Chapters:
00:00 Intro
00:31 Concensus in bodybuilding
03:43 Harmful common bodybuilding practices
04:02 First practice
05:21 Second practice
06:12 Third practice
06:56 Fourth practice
07:44 Fifth practice
08:36 Doing what the pros do?
10:35 Should we only look at science?
11:22 Conclusion
Transcript:
Success leaves clues. To become a better investor I do what the best investors do. To become a better chess player I do what the best chess players do. To become a better bodybuilder I do not do what the best bodybuilders do. In this video I’m going to show you why bodybuilding wisdom has often failed us, yet science has prevailed. I’m going to discuss five popular bodybuilding training methods that science has shown to be counterproductive.
Whenever I post anything on YouTube or Instagram there’s at least one person saying: “As if we needed a study to show that this is true. Bodybuilders have known this all along, and science is just catching up to what the big guys do.” And they’re always right if you allow some leeway with regards to which bodybuilders exactly we’re talking about. That brings us to the first problem of relying on bodybuilding wisdom. There is no clear consensus. You might be tempted to think there is a clear consensus on a lot of matters online. However, this is called the echo chamber effect. echo chamber effect. People hang around like-minded people and the algorithm feeds us what we want to hear. We are increasingly drawn to like-minded individuals with similar opinions. This creates echo chambers, which makes us believe that what we think is true is shared by many people, even though we might have a niche opinion. If we zoom out and look at the big picture of what bodybuilders do and recommend it becomes very clear that there is no clear consensus, and to the extent that there is a consensus, this consensus has shifted dramatically over time. For example, if we look at training frequency, these days, it might seem that all the big guys are doing bro splits and they’re hammering their muscles one time per week and then leaving a lot of rest before they train their muscles again.
However, historically speaking, this is a recent phenomenon. Up until the 50s, pretty much all the greats in bodybuilding did full body workouts. It was only afterwards that splits became more popular. So whose advice should we take? Similarly, with low carb versus high carb diets, you might be tempted to think that currently high carb diets are all the rage and that there’s always been this way. This is false. Low carb diets have long been popular in bodybuilding circles. Even ketogenic diets have on numerous occasions become very popular. And again, up until the 50s or so, high fat – high protein diets were the norm, with eggs, meats, those types of foods being regarded as the healthy masculine foods that would make you more masculine and jacked. So again, whose opinion should we take? In the 50s preferences for body part splits were not the only thing that changed. Steroid use also became rampant. Which brings us to another difficulty when trying to copy what the biggest guys do. If we truly look at the biggest guys and girls, they are almost invariably on drugs.
Now, as it turns out, natural and enhanced bodybuilders have been shown in research to have systematically different training, supplementation and diet practices. For example, research has found that enhanced bodybuilders use more intensity techniques like drop sets and other post failure techniques. So again, who are we going to look at? Are we going to copy the biggest guys on drugs or are we going to try to look at the biggest natural bodybuilders? Which brings us to another problem. How do we know their natural? The person that, to my knowledge, has studied the training practices of the strongest and the biggest individuals who have ever walked the earth is probably Jamie Lewis. Jamie Lewis has written multiple books about what the strongest and the biggest individuals do, how they train, how they diet, and he concluded that there are far more differences than similarities. Some of the most successful powerlifters barely included the barbell bench press in their training, instead relying on dumbbells. Similarly, many of them have not deadlifted or only deadlifted in the last weeks leading up to a competition. If we can’t even reach a true consensus about powerlifters having to include the powerlifts in their training to maximize strength on the powerlifts, I think we can safely say there is no true consensus.
Not only do bodybuilders not agree on which training and nutrition practices are truly best, many conventional bodybuilding practices have turned out in research to be not just useless, but directly counterproductive. Here are five common training practices from bodybuilders that have turned out to be harmful rather than useful for your gains.
The first training practice that many of the pros get wrong is the one you’d expect that they get right the most. It’s exercise technique. If you look at the training practices, if you look at training videos of many pro bodybuilders, some of them have good technique, many of them don’t. They succumb to the same problems as most other lifters do. In particular, ego lifting and not using full range of motion. Research has very clearly shown that using a full range of motion, especially going into a deep stretch to region of long muscle lengths, is very productive for maximal muscle growth. Yet many of the biggest individuals don’t reach full range of motion. Moreover, many of them also don’t control their technique very well. Now, I don’t think perfectly controlled technique is always the way to go, but in some cases we have direct evidence that techniques that are commonly used by bodybuilders are directly harmful. For example, Arnold Schwarzenegger, one of the greatest bodybuilders of all time, a true legend of the sport and he had one of the best biceps of all time. If you look at his actual biceps curls many times he did not use optimal training techniques. Now, who am I to critique Arnold? Well, in this case, we actually have a direct study comparing: giving people the instruction to just get the weight up during biceps curls versus the instruction to focus more on their biceps and have strict exercise technique. The research study found that people that had the more strict exercise technique had better gains in their biceps. Arnold is still an absolute legend, but he did not have all the answers yet.
The second popular training practice from bodybuilders that researchers found to be counterproductive is the use of very short rest intervals, especially pre-contest. Many bodybuilders use very short rest intervals and then make them shorter, going for higher repetitions with less rest before their competitions. The idea is that this helps them burn fat and this has been conclusively shown to be false. What it does do is it can reduce muscle growth. Research has found that using longer rest periods is generally better for muscle hypertrophy because you’re less fatigued, you can do more reps which means more time under tension on your muscles and thereby more muscle growth and more strength development. Now you can use shorter rest intervals as long as you get the volume in, but not increasing the volume and using shorter rest intervals, and also going higher in reps before a competition is definitely bro science. If anything, I would recommend that you take longer rest periods during your contest diet because you’re going to be so exhausted all the time that you’ll probably need a bit more rest to maintain high performance.
The third popular bro science myth that real science has debunked is the hypertrophy zone, specifically, the hypertrophