dogma out there, but among well-informed coaches and athletes (meaning, people who have actually tried training with varying rest lengths) I think it's well-understood that: (1) longer rests are overall better, because you can push yourself harder in each set (2) though longer rests are better overall, short rests have benefits for building work capacity and for metabolite training (3) since you don't have infinite gym time, shorter rests often make sense even in situations where long rest would be better for your goal. For bodybuilders who are doing like 100 different exercises (I exaggerate) to be sure every muscle gets a full workout, they can't wait 5 minutes between every set and realistically complete their workouts. For strength athletes specializing in just a few lifts, they rest as much as they want for maximum performance in every set.
If you want really good information about strength training or bodybuilding, the best source is coaches who are smart, open-minded, and knowledgeable in both academic literature as well as the training methods of top athletes. One source I can recommend is the guys at Renaissance Periodization (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfQgsKhHjSyRLOp9mnffqVg); they have videos specifically about rest periods if you want to see their thoughts.
Hey Luke, I think the quality of the studies has drastically improved over the years. Jeff Nippard had a great video showing that many of the modern studies use much more advanced trainees on much more serious programs. There are of course, still limitations, but it's way better.
I'm a big fan of Renaissance Periodization. But both Chad and Mellifluous Max Montana know their science as well as their practice. And Mike, who had a big hand in their hypertrophy programs, is as knowledgeable as you get.
Yeah, I agree, studies have been improving a lot--but I still will take a coach's recommendations over the literature's. To be fair, the studies that misled me were from 15+ years ago when I first started lifting.
"There is no pure untouched community of noble savage bodybuilders, forming an academic-science-free control group"
In a way, this shouldn't matter. If the people with skin in the game decide that the best info is coming from academia, then shouldn't Taleb/Scott accept that as being the right decision?
It might result in getting stuck at a local maximum. If academia determines the baseline of best practices, and small deviations by experimentally-minded people produce worse results, then there's basically no chance of radical changes arising from that.
However, a pure untouched community has a chance of coming up with totally different methods, like climbing a tree while being chased by a pack of dogs, which might turn out to be an even better way to build muscle.
But if the lifting community can get stuck in a local maximum because of what academics say, why wouldn't they get stuck in local maxima based on random events or clueless but charismatic leaders?
Because the lifting community at this time doesn't act according to random events or clueless but charismatic leaders, they act according to what academia says. Anyone who wants to introduce radical new ideas has to compete with that, which is an uphill battle.
You could also argue that many academics are clueless but charismatic leaders. We don't tend to think of professors as "charismatic" but speaking with absolute confidence is a big part of of it, and profs do that a lot. Especially if they're using their confident speech to promise a better life to people who adhere to their advice!
Metis is one factor, thymos is another; a lot of bodybuilding/fitness lore is about optimizing *long-term motivation*, not maximizing pounds of muscle added per gym-hour. So I'd expect bodybuilding wisdom to skew to things that work reasonably well and feel good.
While they do get long-term feedback from changes in appearance, the short-term visible feedback comes from a) how you feel during/after the workout, and b) progression in how much you lift. (e.g. a typical bulking cycle might mean adding half a pound of muscle and half a pound of fat each week. After a month, you'll be bigger, but also fatter; it's really hard to eyeball changes. You could test different lifting strategies over time, but for many of them the payoff cycle is: rapid gains from getting technically better at doing the lifts -> gains from actually getting stronger -> slower gains as you reach limits). And the longer the periods between changes, the more *other* factors change. The solo RCT is hard.
Another thing that makes practitioners reluctant to change their behaviors in lifting is that a big part of the motivation is seeing a number go up. But that's only meaningful if you are doing exactly the same workout each time; if your lifts go up, but you increased your rest times, you didn't necessarily get stronger, and it's demotivating to worry that your measurement only looks better because of how you measured it.
This is a kind of annoying answer, but I think it gets to the fundamental truth: what fitness researchers are trying to measure is the effect of controlled experiments. What bodybuilders are trying to do is to get big. And getting big is not a series of controlled experiments; it's partly an effort to impose some level of control on the random fluctuations in life (injuries, schedule changes, etc.) that interfere with maximum gainz. You can look at bodybuilding wisdom as a sort of bro canon, not in the sense of embodying what bros think, but embodying how a true bro would motivate you to keep going for one more set.
"thymos is another; a lot of bodybuilding/fitness lore is about optimizing *long-term motivation*,"
exactly! this is the first order cause of success, not optimizing rest period. The post even explains it:
"The real reason was probably that bodybuilders chased the pump and burn they get from shorter rest periods."
so if we want to ignore all the psychological and motivational aspects of training, then yes, maybe the metis is wrong... but if you actually want to stick to a program, the metis may be correct (even if their reasoning is not)
Doesn’t seem like you established that this is consensus in the community by any means, and most of what you shared was contrary to that point. Your conclusion seems pretty shoehorned... because some people of a generalized body are wrong means there is a failure of ‘metis’? This is nothing more than a debunking of what most in the fitness/bodybuilding community would consider an old wives tale....
Of the sites/threads I looked at, about a third explicitly supported the short rest times, and many of the others referred to this having been a previous position which had recently changed.
I’m a very casual bodybuilder who never reads studies on bodybuilding.
I sort of cringed at all of the community sources you cited. None of them (maybe Outlift?) would be used by any bodybuilders I know, casual or serious, who I think of as having metis in the field. Bodybuilding.com is the People magazine / yahoo answers of bodybuilding.
I would look at Instagram, Youtube, or Reddit sources to see what the median of the community thinks nowadays.
While this is a completely new topic for me, I would've expected the bodybuilders to have a generally decent grasp of what makes one "good", without a strong grasp of what it takes to cross the last decile, or last percentile, of gains. They, by almost any measure, haven't "failed miserably" re their end goal from what I can see.
Metis seems to stand in for a shorthand for "generally accepted practices within a community, that evolved to reach strong end goals". But it's evolved, which means it won't be optimised for everything, and might even have counterproductive aspects. The same way that "scientific endeavours" you're citing are engineered, and also will have blind spots that will need correction eventually.
If I have to propose a model I'd think it'll be more like "Given sufficient time and people, metis will get you pretty close to where you wanna go. But you might want to test scientifically to make sure your ideas stack up, as there's a very high probability that a bunch of them might be counterproductive, just not so counterproductive that you'll make no progress."
Several months ago I tried to answer for myself whether resistance bands are "about as effective" as free weights for strength training. The most comprehensive attempt to answer the question I could find was here: https://bonytobeastly.com/resistance-bands-for-muscle-hypertrophy/. (There are some possibly-relevant studies, which the author of that piece selectively references, but none that I found attempted to directly measure hypertrophy or strength gains over time in a controlled trial that compares resistance band training and free weight training.)
If the author of that piece is to be believed, it's the expert consensus that resistance bands are definitely strictly inferior to free weights for building muscle, specifically and solely because 1. a small number of recent studies indicate that tension at long muscle lengths promotes hypertrophy more than tension at short muscle lengths and 2. resistance bands must theoretically have a "resistance curve" that's the opposite of that, i.e. more tension is applied at the end of the range of motion where the working muscles are contracted.
I found this pretty striking since it seems like the author, and apparently all the experts too, are putting *too much* faith into too light a body of relevant evidence and *underweighting* the relevance of "metis"-oriented arguments along the lines of "well it certainly looks and feels exactly like effective strength training in every way, and many people who claim to be experienced lifters think it's effective for them, so why wouldn't it be about as effective". Personally, I'm still training with my resistance bands and am happy with the rate of progress I've seen thus far.
> "well it certainly looks and feels exactly like effective strength training in every way, and many people who claim to be experienced lifters think it's effective for them, so why wouldn't it be about as effective"
Honestly, I haven't heard any experienced lifters claim this, so I'm curious where you're hearing it? My impression from the weightlifting and powerlifting community is that resistance bands are generally inferior (and obviously so), for exactly all the reasons the linked article discusses. They have some niche usages (especially *in addition* to free weights to alter the resistance curve) so a lot of gyms will have them, but I've never seen them used as a primary tool for strength or mass gains.
Obviously I'm not going to tell you not to do something that's working for you--so if you're happy with your resistance bands, that's great--but this view does seem very unconventional.
I didn't mean to imply it's a common position among all experienced lifters -- on the whole, you're right that they tend to be resistant to the idea that resistance bands are an effective substitute for free weights, at least after you float the idea to them -- just that you can find plenty of people who claim to be experienced lifters saying that resistance bands are good shit specifically where you'd expect to most readily find them (e.g. reviewing resistance bands on Amazon, or commenting on YouTube videos about resistance band exercises).
... but wait, what are the reasons you've heard people give besides 1. "the resistance curve is theoretically wand-wavingly not ideal" (I suspect people who says this are imagining that you'd start with the band completely slack at the beginning of the range of motion, which is of course idiotic and wrong) and 2. "they don't provide enough resistance" (which is true if you use bands that don't provide enough resistance, though you can make the same criticism of the little pink 5lb physical therapy dumbbells, a barbell with no plates on it, etc)?
One issue with resistance bands is they wear out over time, so you never really know how much you're lifting (even aside from the fact that you're lifting more at the top). They can also break and snap at you, which doesn't matter so much if they're light but seems like kind of a practical restriction on how heavy you can go.
As far as having some tension on the bands where you start the lift, it kind of depends... in theory, hyperelastic materials (like rubber) have a fairly flat section in the middle of their force-deformation curve, so if you can hit that reliably it wouldn't be too bad. But actually making a setup that achieves this would be a lot of work. I tried to do squats with resistance bands for a while, and any significant tension at the bottom makes it hard to get into position.
The lack of a nice objective number is a real downside, for the people that's important to, but I find that going by feel isn't really a problem as far as actually achieving hard sets goes. (Though, I developed my intution for what a hard set in the right rep range should feel like using free weights, so maybe a total novice who's starting with just resistance bands would have difficulty getting that right. Maybe.)
I don't really understand the "break and snap at you" point -- are you saying very heavy resistance bands breaking and snapping at you might be *more dangerous* than putting a barbell with hundreds of pounds on it on your shoulders or over your chest?
For now I basically do a goblet squat with the band doubled up "upside-down" under my feet (i.e. each hand is holding one end of the band, and the middle of the band is wrapping around *over* my feet), though this is already kind of hard on my wrists and I can imagine I'll have to figure out something different as I gain strength. An acquaintance of mind who's stronger than me who I memed into resistance bands suggested buying a plain ol' metal bar (I'm sure an actual barbell would work fine) and using that to wrap bands around, which I already do for deadlifts and that works pretty well.
"are you saying very heavy resistance bands breaking and snapping at you might be *more dangerous* than putting a barbell with hundreds of pounds on it on your shoulders or over your chest?"
Try to picture what happens in the middle of a 400 lb banded squat when a band snaps and suddenly you have 50 fewer pounds on one side - if you survive that without injury a couple extra Hail Mary's are in order.
The resistance curve is the major point. Even if the band is stretched at the beginning, the beginning is still easier than the end. Theoretically if your bands are long enough, you could equalize the beginning and end of range of motion, but in practical setups, there's a very noticeable difference.
With some exercises, there's also a stability issue. Unlike free weights, the bands have no inertia, so they can wiggle all over while you're trying to press against them. For example, I've tried squatting with a cable machine (which has the same problem with no inertia) and maintaining balance can be annoying. When weights are unstable, your body will refuse to produce maximal force (presumably as an injury-prevention measure) and so it limits your training.
Yeah, I just don't really buy that the resistance increasing through the range of motion necessarily matters *that much* for actual outcomes, as long as you're taking reasonable steps to ensure that the resistance curve isn't insanely steep, until someone attempts to really measure how much it matters for strength or hypertrophy in an actual experiment. I've yet to see anyone put any numbers to how much the resistance curve varies in actual, thoughtful usage for important movements, and how much change there would be "acceptable" or cause resistance bands to be "meaningfully" less effective than free weights.
And, you know, imagine that there is something to this argument and it turns out that resistance bands are "90% as good" overall as free weights as measured by muscle mass change over time; I'm sure that kind of difference would matter to literal professional bodybuilders, and that's perfectly legitimate (indeed anyone who's making money off their physique should absolutely play it safe even just knowing what we know now and stick with the weights), but should it matter so much to your typical hobbyist lifter -- especially if they're not trying to overcome a plateau at the moment and haven't already ruthlessly optimized every other facet of their training and diet -- that they should stress out over whether this far more convenient training modality is suboptimal? Personally, if I were persuaded that I'm making gains 90% as fast as I would if I were to haul my ass to the gym four times a week and deal with plates and such, I would be like, "great, I'm gonna stick with the bands until and unless I plateau and also feel a strong urge to break past that plateau".
I've seen and heard it claimed that one reason free weights are superior to machines *because* they require you to "engage your stabilizer muscles" or some such. Do you disagree that that's good, or do you think free weights engage your stabilizers "the right amount" whereas resistance bands require you to focus too much on stabilizing?
The "90% good" is basically the objection here: resistance bands do provide you with some tension, but might be limiting by ~10%. Unfortunately, even for intermediate-level lifters, you only get about a 10% margin of error before your workouts become completely ineffective. (I'm intentionally being vague to make a point, but to justify the 10% number: you need to be within about 4 reps in reserve for a set to do anything, and 4 RIR translates to about 10% weight).
The stabilizer thing is a bit complicated and that's why you'll hear seemingly contradictory claims. If your stabilizers limit your workout, then that's generally bad, because it means the muscles you were trying to hit aren't getting a sufficient workout. If your stabilizers assist but don't limit, that can be good because that means you're stimulating more muscles and developing coordination that carries over to other activities. However, especially for more advanced bodybuilders, minimizing stabilizer involvement can be preferable so that all your energy is going into the target muscle.
This is straying from the efficacy of resistance bands a bit, but I'll quote from a recent MASS article that covered the study "Effect of Resistance Training to Muscle Failure Vs. Non-Failure on Strength, Hypertrophy and Muscle Architecture in Trained Individuals", Santanielo et al. 2020, regarding your justification:
> In my opinion, we should reframe the failure debate from "do you have to train to failure" to "how far can you train from failure and still maximize hypertrophy?" Training farther from failure may also have additional practical benefits related to fatigue, muscle damage, single-session volume, weekly volume, and weekly frequency, but we'll return to those later. For now, let's look at the evidence. Most of the studies comparing failure versus non-failure training are similar to the currently reviewed research, in that they compare failure to training just a rep or two shy of failure. About a year ago, Greg reviewed a study from Lasevicius et al (9 – MASS Review) which had untrained lifters, in a within-subjects design, train knee extensions to failure or not to failure. While proximity to failure was not controlled in that study, subjects likely had at least seven reps in the tank when performing non-failure training. Still, they experienced similar hypertrophy and strength compared to failure training (however, note that the subjects in the non-failure group performed more sets in order to equate total reps between groups). Further, Carroll et al (10 - MASS Review) had a group of subjects train to ~4-5 RPE over 10 weeks on a variety of lifts (squat and bench press included), and these lifters experienced greater quadriceps growth than a group who trained to failure. The idea that you can perform a decent amount of training at a 5RPE (5RIR) and still maximize hypertrophy is something that I thought seriously about in 2016 after we wrapped both an acute RPE/RIR accuracy study (12) and Dr. Helms' Ph.D. thesis (13). For the acute study, subjects performed one set to failure on the squat at 70% of 1RM and predicted when they had 5, 3, and 1 RIR during the set. Subjects under-predicted RIR by about 5, 3.5, and 2 reps at each threshold. In other words, subjects had on average a 10 RIR when they predicted a 5 RIR. Then, Dr. Helms' study compared two groups who trained the squat and bench three times per week over eight weeks of training, and found that a group who trained, on average, to a self-reported 4-5 RIR experienced similar muscle growth to a group who trained to a 2-3 RIR. Taken together, these studies suggest that the well-trained lifters in Helms' study trained considerably farther from failure than reported. Other studies (14 – MASS Review, 15 – MASS Review) have reported that subjects can predict intra-set RIR to within one rep after the first set of an exercise. So, I don't think the subjects in Helms' study were 3-5 reps off on every set, but the main points are 1) 4-5 RIR training produced similar muscle growth as 2-3 RIR training and 2) the average number of RIR was probably even lower than reported. To me, these findings suggest that trained lifters with a high training frequency can take most sets on compound lifts to around a 5 RIR and still maximize hypertrophy on major muscle groups (i.e., quads and pecs). One valid criticism of this interpretation is that if RIR was under-predicted and there was no group training to a 1 RIR, then it's fallacious to conclude that 5 RIR training is sufficient. I'm sympathetic to that argument, but that lateral quad hypertrophy in this study was 6.6%, similar to a study (+ 4.88%) (16), but with subjects training much closer to failure.
> I don't see much data on the other side of the argument. You could argue that studies using cluster sets or intra-set rest could demonstrate that training close to or at failure is necessary, but I don't think it's an apples-to-apples comparison. A commonly cited study from Goto et al 2005 (17) had subjects perform leg extensions for either 5 sets of 10 reps to failure for 12 weeks or 5 sets of 10 reps with a 10RM load but with a 30-second intra-set rest after the fifth rep to ensure subjects stayed shy of failure. This led to potentially a 1-3 RIR at the end of all 10 reps. Quadriceps hypertrophy was more than double in the failure (+ 12.9%) versus the intra-set rest (+ 4.0%) group. However, this is more of an extended cluster set and not indicative of how most people train. Therefore, I weigh the Carrol, Lasevicius, and Helms studies more highly than the Goto study. Nonetheless, I think it's also fair to say that there is not enough data to definitively conclude how far someone can train from failure and maximize hypertrophy. I would say that someone can train to around a 5 RIR for the most part when using moderate to heavy load training (i.e., not light loads), but it may be even farther from failure than that (gasp). The sufficient RIR might be 2-3 RIR, but I don't believe the existing data suggests that. In short, we need to reframe the question, and both opinions (i.e., 5 RIR or 2-3 RIR) have merit, but suggesting a 5 RIR or less is sufficient is not an outlandish statement based upon the data. I've heard people say, “Well, I tried training to a 5 RIR, and it just didn't feel stimulating, or it didn't feel fatiguing.” That's fine, but that doesn't negate the existing data. As with anything, we sometimes think in a binary fashion, but not all training must be at the same RIR. If someone can do 13 reps at 72.5% of 1RM on the squat and does 5 sets of 8 this would be a 5 RIR on the first set, but the RIR would probably be 2-3 on the final set or two.
I'll clarify that when I say "90% as good" I mean "your workouts are 90% as effective", not anything like "equivalent to doing the same number of reps with 90% as much weight" (and even in that case, my read of the state of the evidence is that it might matter less than you seem to believe even in trained subjects).
I'll say that this is reminding me of the "anabolic window" and related protein timing memes. It's true that protein timing does matter more-than-not-at-all -- I don't think you can eat 1kg of protein once per week and fast the other 6 days and expect to make close-to-optimal gains, and conversely if you're a pro bodybuilder who's butting up against their genetic potential and cutting in preparation for a show, it may well really matter that you obsessively get some protein in you every 2 hours -- but some people have placed or even still place far too much emphasis on it on the basis of vague mechanistic arguments while ignoring what I'll refer to as "common sense" and in the absence of any direct evidence.
In this case, as I understand it, the right amount of focus on protein timing turns out to be "just live your life and try to get at least 3 meals with a good amount of protein each day, if you do that and hit your total daily intake goal and you'll be fine" for anyone who's not an elite lifter, and I predict that the efficacy of resistance bands will turn out to be a very similar story -- "if it feels and looks exactly like a hard session with free weights, and you're putting a little effort into ensuring the resistance curve isn't egregiously steep, and you're not close to your genetic potential and fighting for your life for every extra gram of muscle in the first place, you're probably building muscle about as well as you would with free weights". Hopefully we'll see if I'm right about that within the next decade or so!
I've become confused: is it your position that bands should be preferred over free weights because 'they're more convenient in a home gym setting, so who cares if they're marginally less effective?'? If so, I'm gobsmacked - what major compound lifts are you doing that are more convenient with bands than with free weights? You mentioned deadlifts above; has it really been your experience that banded is more convenient than free for that exercise?
More convenient because they take up very little space (there's no way I'd be able to work a barbell and plates setup into my apartment), less importantly don't require quite the same level of laborious manhandling to set up, even less importantly don't require near as much laying down or bending over to get resistance in the right direction, and perhaps more importantly for many people are quite a bit cheaper than a gym membership over time and probably cheaper than a home gym setup too for many years. The deadlift is probably the least convenient one to get right with bands, in my experience, since the beginning of the ROM is so close to your feet so there's not as much room between "too easy at the start" and "too hard at the end"; I'll usually spend 1 or 2 reps at the beginning of every set just tuning the initial tension so the set will have about the right number of reps, which I don't have to fiddle with near as often for any other movement I do.
I hope nobody thinks I'm telling them they "should" prefer bands over free weights! I'm claiming that the actual hard evidence for resistance bands being inferior to free weights is slim, that at least some people seem to be overinterpreting what little relevant evidence there is in a way that fits their bottom line, and my own priors and limited experience with them says that as long as you're putting the smallest amount of thought into ensuring your workout is appropriately difficult, it's very unlikely that they're so much less effective than free weights that hobbyist lifters should be telling each other that they're a waste of time.
And to be clear, do you hear other people claim that the sloped resistance curve matters *because they believe that tension at long muscle lengths promotes more muscle growth than tension at short muscle lengths and resistance bands do the opposite of that*, or is that just something that one guy came up with and other people believe the sloped resistance curve matters because many movements have a strength curve that doesn't slope upward and the flat resistance curve of free weights hypothetically matches the strength curve of those movements more closely? I was under the impression the long muscle lengths thing was a pretty recent finding from just a few small studies and didn't think it had become much of a meme yet.
I don't think it's widely known about the importance of tension vs muscle length. But I think most lifters would be able to give the feedback "feels too easy at the bottom and too hard at the top, and I'm not getting a good workout because of that".
This lifter gives the feedback "if you put a tiny amount of thought into it, it's hard enough throughout the the full range of motion, and I'm getting what feels indistinguishable from a good workout because of that". :)
You might be interested in the recent exchange between Menno Henselmans and the people at strongerbyscience.com on the subject of whether having high body fat impedes hypertrophy. It greatly lowered my faith in Menno's ability to draw good conclusions from a body of evidence, tbh (though of course that doesn't mean he's actually wrong about any other specific claim he's ever made). https://www.strongerbyscience.com/p-ratios-rebuttal-2/
I'll definitely signal boost this post, just because the strongerbyscience guys are actually pretty epistemologically aligned with the community here, although I'm not sure if they are aware of it's existence (or vice versa).
I was also pretty shocked by Menno in that one, I had also previously held him in quite high regard and his previous work and reasoning didn't seem to show a lot of the, uh... inability to update on evidence that that exchange showed. I *do* wonder if somehow he has some financial stake in that answer to that particular question? It was definitely a poor showing in my view.
Any reader here who counts resistance training among their hobbies and has the money to spare should definitely consider buying a subscription to MASS :). https://www.strongerbyscience.com/mass/
If you listen to the discussion they had on Jeff Nippard's podcast you might be less shocked; Menno comes around somewhat at the end. It's also enlightening to know that Greg himself championed this theory a few years ago and the community ate it up.
Best to focus on obvious lower order influences which at this point are much better understood.
Ah I haven't actually listened to the podcast yet, thats very gratifying to hear, and makes me feel a lot better about the whole thing.
I think I missed it due to not really consuming any of Nippard's content as a rule; Although I was aware of it's existence I hadn't got around to listening.
I actually found the debate on Menno's site. Due to the size of Jeff's audience he's become the defacto platform for debates like this, so if you like this kind of content you may be well served revisiting your rule.
If you're looking for practical advice you can save 90 minutes and just listen to Israetel's opening.
I had watched that debate a few weeks ago, and I came away more convinced by Menno's points. But what was clearest was that in terms of practicality, for almost anyone except specific people whose goals are to continue bulking well past aesthetic/healthy parameters, they all seemed to agree that the more conservative position that Mike/Menno were advocating made sense.
> But here’s what seems like an example of body-builders failing miserably, and needing normal academic science to set them right
There's also the very strong possibility that the difference between N or M rest minutes is irrelevant as a muscle growth factor compared to their use of stereoids and similar enhancers, so it makes sense for lesser "natural" methods not to be as optimized.
Kinda reminds me of Moneyball. Lots of skin in the game on the part of scouts, teams, coaches, GM's, and players, yet they were wrong about important facets of the sport for decades.
It seems wrong to argue about whether or not bodybuilders got it right/wrong in the past (or indeed now) purely by referencing the changing scientific consensus, since that's fundamentally part of the question. What methods do the top bodybuilders use now as compared to 30 years ago, and how big are they, etc.? You need to measure it by bodybuilder end-point metrics, not immediate metabolic measures which are innately far more vulnerable to confusion.
It's a bit odd to use the recentest and biggest RCT as your standard of judging whether the scientific literature beats metis - the former is going to win by definition
The bigger issue is science is once again useless at giving any sort of practical result. For years the science was uncertain about low-carb diets. Meanwhile everyone I've ever met who has successfully lost weight has done so on a low carb diet. Science just isn't very useful outside of carefully controlled environments. Which is to say science isn't all that useful. Science and technology get all the credit for progress, but it's capitalism that deserves it. Soviets had lots of great scientists.
It's not that the science is wrong, but most studies ignore the 'personal' or psychological aspect. What makes the diet X successful is usually not the nutritional superiority of it, but the ease of commitment.
It's unfortunate that this hasn't really become a meme yet in the same way that low-fat and low-carb diets became memes, but there is science indicating that preferring foods with low caloric density is much more important than how much of any specific macronutrient you're eating for lowering caloric intake (though high protein does count for something). Both low-fat and low-carb diets, as they're usually implemented, will lower the caloric density of your diet and thereby leave you more satiated from fewer calories, but you can also just buy foods you like with low caloric density without worrying too much about their macronutrient composition and eat those ad libitum and achieve probably at least as much or I'd bet usually even faster progress.
I know you haven't "met" me but feel free to count me as the first person you've ever interacted with who's successfully lost weight without worrying about carbs in particular.
>I found this interesting because some people hold up (no pun intended) bodybuilders as an almost-perfectly-incentivized “scientific” community. Every bodybuilder has his own skin in the game - based on getting the science right or wrong, he’ll be better or worse at what he does. There’s a quick feedback loop - you can see if you’re gaining muscle or not. And success is easy to observe - check if the person giving you advice has arms that look like tree trunks.
> But here’s what seems like an example of body-builders failing miserably, and needing normal academic science to set them right.
/Something/ feels off about the logic "which is more accurate, metis or scientific studies? we checked, and scientific studies say scientific studies are more accurate. so much for metis!"
Exactly. What was the involvement of exercise science academics in the evolution of bodybuilding from guys who looked like Sean Connery to guys like Phil Heath who look like Marvel comic characters?
The p values & effect sizes of unimportant and fringe questions are less relevant than the results which conveniently in this case are visual.
Eh, I wouldn't worry about that too much here (though it was my criticism of the French Revolution post). Everyone more or less agrees that the goal of modern bodybuilding is big muscles - if BB metis loses to science on that outcome then there's really nothing more to be said.
An important takeaway from this is that illegal* steroid use is (or was, but Fussell doesn't indicate that it has changed) endemic among the bodybuilder community. As a result, their metis is completely different from the mainstream scientific community, which is presumably not "in the know". But I'm not an expert on this so it's possible that on the question of how long to rest between sets is unaffected by how much drugs you're on.
I think sports scientists are collectively very aware that every bodybuilder, powerlifter, etc that isn't specifically competing in "natural"/"tested" shows/meets is on gear, if that's what you mean to say. I can speculate many reasons they tend to perform studies on people who don't (or don't admit to) using steroids, but surely one of the important ones is that it's far easier to get a large and appropriately uniform sample that way; it's hard enough finding a lot of willing subjects that already have enough experience with resistance training to be considered "trained", which is itself an important variable in how people respond to pretty much any strength training intervention you might want to test.
So you're saying that scientific studies in this field have participants who aren't already at peak performance because it's easier to find them and measure their progress? That seems like another reason that results might not generalize to steroid users.
"being trained" (semi-arbitrarily, at least a year of regular lifting) isn't quite as high a bar as what I think of when I hear "peak performance" (close to genetic potential, more like a decade), but yes, quite a lot of studies are done that *would* be relevant to serious lifters (on gear or not) except that the subjects were untrained so who knows.
I should clarify that at least among the sources I read, people generally know you need to ask "did the subjects already have significant time under the bar" and more-or-less ignore the study if not.
Almost all of those studies seemed to measure contrasting conditions that both fall under "short rest periods of 1-3 minutes", especially if you consider that as an unscientific estimate that might be as little as 30 seconds and as long as 5 minutes.
I was left entirely uncertain about what was being asserted or proved.
The problem the bros have is their N=1, or at least some small number depending on how many gym buddies they have. And it can be hard for them to get themselves to consistently change their training methods, especially if they think the new one isn't working. The scientists have a much larger N and more controlled conditions, but their results might not generalize.
I think if you really want to know what works, you have competitions, and you have your academics working as and advising trainers. If the trainers who follow the Long Rest school have athletes who keep beating the athletes of the Short Rest school at competitions... well, there's your answer. Assuming there aren't confounders like the Long Rest athletes coming from Samoa and the Short Rest ones coming from New Jersey or something. I believe this sort of thing has resulted in big gains in swimming and track.
There seems to be a similar thing in bicycle training. Everyone says do intervals, but the major school says a lot of the intervals should be just below your "Functional Threshold Power" (FTP), in the "sweet spot", whereas there's another group which says you should do "polarized" training, always considerably below FTP or considerably above it, and the "sweet spot" is just wasting your time or worse. Unfortunately I have not been able to determine if there are good studies pointing to one or the other.
The metis is that gym bro’s understand where to focus. Mainly, there’s a lot of emphasis on lifting a lot (volume), diet (eating a lot or eating clean), and the juice. Most of the chatter in bodybuilding is about lifting, diet and juice because most of the results come from lifting a lot, dieting, and juicing. I’m sure the bro’s get a lot of these fringe questions about rest between sets wrong because those effect sizes are de minimis compared to stuff like how to get as much volume in per week without overtraining.
If you want to compare the scientific community to the bro’s core competency, I would focus on the juice. The juice is inherently an area where experts should have an advantage because it’s experts who created these substances and ostensibly oversee their use.
Yea that was my thought as well. The strength programs and coaches at D1 unis and pro sports (or equivalent), the athletic teams from Soviet Era coaching, and the juicing set are the real populations to consider. It was unclear if the research includes those. All three have great blends of large, coordinated sample wires, control groups, long term studies, and significant use of guess and check tribal knowledge.
There were things that "bros" were saying for years that have only recently been shown to be more plausible than previously thought. The only example I have of the top of my head is sarcoplasmic hypertrophy (https://www.strongerbyscience.com/sarcoplasmic-vs-myofibrillar-hypertrophy/) but I definitely heard of some others.
Exercise science has a lot of issues, though a lot of that is the usual stuff, but in particular:
- Most studies don't necessarily look at trained people. Something that is plain as day is that things are very different between a weight lifting newbie and someone that has been at it for years.
- Most studies look at acute interventions (a few workouts followed by measures), not chronic changes in training regimen tracked over the span of months.
- Averages. Some stuff works really well for some people but not for others. The issues here might be cofounders (or "co-factors" maybe). It's really hard to control for everything that matters. As an endeavour, bodybuilding is actually pretty hard, once you've gotten to a certain level. Screw any crucial factor up (sleep, stress levels, nutrition, total training volume, ...) and suddenly your intervention does nothing or even proves detrimental.
I think other fields have similar issues, but the situation here is quite fragile. If you shoot up drugs in someone that's a bit too stressed or doesn't eat enough proteins, it's my understanding that the drugs don't usually stop working or even make your condition worse. Ditto if you increase the amount of drugs. With bodybuilding all of this can, and does, happen.
Would be interesting to do something similar with all the training methods that have appeared since the use of power meters and/or interactive trainers became mainstream among "serious" cyclists.
It seems obvious to me power meters and smart trainers have made cyclists much faster. With that said, I think there's still many important open questions like polarized vs sweet-spot, value in over-unders, length of V02 intervals etc. It is worth noting that even if polarized proved to be more effective than sweet-spot, it is simply too mind-numbing to be palatable for most indoor riders.
In theory, TrainerRoad could answer all of these questions but for various reasons, they aren't particularly interested in doing so.
To go to Scott's point, there is a youtuber named Dylan Johnson who makes videos showing what the "science" says about various cycling questions. Unfortunately, the studies he cites are mostly garbage and frequently taken out of context and/or misinterpreted. I would probably trust "metis" or bro-science over what he says.
I haven't been into competitive cycling for a few years, but when I was into it, I spent some time looking at the literature and, to be honest, had a very hard time finding anything useful. Andy Coggan and the WKO crowd seemed like the most reliable crowd. I remember Coggan doing nothing but VO2 intervals daily for a while. Never really saw what his conclusion was.
While I agree that power meters have made people faster, it has also created an obsession on FTP, or more precisely, FTP as measured by the 8-minute test method, since very few people have the courage to do an actual ~60 minutes effort (I did it a couple of times. It was brutal).
In terms of "metis", I remember two crowds: one was the ride a shit-ton crowd and the other was the avoid junk miles and only do intervals crowd. Based merely on observation, the ride a lot crowd was much faster. Personally, I just enjoyed riding hard, so I would find the fastest group ride any given day and go kill myself. I did do try to do structured training, but never lasted long.
There’s some decent science behind the zone 2 polarized training philosophy. Also that idea has been around forever. Like literally forever in the sense that Roman Legions did weekly 20+ mile rucks.
Yeah, TrainerRoad could analyze their customer's training and their FTP test results and come up with some good answers, but they'd be crucified for doing so and justifiably so. So if they have done it they're keeping it under their hat. Also they didn't have polarized training plans until recently, so they wouldn't have all that much data on that question specifically.
As someone that's mildly close to the sport and exercise field, theres some good stuff in the comments here... And also some stuff that's a little painful to read.
I'm slightly shifting myself to be even *more* cautious about speculating into fields I'm not a part of.
"But in most of the communities I look into, trusting the peer-reviewed academic studies still seems to be the way to go."
Both muscle gain and medicine are areas where researchers are relatively incentivized to produce correct conclusions right? Not sure that is true in every scientific field. For example, lore has it that in social psychology, interestingness is (was?) incentivized over correctness.
> None of this should come as a surprise; it’s the same thing that happened to doctors fifty years ago. We thought we’d developed useful lore. Evidence-based medicine showed half of it was wrong.
Given this history, I'm having a hard time understanding why your conclusion is
> But in most of the communities I look into, trusting the peer-reviewed academic studies still seems to be the way to go.
Surely trustomg metis/lore as a way of developing a practice, and allowing that evolved practice to be stripped of ephemera by scientific investigation is the way to go? Are you confident that someone could become an empirically better bodybuilder by reading all the studies first, then going to the gym?
Granted, there are probably domains where the theory is more important than the practice, but if your goal is some (non-academic-paper-publishing) concrete effect, it seems like the better approach by far is building a working, if clunky, set of practical skills and knowledge, then dropping the useless stuff off as you progress.
One community consists of the "pros", which are the ones that enter bodybuilding contests. These are looking to build big muscles with symmetry (and a number of other criteria from the judges). Note that these people do not win based on strength or actual muscle size, but how the muscles look (somewhat like figure skating).
The other community is the "bros". These don't enter contests, but they do compete with each other occasionally, so there is some strength involved, e.g. "What do you bench?". They do have aesthetics in mind - how they look in the tight shirt at the bar.
The people designing these studies generally don't belong to either community. They may ask some people about reasonable sample sizes, program lengths, etc. but they are constrained in cost as to how realistic the programs can be. For example, if you're looking for optimal contest prep programs, note that most contestants seem to take about 12 weeks to prep - from "I'm going to compete" to the actual meet. Most of the studies I've seen don't even last half that long.
I find it fascinating how I've read all of Scott's writing on metis in addition to likely all of the same source material, yet seemingly understand the concept quite differently.
I think of metis as being valuable in 2 types of situations:
1) it has been used and evolved over long periods of time (if it didn't work, it would have likely died out)
2) it pertains to a realm that is much harder to quantify/analyze
Given the above, I would not expect metis to be more informative than the scientific literature in a relatively new field like body building that is relatively legible to study.
You only have half of the equation. You have studies showing the effects, or lack thereof, of shorter rest-times. But, you don't have an actual survey of current body builders to find what they believe, or at least claim to believe. You have lots of suggestive evidence of what they believe, but its all evidence that is subject to self-selection bias. Who knows if the guys who write body building articles and answer questions on forums hold the same views as the guys who don't?
I strongly suspect the most active users on Internet forums are not representative of those actually throwing the weight around. The forums attract newbies drawn to over intellectualizing.
Never thought I’d see an ACX/powerlifting crossover episode, but here we are!
In my ~year of being in the latter community, I can confirm that metis is spotty at best and misinformation runs rampant. I liken this to Gwern’s review of that old book on animal husbandry (https://www.gwern.net/Bakewell ) — for a long time, people in different fragmented groups were trying to optimize for some set of results they thought they wanted, but doing so in a way that was beholden to various unhelpful priors/biases/delusions. On average, they *kind of* got to good results sometimes, but mostly it was a shit-show until more rigorous modern scientific practices came along. And that’s still where we’re at today in any area (like personal fitness) where anyone can become an “expert” with enough clients or clicks. I’m guessing metis has always been like for anything that’s not strictly life or death, but a long-haul optimization problem.
You don’t think powerlifting has progressed pretty far via broscience in your lifetime? Like, objectively, the progress has been unreal in the past 30 years.
And all while being held back by this Luddite rest between sets scheme :)
“Like, objectively, the progress has been unreal in the past 30 years.” Sorry, don’t you mean “the gains have been sick”? ;)
I haven’t been lifting (or paying attention to lifting communities) for 30 years :) — I’m just seeing it now and am amused by the Wild West of information out there. I joined an evidence-based women’s lifting group on Facebook, and fully a third to half of the content is the mods exasperatedly correcting false assumptions about nutrition & form thrown around by newbies who Googled & followed the advice of the first swole guy on YouTube that came up. So maybe there’s some kind of center/periphery dynamic where the core of informed, seasoned lifters are getting a lot better, but due to the popularity & reach of lifting also expanding, quality deteriorates as you get out to the newbie edges?
> So maybe there’s some kind of center/periphery dynamic where the core of informed, seasoned lifters are getting a lot better, but due to the popularity & reach of lifting also expanding, quality deteriorates as you get out to the newbie edges?
I observe that in basically every 'community'/subject/area/whatever!
Maybe since these bodybuilding discussions are happening in an online forum where you can't really see the results or gains of the people recommending them they must instead back up what they are saying with scientific studies to seem credible. This then allows bad science to invade maybe
The language learning community is another with a lot of skin in the game.
Working proficiency is such a long process, small optimizations can save significant amounts of time. It's a little surprising how slowly (if at all) university language settings have embraced tools like the input hypothesis or spaced repetition software, that are widespread in the self-driven learning communities.
On the other hand... there are still a lot of open questions and debates within language learning communities.
Maybe some questions about optimization stick around because a lot of the remaining questions are working so far at the margins? Language learning is a time-on-target activity. If you're spending x hours per day working with the language, that's most of the job.
So, flipping back to the case here, I think if you asked anyone in the lifting community to assign priority weighting to "any program of progressive overload on core lifts" vs. "duration of rest periods" as a point of initial focus... I don't think there would be debates.
If you know the basics, and you know all this other stuff is on the margins, maybe their "metis" is optimizing, but also preventing over-optimization?
i.e., In the world where rest timing led to 20% improvements or something... I think the community would have digested that knowledge. At least somewhat in proportion to relevance.
The first thing you might realize is that no one in these studies is likely to be an actual elite-level bodybuilder. It's entirely possible that figuring out the optimal number of leg extensions for college students isn't optimal for Sergio Olivia Jr on 2g of test/wk eating 7k calories per day with 15 years of training experience under his belt.
The second thing you might realize is that bodybuilding, and indeed sports training in general, defies explicit quantitative analysis. No bodybuilder is setting a stopwatch. They are training by feel. They are also somewhat eating and resting by feel. Athletes are successful because they can autoregulate and ignore the kind of explicit instructions that scientists are looking for in papers, or genpop is looking for in "top 10 exercise habits" lists in mens health magazines.
Bodybuilders will say they "eat clean" chicken and broccoli in interviews and then 4 nights a week are eating McDonalds. No one told them to do that. They may have even been told not to do that. But they just switch their brain off and it all seems to make perfect sense for them. Yes, even during contest prep. Some of the guys who come in the most shredded routinely go off their coach's diet plan egregiously and just laugh about it or rationalize it away or they never even think they cheated at all.
If you wanted to know which explicit simple instructions (like, do 5x5, or rest 90s between sets) causes the most muscle growth in the population you study, keep doing those studies. If you want to know how to become an elite athlete, start by documenting the actual behaviour of elite athletes and highlight the common trends. Spoiler - the basic ingredients are to train hard, eat a lot of food, and use steroids you like.
Yea some of these claims in the cited studies are just laughable. There’s confounding variables on top of confounding variables.
All in all, the evolution of bodybuilding via broscience over the past 50 years has created humans so physically abnormal that an alien species would think bodybuilders were a separate species. And some academic thinks that the rest between sets is holding bodybuilding back. Ok dude.
>The bodybuilders had lots of opportunities to experiment and tinker, with lots of skin in the game, but they were still getting things pretty wrong until researchers looked into some of their conclusions using the normal scientific method.
I have lifted weights for about 10+ years and made every mistake possible short of ruining my health and injuring myself.
- The "pump" is just increased blood flow. It's irrelevant to building muscle. You can get a great pump by curling a 1 pound weight fifty times.
- Pro bodybuilders are all running stacks of steroids + HGH + insulin. The exact response curves of hormones in response to weightlifting are largely irrelevant to them, as they're dumping massive amounts of artificial hormones into their systems anyway.
- Different weightlifters have different goals. The correct path for an aspirant pro bodybuilder is different to that of a person rehabbing an injury, or a person who wants to lose weight. There's no one-size-fits-all approach.
- Natural muscle gain is very slow (aside from the "newbie gains" when you start lifting). It can be difficult to assess whether your training is working or not when you're only gaining 1-5lb of muscle a year.
- Faced with an infinity of contradictory lifting advice, most bodybuilders adopt a "keep it simple, stupid", approach. As one person told me "more food on your plate + more weight on the bar = more muscle. Don't make it any harder than that!"
- When lifting weights, overwhelmingly the most important consideration is not getting injured. It doesn't matter if your training methods are effective in building muscle if they're also wrecking your joints: soon you won't be able to train at all.
I apologize if this is uncharitable/wrong, but as far as I can tell, the only real fundamental pro-science claim here is that knowledge of past RCTs (and similar things) makes you better at predicting the results of similar future RCTs as compared to things metis people say, when the things the metis people say is interpreted as a prediction about future RCTs.
Which isn't a point _against_ the ppl who are into doing RCTs and similar things, but seems kind of weak.
[also, to be fair, a lot of things that people say in bodybuilding are pretty easy to parse as predictions about future RCTs...]
The real issue at hand is the relationship between RCTs and practically useful knowledge/truth.
It seems to me that like in cases where you can reasonably name & isolate a Fact from the mess of real-life bodybuilding practice and culture, then definitely doing RCTs around that Fact will allow you to gain knowledge in a controlled setting (you will certainly accept or reject some hypotheses), and then maybe when you map that knowledge back into the wild, it'll improve practice in meaningful ways.
Certainly you should be able to predict future RCTs around the Fact better.
But like how relatively important are such situations? As compared to more "a-scientific" things (where for a beginner, an "a-scientific" thing might be just like personal stories from other people that make it easier to imagine yourself lifting and then you go do it, I don't know)?
I don't think this is a valid evaluation of metis vs legible expertise. The question being answered in these studies (how to get the biggest muscles possible) has only really been a focus of high-level bodybuilding since the reign of Dorian Yates in the early 90s. If you look at major bodybuilders from before then, like Frank Zane and Arnold, they're much less about massive muscles and more about aesthetics.
That gives this kind of bodybuilding <30 years to figure itself out - not anywhere near enough time to establish metis. The examples in SLaS are from cultures that figured things out over thousands of years: I expect the Inuit hadn't nailed down their seal hunting techniques three decades after first entering the arctic.
Writing about the optimal way to get swole is only going to further persuade the likes of the NYT that this is an alt-right blog.
The real story of course is that the rationalist community is about searching for truth, and there are certain truths that only alt-rightists are willing to proclaim. More and more such examples are coming from the realms of fitness, nutrition, and intersexual dynamics. That's probably a good thing, as alt-right will become just another flavor of right, just like alt-rock became another flavor of rock. As someone who sympathizes with the alt-right, I'd be very happy if it became less about ridiculous political conspiracy theories and more about telling fifteen-year-old boys to lift heavy shit and put it back down again because that's how they'll feel good, get self-confidence, and get laid.
Your basic premise, that bodybuilders were wrong because they disagreed with exercise research, isn't justified, because exercise research doesn't use bodybuilders as subjects.
There are a small number of bodybuilders in the world, and they're genetic freaks who work out constantly, make bodybuilding their lifestyle, take lots of drugs, and already have a lot of muscle. "Bro science" is designed for, and based on the advice of, the most-elite bodybuilders, and what they have to do to keep gaining muscle is very different from what you, I, or even a typical elite athlete, would have to do.
For example, bro wisdom says to do 3-5 sets of each exercise. Lots of studies show conclusively that, for exercise research subjects, the third set and onward is a waste of time, and the second set might not be worth doing either.
(I'm lying a bit; most of these studies conclude that you should do 3 sets. But the data clearly show that the gain per minute, or gain per work done, is maximal when you do 1 set, and the correct conclusion is that you should do 1-2 sets of many different exercises for many different muscles, rather than 3 sets of fewer exercises. The studies "disagree" because they aren't asking how to exercise most efficiently, but how to exercise one particular muscle so as to gain the most total mass /per exercise session/ (not per minute) for that particular muscle, regardless of how long you have to exercise.)
Bro wisdom says to take 1-3 minutes between sets because pro bodybuilders have to exercise REALLY FAST. Their workout routines are often 30 sets per day. If you take 5 minutes between each set, that's going to take hours per day just waiting between sets!
You and I don't need to do 30 sets per day, because our bodies aren't constantly, aggressively tearing down muscle at the rate that the bodies of pro bodybuilders are. The more muscular you get, the more your body wants to get rid of that expensive muscle.
(When I wrote "exercise research doesn't use bodybuilders as subjects", I meant " exercise research doesn't use PRO bodybuilders as subjects".)
Also, exercise science habitually asks the wrong questions. Here "what is the best rest time between sets for one exercise for gaining muscle at that exercise?" is the wrong question; "what rest time between sets results in the most muscle gain in 1 hour at the gym?" is the right question.
Also, a meta-analysis in exercise science is often worse than any of the studies within it. This is because subjects, exercises, and precise manner of exercise, are so variable that each study you add to your metanalysis adds more (unmeasured) independent variables.
> Lots of studies show conclusively that, for exercise research subjects, the third set and onward is a waste of time, and the second set might not be worth doing either.
FYI most of these studies were on beginners. In the last decade or so, they've done a better job running studies on non-beginners, and the consensus seems to be that more volume is better, well beyond 3 sets.
You're right that most were on beginners, but not all; and so far, literally every study I've looked at /showed/ that doing just 1 set is more efficient than doing 3 sets (though often not with statistical significance, owing to small sample sizes), yet /concluded/ that doing 3 sets is more efficient.
James Krieger 2010, "Single vs multiple sets of resistance exercise for muscle hypertrophy: A meta-analysis", included 2 studies using "trained" subjects (Ostrowski..Lyttle 1997, Rhea..Burkett 2002). Both showed, in every comparison except for one in which the one-set group lost mass, that doing 1 set is more time-efficient at gaining muscle size than doing 4 sets, although with small samples and hence we're not talking 95% certainty in all these cases. Yet all studies /concluded/ that doing more sets was better.
This sentence from Ostrowski reveals the source of confusion (p. 153): "There may be a minimum volume for resistance training at which adaptations are optimized, at least in the short term, and beyond which the performance of additional resistance activity provides no further benefit." By saying that the point at which "adaptations are optimized" IS the point beyond which more work "provides no further benefit", it shows that Ostrowski doesn't know what optimization means, and is only talking about maximizing total gain under the assumption of an unlimited number of hours per day to exercise.
Take this dataset of effect sizes (ES) from Ostrowski: Measuring rectus femoris thickness, 9 subjects doing 1 set, ES 0.27; 9 subjects doing 4 sets, ES 0.78. I'm saying that doing 1 set is better because 4 x 0.27 = 1.08 > 0.78. Those 1-setters could gain more width to that muscle by doing more sets, but they could gain size more efficiently by exercising any other muscle instead.
Now look at Schoenfeld..Krieger 2018, "Dose-response relationship between weekly resistance training volume and increases in muscle mass: A systematic review and meta-analysis". This study concluded that each additional set per week was associated with a constant increase per set in effect size; but if you look at their data (Table 2), you'll see they just forced a constant increase onto the data by doing a linear regression! The data again seems to show that fewer sets are more efficient than more sets, although the way they stratified it in Table 2 makes it impossible to tell for sure.
The consensus is that more volume is better, but the consensus is wrong because it's answering the wrong question. The right question is how you should exercise to develop the most muscle with a constant amount of time and effort. In all studies, doing 3 sets results in less than 3 times as much gain as doing 1 set, and likewise for all higher set numbers. Therefore, 1 set per muscle is the more-efficient way to exercise.
It's easy to think of the scientific community as an architecture for producing knowledge. But how that knowledge is distributed and how it derives it's authority are of equal importance.
The gym bros never had an architecture for distribution or verification. Of course they would get stuck on something suboptimal if they are giving each other advice.
Say the mechanism for checking credibility of the advice is the size of someone's arms. Now say we have 1 guy doing something unorthodox and 100 doing the accepted wisdom.
Even if the unorthodox method was better, produced nice big arms, it's still just 1 guy vs those 100 out of whom much more than 1 pair of nice arms would emerge just by sheet statistical likelyness.
I think that if the architecture is not set up for systematically reward 'correct' information, quantity is going to rule.
By Googling, you only learn the opinions of gym bros that go online and do research. This is undoubtedly a growing percentage, but 10 years ago (when I used to go to a gym that was popular with bodybuilders) it was close to zero. People took advice from the "local experts", who were generally muscular due to genetics and/or drugs, often probably despite their training routines. If someone with ripped arms told a newbie to perform sets of 100 curls on a full moon, most would do it unquestioningly.
My two pence worth on the rest debate is to say that you're probably best actually just doing 1 single set of each exercise anyway, so it's a moot point.
The difference in gains between single vs multiple sets in studies is always pretty tiny, if there is one at all. Couple this with the fact that most people will hit their genetic ceiling pretty quickly, by doing multiple sets with long rest periods you're increasing your time in the gym by x5 to ultimately get the same results after a few years.
As someone who used to do 1-2 sets, I assure you it's a bad way to train and will cause an early plateau. If you want to get to the intermediate or higher level, you'll need to do a lot more volume. The magic number seems to be 12-20 sets/week, but there's a lot of factors that affect the exact number.
I think *recent* academic literature has established a consensus that high volumes are better; there were a lot of studies ~20 years ago that suggested the opposite (usually because they were studying beginners) and that's indeed what misled me. In fact there was recently a study that got a lot of attention that showed 40 sets/week was better than 20 sets/week--they did not research the sustainability of such training, though.
I agree that over the short term, higher volume training can probably produce (marginally) faster gains.
My argument though, is if you say look at a 5 year plan for an average person, 20-30 mins a week will probably get you the same long term results as 5-8 hours per week. Maybe with the 5-8 hours a week you'd hit your ceiling in 3-4 years.
If building muscle as fast as possible is your number one priority maybe all that extra time and effort is worth it. Personally though, I'd rather put that time to other use. (I say this as a 40 year old married man, probably had my skinny 20 year old single self known all this I'd have still trained 2 hours a day...)
You also have to consider "intention to treat". Anecdotally I've seen so many people start out with high volume programs training for hours several days per week, and most quit pretty quickly. Lower volume and frequency programs tend to be more sustainable for most people.
You see this kind of thing with diet studies all the time. Great results in the lab over a short period, but in the real world long term very few people can actually stick to them.
Higher volume is important not just for faster gains, but also for long-term gains. (Indeed the speed of gains is usually not as much an issue as the existence of gains--one of the must frustrating things being an experienced lifter is that a lot of times, you'll run a program and not get any results at all!) For the first few months of training, some people will see basically maximal results doing 1 set 3 days a week--extra volume won't add muscle any faster. However the plateau comes fast, and you'll be stuck at only a fraction of your potential--maybe 1/3 of your gains. To go farther, you need to add more volume, and to get to your maximum, you'll need smart periodization strategies, too.
I definitely agree that a lot of people start way too ambitiously, and moreover, a lot of people have modest goals ("look toned") that don't require much more than a bare minimum program. But I also think a lot of people who want to make more progress don't realize they're undertrained.
Interesting parallel to sabermetrics etc. in pro sports. The old-style coaches had plenty of experience and plenty of skin in the game, but it turned out that they were making some pretty basic mistakes and the ones who adopted metrics thrived.
All the studies that explicitly equated work still found no difference. If you can do 4 sets of a slightly lower weight with 1 minute breaks, or 3 sets of a slightly higher weight with 5 minute breaks, you're saving lots of time with the former. Outside of a controlled experiment, saving time leads to getting more work done or being more consistent with your training. The studies so far haven't really addressed the real world consequences of rest time advice. They're like feeding lab rats precise numbers of calories of coca-cola and salad and concluding that for weight loss it doesn't matter whether you eat salad or drink coca-cola. But in the real world ceteris isn't paribus because everything is ad libitum. If somebody can get the same work done in less time, he is likely to end up getting more work done. If you want to test it properly, randomize and tell group A to rest short, tell group B to rest long, and don't control anything else about their training. Even after hearing of all those studies I'd still wager 3:1 odds that the short rest group does not worse than the long rest group.
All of the comments seem to correctly focus on the false premise of the post: that it's quick/easy to see what's working when you bodybuild.
The meta-question is why Scott didn't bother to talk to someone in the community, any one of which could have clued him in. The "mentis" I'm familiar with would have included:
1) feedback is slow and there are tons of confounding variables
2) age, training age, and genotype all overwhelm any tinkering at the margins
2a) newbie gains aren't real life for long and should probably be treated separately
3) most "bodybuilding" is all about the margins! After 5 years of on-point habits, you're squeaking out a pound or two per year; without juicing, there are no more leaps to be made
4) there's no short-term economic incentive for funding the large long-term studies required to get robust results. (Maybe the military is the only org equipped to control diet and exercise for a large n; they'll even have some twins!) It's a bit mysterious why they don't, since generally poor recruit health has officially been identified as a strategic risk...
Menno Hanselmans is pretty hard to put into a box. He's practicing bodybuilder, ex data analyst and his last brand name was "bayesianbodybuilding". So quite a lot of empirical knowledge is involved. If anything, he's possibly the best practitioner of the bayesian method I've seen: scarcely anything in fitness science is proven to the proper scientific method standards, so a vast majority of the time you have to work with weak or moderate evidence, plus a large variability in your clients. Knowing how to swim in this sea of evidence is pretty important. It's not the first time he's using a study to argue the opposite of that study's conclusion. Here's his advice on how to read a paper: https://www.facebook.com/MennoHenselmans/posts/research-tip-when-you-want-to-critically-evaluate-a-study-dont-read-the-full-pap/2152206684837155/
Also he's not alone. He's part of a new generation of evidence based PHD bodybuilders that mostly go in the same direction: Brad Schoenfeld (that he mentioned), Mike Israetel, Eric Helms, Greg Nuckols.
Maybe the bodybuilders fell prey to a common problem of Metis based practices. The harmless ritual. If rest duration has minimal impact, then prescribing a pointless ideal rest duration doesn't hurt gains. Once one is prescribed, it will be very difficult to get rid of.
Hunters may perform some ritual to thank the spirit of their game and put it to rest. This doesn't gain them anything, but because it costs so little it is difficult to get rid of.
It's worthwhile to consider the biases of all groups with "metis" and in which direction they may err. You mention "primitive tribes" that have an "almost supernatural" knowledge of food preparation - they have a bias in favor of avoiding potential danger and consuming a limited number of knowably safe foods. For these reasons, many such people have "taboos" against foods that are widely considered safe and healthy - e.g. Navajo have a taboo against fish, I recall once seeing a documentary about a New Guinean tribe that has a taboo on citrus, and, perhaps most famously, the ancient Hebrews (and their modern dietary descendants) had a slew of food taboos on everything from pork to shrimp to mixing meat and dairy.
In which direction might Bodybuilder "metis" err? I think it's quite obvious: in the direction of looking tough in front of your other gymbros. The community as a whole might generally try to embrace science and experimentation, but when there's a question with mixed evidence (as was the case of rest periods), they're going to err on the side of what makes them look harder, faster, stronger in the gym, in this case resting less. To suddenly start resting 2-5 minutes between sets might bring marginal long-term gains in muscle growth, but it comes at the short-term cost of looking tired in front of one's peers. The net incentive structure is to pump those sets out as quickly as possible.
My experience [doing interviews](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1uJTtwNscwroARRMaOUPFzFpRcHDVI-bjVvDVZ7gZtbA/edit) to aid forecasting in 2020 is that there's often less "metis"/on-the-ground-wisdom than I initially expected, at least in a way that's distillable to abstract truths. I was initially uncertain how much this generalizes to beyond things like covid but upon reflection think it generalizes fairly well.
The issue isn't in the world but my map of the world: I often assumed "magic" in the on-the-ground wisdom without considering carefully that any causal model to generate such on-the-ground crowd wisdom would be implausible upon a first glance.
Isn't the whole point of metis not to optimize blindly for one metric and not to ignore entire reality around it?
If you rest for five minutes instead of two, your workout will take way longer. In reality, just how often will you go to the gym if it takes you double the amount of time? The pump and lifting is enjoyable, waiting is just plain boring. Will you ever enjoy working out if you keep staring at the clock, measure five minutes every time, get bored between each set, then go home after two hours?
Even knowing what the studies say, I would err on the side of more enjoyable shorter workouts, because I know the breaks make negligible difference while consistent gym habit makes all the difference.
This was my thought as well. I was thinking that the pump is a really satisfying feeling and it helps with motivation when you look at yourself in the mirror when you have a pump. Perhaps this also helps build the habit.
I think there a couple of confounders going unmentioned.
First, the age confounder. Older body builders with bad advice they got from their mentors probably aren't as present in online forums. Younger body builders are probably more tech savvy, reading everything they can and so more up to date on the science. So the populations being surveyed aren't the same back in 2011 and now, ie. science advances one funeral at a time.
Second, body builders use more "intuitive" cues to guide their training. For instance, the mind-muscle connection, which is now getting some empirical support, but also the pump which we see can lead you astray. These are exactly the immediate feedback mechanisms that you discuss (the pump makes you look immediately huge). However, it leads you to discount the empirical support because it seems to contradict what you see and how you feel internally.
Finally, by your own description, the lifting community only accepted the science because of a concerted campaign from researchers to correct the situation. Absent this, it's not clear that it would have changed on such a rapid timeline.
I have relatively low confidence in either formal academic research or folk wisdom in healthy lifestyle questions beyond the basics. The broad outline of a healthy diet, yes, but anything more specific like high or low carbs vs fats seems very dubious and indeed the formal literature seems to vary considerably. In a sense this is unsurprising, it is hard to get compliance and rct are hard if not impossible to do with any sufficient number of people. There is wide interpersonal variation.
The popular, free weight training program StrongLifts 5x5 recommends 90 second rests if your set was easy and 3 minutes if it was hard. It's even built into their app.
I've never even questioned it. I just assumed the designer of the program was as reasonably well informed as you could expect a broscientist to be. Pleasantly surprised.
Oh, maybe this doesn't apply because body building is not the same as weight training? Body building is about getting big muscles first and foremost. Weight training is about Health Benefits ™
Strength training and bodybuilding do diverge quite a bit for advanced athletes, but not much for beginners. The conventional wisdom in strength training has always been to take long rests, often > 5 minutes. Bodybuilding has had a lot less agreement on the best approach to rest, and indeed as many others and myself have pointed out in comments, there's a lot of nuance to this question when you consider real-world training constraints.
3 minutes rest is usually fine for beginners, but as you get stronger, you'll find you may need more to fully recover. StrongLifts is generally a solid program, the one major tweak I'd make is to use 3 sets instead of 5 if you're more of a "fast twitch" athlete (e.g. good at jumping and sprinting). 15 sets/week of squats is quite high volume and can lead to too much fatigue accumulation.
Soviet era Olympic and general amateur/pro athletics programs might offer some really interesting follow-on research. As the rules were different there, successful coaches were able to experiment on a controlled population (their athletes) on what methods did or did not work, with the athletes having much less say. I wonder/bet you could dig up an example of a Soviet era coach using a control group + and not, and with those coaches operating somewhat on gut instinct/bro science themselves. Modern strength programs also blur that serious science<>bro science line too (control group == last season’s players).
"The most important lesson I draw from this is that metis and a community doing practical work doesn’t put you above academic science and peer-reviewed results (or at least it doesn’t always put you there)."
Counterpoint: Have you considered that both metis and academic science are equally valid ways of knowing? (Yes, this is a serious position many academics hold).
Could it be that short rest periods result in a more satisfying pump and less time spent at the gym, making it more likely someone sticks with a bodybuilding routine, thus making more “gainz” than the long rest period people?
The gym bro’s advice might actually be optimal in an uncontrolled environment.
There are a lot of great comments on here and I'm pleasantly surprised to see so many ACX readers lift recreationally and seem pretty up to speed on the culture and the science.
The one thing I haven't seen mentioned yet is the asymptotic nature of strength and hypertrophy gains. The nature of the game is, no matter what, you have a pretty hard limit on how big and how strong you are ever going to get. That limit is set genetically and about all you can do to manipulate it is use anabolic steroids, but that simply pushes the limit higher. You still have a limit.
This leaves you in a situation where "skin in the game" doesn't necessarily leave you with incentives to select the absolute maximally productive program. The first reason that has already been discussed well in other comments is that, overwhelmingly, what matters more than anything else is long term consistency. If you lift for ten years without fail, you have some chance of achieving your genetic limit. If you lift in fits and spurts and constantly give up, no matter how optimally you progress when you're lifting, you'll never get anywhere near your genetic limit. So the top performers are all people who have been in the game for a long time and stuck with it. Thus, the very first concern when choosing how to train is will you stick with it?
The second reason that I haven't seen discussed yet is that having a hard limit on what you can ever achieve in one lifetime means many different programs will all get you there as long as you stick with it. Training more optimally can only get you there slightly faster. You're inevitably going to peak at some point. This isn't like investment or betting strategies that have potentially boundless returns. If you watch Pumping Iron, you'll see Arnold doing a lot of stuff that likely doesn't quite pass scientific muster. He was quite obsessed with feeling a pump and did a lot of low-intensity, low-rest work. What difference did that make? He was as genetically blessed as anyone who ever lived, had access to drugs as good as anyone else so that was not a discriminator, and he'd been training since he was a kid. By the time that documentary was filmed, he was never going to get any bigger no matter what he did (unless he was willing to sacrifice leanness, but that defeats the purpose of competitive bodybuilding).
Consider Arnold started lifting at 15 and first won Mr. Universe at 20. If he had been just a little bit more Bayesian in his approach to programming, then what? Could he have won at 19 instead? How much of a difference does that actually make? He has had the most pinnacle dream life any reasonable person could ever hope to have either way.
The one thing nearly everyone on bodybuilding.com gets right, no matter what else they do, is to join a community at all and publicly commit to demonstrating their progress. Even if what they end up doing is stupid in nearly every other way, "lift something at all on a regular basis" gets you 80% of the way there, which is 80% further than the average coach potato American.
> The second reason that I haven't seen discussed yet is that having a hard limit on what you can ever achieve in one lifetime means many different programs will all get you there as long as you stick with it.
I don't think this is true: the programs you run matter a lot for how far you'll get. Someone running a beginner program (i.e. no periodization) will plateau around 1/2 their max potential, and indeed that's when a lot of casual lifters will complain they hit a plateau. But there's much more gains to be had when using more complex programs that are aimed at intermediate or advanced lifters.
Forums aren't the right place to find out bro science. Go to the gym as a scrawny person, look like you're learning how to benchpress, and the bros will come to you (very aggressively - personal experience). Ask them about rest periods.
If you're lifting using a machine at a reasonably busy public gym there's the issue that somebody might be waiting for the machine. If you have seriously long rests then to the other observers it won't look like you're resting between sets and will look more like you're sitting on the machine just because
I've been a thrower (the track & field kind) for all my life, and the incremental improvement of the world record is a good example of Metis. Throwing events are sufficiently unimportant for anybody to bother conducting scientific studies about them, but they're important enough for thousands and thousands of people trying to get better them all over the world (lots of people train for High school track, NCAA, Olympics etc).
Take the hammer throw as an example: the world record in 1913 was 57.77m, and by 1986 it was 86.74m. That's a 50% improvement, which is quite amazing considering human biology is consistent. Some of the advancement was "passed down" from our scientific overlords - like steroids, nutrition, and how to do strength training (although much of that was also word-of-mouth). But the hammer throw is extra interesting because that 50% improvement is not seen in other events, like the 100m dash (where they also made use of steroids, nutrition, and strength training). They only saw a 10% improvement between 1911 and 2009. So what's up with the remaining 40% found in the hammer?
Part of it is that hammer throwers are stronger, so extra steroids, nutrition, and weight training helps them more than it helps 100m runners, but mostly it's because the hammer throw is a complex movement relative to running. So hammer throwers made lots of technological progress and all of that knowledge was passed on through Metis. Basically, none of it is the product of the scientific method, and none was published. It was about people trying new things, seeing what made the hammer fly farther, and coaches passing that knowledge onto the next generation athletes. So when I started my career, I and my dad went around the country to meet up with knowledgeable throwers and coaches, who in turn had been taught by people before them. And by the time I was 16, I threw what would have been a world record in 1950, and by age 20 I threw what would've been the world record in 1960. And I'm not tooting my own horn here - literally thousands have thrown that far, and it's because of knowledge being passed on.
(Greater strength in the bench press than the incline or overhead means you can transmit more force to the shot with a slightly more horizontal angle than is theoretically optimal.).
Exactly right! There's a trade-off between the optimal angle of release and the speed of the shot. Your angle of release basically becomes whatever angle you manage to square up your chest.
I've long thought that comparing the 'practical wisdom' communities with supposedly numerical, Occidental forms of acquiring knowledge is a false dichotomy - given that arguably all knowledge is built upon the basis of forebears, including Western science. Instead, the argument is more accurately an attempt to contrast advanced, scientific methodology with what is tantamount to argumentum ad antiquitatem at best, and long-surpassed evolutionary adaptation at worst - i.e., watch the members of the tribe who die during the process of cooking/eating that plant, and avoid following their methods.
What I really want to know is - what about 10 minutes rest? 30 minutes? 2 hours?
I have my weights in the garden and I do sets throughout the day whenever inspiration strikes. Surely, there's gotta be a difference there. Do I need to do significantly more sets to compensate for the long breaks?
I think Taleb might argue that SA did not focus on an appropriately anti fragile metis group. For example, old dog Russian kettlebell practitioners who focused obsessively on practice/technique and long rest times for over a century didnt need randomized control trials to know they were being effective (most modern American gym rats are a different story).
They also generally don't look like they lift with their shirts on or have particularly impressive track records in strength sports (and actual top GS guys spend a lot of time running and doing barbell work, microload, use comp KBs rather than the Dragon Door triangle-handle style, etc.). It's fun to throw kettlebells around and feel like an old time strongman in a leopard print toga, and if you have limited time/space/funds they're not a terrible tool, but there's a reason that the plate-loaded barbell took over once it was invented.
Generally agree, and didn't want to get stuck on KBs, but there are workout philosophies that far predate modern western gym culture that emphasize practice, precision, long cool down periods etc, such as the Russians and USSR, who while flawed / on steroids, are certainly skin-in-game competitive practitioners.
The short rest period/modern gym culture approach might be a practice that just seems like it's tried and true when it's actually pretty recent.
Okay, fair. Yeah, it's real common among Olympic weightlifters of all nationalities to take their time between sets, even singles/doubles (though the rising bar structure is a good reason to train to be able to follow yourself in a meet, and you also see old-timers like Bill Starr and Joe Mills talking about ramped singles/doubles on the minute.). I do wonder whether this can properly be ascribed to metis or to formal science that we just don't have access to (because, ex hypothesi, there's no English version of the original research and the review is, like, a paragraph in some Bud Charniga translation or something.). It's not like the USSR didn't have sports scientists--quite the contrary.
In any case, we're getting pretty far removed from optimizing for hypertrophy.
Yep, good points - funny how so many roads lead back to the future is here / not evenly distributed thing. The work involved in translating old Soviet studies, etc. won't make any careers, but there are probably diamonds in those hills. As long as I'm stuck on the USSR, I think there might still be a metis chicken that predates the science egg, only because the practice-based workout philosophy seems pretty cultural and old (and some might say there's a collectivist/group-over-individual parallel, but that's a stretch).
Can someone explain the "strength vs. bigger muscles" thing to me? How can smaller muscles be stronger than larger muscles (on the same person, that is; interperson/species mechanics will obviously differ)?
a larger muscle will be stronger than a smaller muscle, all else equal, but all else is rarely equal. training that optimizes growing large muscles will be different than training that optimizes neurological factors. but keep in mind, this is 'optimizes' for, it does not mean 'excludes'. So training for size will get you strength (just not as much), and training for strength will get you size (just not as much).
(disclaimer: this is my armchair knowledge, i'm not an exercise scientist)
I think you’ve got it exactly right, that bodybuilders, far from eschewing science, are reading anything they can get their hands on to gain an advantage, which means when that science is wrong it’s going to lead people astray. I think one answer to why the feedback loop didn’t help is the failure modes weren’t dramatic enough. Lifting with short rest periods still builds muscle. Just sometimes marginally less than more rest. But the main downsides are unnecessary pain, so there aren’t really the same selective pressures you’d see if short rest turned everybody into 98 pound weaklings. (Also, steroids can mask a lot of the downsides;)
I am a lifter who also happens to be a physicist with OCD tendencies so I try to collect data to support what I am doing, trying out things that people tell me about. My favourite lift is the deadlift.
With deadlifts I tried some fixed recovery periods (2, 3, 4 and 5 minutes) and discovered that 5 minutes was far too long between my first and second set and two minutes was far to short between my fourth and fifth set (systemic fatigue being the limit). I moved from fixed times between sets to measuring recovery between sets based on heart rate, my next set starts when my heart rate hits my target recovery value. In practice this means that if I am doing five sets of five deadlifts above 90% of my 1 rep maximum there will be only 90 seconds between my first and second work sets, 120-150 seconds between my second and my third, 180-210 seconds between my third and fourth and 300 seconds or more between my fourth and fifth sets.
While I am still collecting data on how my body recovers after sets, this has been interrupted by the gyms being closed in my city, so I am restricted to dumbbell front squats in my home.
On my first set my heart rate will rise to a maximum and then cleanly and quickly recover (with something like a 20 bpm difference between peak and trough). On my second set the rising part of the curve will look the same, but my recovery will take a little longer and pause on the way down. Subsequent sets develop odd features where there is a second peak in my heart rate while I am recovering, my heart rate will start to drop then rise again, eventually the second effort peak will be higher while I am recovering than while I am actually working out. Systemic fatigue accumulates and takes longer and longer to clear.
In any one session, how much systemic fatigue you accumulate doesn't make too much difference if you are actually into the feeling of working out, but over time, it makes it harder and harder to start the next heavy workout session. You can only make serious gains if you actually manage your fatigue.
Anything that stops you from doing the next session will limit your ability to make any gains.
I’m a little confused here about the grounds of debate. If we wanted to test Taleb’s assertion that metis outperforms academic knowledge, the kind of experiment I’d imagine would look something like having group A spend a couple months reading scientific literature about strength training, and group B spend a couple months hanging out with bodybuilders, have both groups develop and execute practice regimes, and then have a competition between group A and B and see who does better.
Instead, this post evaluates the performance of the body building community’s metis not by objective outcome, but by *how well it aligns with the current state of the scientific consensus*. Isn’t that assuming the conclusion? If the criterion is “how well does metis match the conclusions of peer-reviewed studies”, of course the outcome will be “less well than the most recent peer-reviewed studies”.
"In 2005, Ahtiainen et al. found similar muscle growth when training with 5 vs. 2-minute rest periods. Importantly, this study was work equated, which meant the shorter rest period group performed an average of one extra set for each exercise to compensate for their lower work capacity."
Shouldn't it be the longer rest period group or am I reading things wrong?
The shorter rest period group will be able to do fewer repetitions or lift lower weights because they're more exhausted from getting less rest. So to equate the volume they have to do an extra set
I have a good idea for a Thing You Will Regret Writing: do this same sort of analysis looking at the breastfeeding literature and the claims of GPs/lactation consultants. The latter groups are still heavily promoting breatsfeeding on the basis of putative long-term benefits shown in old-school OLS studies. Those long-term benefits are nonexistent in a set of recent, methodologically superior "discordant sibling" studies that use family effects to control for SES and parental IQ.
But, but, but.... internet forums about sport attract nerd(ier) types who are interested in the science. Ditto people that write about this stuff on their websites.
I must admit, I too am taken aback by this revelation. However, in retrospect, considering his previous website was named https://fitover40dallas.com/, perhaps it's not as far-fetched as it initially seemed.
Can't believe this actually happened.
Which part? Gym bros updating their beliefs based on academic research? They have access to Google too you know
ACX - Henselmans crossover.
I am also surprised. Then again, his website used to be called bayesianbodybuilding.com, so maybe not such a stretch...
Yeah, I guess this occupied the sweet spot between "very unlikely" and "still sort of makes sense".
Can't believe this didn't happen earlier, given his website was literally called 'Bayesian Bodybuilding'.
the dumb thing about applying the skin in the game logic to a topic like this is just because you want to figure out what works doesn't mean you can (reliably). there are so many variables that go into gaining muscle (or whatever other type of fitness you are into) that parsing out what works absent control is nearly impossible. loads of people *think* they have figured it out but they are just overfitting, something of course humans are quite good at. also because the impact of some variables dwarfs them impact of others (e.g. genetic variability in training response versus how long you rest between sets, or whether you are on PEDs) people are frequently confused about why they (or some other person) is or is not high performing. people that are huge or super fit or whatever are much more likely to be high responders to training (or PEDs) and are consequentially much less likely to understand what will make someone else develop.
I was just going to say this same thing! You'd think it'd be easy to tell if you're gaining more muscle or not, but over scales as short as even a few months it can be hard to tell what's due to training, what's due to diet or hydration, quality of sleep, etc. You could feel like you're getting in the same quality of workouts, but maybe you spend a couple weeks a little sick, and suddenly you have no idea whether your training was working. Everything fluctuates all the time and the human body is incredibly complicated.
Yep! The feedback loop is not all that tight. It's a short enough time period between starting working out and seeing a visible difference that people will say, "trust me, this worked for me, look at my before/after pictures, it's proof!". But there's such a huge mess of genetics and diet and a dozen small factors regarding exactly how a workout is structured/performed that drawing a direct causal link between things is really hard and the door is wide open for superstitious thinking.
Also the issue, if you're relying on a source like bodybuilding.com, that your data pool is going to be overwhelmed by beginners. Even if they're not literal beginners, weightlifting is plagued by people stopping for long periods and then picking back up. This is related to what plagued exercise science research methods for such a long time and why so many coaches dismissed it. If all your research is conducted on beginners, basically anything works. Newb effect overwhelms all other differences. Marginal things like rest periods only matter to advanced lifters, but you need to study advanced lifters to figure that out. Then you get confounded by the fact that, up until a few years ago, the threat of being blacklisted by sponsors prevented anyone from admitting they were chemically enhanced, making it impossible to know if you were really comparing valid experiment and control groups if you did manage to find advanced lifters willing to enroll in your study.
All in all, the ground has been fertile for a huge renaissance in research-backed training and it is only in the past few years this can be realized.
Although a lot of this research has also already been done in eastern bloc countries where it was never illegal or taboo to use PEDs and they had the ability to force advanced athletes to enroll in research studies, but most of that work was never translated into English or made available to western scientists.
It's even worse then you say, since what matters here is not absolute gains but marginal gains--how much better or worse is your program compared to other programs you might have done? Maybe you added 50 lbs to your bench over the last 6 months, but could you have added 55 with another program? You'll never know.
Came here to say basically this.
As someone who has coached many elite athletes, the thing that separates them from everyone else is genetic potential to adapt to training.
Most of those folks can do pretty much anything in the gym and have horrible lifestyle habits outside of the gym and still become freaks just by working out and trying hard.
Humans tend to blindly copy what the elites do, so it’s really easy for weird “bubbles” of incorrect training - the proverbial “broscience” - to pop up in any fitness culture.
"genetic potential to adapt to training" - an excellent phrase. I'll steal it.
Please do. What I was trying to get at there is that elite athletes don't always show up as obviously "more talented" than others. They just get better faster than everyone else — and seem to continue getting better long after others have plateaued.
It's a great phrase. No one gets great without the genes AND the sweat.
Came here to say... something slightly different, so I may as well say it while I approve of the post above and its implications.
Metis is things that's been figured out to work without formal understanding why (or at least formal means of confirmation why) by individuals. There are ways to achieve this, biological evolution found them and cultural evolution sped them up, but it still requires a long process of trial and error and a harsh selection mechanism - the skin in the game being literally one's own, and the matter being survival. And it's one's own survival, not your patients', so it doesn't much affect modern hobbies or even professions. Medical doctors, bodybuilders, etc. only need to be adequately good compared to the best in their field (surely, the field as a whole must prove itself useful or it perishes, but medicine and bodybuilding have crossed that hurdle several generations ago). People don't go out of the gene pool if they don't, e.g., develop enough muscle. Subsistence farmers or hunters/gatherers, on the other hand, die if they don't produce enough food, which makes the heuristic to follow the ways of their surviving seniors much more reliable for them that it could ever be for citizens of the modern world.
Another thing - people will always choose actual understanding over metis, because achieving actual understanding is clearly, obviously better. Corollary - once you get to the point something becomes a subject of scientific inquiry, metis mostly stops playing a role. That's not a takedown of metis, it's still important, it will never cease being important as long as scientific inquiry is hard, difficult and costly. But it's not something that can plausibly coexist, on equal footing, with actual understanding. Not because actual understanding is a more viable goal (thankfully, contemporary scientific practice has accumulated enough metis to understand its own shortcomings and proceeds with enough humility to treat most of its own results and ideas as inconclusive, a vast improvement over enlightenment/modernist naivete, though apparently still not sufficient enough to avoid fuckups like discouraging people from wearing masks), but simply because it's a much more appealing one. If there's a chance to actually understand, people will jump on it and incorporate it into their model of the world, just like the bodybuilders reading scientific studies. Whatever the result, it's just not an example of metic knowledge anymore.
Am I the only one who doesn't see the forum users being all that wrong? They don't quite hit on the right model (what matters is training volume), but "If shorter rests reduce what you are capable of doing, you are probably leaving some gainz in the gym" seems in the right ballpark, right?
That was the point I was trying to make - if I came across as saying the forum users were wrong, please let me know what made you think that so I can edit it.
"they were still getting things pretty wrong" is the main thing.
Ah, I meant people in the past, before the studies happened, not the people on those particular more recent forum threads.
Actually I have read it the same as the commenter above, understanding as if the forum users were wrong and thus "metis" not playing a role here.
Right. What I noticed the studies, or maybe just the analysis, didn’t cover directly was that if you lift like a power lifter vs a body builder, your muscle gains and fitness outcomes are going to be very different. You have to control for meal programs and such, but ultimately bulk/cut macros are fairly similar across lifting styles (they’d prob be fairly different if you took the top 1% of BBs and PLs though).
That leaves “time under tension” as the place to look, which is the governing difference bt lifting styles IMO. It seems like the studies covered that in different words - more rest is fine as long as total reps hit are a certain level.
Which then is to say, fitness folks have been bro-science aware of ToT for a while I think. So is that metis in action?
Based on the data I can see, I think maybe the “short rest periods lead to more gains” thing for so sticky because it’s actually true if you only have an hour a day in the gym and need to devote 1-2 days a week to cardio.
If you have two hours to lift, 5-minute tests are superior. If you have one hour you have two minutes max of you won’t be lifting as much.
How tightknit and close is the community really? In my 5 year semi-gym rat experience until very recently most weightlifters didn't publish/youtube their methods or publish books, etc. and many weren't posting their tips on boards - it was and still largely is a verbal tradition. The methods of bodybuilders and powerlifters has changed rapidly recently with more social media exposure and was always a group that experimented a lot but you just wouldn't always hear about the experiment or the results - for n=1 when I got into lifting it was taught to me to take longer rests on most sets and most days...
I also have a complaint about categorizing the bodybuilding community's collective knowledge corpus as metis: the community's not very old. Primitive tribes have been refining their methods for thousands of years, the bodybuilding community for 140 max. And then, as you say Ringo, there is the question of the fidelity of information transfer across generations.
Oral traditions are so lossy that they'd probably stop getting smarter after a few hundred years. Or at least they'd be very close to the asymptote where losses equal gains.
Painscience.com makes the point that the whole concept of stretching is scientifically unsupported and very dubious.
I imagine you have something more specific in mind than "stretching is scientifically unsupported".
No one has every observed stretching in the field.
I have been telling people that at 5-a-side football for years and one day someone will believe me!
That seems to be about stretching and pain. I was thinking about stretching before doing some athletic event. Which is something I was trained always to do.
From what I've read/seen/ experienced, the key is that you (supposedly) should do "full motion" stretches (moving the body parts through their full range of motion several times(like swinging your arms through a full circle)) to warm up, and only do "isometric" stretches (holding the body parts still in extreme positions (like runner's stretches)) to cool down after whatever you were doing. So it's not the stretching itself that's harmful, but whether you're doing the right type at the right time.
I believe that's correct. Warm up with dynamic stretches (get the blood flowing), and cool down with static stretches.
Static stretches are intended to relax and lengthen the muscle fibers, and studies have shown that this actually reduces their concentric force output. Weakening some muscles just before you're about to require them to produce force is a great way to get injured, and there's some evidence that static stretching before training correlates with increased risk of injury.
OK sure, at the end of the game when your calves cramp up, stretching is only cure I know of. Up above someone posted stretching is bad. Which makes no sense to me. Even pooh bear did some stretches. :^)
That criticism seems a bit overly general. Stretching decreases strength, but it increases flexibility. There are times when you may actually want to move a part of your body over a wide range. I'm not going to bet that stretching prevents injuries. But it has its place.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/fitness/in-depth/stretching/art-20047931
Yes, he agrees about the flexibility part, just thinks it's pretty rare that you _need_ any extra.
Gymnastics probably, maybe climbing. Although both those sports depend heavily on strength as well. In practice, all the top competitors in both do seem to stretch beforehand, but it's entirely possible they could be doing it wrong.
I think there is another element in sports where you compete very frequently, like baseball as opposed to powerlifting. That's probably the case with endurance running as well. If you're suffering from a great deal of accumulated stiffness, it might be helpful, though probably more helpful to use massage and dynamic stretching than static.
Stretching only prevents injury insofar as flexibility prevents injury. So you might need a more flexible groin to be able to do deep squats without curving your lower back at the bottom for example. But stretching your groin doesn't actually reduce your risk of pulling your groin.
I think it's important to note that "stretching" here is specifically referring to what's sometimes called "static stretching", the goal of which is typically to lengthen the muscle fibers being stretched.
I think the primary benefit in stretching is increased range of motion. I've found stretching most helpful when trying to correct an imbalance using a stretch paired with a targeted exercise for agonist-antagonist muscles.
For instance, I often stretch my pectorals (antagonist) just before doing some rotator cuff work (agonists), like face pulls. This enables a longer range of motion on the pulling exercise because the antagonist is lengthened and weakened. Longer range of motion is pretty well established as being better for general strength development. So this would be a good approach for something like upper crossed syndrome.
Other than that, I agree that static stretching is nothing more than light, bodyweight exercise.
Scientifically unsupported AND dubious? Wow! Double whammy, one-two punch!
Look, stretching makes me feel great so I don't care. I'm 100% of my sample size and it helps me to unkink my aging body and to lift.
Funnily enough, that's exactly what the site's writer says. :-) That he still does it because it feels good, but that you shouldn't expect anything beyond that.
"That he still does it because it feels good, but that you shouldn't expect anything beyond that."
Think about that.
You sound young. As you age, you will understand how profoundly important feeling good is. Why, somebody might even do a scientific study of it. But I guess that would take all the fun out of it.
Feeling good for the moment matters, but I would imagine most people arguing for stretching think it's not just the equivalent of masturbation?
That's funny, and makes your point, but are you also implying that masturbation is the equivalent of 'masturbation' (e.g. pointless or extraneous)?
I suspect there are significant advantages to masturbating regularly!
Heard that too. In athletic circles not stretching is seen as taboo. Not stretching signals that you don't take the risk of injury seriously enough, and people generally don't respect the opinion that it's unnecessary since it isn't scientifically proven to make a difference.
I don't think measuring the mass gains is the right metric for bodybuilders. They are going for size which isn't the same thing, powerlifters are denser and stronger but don't win bodybuilding contests
Depends. Maybe you are using a strictly defined version of "bodybuilder" there, such that you are precisely correct among some group who identify themselves as such. But I think part of the trouble in nailing down the answer to seemingly simple questions like optimal rest time, is that the goal isn't universally agreed upon.
Do you want muscles that take up more volume? Or do you want more muscle mass? Or do you want muscles that can lift heavier weights? Or do you want muscles that can more quickly lift the same amount of weight? Or do you want to be able to do more reps before you get tired?
Most of those things are probably pretty correlated, but there's probably not perfect correlation between any of them either. There might be different best practices depending on what kind of "strong" you want to be.
I think the research indicates that they're the same thing to the point of minor quibbles, so I'd say it's the way to go.
For most people the difference would probably be a minor quibble. If you're neither a bodybuilder nor a powerlifter, just a normal person trying to put on some muscle, then those two goals are in almost the same direction. But the "bodybuilding community" that has supposedly acquired all this metis would be the people who devote their lives to it, right? To them, powerlifters and olympic lifters are apples and oranges, bodybuilders are pineapples, and anybody stepping into a crossfit gym is a stack of pancakes. Elite athletes tailor their training very specifically to their goals.
The scientific studies are mostly not on elite athletes, or even a specific type of athlete, because of difficulties in getting a good sample size. They tend to have samples like "15 resistance-trained males, ages 18-37" where that could mean anything from college football player to amateur powerlifter to wrestler.
Well, our biggest disagreement is on the use of muscle mass as a metric of muscle volume right? Let me show you wants influenced my thinking on this. I'm going to argue that powerlifters should be very concerned about pure size, but the same argument applies in the opposite direction.
The following study examines a bunch of (elite!) Powerlifters and shows that muscle mass is a highly explanatory variable in accounting for relative ranking. So even at the highest level, mass seems to dominate over myriad factors like leverage, neuromuscular coordination etc.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23828289/
In comparing density volume, I would assume you are talking about sarcoplasmic v myofibrillar hypertrophy? This review comes to the conclusion that the evidence that training style influences the relative balance is quite weak, and other factors like age and training age may be more important. Furthermore, there doesn't seem to be a huge difference in density between the two types.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.strongerbyscience.com/sarcoplasmic-hypertrophy-relevant/amp/
Finally, elite bodybuilders like Stan Efferding are immediately elite powerlifters on entering the sport. And top powerlifters like Brandon Allen have been successful incorporating higher rep regimes into their programming.
There are definitely huge differences between the sports. But I don't think a focus on volume vs density is one of them.
Stan Efferding is a bizarre choice of you're trying to demonstrate that elite bodybuilders could automatically be elite powerlifters if they wanted to be: the man is a powerlifter who didn't get his IFBB pro card until he was a masters athlete, and who was never a particularly elite bodybuilder. Pick someone like Big Ramy and let's see if he can destroy the powerlifting world with those unbelievable legs - I predict no, but you're welcome to disagree.
Calling him a bizarre choice is a stretch. He trained as a bodybuilder and competed in bodybuilding for years before making the highly successful stretch.
No one's trying to prove that bodybuilders can immediately dominate in powerlifting. I'm showing that the correlation between the two is large, and Stan Efferding is a perfect example of that.
If you're coming here to criticise an example, at least bring one. The real life analogue of the scenario you describe is Dr. Squat vs Tom Platz. And while I have reservations about it, at least it occurred outside of my own head.
If you were using Efferding as an example of an elite powerlifter who also had some decent success as a bodybuilder I wouldn't have objected - it's just weird to hear him used as evidence that bodybuilders are automatically good at powerlifting. Like hearing Michael Jordan used to demonstrate how elite baseball players immediately become elite basketball players as soon as they step on the court.
I hadn't seen the Hatfield/Platz showdown (and it's awesome, thank you for enlightening me) but it went about how I would expect: the powerlifter dominated the 1RM, and the bodybuilder dominated the amrap. Those are different skills which use different types of muscle fibers and those who are good at one aren't necessarily good at the other. I don't think this changes my prediction that Ramy couldn't squat 1000 pounds no matter how hard he tried, even though he's carrying more muscle mass on his legs than anyone in the powerlifting world.
"No one's trying to prove that bodybuilders can immediately dominate in powerlifting." To this I will cite your first comment: "elite bodybuilders like Stan Efferding are immediately elite powerlifters on entering the sport". If that's not what you meant then fair enough, or that's what I was working off of.
As for bringing my own examples, I understand Mark Bell hasn't had much luck on the bodybuilding stage. I don't have any examples on the mind of elite bodybuilders who tried to switch to powerlifting and flamed out, but I also don't have any examples of the opposite, so it's a wash and I'm back to my priors.
This is an example of the tails coming apart.
Bigger muscles are stronger muscles. But the person with the biggest muscles isn't the strongest, and the person with the strongest muscles isn't the biggest.
But they're definitely not uncorrelated, either. Some bodybuilders have come from a powerlifting background (Stan Efferding, Franco Columbu). And some bodybuilders are really strong - Ronnie Coleman squatted 810lb twice in wraps and a belt when the world record was around ~900lb, I think.
How are muscle mass and "size" not the same thing?
It seems obviously critical that if you rest 5 minutes between sets you can only do 1/5 of much work in a given amount of time as if you rest 1 minute between sets. Setting the work equal seems like a complete sham.
Someone should correct me if I'm wrong, but I think most of the studies found there was naturally equal work, because if you rest too short, you can't do as many reps before getting tired.
Yes of course holding everything equal you can do less reps in a set if you rest a shorter period of time, but I really doubt the work naturally comes out equal. Furthermore, there are basically an unlimited number of muscles in your body. Nobody exercises every muscle every day to the maximum possible extent. If you rest less, you will be able to work more muscle groups, which are not subject (or, not very subject) to this tiring phenomenon when you are working other muscle groups.
I feel like most intermediate/advanced weightlifting programs attempt to exercise every muscle you care about to the maximum possible sustainable extent. Also if you're auto-regulating in some way, the work should come out roughly equal. Obviously if you care about how long your workouts are there's an advantage to shorter rests, but not everybody cares about that.
I disagree. Only professional bodybuilders do that. They can be in the gym for 6-8 hours a day virtually every day. Even professional athletes are not close to that.
I don't know what you mean about auto-regulating and work coming out roughly equal. I think it's very false that the amount of work would come out nearly equal. Most people have certain exercises that they do in a given workout so your workout is just going to take way longer if you have a 5 minute rest period, and most people don't have time for that so they are going to cut it down a lot if they lengthen the rest.
I'll give an example to illustrate what I'm talking about. Let's say your workout program has you doing bench press or a variation 3 times a week. On each of those days, you go into the gym and you have a target level of fatigue you're trying to hit, based on where you are in that program. Once you hit that level of fatigue, you're done with chest for the day. Doing more would actually sabotage you. If you over do it, you won't be able to recover adequately for your next workout, then you won't be able to do as much work on your next workout, and your total amount of work done over time will actually be less.
If you take 5 minute rests, maybe getting the bench sets done takes 45 minutes, while with 1 minute rests it takes 15. But you absolutely can't just do 3 times as many sets just because you have that extra time. Your ability to recover is what's constraining the amount of work you can do, not the amount of time you have. Yes, elite level bodybuilders who are on PEDs have excellent work capacity and excellent recovery and can handle super-long high volume workouts, but they're still being constrained by recovery, and not time.
In the real world, I get it. I workout in the morning before work and am absolutely time constrained, so I aim for 2 minutes or so in between sets.
This is right. It's why many use total weekly tonnage as a gauge of how much they lift. As you said, if you lift 10% more on a Monday you may sabotage your overall weekly tonnage because you're gonna be too sore to do well on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday for example.
There are body builders who do a full body routine where they work out every muscle they care about any day they lift. And there is a big argument about what's the right split. Should you work out half your muscles, or or a third of your muscles each workout?
Is it better to hit a muscle lightly every day or really hard once a week or something in between?
> Yes of course holding everything equal you can do less reps in a set if you rest a shorter period of time, but I really doubt the work naturally comes out equal.
This might be the critical thing you can get from metis moreso than studies.
The study says that you get more muscle growth with 3 minute rests given the same number of reps. It's true; it's a well-conducted study. What it hasn't told you is whether, given the same hour to spend in the gym, you get better results doing more reps with less rest or vice versa.
Now suppose you do. Then there is an advantageous alternative for the bodybuilders to discover over what the study suggests. Given the same time to spend in the gym, shorter rests yield more gains by increasing the number of reps you have time to do. Metis has a chance to beat the conclusion of the study.
But suppose you don't. The study's conclusion holds even if you're time constrained. More rest is at least as important as more reps. Well then there isn't something for the bodybuilders to improve there. No surprise that they didn't find it if it wasn't there.
The exact definition of "work" is important. In terms of tonnage (weight x reps) or reps, you can do more work per time with shorter rests than longer rests (up to some point where rest is so short you've hit your limit). However in terms of growth stimulus to your muscles, it gets more debatable, since stimulus depends a lot on how "hard" the reps are.
The most convincing explanation of the volume/"hardness" distinction I've seen is the "time under (maximal) tension" model. I'm not an expert, so take this with a grain of salt.
Basically the theory is that the stimulus for muscle growth is proportional to the amount of time a muscle fiber (not necessarily the muscle as a whole) is under tension very close to its maximum capability. This mostly happens in the last few reps of each set when you're straining to complete them (fibers can only reach maximum tension when activated as strongly as possible and also moving slowly, so you can't get it on the first few reps by throwing the weight really fast, nor by doing them really slowly). If the weight is lighter but you did more reps, you tire out the muscle so that fewer fibers can be recruited at a time (peripheral muscle fatigue) but that's okay because the ones that are working will get lots of time under tension.
Under this model, the factor that can really screw you up is "central nervous system fatigue," which is where you make yourself feel tired--not just a particular muscle, but tired overall. Then your ability to activate all your muscles decreases because you're subconsciously trying to save energy. Sub-maximal activation means sub-maximal tension in every fiber, so even though you feel like you're straining you don't get much time under tension. This seems like a pretty strong argument in favor of resting between sets pretty much until you don't feel worn out.
Yes, I think this theory is essentially correct and helps explain a lot of common observations about the effects of varying rest, reps, and sets.
The issue which doesn't come into play with controlled studies is that in real life time is a factor. If you allow too much rest and then have to leave the gym before you exhaust yourself due to each set taking 5 minutes, you're hurting your work significantly.
I think the issue wrt assuming a fixed amount of work is many people have time-bound workouts. If you pick a limit of 45 or 60 minutes and stick to that, then doubling the rest time necessarily cuts the total work in half. I think a lot of commenters (here, on HackerNews, and in those forum threads) are assuming people have a somewhat rigid timebox for their workout.
That said, if I think about the lifters who really need to optimize this variable. The lifters where optimizing rest time actually matters. I think that is going to be the very advanced and top-percentile lifters. I think they are likely to approach their workout with a fixed amount of work to do and are willing to optimize the time each day to maximize the output of that fixed set of work. The studies seem to match the perspective of the people who actually need the answer.
The last with=without? I don't think it's true that most people who try to optimize their workouts are professional bodybuilders. I think you have quite a range but the vast majority are probably highly recreational.
Not at all--if the exercise takes you, say 5 minutes, then the comparison is between repeating every 10 minutes versus every six minutes. You don't even get to do twice as much work by cutting your rest time by 80% in this case.
You are of course right about the math, but bodybuilding exercises do not take 5 minutes. 30 seconds might be typical (low reps in a set is common), maybe a minute.
Do you think instead they should hold the amount of time equal?
So people doing 1 set per minute vs 5 sets per minute do 5x at many sets?
The problem here is we already know doing more sets in general leads to greater gains.
There are a lot of dimensions to working out and if you want to find out the right rest time between sets then # of sets seem like a pretty reasonable thing to keep constant.
I could see an argument that maybe they should optimize for something else but "complete sham" doesn't make any sense to me.
Really, it doesn't make sense? Do most people have unbounded workout schedules where they can spend an unlimited time in the gym, or do most people plan workouts to take around an hour? The answer is the latter.
I think if you're setting work equal then you need to be very specific about the results and what they mean and yes I think someone should be investigating it on a time basis because a lot of people want to answer the question "what's the best use of my hour?" and not "If I have unlimited time and don't care how long my workout is, should I rest 1 minute between sets or 5 minutes"
The question set out to answer was whether rest periods influence muscle growth, which is a valid question to ask before you go into time optimization. If it doesn't, you can choose the rest times that optimize the number of sets within your hour. If it does, the optimum might be a lower number of total sets but with better rest times.
scott you're still confused here. two points about metis you're missing:
1. rule zero of bro lifting science has alwas been "stop worrying about RCTs and get your ass to the gym," which contains "if taking short breaks gets you to work out, do that, if taking long breaks gets you to work out, do that". prioritization is contained in metis truth, not in abstract truth.
2. do you think gym bros could do the research deep-dive you did? it's unclear to me whether they could even navigate the landscape of peer reviewed papers to achieve these results. i couldn't and i'm fairly smart. parsing academic lit is its own skill.
The larger point is that metis is good because it captures "attainability/practicality" instead of an abstract, perhaps unattainable form of abstract accuracy. this matter when you want to do things as opposed to simply knowing things.
A lot of gym bros can absolutely parse the academic lit. My brother didn't do great in school, but he knows enough to have a master's degree in exercise science.
That said, I agree that for most people, results from working out hard and eating enough protein absolutely dwarf results from tinkering with time between sets.
parsing a single paper is a bit different from being able to synthesize papers into a unified view of things. former is easier than the latter, though i do agree that lots of bros are surprisingly good at both and can get there with enough time.
Some of the other examples Henselmans gives seem like specific failures that can't be explained by your point 1.
Re: 2 - this makes sense if you're talking about doing the best they can with limited resources (where ability to read papers is a resource), but my point is that if you can understand research, this will give you an improvement over just using metis.
thanks for the response! haven't read henselmans but i buy that the first point is true.
re: point #2, my main dispute is with the conclusion of "ha, peer-review beats metis!" when it seems closer to "well, over time metis grows to incorporate abstract truth", which, surely means that metis is the true victor, no? surely the ability to read papers is helpful in some way but metis is the only thing that tells you whether it has the highest marginal utility (vs. "shut up and lift this heavy object until it becomes a routine for you")
"In the long run we're all dead." Even assuming metis will catch up eventually, if science can get you ahead by five or ten years that can matter a lot in some contexts.
In re point #2 on gym bros: I think there's a good bit of of systemic sampling error going on. If you limit your search to bodybuilding.com (a website probably more known in the lifting community for an infamous argument about what working out every other day means) or t-nation you're missing a huge chunk of the community, and probably all of the trend setters and thought leaders.
Two of the most popular lifting websites right now are:
Stronger By Science (they publish Monthly Applications in Strength Sport (MASS), a research review by Greg Nuckols, Dr. Eric Trexler, Dr. Eric Helms, and Dr. Mike Zourdos). Has an incredible series of podcasts. For an interesting recent article I would recommend:
https://www.strongerbyscience.com/p-ratios-rebuttal-2/
Here's an interview they did years ago with Schoenfeld:
https://www.strongerbyscience.com/ask-the-expert-interview-with-brad-schoenfeld-ph-d/
Renaissance Periodization (Mike Israetel)
Here's a link to some of their articles:
https://renaissanceperiodization.com/expert-advice
Here's a lifting forum of Hanley Normalized Fatigue Metric, one of several methods for attempting to figure out volume equated training vs fatigue generated (which is integral in a lot of training, whether it's called HNFM or RPE or what have out).
https://www.exodus-strength.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=994
Honorable mentions to RTS, Barbell Medicine, Dr. Layne Norton.
Now I want to know what the argument about working out every other day was.
Buckle in/sit down before reading.
https://forum.bodybuilding.com/showthread.php?t=107926751
That was great, thanks.
>"if taking short breaks gets you to work out, do that, if taking long breaks gets you to work out, do that"
In my experience most hardcore lifters are literally addicts and couldn't stop working out if they wanted to.
I'm probably in that group. I can't stop. If I miss even one day, I feel like my body's withering away. When the gyms closed due to COVID19 I actually fell into depression - no kidding.
If I'm understanding correctly, it seems to me like the science is saying it isn't very important how long you rest. If that's the case, I wouldn't necessarily expect metis to figure that out. Metis isn't built around finding the truth per se - it's built around putting together an internally coherent set of practices that work to produce a desirable result. I wouldn't necessarily expect metis to optimize away all inefficiencies, and in this case having a rule around resting time doesn't even seem inefficient, just unnecessary.
Check out some of the other examples Henselmans gives on his site, some of which do seem to be counterproductive.
Yeah, the other examples do seem to come out stronger.
It still seems to me though like when we move to reducing metis to individual claims, and then test those specific claims, we're moving firmly into the territory where scientific techniques are going to be dominant. Taking things apart and analyzing the pieces is the whole point of science.
I'm not honestly sure how to make a good comparison though - I don't know if it would even be possible to create a workout regimen that isn't rooted firmly in established metis.
Consider that stuff like gyms, workout clothing, "reps" and "sets", and all the different equipment is part of an overall package of metis. If you didn't inherit all that culture, would you be able to come up with an effective workout regimen based solely on biological knowledge? You could probably quickly get to the idea that lifting heavy weights is beneficial, but you'd have to reinvent a lot of wheels to actually put together a system that gets people gainz.
What DOES seem clear to me though is that, within an established metis, we can often make improvements by applying scientific methods (though the manioc and corn examples show potential pitfalls). But I'm not sure science by itself will get you very far.
Or shoot, now that I'm thinking about it, it sort of feels to me like the more traditional metis approach to working out would be like, whatever sort of training knights were doing back before modern science came along. Maybe the whole modern workout edifice of weights, exercise equipment, etc. is the fitness equivalent of a modern scientifically planned city.
My thinking on this all feels pretty loose though. I might need to let it simmer a bit.
Apparently the Spartans (the actual tiny minority of aristocratic warriors) never trained in combat or martial arts, beyond perhaps some small amount of training for formations. [And now that I think about it, I'd imagine they wrestled too, which very much seems like a martial art, if not a 'combat' art.] Almost all of their training consisted of basic physical fitness (i.e. "the more traditional metis approach"), i.e. doing physical activities that almost every human ever does, e.g. running, throwing things, lifting things.
Henselman is a schmuck.
I ended up writing a lot and rambling, though I think there are those who will find it interesting regardless. My overall thoughts on the metis question as applied to bodybuilding - based on having been involved in the sport since 2005 and having worked with various top coaches over the year - is that 1) the examples Henselman and you by extension of bodybuilding being behind the science are either untrue or expressed in an overly simplistic fashion to the point that they may as well be untrue and 2) bodybuilding since the dawn of the forum age has been a hybrid of anecdote, in the the trenches learning and armchair philosophizing, mixed with formal education in exercise science and leveraging of pubmed. The blend is such that you cannot tell where an idea came from first with any certainty. My overall impression, however, is that practice has been consistently ahead of pubmed on everything from nutrition to training to pharmacology. That is the gain from metis. The cost is that there is a lot of trash out there - the frontier of knowledge is not widely attained. This is why Henselman's exist.
On to the original ramblings...
Broad concensus has been for at least the last couple decades that I've been involved in strength training and bodybuilding circles (I was a national competitor at heavyweight in bodybuilding, now jiu-jitsu), is that your rest periods are as long as needed until you are "ready" and this in turn is dictated by a range of factors. Some examples:
-How conditioned are you? If your cardio is trash, then you may find that it necessitates a longer rest period than your muscles do. Conversely, if you are well conditioned, you might need to force yourself to wait longer so that your muscles are ready.
-What movement did you do? It takes longer ot be ready after a 20 rep set of breathing squats compared to some tricep kickbacks. Did you use intensity techniques? When did this take place in your workout - beginning, middle, end?
-What is the role of this movement at this point in your workout? If you look at many of the best trainers - an example would be John Meadows - you will find that bodybuilding training days consist of different segments. In the beginning you introdue blood into the muscles but try to limit fatigue - a warm up. You then typically go to a compound movement where you are going to work with heavier weights with a more explosive rep cadence. This is generally where you would be trying to increase the weight used over time. The rest of the workout is then focused on doing volume, hitting different angles and introducing tension at different parts of the stretch - that is focus on peak contraction versus loading the stretched position. The latter tends to come at the end of the workout because you can't express much strength after what amounts to weighted stretching of the engorged muscle. Etc. Rest periods are different throughout these phases. So that is best practice and while there are tons of folks who are pubmed warriors, the metis angle has produced what I've just described, which would also describe a lot of what you would have seen in 70's, 80's, 90's etc. weight rooms. That isn't to say that there wasn't always a diversity of debate. Consider volume training (e.g. Lee Haney, Gaspari, Arnold...most professional bodybuilders) vs. high intensity ( Mike Mentzer, Dorian Yates, Doggcrapp Training).
Going back Henselman as schmuck, things like workout frequency are intermixed with these considerations. Doggcrapp (or DC) Training came about in the late 90's ealry 00's but was being developed in the 90s. One of it's key insights was specifically the frequency aspect: it is better to introduce the minimum necessary stimulus for adaptation and do it as many times a year as possible. DC argued that the way to do that is with an A/B split done 3x a week and to use triple rest pause sets to quickly innervate all the fibers in the target musculature. He also told folks they needed to eat a lot of protein. I trained DC style for years, including under DC's protege. As one becomes more advanced, the frequency comes down so that you can do a bit more volume focusing on muscle imbalances. The notion is that you are compromising overall growth in exchange for greater focus and conserving recovery capacity for more stubborn bodyparts. This principle is also commonly applied to higher volume approaches. For example, my legs were always a strong point and my back and chest were weaker. Accordingly, I trained legs fairly easy and hit back and chest twice a week hard and everything else once a week. My point is that this was, is and will be standard stuff. Nothing groundbreaking. It can be supported by studies, but is has long been well known through trial and observation. This isn't to say that there aren't a lot of dumbasses at your gym or on bodybuilding.com, but the group as a whole has continuously had tremendous practical knowledge.
Miscellaneous related thoughts:
-7 sets of 3RM and 3 sets of 10RM are not the same thing. Most studies are not adequately controlled and moreover most don't use trained individuals.
-7 sets of 3RM is vastly more dangerous over time compared to 3 sets of 10RM. From a bodybuilding perspective, you need to find ways to increase progressive overload over a long period of time which in combination with your nutrition and supplementation will drive growth. Things like the "hypertrophy" range are really more about, this is a rep range where you can safely and continuously increase loading. These are also ranges where you can lift like a bodybuilder and not like a weightlifter. What does this mean? A weightlifter wants to lift the weight and will explosively do so, making use of whatever neurological patterns are most efficient at doing so. The bodybuilder goes into every set with the goal of maximally stimulating particular muscles and even particular parts of muscles. This is the art of bodybuilding training. It doesn't work very well with very high intensities. This comes on top of the safety issue.
-A few others have mentioned this, but time is definitely a thing. It also plays into progressive overload whereby density of training is one of hte many variables that can be used to generate progressive overload. If you are approaching a contest, you may actually prefer to use this variable vs. load for injury avoidance purposes, though most trainers advise that you try to keep your weights as close to off-season weights as possible as the best insurance against muscle loss.
-If you or anyone is really interested in bodybuilding traing, I highly recommend digging into DC training, John Meadows, Scott Stevenson. Also, go and look at how athlete and powerlifting trainers think about adding size - they are typicaly looking at moderate rep ranges with subfailure sets to accumulate volume. Westside barbell calls i the "repetition method" while Jim Wendler emphasizes that it is really just about doing "the work" after you've hit your strength goals for that day on the main movements. Also compare to german volume training a la Charles Poliquin.
"On the other hand, some of their failure seems to have come from taking past scientific studies too seriously."
I think you might be running into something that's pretty specific to the bodybuilding community, which is a widespread and intense interest in reading scientific studies, but a lack of sufficient training to read them critically and synthetically, given the detail and the volume. So some of this is people trying to overthink things and doing badly because of it.
(I would note, as someone who listens every week to the clinical updates on microbe.tv/twiv, that — according to their lead clinician — highly trained doctors immersed in evidence-based western medicine apparently continue to recommend COVID treatments that have been shown to be ineffective or counterproductive, because they too have trouble synthesizing and tracking what research has shown to be most effective)
Bodybuilding/powerlifting metis for the strongest, largest people I know doesn't actually take the form of knowing how to get bigger: it takes the form of *how to not get injured.* One of the biggest guys I know at the MIT gym — I think he's a postdoc in physics — usually spends at least 60 minutes stretching before he begins lifting. When I asked him why, he said something like "well, I love lifting weights, and I want to do so for the rest of my life, so I don't want to get injured. Over time, I have learned to be able to pay attention to my body, to notice where I'm tight or stiff, and to focus on that rather than on just lifting heavier stuff all the time."
It's super easy to get bigger through quantitative approaches: lift progressively heavy things, eat more. What you're quoting above is really fine grained optimization at the margins on these things that lend themselves to analysis.
The metis stuff is how not to get injured, I think, which is much harder to quantify and involves more of the intent listening, focus, craft, and mentorship.
Funnily enough, I think the consensus among the evidence-based fitness community is that stretching *before* lifting isn't beneficial and probably increases the risk of injury.
That's true for stretching proper but not mobility work. I should have said mobility though :)
I'd really give doctors a lot of benefit of the doubt w.r.t. COVID treatments. My experience of reading COVID related papers is that they're a staggering mess. Not only conflicting in every imaginable way but many of them have severe methodological or logical errors. I don't think anyone could synthesize coherent view out of them - it definitely feels like one of those areas where the more you read the output of academic peer reviewed papers, the dumber you're likely to get, and the "metis" of doctors swapping tips on Twitter is likely to do better.
I agree! And I think the same is true of bodybuilding papers
Lifting weights for hypertrophy is in fact a primarily anaerobic activity, though slow twitch relies on oxidation. Glad that was mentioned. When you start adding rest time variables, what youre really doing is simultaneously working your metabolic and cardiovascular efficiency. Might recommend mike mentzer and dorian yates’ “Heavy Duty” and “Blood and Guts” respectively. Among other details they advocated just 1 working set to failure. Anything beyond that seems to be superfluous for bodybuilding.
I think the aerobic component of weightlifting is massively underrated. See the following article.
https://www.strongerbyscience.com/avoiding-cardio-could-be-holding-you-back/
I'm going to suggest a good comparison of Metis to the peered reviewed study in two different populations. Priests and Rabbis have been helping people cope with depression, loss, sadness forever. Do they get formal training, what does that training say, is it different than what a therapist would do? Is it better? I mean priest have been doing trauma counseling for 100s of years, are they any good at it, better than our grief counselors or shrinks?
It seems pretty obvious to me that you probably want both. Intuition, selective pressure, and imitating successful people can only get you so far, and the same is true of measurements, numbers, spreadsheets, and abstractions.
It seems like a lot of people want to fall _really hard_ on one side or the other: either you go all in on your intuition and grandmother's recipes, trusting the tried and true methods - or else you're all numbers and spreadsheet and toe shoes and soy lent.
This seems to be a general, pattern, too, in different modes of cognition: some people are great at saying 'no' to ideas but have a hard time saying yes to anything remotely creative. Others are creative fountains but can't constraint themselves to just pursuing a few ideas that are relatively close to feasible.
It seems that wherever tradeoffs exist, a lot of people want to just rest entirely on one side or the other. Anyone else notice this?
Enjoyed this article, which bridged two of my interests.
I've a couple of thoughts.
1. The fast feedback and personal experiments of metis are real and their results are tangible and positive. People who train almost always slowly gravitate towards the correct information and make progress. Very few people in their 3rd year of bodybuilding are doing long distance roadwork and bodyweight exercises.
2. However, the road is long, the local optima plentiful and the configuration space is huge. So past a certain point it becomes really hard to find the optimal program.
3. As Scott discovered, broscience is very diverse. Sure there are some common opinions, but there is loads of contradictory and contrarian stuff. I suspect this is the case with all metis. The value of science is cutting down the weeds so more flowers will grow.
4. There's no clear point where the science kills the metis. If you trained based on the science in the 90s you would have constantly plateaued as you gambled everything on studies of untrained unmuscled individuals. Now there are studies that deliver BRUTAL routines to elite level trainees.
5. The process of incorporating the science into the metis is the snake that eats its tail, as the latter will inform your ability to sniff out the quality studies in the former. For this reason Menno Henselmans himself says the process must be BAYESIAN. How's that for full circle.
https://mennohenselmans.com/bayesian-bodybuilding-method/
I would disagree with the claim that "peer-reviewed academic studies still seems to be the way to go" for fitness; my general impression is that academic studies lag best practices known among informed athletes and coaches. Academic studies often have a lot a limitations especially with advanced athletes over long time periods, because very few study participants are advanced and very few studies are over long time periods. Indeed, I just wrote a comment in the last open thread about how I got screwed in my own training by putting too much stock in a couple academic studies, which had correct conclusions about how beginners can train, but it's incorrect if you're not a beginner.
As for rest periods, there is indeed a lot of unsupported dogma out there, but among well-informed coaches and athletes (meaning, people who have actually tried training with varying rest lengths) I think it's well-understood that: (1) longer rests are overall better, because you can push yourself harder in each set (2) though longer rests are better overall, short rests have benefits for building work capacity and for metabolite training (3) since you don't have infinite gym time, shorter rests often make sense even in situations where long rest would be better for your goal. For bodybuilders who are doing like 100 different exercises (I exaggerate) to be sure every muscle gets a full workout, they can't wait 5 minutes between every set and realistically complete their workouts. For strength athletes specializing in just a few lifts, they rest as much as they want for maximum performance in every set.
If you want really good information about strength training or bodybuilding, the best source is coaches who are smart, open-minded, and knowledgeable in both academic literature as well as the training methods of top athletes. One source I can recommend is the guys at Renaissance Periodization (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfQgsKhHjSyRLOp9mnffqVg); they have videos specifically about rest periods if you want to see their thoughts.
Hey Luke, I think the quality of the studies has drastically improved over the years. Jeff Nippard had a great video showing that many of the modern studies use much more advanced trainees on much more serious programs. There are of course, still limitations, but it's way better.
I'm a big fan of Renaissance Periodization. But both Chad and Mellifluous Max Montana know their science as well as their practice. And Mike, who had a big hand in their hypertrophy programs, is as knowledgeable as you get.
Yeah, I agree, studies have been improving a lot--but I still will take a coach's recommendations over the literature's. To be fair, the studies that misled me were from 15+ years ago when I first started lifting.
Sure, and yeah, those studies were some garbage.
"There is no pure untouched community of noble savage bodybuilders, forming an academic-science-free control group"
In a way, this shouldn't matter. If the people with skin in the game decide that the best info is coming from academia, then shouldn't Taleb/Scott accept that as being the right decision?
It might result in getting stuck at a local maximum. If academia determines the baseline of best practices, and small deviations by experimentally-minded people produce worse results, then there's basically no chance of radical changes arising from that.
However, a pure untouched community has a chance of coming up with totally different methods, like climbing a tree while being chased by a pack of dogs, which might turn out to be an even better way to build muscle.
But if the lifting community can get stuck in a local maximum because of what academics say, why wouldn't they get stuck in local maxima based on random events or clueless but charismatic leaders?
Because the lifting community at this time doesn't act according to random events or clueless but charismatic leaders, they act according to what academia says. Anyone who wants to introduce radical new ideas has to compete with that, which is an uphill battle.
You could also argue that many academics are clueless but charismatic leaders. We don't tend to think of professors as "charismatic" but speaking with absolute confidence is a big part of of it, and profs do that a lot. Especially if they're using their confident speech to promise a better life to people who adhere to their advice!
Metis is one factor, thymos is another; a lot of bodybuilding/fitness lore is about optimizing *long-term motivation*, not maximizing pounds of muscle added per gym-hour. So I'd expect bodybuilding wisdom to skew to things that work reasonably well and feel good.
While they do get long-term feedback from changes in appearance, the short-term visible feedback comes from a) how you feel during/after the workout, and b) progression in how much you lift. (e.g. a typical bulking cycle might mean adding half a pound of muscle and half a pound of fat each week. After a month, you'll be bigger, but also fatter; it's really hard to eyeball changes. You could test different lifting strategies over time, but for many of them the payoff cycle is: rapid gains from getting technically better at doing the lifts -> gains from actually getting stronger -> slower gains as you reach limits). And the longer the periods between changes, the more *other* factors change. The solo RCT is hard.
Another thing that makes practitioners reluctant to change their behaviors in lifting is that a big part of the motivation is seeing a number go up. But that's only meaningful if you are doing exactly the same workout each time; if your lifts go up, but you increased your rest times, you didn't necessarily get stronger, and it's demotivating to worry that your measurement only looks better because of how you measured it.
This is a kind of annoying answer, but I think it gets to the fundamental truth: what fitness researchers are trying to measure is the effect of controlled experiments. What bodybuilders are trying to do is to get big. And getting big is not a series of controlled experiments; it's partly an effort to impose some level of control on the random fluctuations in life (injuries, schedule changes, etc.) that interfere with maximum gainz. You can look at bodybuilding wisdom as a sort of bro canon, not in the sense of embodying what bros think, but embodying how a true bro would motivate you to keep going for one more set.
"thymos is another; a lot of bodybuilding/fitness lore is about optimizing *long-term motivation*,"
exactly! this is the first order cause of success, not optimizing rest period. The post even explains it:
"The real reason was probably that bodybuilders chased the pump and burn they get from shorter rest periods."
so if we want to ignore all the psychological and motivational aspects of training, then yes, maybe the metis is wrong... but if you actually want to stick to a program, the metis may be correct (even if their reasoning is not)
Doesn’t seem like you established that this is consensus in the community by any means, and most of what you shared was contrary to that point. Your conclusion seems pretty shoehorned... because some people of a generalized body are wrong means there is a failure of ‘metis’? This is nothing more than a debunking of what most in the fitness/bodybuilding community would consider an old wives tale....
Of the sites/threads I looked at, about a third explicitly supported the short rest times, and many of the others referred to this having been a previous position which had recently changed.
Interesting, I would think that’s a point in favor of ‘metis’ then? A majority have the view that is supported by RCTs?
I’m a very casual bodybuilder who never reads studies on bodybuilding.
I sort of cringed at all of the community sources you cited. None of them (maybe Outlift?) would be used by any bodybuilders I know, casual or serious, who I think of as having metis in the field. Bodybuilding.com is the People magazine / yahoo answers of bodybuilding.
I would look at Instagram, Youtube, or Reddit sources to see what the median of the community thinks nowadays.
America’s Test Kitchen applied the scientific method to a lot of culinary folk wisdom and it was found wanting.
While this is a completely new topic for me, I would've expected the bodybuilders to have a generally decent grasp of what makes one "good", without a strong grasp of what it takes to cross the last decile, or last percentile, of gains. They, by almost any measure, haven't "failed miserably" re their end goal from what I can see.
Metis seems to stand in for a shorthand for "generally accepted practices within a community, that evolved to reach strong end goals". But it's evolved, which means it won't be optimised for everything, and might even have counterproductive aspects. The same way that "scientific endeavours" you're citing are engineered, and also will have blind spots that will need correction eventually.
If I have to propose a model I'd think it'll be more like "Given sufficient time and people, metis will get you pretty close to where you wanna go. But you might want to test scientifically to make sure your ideas stack up, as there's a very high probability that a bunch of them might be counterproductive, just not so counterproductive that you'll make no progress."
Several months ago I tried to answer for myself whether resistance bands are "about as effective" as free weights for strength training. The most comprehensive attempt to answer the question I could find was here: https://bonytobeastly.com/resistance-bands-for-muscle-hypertrophy/. (There are some possibly-relevant studies, which the author of that piece selectively references, but none that I found attempted to directly measure hypertrophy or strength gains over time in a controlled trial that compares resistance band training and free weight training.)
If the author of that piece is to be believed, it's the expert consensus that resistance bands are definitely strictly inferior to free weights for building muscle, specifically and solely because 1. a small number of recent studies indicate that tension at long muscle lengths promotes hypertrophy more than tension at short muscle lengths and 2. resistance bands must theoretically have a "resistance curve" that's the opposite of that, i.e. more tension is applied at the end of the range of motion where the working muscles are contracted.
I found this pretty striking since it seems like the author, and apparently all the experts too, are putting *too much* faith into too light a body of relevant evidence and *underweighting* the relevance of "metis"-oriented arguments along the lines of "well it certainly looks and feels exactly like effective strength training in every way, and many people who claim to be experienced lifters think it's effective for them, so why wouldn't it be about as effective". Personally, I'm still training with my resistance bands and am happy with the rate of progress I've seen thus far.
> "well it certainly looks and feels exactly like effective strength training in every way, and many people who claim to be experienced lifters think it's effective for them, so why wouldn't it be about as effective"
Honestly, I haven't heard any experienced lifters claim this, so I'm curious where you're hearing it? My impression from the weightlifting and powerlifting community is that resistance bands are generally inferior (and obviously so), for exactly all the reasons the linked article discusses. They have some niche usages (especially *in addition* to free weights to alter the resistance curve) so a lot of gyms will have them, but I've never seen them used as a primary tool for strength or mass gains.
Obviously I'm not going to tell you not to do something that's working for you--so if you're happy with your resistance bands, that's great--but this view does seem very unconventional.
I didn't mean to imply it's a common position among all experienced lifters -- on the whole, you're right that they tend to be resistant to the idea that resistance bands are an effective substitute for free weights, at least after you float the idea to them -- just that you can find plenty of people who claim to be experienced lifters saying that resistance bands are good shit specifically where you'd expect to most readily find them (e.g. reviewing resistance bands on Amazon, or commenting on YouTube videos about resistance band exercises).
... but wait, what are the reasons you've heard people give besides 1. "the resistance curve is theoretically wand-wavingly not ideal" (I suspect people who says this are imagining that you'd start with the band completely slack at the beginning of the range of motion, which is of course idiotic and wrong) and 2. "they don't provide enough resistance" (which is true if you use bands that don't provide enough resistance, though you can make the same criticism of the little pink 5lb physical therapy dumbbells, a barbell with no plates on it, etc)?
One issue with resistance bands is they wear out over time, so you never really know how much you're lifting (even aside from the fact that you're lifting more at the top). They can also break and snap at you, which doesn't matter so much if they're light but seems like kind of a practical restriction on how heavy you can go.
As far as having some tension on the bands where you start the lift, it kind of depends... in theory, hyperelastic materials (like rubber) have a fairly flat section in the middle of their force-deformation curve, so if you can hit that reliably it wouldn't be too bad. But actually making a setup that achieves this would be a lot of work. I tried to do squats with resistance bands for a while, and any significant tension at the bottom makes it hard to get into position.
The lack of a nice objective number is a real downside, for the people that's important to, but I find that going by feel isn't really a problem as far as actually achieving hard sets goes. (Though, I developed my intution for what a hard set in the right rep range should feel like using free weights, so maybe a total novice who's starting with just resistance bands would have difficulty getting that right. Maybe.)
I don't really understand the "break and snap at you" point -- are you saying very heavy resistance bands breaking and snapping at you might be *more dangerous* than putting a barbell with hundreds of pounds on it on your shoulders or over your chest?
For now I basically do a goblet squat with the band doubled up "upside-down" under my feet (i.e. each hand is holding one end of the band, and the middle of the band is wrapping around *over* my feet), though this is already kind of hard on my wrists and I can imagine I'll have to figure out something different as I gain strength. An acquaintance of mind who's stronger than me who I memed into resistance bands suggested buying a plain ol' metal bar (I'm sure an actual barbell would work fine) and using that to wrap bands around, which I already do for deadlifts and that works pretty well.
"are you saying very heavy resistance bands breaking and snapping at you might be *more dangerous* than putting a barbell with hundreds of pounds on it on your shoulders or over your chest?"
Try to picture what happens in the middle of a 400 lb banded squat when a band snaps and suddenly you have 50 fewer pounds on one side - if you survive that without injury a couple extra Hail Mary's are in order.
The resistance curve is the major point. Even if the band is stretched at the beginning, the beginning is still easier than the end. Theoretically if your bands are long enough, you could equalize the beginning and end of range of motion, but in practical setups, there's a very noticeable difference.
With some exercises, there's also a stability issue. Unlike free weights, the bands have no inertia, so they can wiggle all over while you're trying to press against them. For example, I've tried squatting with a cable machine (which has the same problem with no inertia) and maintaining balance can be annoying. When weights are unstable, your body will refuse to produce maximal force (presumably as an injury-prevention measure) and so it limits your training.
Yeah, I just don't really buy that the resistance increasing through the range of motion necessarily matters *that much* for actual outcomes, as long as you're taking reasonable steps to ensure that the resistance curve isn't insanely steep, until someone attempts to really measure how much it matters for strength or hypertrophy in an actual experiment. I've yet to see anyone put any numbers to how much the resistance curve varies in actual, thoughtful usage for important movements, and how much change there would be "acceptable" or cause resistance bands to be "meaningfully" less effective than free weights.
And, you know, imagine that there is something to this argument and it turns out that resistance bands are "90% as good" overall as free weights as measured by muscle mass change over time; I'm sure that kind of difference would matter to literal professional bodybuilders, and that's perfectly legitimate (indeed anyone who's making money off their physique should absolutely play it safe even just knowing what we know now and stick with the weights), but should it matter so much to your typical hobbyist lifter -- especially if they're not trying to overcome a plateau at the moment and haven't already ruthlessly optimized every other facet of their training and diet -- that they should stress out over whether this far more convenient training modality is suboptimal? Personally, if I were persuaded that I'm making gains 90% as fast as I would if I were to haul my ass to the gym four times a week and deal with plates and such, I would be like, "great, I'm gonna stick with the bands until and unless I plateau and also feel a strong urge to break past that plateau".
I've seen and heard it claimed that one reason free weights are superior to machines *because* they require you to "engage your stabilizer muscles" or some such. Do you disagree that that's good, or do you think free weights engage your stabilizers "the right amount" whereas resistance bands require you to focus too much on stabilizing?
The "90% good" is basically the objection here: resistance bands do provide you with some tension, but might be limiting by ~10%. Unfortunately, even for intermediate-level lifters, you only get about a 10% margin of error before your workouts become completely ineffective. (I'm intentionally being vague to make a point, but to justify the 10% number: you need to be within about 4 reps in reserve for a set to do anything, and 4 RIR translates to about 10% weight).
The stabilizer thing is a bit complicated and that's why you'll hear seemingly contradictory claims. If your stabilizers limit your workout, then that's generally bad, because it means the muscles you were trying to hit aren't getting a sufficient workout. If your stabilizers assist but don't limit, that can be good because that means you're stimulating more muscles and developing coordination that carries over to other activities. However, especially for more advanced bodybuilders, minimizing stabilizer involvement can be preferable so that all your energy is going into the target muscle.
This is straying from the efficacy of resistance bands a bit, but I'll quote from a recent MASS article that covered the study "Effect of Resistance Training to Muscle Failure Vs. Non-Failure on Strength, Hypertrophy and Muscle Architecture in Trained Individuals", Santanielo et al. 2020, regarding your justification:
> In my opinion, we should reframe the failure debate from "do you have to train to failure" to "how far can you train from failure and still maximize hypertrophy?" Training farther from failure may also have additional practical benefits related to fatigue, muscle damage, single-session volume, weekly volume, and weekly frequency, but we'll return to those later. For now, let's look at the evidence. Most of the studies comparing failure versus non-failure training are similar to the currently reviewed research, in that they compare failure to training just a rep or two shy of failure. About a year ago, Greg reviewed a study from Lasevicius et al (9 – MASS Review) which had untrained lifters, in a within-subjects design, train knee extensions to failure or not to failure. While proximity to failure was not controlled in that study, subjects likely had at least seven reps in the tank when performing non-failure training. Still, they experienced similar hypertrophy and strength compared to failure training (however, note that the subjects in the non-failure group performed more sets in order to equate total reps between groups). Further, Carroll et al (10 - MASS Review) had a group of subjects train to ~4-5 RPE over 10 weeks on a variety of lifts (squat and bench press included), and these lifters experienced greater quadriceps growth than a group who trained to failure. The idea that you can perform a decent amount of training at a 5RPE (5RIR) and still maximize hypertrophy is something that I thought seriously about in 2016 after we wrapped both an acute RPE/RIR accuracy study (12) and Dr. Helms' Ph.D. thesis (13). For the acute study, subjects performed one set to failure on the squat at 70% of 1RM and predicted when they had 5, 3, and 1 RIR during the set. Subjects under-predicted RIR by about 5, 3.5, and 2 reps at each threshold. In other words, subjects had on average a 10 RIR when they predicted a 5 RIR. Then, Dr. Helms' study compared two groups who trained the squat and bench three times per week over eight weeks of training, and found that a group who trained, on average, to a self-reported 4-5 RIR experienced similar muscle growth to a group who trained to a 2-3 RIR. Taken together, these studies suggest that the well-trained lifters in Helms' study trained considerably farther from failure than reported. Other studies (14 – MASS Review, 15 – MASS Review) have reported that subjects can predict intra-set RIR to within one rep after the first set of an exercise. So, I don't think the subjects in Helms' study were 3-5 reps off on every set, but the main points are 1) 4-5 RIR training produced similar muscle growth as 2-3 RIR training and 2) the average number of RIR was probably even lower than reported. To me, these findings suggest that trained lifters with a high training frequency can take most sets on compound lifts to around a 5 RIR and still maximize hypertrophy on major muscle groups (i.e., quads and pecs). One valid criticism of this interpretation is that if RIR was under-predicted and there was no group training to a 1 RIR, then it's fallacious to conclude that 5 RIR training is sufficient. I'm sympathetic to that argument, but that lateral quad hypertrophy in this study was 6.6%, similar to a study (+ 4.88%) (16), but with subjects training much closer to failure.
> I don't see much data on the other side of the argument. You could argue that studies using cluster sets or intra-set rest could demonstrate that training close to or at failure is necessary, but I don't think it's an apples-to-apples comparison. A commonly cited study from Goto et al 2005 (17) had subjects perform leg extensions for either 5 sets of 10 reps to failure for 12 weeks or 5 sets of 10 reps with a 10RM load but with a 30-second intra-set rest after the fifth rep to ensure subjects stayed shy of failure. This led to potentially a 1-3 RIR at the end of all 10 reps. Quadriceps hypertrophy was more than double in the failure (+ 12.9%) versus the intra-set rest (+ 4.0%) group. However, this is more of an extended cluster set and not indicative of how most people train. Therefore, I weigh the Carrol, Lasevicius, and Helms studies more highly than the Goto study. Nonetheless, I think it's also fair to say that there is not enough data to definitively conclude how far someone can train from failure and maximize hypertrophy. I would say that someone can train to around a 5 RIR for the most part when using moderate to heavy load training (i.e., not light loads), but it may be even farther from failure than that (gasp). The sufficient RIR might be 2-3 RIR, but I don't believe the existing data suggests that. In short, we need to reframe the question, and both opinions (i.e., 5 RIR or 2-3 RIR) have merit, but suggesting a 5 RIR or less is sufficient is not an outlandish statement based upon the data. I've heard people say, “Well, I tried training to a 5 RIR, and it just didn't feel stimulating, or it didn't feel fatiguing.” That's fine, but that doesn't negate the existing data. As with anything, we sometimes think in a binary fashion, but not all training must be at the same RIR. If someone can do 13 reps at 72.5% of 1RM on the squat and does 5 sets of 8 this would be a 5 RIR on the first set, but the RIR would probably be 2-3 on the final set or two.
I'll clarify that when I say "90% as good" I mean "your workouts are 90% as effective", not anything like "equivalent to doing the same number of reps with 90% as much weight" (and even in that case, my read of the state of the evidence is that it might matter less than you seem to believe even in trained subjects).
I'll say that this is reminding me of the "anabolic window" and related protein timing memes. It's true that protein timing does matter more-than-not-at-all -- I don't think you can eat 1kg of protein once per week and fast the other 6 days and expect to make close-to-optimal gains, and conversely if you're a pro bodybuilder who's butting up against their genetic potential and cutting in preparation for a show, it may well really matter that you obsessively get some protein in you every 2 hours -- but some people have placed or even still place far too much emphasis on it on the basis of vague mechanistic arguments while ignoring what I'll refer to as "common sense" and in the absence of any direct evidence.
In this case, as I understand it, the right amount of focus on protein timing turns out to be "just live your life and try to get at least 3 meals with a good amount of protein each day, if you do that and hit your total daily intake goal and you'll be fine" for anyone who's not an elite lifter, and I predict that the efficacy of resistance bands will turn out to be a very similar story -- "if it feels and looks exactly like a hard session with free weights, and you're putting a little effort into ensuring the resistance curve isn't egregiously steep, and you're not close to your genetic potential and fighting for your life for every extra gram of muscle in the first place, you're probably building muscle about as well as you would with free weights". Hopefully we'll see if I'm right about that within the next decade or so!
I've become confused: is it your position that bands should be preferred over free weights because 'they're more convenient in a home gym setting, so who cares if they're marginally less effective?'? If so, I'm gobsmacked - what major compound lifts are you doing that are more convenient with bands than with free weights? You mentioned deadlifts above; has it really been your experience that banded is more convenient than free for that exercise?
More convenient because they take up very little space (there's no way I'd be able to work a barbell and plates setup into my apartment), less importantly don't require quite the same level of laborious manhandling to set up, even less importantly don't require near as much laying down or bending over to get resistance in the right direction, and perhaps more importantly for many people are quite a bit cheaper than a gym membership over time and probably cheaper than a home gym setup too for many years. The deadlift is probably the least convenient one to get right with bands, in my experience, since the beginning of the ROM is so close to your feet so there's not as much room between "too easy at the start" and "too hard at the end"; I'll usually spend 1 or 2 reps at the beginning of every set just tuning the initial tension so the set will have about the right number of reps, which I don't have to fiddle with near as often for any other movement I do.
I hope nobody thinks I'm telling them they "should" prefer bands over free weights! I'm claiming that the actual hard evidence for resistance bands being inferior to free weights is slim, that at least some people seem to be overinterpreting what little relevant evidence there is in a way that fits their bottom line, and my own priors and limited experience with them says that as long as you're putting the smallest amount of thought into ensuring your workout is appropriately difficult, it's very unlikely that they're so much less effective than free weights that hobbyist lifters should be telling each other that they're a waste of time.
And to be clear, do you hear other people claim that the sloped resistance curve matters *because they believe that tension at long muscle lengths promotes more muscle growth than tension at short muscle lengths and resistance bands do the opposite of that*, or is that just something that one guy came up with and other people believe the sloped resistance curve matters because many movements have a strength curve that doesn't slope upward and the flat resistance curve of free weights hypothetically matches the strength curve of those movements more closely? I was under the impression the long muscle lengths thing was a pretty recent finding from just a few small studies and didn't think it had become much of a meme yet.
I don't think it's widely known about the importance of tension vs muscle length. But I think most lifters would be able to give the feedback "feels too easy at the bottom and too hard at the top, and I'm not getting a good workout because of that".
This lifter gives the feedback "if you put a tiny amount of thought into it, it's hard enough throughout the the full range of motion, and I'm getting what feels indistinguishable from a good workout because of that". :)
This is a scientific shitpost if I've ever seen one.
You might be interested in the recent exchange between Menno Henselmans and the people at strongerbyscience.com on the subject of whether having high body fat impedes hypertrophy. It greatly lowered my faith in Menno's ability to draw good conclusions from a body of evidence, tbh (though of course that doesn't mean he's actually wrong about any other specific claim he's ever made). https://www.strongerbyscience.com/p-ratios-rebuttal-2/
I'll definitely signal boost this post, just because the strongerbyscience guys are actually pretty epistemologically aligned with the community here, although I'm not sure if they are aware of it's existence (or vice versa).
I was also pretty shocked by Menno in that one, I had also previously held him in quite high regard and his previous work and reasoning didn't seem to show a lot of the, uh... inability to update on evidence that that exchange showed. I *do* wonder if somehow he has some financial stake in that answer to that particular question? It was definitely a poor showing in my view.
Any reader here who counts resistance training among their hobbies and has the money to spare should definitely consider buying a subscription to MASS :). https://www.strongerbyscience.com/mass/
I'll second this
I'll third this
If you listen to the discussion they had on Jeff Nippard's podcast you might be less shocked; Menno comes around somewhat at the end. It's also enlightening to know that Greg himself championed this theory a few years ago and the community ate it up.
Best to focus on obvious lower order influences which at this point are much better understood.
Ah I haven't actually listened to the podcast yet, thats very gratifying to hear, and makes me feel a lot better about the whole thing.
I think I missed it due to not really consuming any of Nippard's content as a rule; Although I was aware of it's existence I hadn't got around to listening.
I actually found the debate on Menno's site. Due to the size of Jeff's audience he's become the defacto platform for debates like this, so if you like this kind of content you may be well served revisiting your rule.
If you're looking for practical advice you can save 90 minutes and just listen to Israetel's opening.
I had watched that debate a few weeks ago, and I came away more convinced by Menno's points. But what was clearest was that in terms of practicality, for almost anyone except specific people whose goals are to continue bulking well past aesthetic/healthy parameters, they all seemed to agree that the more conservative position that Mike/Menno were advocating made sense.
This is a great. Thanks for sharing.
> But here’s what seems like an example of body-builders failing miserably, and needing normal academic science to set them right
There's also the very strong possibility that the difference between N or M rest minutes is irrelevant as a muscle growth factor compared to their use of stereoids and similar enhancers, so it makes sense for lesser "natural" methods not to be as optimized.
Kinda reminds me of Moneyball. Lots of skin in the game on the part of scouts, teams, coaches, GM's, and players, yet they were wrong about important facets of the sport for decades.
A lot of coaches, GMs, and scouts are actually incentivized to be wrong in a conventional way, rather than take a risk.
It seems wrong to argue about whether or not bodybuilders got it right/wrong in the past (or indeed now) purely by referencing the changing scientific consensus, since that's fundamentally part of the question. What methods do the top bodybuilders use now as compared to 30 years ago, and how big are they, etc.? You need to measure it by bodybuilder end-point metrics, not immediate metabolic measures which are innately far more vulnerable to confusion.
Yeah, came here to say this.
It's a bit odd to use the recentest and biggest RCT as your standard of judging whether the scientific literature beats metis - the former is going to win by definition
The bigger issue is science is once again useless at giving any sort of practical result. For years the science was uncertain about low-carb diets. Meanwhile everyone I've ever met who has successfully lost weight has done so on a low carb diet. Science just isn't very useful outside of carefully controlled environments. Which is to say science isn't all that useful. Science and technology get all the credit for progress, but it's capitalism that deserves it. Soviets had lots of great scientists.
It's not that the science is wrong, but most studies ignore the 'personal' or psychological aspect. What makes the diet X successful is usually not the nutritional superiority of it, but the ease of commitment.
It's unfortunate that this hasn't really become a meme yet in the same way that low-fat and low-carb diets became memes, but there is science indicating that preferring foods with low caloric density is much more important than how much of any specific macronutrient you're eating for lowering caloric intake (though high protein does count for something). Both low-fat and low-carb diets, as they're usually implemented, will lower the caloric density of your diet and thereby leave you more satiated from fewer calories, but you can also just buy foods you like with low caloric density without worrying too much about their macronutrient composition and eat those ad libitum and achieve probably at least as much or I'd bet usually even faster progress.
I know you haven't "met" me but feel free to count me as the first person you've ever interacted with who's successfully lost weight without worrying about carbs in particular.
>I found this interesting because some people hold up (no pun intended) bodybuilders as an almost-perfectly-incentivized “scientific” community. Every bodybuilder has his own skin in the game - based on getting the science right or wrong, he’ll be better or worse at what he does. There’s a quick feedback loop - you can see if you’re gaining muscle or not. And success is easy to observe - check if the person giving you advice has arms that look like tree trunks.
s/bodybuilder/dieter/
s/gaining/losing/
s/muscle/fat/
> But here’s what seems like an example of body-builders failing miserably, and needing normal academic science to set them right.
/Something/ feels off about the logic "which is more accurate, metis or scientific studies? we checked, and scientific studies say scientific studies are more accurate. so much for metis!"
Exactly. What was the involvement of exercise science academics in the evolution of bodybuilding from guys who looked like Sean Connery to guys like Phil Heath who look like Marvel comic characters?
The p values & effect sizes of unimportant and fringe questions are less relevant than the results which conveniently in this case are visual.
Eh, I wouldn't worry about that too much here (though it was my criticism of the French Revolution post). Everyone more or less agrees that the goal of modern bodybuilding is big muscles - if BB metis loses to science on that outcome then there's really nothing more to be said.
There was a discussion on r/slatestarcodex a few weeks back about this interview with former bodybuilder Sam Fussell: https://www.drmichaeljoyner.com/sam-fussell-an-interview-with-the-author-of-muscle/
An important takeaway from this is that illegal* steroid use is (or was, but Fussell doesn't indicate that it has changed) endemic among the bodybuilder community. As a result, their metis is completely different from the mainstream scientific community, which is presumably not "in the know". But I'm not an expert on this so it's possible that on the question of how long to rest between sets is unaffected by how much drugs you're on.
(Reddit thread: https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/mdf04d/fussell_on_muscle/)
*Illegal in the sense that it gets you banned from sports, not that steroids are illegal drugs, which AFAIK they aren't.
I think sports scientists are collectively very aware that every bodybuilder, powerlifter, etc that isn't specifically competing in "natural"/"tested" shows/meets is on gear, if that's what you mean to say. I can speculate many reasons they tend to perform studies on people who don't (or don't admit to) using steroids, but surely one of the important ones is that it's far easier to get a large and appropriately uniform sample that way; it's hard enough finding a lot of willing subjects that already have enough experience with resistance training to be considered "trained", which is itself an important variable in how people respond to pretty much any strength training intervention you might want to test.
So you're saying that scientific studies in this field have participants who aren't already at peak performance because it's easier to find them and measure their progress? That seems like another reason that results might not generalize to steroid users.
"being trained" (semi-arbitrarily, at least a year of regular lifting) isn't quite as high a bar as what I think of when I hear "peak performance" (close to genetic potential, more like a decade), but yes, quite a lot of studies are done that *would* be relevant to serious lifters (on gear or not) except that the subjects were untrained so who knows.
I should clarify that at least among the sources I read, people generally know you need to ask "did the subjects already have significant time under the bar" and more-or-less ignore the study if not.
Almost all of those studies seemed to measure contrasting conditions that both fall under "short rest periods of 1-3 minutes", especially if you consider that as an unscientific estimate that might be as little as 30 seconds and as long as 5 minutes.
I was left entirely uncertain about what was being asserted or proved.
The problem the bros have is their N=1, or at least some small number depending on how many gym buddies they have. And it can be hard for them to get themselves to consistently change their training methods, especially if they think the new one isn't working. The scientists have a much larger N and more controlled conditions, but their results might not generalize.
I think if you really want to know what works, you have competitions, and you have your academics working as and advising trainers. If the trainers who follow the Long Rest school have athletes who keep beating the athletes of the Short Rest school at competitions... well, there's your answer. Assuming there aren't confounders like the Long Rest athletes coming from Samoa and the Short Rest ones coming from New Jersey or something. I believe this sort of thing has resulted in big gains in swimming and track.
There seems to be a similar thing in bicycle training. Everyone says do intervals, but the major school says a lot of the intervals should be just below your "Functional Threshold Power" (FTP), in the "sweet spot", whereas there's another group which says you should do "polarized" training, always considerably below FTP or considerably above it, and the "sweet spot" is just wasting your time or worse. Unfortunately I have not been able to determine if there are good studies pointing to one or the other.
The metis is that gym bro’s understand where to focus. Mainly, there’s a lot of emphasis on lifting a lot (volume), diet (eating a lot or eating clean), and the juice. Most of the chatter in bodybuilding is about lifting, diet and juice because most of the results come from lifting a lot, dieting, and juicing. I’m sure the bro’s get a lot of these fringe questions about rest between sets wrong because those effect sizes are de minimis compared to stuff like how to get as much volume in per week without overtraining.
If you want to compare the scientific community to the bro’s core competency, I would focus on the juice. The juice is inherently an area where experts should have an advantage because it’s experts who created these substances and ostensibly oversee their use.
Yea that was my thought as well. The strength programs and coaches at D1 unis and pro sports (or equivalent), the athletic teams from Soviet Era coaching, and the juicing set are the real populations to consider. It was unclear if the research includes those. All three have great blends of large, coordinated sample wires, control groups, long term studies, and significant use of guess and check tribal knowledge.
There is two sides to that dynamic though.
There were things that "bros" were saying for years that have only recently been shown to be more plausible than previously thought. The only example I have of the top of my head is sarcoplasmic hypertrophy (https://www.strongerbyscience.com/sarcoplasmic-vs-myofibrillar-hypertrophy/) but I definitely heard of some others.
... actually, I googled, and here is T-Nation article (unlike the previous link, I'm not vouching for it) that tallies wins and losses for "bro science practices": https://www.t-nation.com/training/4-things-bro-science-got-right
Exercise science has a lot of issues, though a lot of that is the usual stuff, but in particular:
- Most studies don't necessarily look at trained people. Something that is plain as day is that things are very different between a weight lifting newbie and someone that has been at it for years.
- Most studies look at acute interventions (a few workouts followed by measures), not chronic changes in training regimen tracked over the span of months.
- Averages. Some stuff works really well for some people but not for others. The issues here might be cofounders (or "co-factors" maybe). It's really hard to control for everything that matters. As an endeavour, bodybuilding is actually pretty hard, once you've gotten to a certain level. Screw any crucial factor up (sleep, stress levels, nutrition, total training volume, ...) and suddenly your intervention does nothing or even proves detrimental.
I think other fields have similar issues, but the situation here is quite fragile. If you shoot up drugs in someone that's a bit too stressed or doesn't eat enough proteins, it's my understanding that the drugs don't usually stop working or even make your condition worse. Ditto if you increase the amount of drugs. With bodybuilding all of this can, and does, happen.
Just don't ask how many days in a week there are.
Reference for the unintiated: https://forum.bodybuilding.com/showthread.php?t=107926751
I haven’t laughed so hard in at least a week. I needed that. Thanks.
Would be interesting to do something similar with all the training methods that have appeared since the use of power meters and/or interactive trainers became mainstream among "serious" cyclists.
It seems obvious to me power meters and smart trainers have made cyclists much faster. With that said, I think there's still many important open questions like polarized vs sweet-spot, value in over-unders, length of V02 intervals etc. It is worth noting that even if polarized proved to be more effective than sweet-spot, it is simply too mind-numbing to be palatable for most indoor riders.
In theory, TrainerRoad could answer all of these questions but for various reasons, they aren't particularly interested in doing so.
To go to Scott's point, there is a youtuber named Dylan Johnson who makes videos showing what the "science" says about various cycling questions. Unfortunately, the studies he cites are mostly garbage and frequently taken out of context and/or misinterpreted. I would probably trust "metis" or bro-science over what he says.
I haven't been into competitive cycling for a few years, but when I was into it, I spent some time looking at the literature and, to be honest, had a very hard time finding anything useful. Andy Coggan and the WKO crowd seemed like the most reliable crowd. I remember Coggan doing nothing but VO2 intervals daily for a while. Never really saw what his conclusion was.
While I agree that power meters have made people faster, it has also created an obsession on FTP, or more precisely, FTP as measured by the 8-minute test method, since very few people have the courage to do an actual ~60 minutes effort (I did it a couple of times. It was brutal).
In terms of "metis", I remember two crowds: one was the ride a shit-ton crowd and the other was the avoid junk miles and only do intervals crowd. Based merely on observation, the ride a lot crowd was much faster. Personally, I just enjoyed riding hard, so I would find the fastest group ride any given day and go kill myself. I did do try to do structured training, but never lasted long.
I might check that youtuber. Thanks.
There’s some decent science behind the zone 2 polarized training philosophy. Also that idea has been around forever. Like literally forever in the sense that Roman Legions did weekly 20+ mile rucks.
Yeah, TrainerRoad could analyze their customer's training and their FTP test results and come up with some good answers, but they'd be crucified for doing so and justifiably so. So if they have done it they're keeping it under their hat. Also they didn't have polarized training plans until recently, so they wouldn't have all that much data on that question specifically.
That's a gigachad post if ever there was one.
This is a bit weird to read.
As someone that's mildly close to the sport and exercise field, theres some good stuff in the comments here... And also some stuff that's a little painful to read.
I'm slightly shifting myself to be even *more* cautious about speculating into fields I'm not a part of.
"But in most of the communities I look into, trusting the peer-reviewed academic studies still seems to be the way to go."
Both muscle gain and medicine are areas where researchers are relatively incentivized to produce correct conclusions right? Not sure that is true in every scientific field. For example, lore has it that in social psychology, interestingness is (was?) incentivized over correctness.
> None of this should come as a surprise; it’s the same thing that happened to doctors fifty years ago. We thought we’d developed useful lore. Evidence-based medicine showed half of it was wrong.
Given this history, I'm having a hard time understanding why your conclusion is
> But in most of the communities I look into, trusting the peer-reviewed academic studies still seems to be the way to go.
Surely trustomg metis/lore as a way of developing a practice, and allowing that evolved practice to be stripped of ephemera by scientific investigation is the way to go? Are you confident that someone could become an empirically better bodybuilder by reading all the studies first, then going to the gym?
Granted, there are probably domains where the theory is more important than the practice, but if your goal is some (non-academic-paper-publishing) concrete effect, it seems like the better approach by far is building a working, if clunky, set of practical skills and knowledge, then dropping the useless stuff off as you progress.
There are two communities of bodybuilders.
One community consists of the "pros", which are the ones that enter bodybuilding contests. These are looking to build big muscles with symmetry (and a number of other criteria from the judges). Note that these people do not win based on strength or actual muscle size, but how the muscles look (somewhat like figure skating).
The other community is the "bros". These don't enter contests, but they do compete with each other occasionally, so there is some strength involved, e.g. "What do you bench?". They do have aesthetics in mind - how they look in the tight shirt at the bar.
The people designing these studies generally don't belong to either community. They may ask some people about reasonable sample sizes, program lengths, etc. but they are constrained in cost as to how realistic the programs can be. For example, if you're looking for optimal contest prep programs, note that most contestants seem to take about 12 weeks to prep - from "I'm going to compete" to the actual meet. Most of the studies I've seen don't even last half that long.
Yea these studies asked an unimportant question using unconvincing methodologies
A meta point:
I find it fascinating how I've read all of Scott's writing on metis in addition to likely all of the same source material, yet seemingly understand the concept quite differently.
I think of metis as being valuable in 2 types of situations:
1) it has been used and evolved over long periods of time (if it didn't work, it would have likely died out)
2) it pertains to a realm that is much harder to quantify/analyze
Given the above, I would not expect metis to be more informative than the scientific literature in a relatively new field like body building that is relatively legible to study.
You only have half of the equation. You have studies showing the effects, or lack thereof, of shorter rest-times. But, you don't have an actual survey of current body builders to find what they believe, or at least claim to believe. You have lots of suggestive evidence of what they believe, but its all evidence that is subject to self-selection bias. Who knows if the guys who write body building articles and answer questions on forums hold the same views as the guys who don't?
I strongly suspect the most active users on Internet forums are not representative of those actually throwing the weight around. The forums attract newbies drawn to over intellectualizing.
"It said that people training for strength should wait 3-5 minutes, but people training for hypertrophy (bigger muscles) should wait 30 - 60 seconds."
If this is true, it might be part of the difference. I suspect that the scientists are measuring strength, rather than muscle size.
the quotes say 'muscle growth', not strength
I think in quite an autistic fashion this post misses forest behind the trees.
In long run it is not really important how long you rest. You will figure out what works for you best.
What matters is diet, exercises , mindset and.. cough.. pharma. Whether you rest 60 or 3 minutes matters jack sh1t
Never thought I’d see an ACX/powerlifting crossover episode, but here we are!
In my ~year of being in the latter community, I can confirm that metis is spotty at best and misinformation runs rampant. I liken this to Gwern’s review of that old book on animal husbandry (https://www.gwern.net/Bakewell ) — for a long time, people in different fragmented groups were trying to optimize for some set of results they thought they wanted, but doing so in a way that was beholden to various unhelpful priors/biases/delusions. On average, they *kind of* got to good results sometimes, but mostly it was a shit-show until more rigorous modern scientific practices came along. And that’s still where we’re at today in any area (like personal fitness) where anyone can become an “expert” with enough clients or clicks. I’m guessing metis has always been like for anything that’s not strictly life or death, but a long-haul optimization problem.
Yes, metis or Chesterton's Fence or whatever often seems to go wrong in the real world.
We have whole fields (ie, pre-modern medicine) where virtually every local norm was worse than doing nothing.
You don’t think powerlifting has progressed pretty far via broscience in your lifetime? Like, objectively, the progress has been unreal in the past 30 years.
And all while being held back by this Luddite rest between sets scheme :)
“Like, objectively, the progress has been unreal in the past 30 years.” Sorry, don’t you mean “the gains have been sick”? ;)
I haven’t been lifting (or paying attention to lifting communities) for 30 years :) — I’m just seeing it now and am amused by the Wild West of information out there. I joined an evidence-based women’s lifting group on Facebook, and fully a third to half of the content is the mods exasperatedly correcting false assumptions about nutrition & form thrown around by newbies who Googled & followed the advice of the first swole guy on YouTube that came up. So maybe there’s some kind of center/periphery dynamic where the core of informed, seasoned lifters are getting a lot better, but due to the popularity & reach of lifting also expanding, quality deteriorates as you get out to the newbie edges?
> So maybe there’s some kind of center/periphery dynamic where the core of informed, seasoned lifters are getting a lot better, but due to the popularity & reach of lifting also expanding, quality deteriorates as you get out to the newbie edges?
I observe that in basically every 'community'/subject/area/whatever!
If it is work equated, how do you know if the effect is from rest periods, vs. #reps?
You don’t but the guy’s site also makes a point about how rep ranges don’t affect hypertrophy which I also have a hard time believing.
and what did that experiment look like? was it also work equated?
Maybe since these bodybuilding discussions are happening in an online forum where you can't really see the results or gains of the people recommending them they must instead back up what they are saying with scientific studies to seem credible. This then allows bad science to invade maybe
The language learning community is another with a lot of skin in the game.
Working proficiency is such a long process, small optimizations can save significant amounts of time. It's a little surprising how slowly (if at all) university language settings have embraced tools like the input hypothesis or spaced repetition software, that are widespread in the self-driven learning communities.
On the other hand... there are still a lot of open questions and debates within language learning communities.
Maybe some questions about optimization stick around because a lot of the remaining questions are working so far at the margins? Language learning is a time-on-target activity. If you're spending x hours per day working with the language, that's most of the job.
So, flipping back to the case here, I think if you asked anyone in the lifting community to assign priority weighting to "any program of progressive overload on core lifts" vs. "duration of rest periods" as a point of initial focus... I don't think there would be debates.
If you know the basics, and you know all this other stuff is on the margins, maybe their "metis" is optimizing, but also preventing over-optimization?
i.e., In the world where rest timing led to 20% improvements or something... I think the community would have digested that knowledge. At least somewhat in proportion to relevance.
in the real world, wouldn't you also be lifting heavier weights at longer rest intervals?
The first thing you might realize is that no one in these studies is likely to be an actual elite-level bodybuilder. It's entirely possible that figuring out the optimal number of leg extensions for college students isn't optimal for Sergio Olivia Jr on 2g of test/wk eating 7k calories per day with 15 years of training experience under his belt.
The second thing you might realize is that bodybuilding, and indeed sports training in general, defies explicit quantitative analysis. No bodybuilder is setting a stopwatch. They are training by feel. They are also somewhat eating and resting by feel. Athletes are successful because they can autoregulate and ignore the kind of explicit instructions that scientists are looking for in papers, or genpop is looking for in "top 10 exercise habits" lists in mens health magazines.
Bodybuilders will say they "eat clean" chicken and broccoli in interviews and then 4 nights a week are eating McDonalds. No one told them to do that. They may have even been told not to do that. But they just switch their brain off and it all seems to make perfect sense for them. Yes, even during contest prep. Some of the guys who come in the most shredded routinely go off their coach's diet plan egregiously and just laugh about it or rationalize it away or they never even think they cheated at all.
If you wanted to know which explicit simple instructions (like, do 5x5, or rest 90s between sets) causes the most muscle growth in the population you study, keep doing those studies. If you want to know how to become an elite athlete, start by documenting the actual behaviour of elite athletes and highlight the common trends. Spoiler - the basic ingredients are to train hard, eat a lot of food, and use steroids you like.
Yea some of these claims in the cited studies are just laughable. There’s confounding variables on top of confounding variables.
All in all, the evolution of bodybuilding via broscience over the past 50 years has created humans so physically abnormal that an alien species would think bodybuilders were a separate species. And some academic thinks that the rest between sets is holding bodybuilding back. Ok dude.
>The bodybuilders had lots of opportunities to experiment and tinker, with lots of skin in the game, but they were still getting things pretty wrong until researchers looked into some of their conclusions using the normal scientific method.
I have lifted weights for about 10+ years and made every mistake possible short of ruining my health and injuring myself.
Some comments:
- <em>Bodybuilders are one of the collectively stupidest groups of people I've ever seen</em>. I can't begin to tell you the dumb shit I've seen on bodybuilding.com. <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/bodybuilders-dont-know-how-many-days-in-week-2015-1">This debate</a> about whether a week has 7 or 8 days has to be up there.
- The "pump" is just increased blood flow. It's irrelevant to building muscle. You can get a great pump by curling a 1 pound weight fifty times.
- Pro bodybuilders are all running stacks of steroids + HGH + insulin. The exact response curves of hormones in response to weightlifting are largely irrelevant to them, as they're dumping massive amounts of artificial hormones into their systems anyway.
- Different weightlifters have different goals. The correct path for an aspirant pro bodybuilder is different to that of a person rehabbing an injury, or a person who wants to lose weight. There's no one-size-fits-all approach.
- Natural muscle gain is very slow (aside from the "newbie gains" when you start lifting). It can be difficult to assess whether your training is working or not when you're only gaining 1-5lb of muscle a year.
- Faced with an infinity of contradictory lifting advice, most bodybuilders adopt a "keep it simple, stupid", approach. As one person told me "more food on your plate + more weight on the bar = more muscle. Don't make it any harder than that!"
- When lifting weights, overwhelmingly the most important consideration is not getting injured. It doesn't matter if your training methods are effective in building muscle if they're also wrecking your joints: soon you won't be able to train at all.
apologies for the broken link
I mean... that was just trolling, right? The way he was arguing was actually too good for him to be that dumb.
Isn't the more important gap/difference between metis and Science in fields/practices where the science doesn't have enough specific recommendation?
"Once science is better you should follow it" is not much of a bromide.
Who would win in what fight?
The having scientifically valid causal descriptions fight, or the getting swole fight?
I apologize if this is uncharitable/wrong, but as far as I can tell, the only real fundamental pro-science claim here is that knowledge of past RCTs (and similar things) makes you better at predicting the results of similar future RCTs as compared to things metis people say, when the things the metis people say is interpreted as a prediction about future RCTs.
Which isn't a point _against_ the ppl who are into doing RCTs and similar things, but seems kind of weak.
[also, to be fair, a lot of things that people say in bodybuilding are pretty easy to parse as predictions about future RCTs...]
The real issue at hand is the relationship between RCTs and practically useful knowledge/truth.
It seems to me that like in cases where you can reasonably name & isolate a Fact from the mess of real-life bodybuilding practice and culture, then definitely doing RCTs around that Fact will allow you to gain knowledge in a controlled setting (you will certainly accept or reject some hypotheses), and then maybe when you map that knowledge back into the wild, it'll improve practice in meaningful ways.
Certainly you should be able to predict future RCTs around the Fact better.
But like how relatively important are such situations? As compared to more "a-scientific" things (where for a beginner, an "a-scientific" thing might be just like personal stories from other people that make it easier to imagine yourself lifting and then you go do it, I don't know)?
Genuinely not that clear to me.
I don't think this is a valid evaluation of metis vs legible expertise. The question being answered in these studies (how to get the biggest muscles possible) has only really been a focus of high-level bodybuilding since the reign of Dorian Yates in the early 90s. If you look at major bodybuilders from before then, like Frank Zane and Arnold, they're much less about massive muscles and more about aesthetics.
That gives this kind of bodybuilding <30 years to figure itself out - not anywhere near enough time to establish metis. The examples in SLaS are from cultures that figured things out over thousands of years: I expect the Inuit hadn't nailed down their seal hunting techniques three decades after first entering the arctic.
Writing about the optimal way to get swole is only going to further persuade the likes of the NYT that this is an alt-right blog.
The real story of course is that the rationalist community is about searching for truth, and there are certain truths that only alt-rightists are willing to proclaim. More and more such examples are coming from the realms of fitness, nutrition, and intersexual dynamics. That's probably a good thing, as alt-right will become just another flavor of right, just like alt-rock became another flavor of rock. As someone who sympathizes with the alt-right, I'd be very happy if it became less about ridiculous political conspiracy theories and more about telling fifteen-year-old boys to lift heavy shit and put it back down again because that's how they'll feel good, get self-confidence, and get laid.
Your basic premise, that bodybuilders were wrong because they disagreed with exercise research, isn't justified, because exercise research doesn't use bodybuilders as subjects.
There are a small number of bodybuilders in the world, and they're genetic freaks who work out constantly, make bodybuilding their lifestyle, take lots of drugs, and already have a lot of muscle. "Bro science" is designed for, and based on the advice of, the most-elite bodybuilders, and what they have to do to keep gaining muscle is very different from what you, I, or even a typical elite athlete, would have to do.
For example, bro wisdom says to do 3-5 sets of each exercise. Lots of studies show conclusively that, for exercise research subjects, the third set and onward is a waste of time, and the second set might not be worth doing either.
(I'm lying a bit; most of these studies conclude that you should do 3 sets. But the data clearly show that the gain per minute, or gain per work done, is maximal when you do 1 set, and the correct conclusion is that you should do 1-2 sets of many different exercises for many different muscles, rather than 3 sets of fewer exercises. The studies "disagree" because they aren't asking how to exercise most efficiently, but how to exercise one particular muscle so as to gain the most total mass /per exercise session/ (not per minute) for that particular muscle, regardless of how long you have to exercise.)
Bro wisdom says to take 1-3 minutes between sets because pro bodybuilders have to exercise REALLY FAST. Their workout routines are often 30 sets per day. If you take 5 minutes between each set, that's going to take hours per day just waiting between sets!
You and I don't need to do 30 sets per day, because our bodies aren't constantly, aggressively tearing down muscle at the rate that the bodies of pro bodybuilders are. The more muscular you get, the more your body wants to get rid of that expensive muscle.
(When I wrote "exercise research doesn't use bodybuilders as subjects", I meant " exercise research doesn't use PRO bodybuilders as subjects".)
Also, exercise science habitually asks the wrong questions. Here "what is the best rest time between sets for one exercise for gaining muscle at that exercise?" is the wrong question; "what rest time between sets results in the most muscle gain in 1 hour at the gym?" is the right question.
Also, a meta-analysis in exercise science is often worse than any of the studies within it. This is because subjects, exercises, and precise manner of exercise, are so variable that each study you add to your metanalysis adds more (unmeasured) independent variables.
> Lots of studies show conclusively that, for exercise research subjects, the third set and onward is a waste of time, and the second set might not be worth doing either.
FYI most of these studies were on beginners. In the last decade or so, they've done a better job running studies on non-beginners, and the consensus seems to be that more volume is better, well beyond 3 sets.
You're right that most were on beginners, but not all; and so far, literally every study I've looked at /showed/ that doing just 1 set is more efficient than doing 3 sets (though often not with statistical significance, owing to small sample sizes), yet /concluded/ that doing 3 sets is more efficient.
James Krieger 2010, "Single vs multiple sets of resistance exercise for muscle hypertrophy: A meta-analysis", included 2 studies using "trained" subjects (Ostrowski..Lyttle 1997, Rhea..Burkett 2002). Both showed, in every comparison except for one in which the one-set group lost mass, that doing 1 set is more time-efficient at gaining muscle size than doing 4 sets, although with small samples and hence we're not talking 95% certainty in all these cases. Yet all studies /concluded/ that doing more sets was better.
This sentence from Ostrowski reveals the source of confusion (p. 153): "There may be a minimum volume for resistance training at which adaptations are optimized, at least in the short term, and beyond which the performance of additional resistance activity provides no further benefit." By saying that the point at which "adaptations are optimized" IS the point beyond which more work "provides no further benefit", it shows that Ostrowski doesn't know what optimization means, and is only talking about maximizing total gain under the assumption of an unlimited number of hours per day to exercise.
Take this dataset of effect sizes (ES) from Ostrowski: Measuring rectus femoris thickness, 9 subjects doing 1 set, ES 0.27; 9 subjects doing 4 sets, ES 0.78. I'm saying that doing 1 set is better because 4 x 0.27 = 1.08 > 0.78. Those 1-setters could gain more width to that muscle by doing more sets, but they could gain size more efficiently by exercising any other muscle instead.
Now look at Schoenfeld..Krieger 2018, "Dose-response relationship between weekly resistance training volume and increases in muscle mass: A systematic review and meta-analysis". This study concluded that each additional set per week was associated with a constant increase per set in effect size; but if you look at their data (Table 2), you'll see they just forced a constant increase onto the data by doing a linear regression! The data again seems to show that fewer sets are more efficient than more sets, although the way they stratified it in Table 2 makes it impossible to tell for sure.
The consensus is that more volume is better, but the consensus is wrong because it's answering the wrong question. The right question is how you should exercise to develop the most muscle with a constant amount of time and effort. In all studies, doing 3 sets results in less than 3 times as much gain as doing 1 set, and likewise for all higher set numbers. Therefore, 1 set per muscle is the more-efficient way to exercise.
(Correction: Rhea..Burkett 2002 used 3 sets vs. 1 instead of 4 sets vs. 1.)
Restated more succinctly: The marginal utility of a set decreases with every set.
It's easy to think of the scientific community as an architecture for producing knowledge. But how that knowledge is distributed and how it derives it's authority are of equal importance.
The gym bros never had an architecture for distribution or verification. Of course they would get stuck on something suboptimal if they are giving each other advice.
Say the mechanism for checking credibility of the advice is the size of someone's arms. Now say we have 1 guy doing something unorthodox and 100 doing the accepted wisdom.
Even if the unorthodox method was better, produced nice big arms, it's still just 1 guy vs those 100 out of whom much more than 1 pair of nice arms would emerge just by sheet statistical likelyness.
I think that if the architecture is not set up for systematically reward 'correct' information, quantity is going to rule.
By Googling, you only learn the opinions of gym bros that go online and do research. This is undoubtedly a growing percentage, but 10 years ago (when I used to go to a gym that was popular with bodybuilders) it was close to zero. People took advice from the "local experts", who were generally muscular due to genetics and/or drugs, often probably despite their training routines. If someone with ripped arms told a newbie to perform sets of 100 curls on a full moon, most would do it unquestioningly.
My two pence worth on the rest debate is to say that you're probably best actually just doing 1 single set of each exercise anyway, so it's a moot point.
The difference in gains between single vs multiple sets in studies is always pretty tiny, if there is one at all. Couple this with the fact that most people will hit their genetic ceiling pretty quickly, by doing multiple sets with long rest periods you're increasing your time in the gym by x5 to ultimately get the same results after a few years.
As someone who used to do 1-2 sets, I assure you it's a bad way to train and will cause an early plateau. If you want to get to the intermediate or higher level, you'll need to do a lot more volume. The magic number seems to be 12-20 sets/week, but there's a lot of factors that affect the exact number.
I think *recent* academic literature has established a consensus that high volumes are better; there were a lot of studies ~20 years ago that suggested the opposite (usually because they were studying beginners) and that's indeed what misled me. In fact there was recently a study that got a lot of attention that showed 40 sets/week was better than 20 sets/week--they did not research the sustainability of such training, though.
I agree that over the short term, higher volume training can probably produce (marginally) faster gains.
My argument though, is if you say look at a 5 year plan for an average person, 20-30 mins a week will probably get you the same long term results as 5-8 hours per week. Maybe with the 5-8 hours a week you'd hit your ceiling in 3-4 years.
If building muscle as fast as possible is your number one priority maybe all that extra time and effort is worth it. Personally though, I'd rather put that time to other use. (I say this as a 40 year old married man, probably had my skinny 20 year old single self known all this I'd have still trained 2 hours a day...)
You also have to consider "intention to treat". Anecdotally I've seen so many people start out with high volume programs training for hours several days per week, and most quit pretty quickly. Lower volume and frequency programs tend to be more sustainable for most people.
You see this kind of thing with diet studies all the time. Great results in the lab over a short period, but in the real world long term very few people can actually stick to them.
Higher volume is important not just for faster gains, but also for long-term gains. (Indeed the speed of gains is usually not as much an issue as the existence of gains--one of the must frustrating things being an experienced lifter is that a lot of times, you'll run a program and not get any results at all!) For the first few months of training, some people will see basically maximal results doing 1 set 3 days a week--extra volume won't add muscle any faster. However the plateau comes fast, and you'll be stuck at only a fraction of your potential--maybe 1/3 of your gains. To go farther, you need to add more volume, and to get to your maximum, you'll need smart periodization strategies, too.
I definitely agree that a lot of people start way too ambitiously, and moreover, a lot of people have modest goals ("look toned") that don't require much more than a bare minimum program. But I also think a lot of people who want to make more progress don't realize they're undertrained.
This sounds a lot like anecdotal broscience to me.
Do you have any kind of studies to back this up?
Or is this all metis?
Interesting parallel to sabermetrics etc. in pro sports. The old-style coaches had plenty of experience and plenty of skin in the game, but it turned out that they were making some pretty basic mistakes and the ones who adopted metrics thrived.
All the studies that explicitly equated work still found no difference. If you can do 4 sets of a slightly lower weight with 1 minute breaks, or 3 sets of a slightly higher weight with 5 minute breaks, you're saving lots of time with the former. Outside of a controlled experiment, saving time leads to getting more work done or being more consistent with your training. The studies so far haven't really addressed the real world consequences of rest time advice. They're like feeding lab rats precise numbers of calories of coca-cola and salad and concluding that for weight loss it doesn't matter whether you eat salad or drink coca-cola. But in the real world ceteris isn't paribus because everything is ad libitum. If somebody can get the same work done in less time, he is likely to end up getting more work done. If you want to test it properly, randomize and tell group A to rest short, tell group B to rest long, and don't control anything else about their training. Even after hearing of all those studies I'd still wager 3:1 odds that the short rest group does not worse than the long rest group.
That's some context-appropriate avatar.
All of the comments seem to correctly focus on the false premise of the post: that it's quick/easy to see what's working when you bodybuild.
The meta-question is why Scott didn't bother to talk to someone in the community, any one of which could have clued him in. The "mentis" I'm familiar with would have included:
1) feedback is slow and there are tons of confounding variables
2) age, training age, and genotype all overwhelm any tinkering at the margins
2a) newbie gains aren't real life for long and should probably be treated separately
3) most "bodybuilding" is all about the margins! After 5 years of on-point habits, you're squeaking out a pound or two per year; without juicing, there are no more leaps to be made
4) there's no short-term economic incentive for funding the large long-term studies required to get robust results. (Maybe the military is the only org equipped to control diet and exercise for a large n; they'll even have some twins!) It's a bit mysterious why they don't, since generally poor recruit health has officially been identified as a strategic risk...
The first link in the article is mostly about that.
Menno Hanselmans is pretty hard to put into a box. He's practicing bodybuilder, ex data analyst and his last brand name was "bayesianbodybuilding". So quite a lot of empirical knowledge is involved. If anything, he's possibly the best practitioner of the bayesian method I've seen: scarcely anything in fitness science is proven to the proper scientific method standards, so a vast majority of the time you have to work with weak or moderate evidence, plus a large variability in your clients. Knowing how to swim in this sea of evidence is pretty important. It's not the first time he's using a study to argue the opposite of that study's conclusion. Here's his advice on how to read a paper: https://www.facebook.com/MennoHenselmans/posts/research-tip-when-you-want-to-critically-evaluate-a-study-dont-read-the-full-pap/2152206684837155/
Also he's not alone. He's part of a new generation of evidence based PHD bodybuilders that mostly go in the same direction: Brad Schoenfeld (that he mentioned), Mike Israetel, Eric Helms, Greg Nuckols.
Maybe the bodybuilders fell prey to a common problem of Metis based practices. The harmless ritual. If rest duration has minimal impact, then prescribing a pointless ideal rest duration doesn't hurt gains. Once one is prescribed, it will be very difficult to get rid of.
Hunters may perform some ritual to thank the spirit of their game and put it to rest. This doesn't gain them anything, but because it costs so little it is difficult to get rid of.
It's worthwhile to consider the biases of all groups with "metis" and in which direction they may err. You mention "primitive tribes" that have an "almost supernatural" knowledge of food preparation - they have a bias in favor of avoiding potential danger and consuming a limited number of knowably safe foods. For these reasons, many such people have "taboos" against foods that are widely considered safe and healthy - e.g. Navajo have a taboo against fish, I recall once seeing a documentary about a New Guinean tribe that has a taboo on citrus, and, perhaps most famously, the ancient Hebrews (and their modern dietary descendants) had a slew of food taboos on everything from pork to shrimp to mixing meat and dairy.
In which direction might Bodybuilder "metis" err? I think it's quite obvious: in the direction of looking tough in front of your other gymbros. The community as a whole might generally try to embrace science and experimentation, but when there's a question with mixed evidence (as was the case of rest periods), they're going to err on the side of what makes them look harder, faster, stronger in the gym, in this case resting less. To suddenly start resting 2-5 minutes between sets might bring marginal long-term gains in muscle growth, but it comes at the short-term cost of looking tired in front of one's peers. The net incentive structure is to pump those sets out as quickly as possible.
My experience [doing interviews](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1uJTtwNscwroARRMaOUPFzFpRcHDVI-bjVvDVZ7gZtbA/edit) to aid forecasting in 2020 is that there's often less "metis"/on-the-ground-wisdom than I initially expected, at least in a way that's distillable to abstract truths. I was initially uncertain how much this generalizes to beyond things like covid but upon reflection think it generalizes fairly well.
The issue isn't in the world but my map of the world: I often assumed "magic" in the on-the-ground wisdom without considering carefully that any causal model to generate such on-the-ground crowd wisdom would be implausible upon a first glance.
Isn't the whole point of metis not to optimize blindly for one metric and not to ignore entire reality around it?
If you rest for five minutes instead of two, your workout will take way longer. In reality, just how often will you go to the gym if it takes you double the amount of time? The pump and lifting is enjoyable, waiting is just plain boring. Will you ever enjoy working out if you keep staring at the clock, measure five minutes every time, get bored between each set, then go home after two hours?
Even knowing what the studies say, I would err on the side of more enjoyable shorter workouts, because I know the breaks make negligible difference while consistent gym habit makes all the difference.
This was my thought as well. I was thinking that the pump is a really satisfying feeling and it helps with motivation when you look at yourself in the mirror when you have a pump. Perhaps this also helps build the habit.
You're asking:
"Who'd win in a fight - a community of practitioners with skin in the game, or academic scientists with peer-reviewed studies?"
And then you use peer reviewed studies to determine who is winning. This is not a fair comparison.
It would be better to have a real world survivor threshold, like who makes it to the pro level and then see what they are doing.
I think there a couple of confounders going unmentioned.
First, the age confounder. Older body builders with bad advice they got from their mentors probably aren't as present in online forums. Younger body builders are probably more tech savvy, reading everything they can and so more up to date on the science. So the populations being surveyed aren't the same back in 2011 and now, ie. science advances one funeral at a time.
Second, body builders use more "intuitive" cues to guide their training. For instance, the mind-muscle connection, which is now getting some empirical support, but also the pump which we see can lead you astray. These are exactly the immediate feedback mechanisms that you discuss (the pump makes you look immediately huge). However, it leads you to discount the empirical support because it seems to contradict what you see and how you feel internally.
Finally, by your own description, the lifting community only accepted the science because of a concerted campaign from researchers to correct the situation. Absent this, it's not clear that it would have changed on such a rapid timeline.
I have relatively low confidence in either formal academic research or folk wisdom in healthy lifestyle questions beyond the basics. The broad outline of a healthy diet, yes, but anything more specific like high or low carbs vs fats seems very dubious and indeed the formal literature seems to vary considerably. In a sense this is unsurprising, it is hard to get compliance and rct are hard if not impossible to do with any sufficient number of people. There is wide interpersonal variation.
Weightlifting suffers from similar problems.
The popular, free weight training program StrongLifts 5x5 recommends 90 second rests if your set was easy and 3 minutes if it was hard. It's even built into their app.
I've never even questioned it. I just assumed the designer of the program was as reasonably well informed as you could expect a broscientist to be. Pleasantly surprised.
Oh, maybe this doesn't apply because body building is not the same as weight training? Body building is about getting big muscles first and foremost. Weight training is about Health Benefits ™
Strength training and bodybuilding do diverge quite a bit for advanced athletes, but not much for beginners. The conventional wisdom in strength training has always been to take long rests, often > 5 minutes. Bodybuilding has had a lot less agreement on the best approach to rest, and indeed as many others and myself have pointed out in comments, there's a lot of nuance to this question when you consider real-world training constraints.
3 minutes rest is usually fine for beginners, but as you get stronger, you'll find you may need more to fully recover. StrongLifts is generally a solid program, the one major tweak I'd make is to use 3 sets instead of 5 if you're more of a "fast twitch" athlete (e.g. good at jumping and sprinting). 15 sets/week of squats is quite high volume and can lead to too much fatigue accumulation.
Soviet era Olympic and general amateur/pro athletics programs might offer some really interesting follow-on research. As the rules were different there, successful coaches were able to experiment on a controlled population (their athletes) on what methods did or did not work, with the athletes having much less say. I wonder/bet you could dig up an example of a Soviet era coach using a control group + and not, and with those coaches operating somewhat on gut instinct/bro science themselves. Modern strength programs also blur that serious science<>bro science line too (control group == last season’s players).
"The most important lesson I draw from this is that metis and a community doing practical work doesn’t put you above academic science and peer-reviewed results (or at least it doesn’t always put you there)."
Counterpoint: Have you considered that both metis and academic science are equally valid ways of knowing? (Yes, this is a serious position many academics hold).
Ingredients for muscularity, in order of importance: genes, low body fat, lifting.
Fixed it for you.
Could it be that short rest periods result in a more satisfying pump and less time spent at the gym, making it more likely someone sticks with a bodybuilding routine, thus making more “gainz” than the long rest period people?
The gym bro’s advice might actually be optimal in an uncontrolled environment.
There are a lot of great comments on here and I'm pleasantly surprised to see so many ACX readers lift recreationally and seem pretty up to speed on the culture and the science.
The one thing I haven't seen mentioned yet is the asymptotic nature of strength and hypertrophy gains. The nature of the game is, no matter what, you have a pretty hard limit on how big and how strong you are ever going to get. That limit is set genetically and about all you can do to manipulate it is use anabolic steroids, but that simply pushes the limit higher. You still have a limit.
This leaves you in a situation where "skin in the game" doesn't necessarily leave you with incentives to select the absolute maximally productive program. The first reason that has already been discussed well in other comments is that, overwhelmingly, what matters more than anything else is long term consistency. If you lift for ten years without fail, you have some chance of achieving your genetic limit. If you lift in fits and spurts and constantly give up, no matter how optimally you progress when you're lifting, you'll never get anywhere near your genetic limit. So the top performers are all people who have been in the game for a long time and stuck with it. Thus, the very first concern when choosing how to train is will you stick with it?
The second reason that I haven't seen discussed yet is that having a hard limit on what you can ever achieve in one lifetime means many different programs will all get you there as long as you stick with it. Training more optimally can only get you there slightly faster. You're inevitably going to peak at some point. This isn't like investment or betting strategies that have potentially boundless returns. If you watch Pumping Iron, you'll see Arnold doing a lot of stuff that likely doesn't quite pass scientific muster. He was quite obsessed with feeling a pump and did a lot of low-intensity, low-rest work. What difference did that make? He was as genetically blessed as anyone who ever lived, had access to drugs as good as anyone else so that was not a discriminator, and he'd been training since he was a kid. By the time that documentary was filmed, he was never going to get any bigger no matter what he did (unless he was willing to sacrifice leanness, but that defeats the purpose of competitive bodybuilding).
Consider Arnold started lifting at 15 and first won Mr. Universe at 20. If he had been just a little bit more Bayesian in his approach to programming, then what? Could he have won at 19 instead? How much of a difference does that actually make? He has had the most pinnacle dream life any reasonable person could ever hope to have either way.
The one thing nearly everyone on bodybuilding.com gets right, no matter what else they do, is to join a community at all and publicly commit to demonstrating their progress. Even if what they end up doing is stupid in nearly every other way, "lift something at all on a regular basis" gets you 80% of the way there, which is 80% further than the average coach potato American.
> The second reason that I haven't seen discussed yet is that having a hard limit on what you can ever achieve in one lifetime means many different programs will all get you there as long as you stick with it.
I don't think this is true: the programs you run matter a lot for how far you'll get. Someone running a beginner program (i.e. no periodization) will plateau around 1/2 their max potential, and indeed that's when a lot of casual lifters will complain they hit a plateau. But there's much more gains to be had when using more complex programs that are aimed at intermediate or advanced lifters.
Forums aren't the right place to find out bro science. Go to the gym as a scrawny person, look like you're learning how to benchpress, and the bros will come to you (very aggressively - personal experience). Ask them about rest periods.
If you're lifting using a machine at a reasonably busy public gym there's the issue that somebody might be waiting for the machine. If you have seriously long rests then to the other observers it won't look like you're resting between sets and will look more like you're sitting on the machine just because
I've been a thrower (the track & field kind) for all my life, and the incremental improvement of the world record is a good example of Metis. Throwing events are sufficiently unimportant for anybody to bother conducting scientific studies about them, but they're important enough for thousands and thousands of people trying to get better them all over the world (lots of people train for High school track, NCAA, Olympics etc).
Take the hammer throw as an example: the world record in 1913 was 57.77m, and by 1986 it was 86.74m. That's a 50% improvement, which is quite amazing considering human biology is consistent. Some of the advancement was "passed down" from our scientific overlords - like steroids, nutrition, and how to do strength training (although much of that was also word-of-mouth). But the hammer throw is extra interesting because that 50% improvement is not seen in other events, like the 100m dash (where they also made use of steroids, nutrition, and strength training). They only saw a 10% improvement between 1911 and 2009. So what's up with the remaining 40% found in the hammer?
Part of it is that hammer throwers are stronger, so extra steroids, nutrition, and weight training helps them more than it helps 100m runners, but mostly it's because the hammer throw is a complex movement relative to running. So hammer throwers made lots of technological progress and all of that knowledge was passed on through Metis. Basically, none of it is the product of the scientific method, and none was published. It was about people trying new things, seeing what made the hammer fly farther, and coaches passing that knowledge onto the next generation athletes. So when I started my career, I and my dad went around the country to meet up with knowledgeable throwers and coaches, who in turn had been taught by people before them. And by the time I was 16, I threw what would have been a world record in 1950, and by age 20 I threw what would've been the world record in 1960. And I'm not tooting my own horn here - literally thousands have thrown that far, and it's because of knowledge being passed on.
I've heard that the question of why shot putters release at less than a 45 degree angle wasn't formally answered until fairly recently, maybe here? https://shapeamerica.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02640410152006135
(Greater strength in the bench press than the incline or overhead means you can transmit more force to the shot with a slightly more horizontal angle than is theoretically optimal.).
Exactly right! There's a trade-off between the optimal angle of release and the speed of the shot. Your angle of release basically becomes whatever angle you manage to square up your chest.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d2/Shotput.jpg
I've long thought that comparing the 'practical wisdom' communities with supposedly numerical, Occidental forms of acquiring knowledge is a false dichotomy - given that arguably all knowledge is built upon the basis of forebears, including Western science. Instead, the argument is more accurately an attempt to contrast advanced, scientific methodology with what is tantamount to argumentum ad antiquitatem at best, and long-surpassed evolutionary adaptation at worst - i.e., watch the members of the tribe who die during the process of cooking/eating that plant, and avoid following their methods.
What I really want to know is - what about 10 minutes rest? 30 minutes? 2 hours?
I have my weights in the garden and I do sets throughout the day whenever inspiration strikes. Surely, there's gotta be a difference there. Do I need to do significantly more sets to compensate for the long breaks?
From what I've read, for strength you are doing fine. For hypertrophy, it may not be ideal.
I think Taleb might argue that SA did not focus on an appropriately anti fragile metis group. For example, old dog Russian kettlebell practitioners who focused obsessively on practice/technique and long rest times for over a century didnt need randomized control trials to know they were being effective (most modern American gym rats are a different story).
They also generally don't look like they lift with their shirts on or have particularly impressive track records in strength sports (and actual top GS guys spend a lot of time running and doing barbell work, microload, use comp KBs rather than the Dragon Door triangle-handle style, etc.). It's fun to throw kettlebells around and feel like an old time strongman in a leopard print toga, and if you have limited time/space/funds they're not a terrible tool, but there's a reason that the plate-loaded barbell took over once it was invented.
Generally agree, and didn't want to get stuck on KBs, but there are workout philosophies that far predate modern western gym culture that emphasize practice, precision, long cool down periods etc, such as the Russians and USSR, who while flawed / on steroids, are certainly skin-in-game competitive practitioners.
The short rest period/modern gym culture approach might be a practice that just seems like it's tried and true when it's actually pretty recent.
Brining up all these modern examples, I'm more curious to hear Scott's take on Skin in the Game. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B075HYVP7C/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
Okay, fair. Yeah, it's real common among Olympic weightlifters of all nationalities to take their time between sets, even singles/doubles (though the rising bar structure is a good reason to train to be able to follow yourself in a meet, and you also see old-timers like Bill Starr and Joe Mills talking about ramped singles/doubles on the minute.). I do wonder whether this can properly be ascribed to metis or to formal science that we just don't have access to (because, ex hypothesi, there's no English version of the original research and the review is, like, a paragraph in some Bud Charniga translation or something.). It's not like the USSR didn't have sports scientists--quite the contrary.
In any case, we're getting pretty far removed from optimizing for hypertrophy.
Yep, good points - funny how so many roads lead back to the future is here / not evenly distributed thing. The work involved in translating old Soviet studies, etc. won't make any careers, but there are probably diamonds in those hills. As long as I'm stuck on the USSR, I think there might still be a metis chicken that predates the science egg, only because the practice-based workout philosophy seems pretty cultural and old (and some might say there's a collectivist/group-over-individual parallel, but that's a stretch).
Can someone explain the "strength vs. bigger muscles" thing to me? How can smaller muscles be stronger than larger muscles (on the same person, that is; interperson/species mechanics will obviously differ)?
there are other factors to strength, ie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_unit_recruitment
a larger muscle will be stronger than a smaller muscle, all else equal, but all else is rarely equal. training that optimizes growing large muscles will be different than training that optimizes neurological factors. but keep in mind, this is 'optimizes' for, it does not mean 'excludes'. So training for size will get you strength (just not as much), and training for strength will get you size (just not as much).
(disclaimer: this is my armchair knowledge, i'm not an exercise scientist)
I think you’ve got it exactly right, that bodybuilders, far from eschewing science, are reading anything they can get their hands on to gain an advantage, which means when that science is wrong it’s going to lead people astray. I think one answer to why the feedback loop didn’t help is the failure modes weren’t dramatic enough. Lifting with short rest periods still builds muscle. Just sometimes marginally less than more rest. But the main downsides are unnecessary pain, so there aren’t really the same selective pressures you’d see if short rest turned everybody into 98 pound weaklings. (Also, steroids can mask a lot of the downsides;)
I am a lifter who also happens to be a physicist with OCD tendencies so I try to collect data to support what I am doing, trying out things that people tell me about. My favourite lift is the deadlift.
With deadlifts I tried some fixed recovery periods (2, 3, 4 and 5 minutes) and discovered that 5 minutes was far too long between my first and second set and two minutes was far to short between my fourth and fifth set (systemic fatigue being the limit). I moved from fixed times between sets to measuring recovery between sets based on heart rate, my next set starts when my heart rate hits my target recovery value. In practice this means that if I am doing five sets of five deadlifts above 90% of my 1 rep maximum there will be only 90 seconds between my first and second work sets, 120-150 seconds between my second and my third, 180-210 seconds between my third and fourth and 300 seconds or more between my fourth and fifth sets.
While I am still collecting data on how my body recovers after sets, this has been interrupted by the gyms being closed in my city, so I am restricted to dumbbell front squats in my home.
On my first set my heart rate will rise to a maximum and then cleanly and quickly recover (with something like a 20 bpm difference between peak and trough). On my second set the rising part of the curve will look the same, but my recovery will take a little longer and pause on the way down. Subsequent sets develop odd features where there is a second peak in my heart rate while I am recovering, my heart rate will start to drop then rise again, eventually the second effort peak will be higher while I am recovering than while I am actually working out. Systemic fatigue accumulates and takes longer and longer to clear.
In any one session, how much systemic fatigue you accumulate doesn't make too much difference if you are actually into the feeling of working out, but over time, it makes it harder and harder to start the next heavy workout session. You can only make serious gains if you actually manage your fatigue.
Anything that stops you from doing the next session will limit your ability to make any gains.
I’m a little confused here about the grounds of debate. If we wanted to test Taleb’s assertion that metis outperforms academic knowledge, the kind of experiment I’d imagine would look something like having group A spend a couple months reading scientific literature about strength training, and group B spend a couple months hanging out with bodybuilders, have both groups develop and execute practice regimes, and then have a competition between group A and B and see who does better.
Instead, this post evaluates the performance of the body building community’s metis not by objective outcome, but by *how well it aligns with the current state of the scientific consensus*. Isn’t that assuming the conclusion? If the criterion is “how well does metis match the conclusions of peer-reviewed studies”, of course the outcome will be “less well than the most recent peer-reviewed studies”.
"In 2005, Ahtiainen et al. found similar muscle growth when training with 5 vs. 2-minute rest periods. Importantly, this study was work equated, which meant the shorter rest period group performed an average of one extra set for each exercise to compensate for their lower work capacity."
Shouldn't it be the longer rest period group or am I reading things wrong?
The shorter rest period group will be able to do fewer repetitions or lift lower weights because they're more exhausted from getting less rest. So to equate the volume they have to do an extra set
I have a good idea for a Thing You Will Regret Writing: do this same sort of analysis looking at the breastfeeding literature and the claims of GPs/lactation consultants. The latter groups are still heavily promoting breatsfeeding on the basis of putative long-term benefits shown in old-school OLS studies. Those long-term benefits are nonexistent in a set of recent, methodologically superior "discordant sibling" studies that use family effects to control for SES and parental IQ.
But, but, but.... internet forums about sport attract nerd(ier) types who are interested in the science. Ditto people that write about this stuff on their websites.
I must admit, I too am taken aback by this revelation. However, in retrospect, considering his previous website was named https://fitover40dallas.com/, perhaps it's not as far-fetched as it initially seemed.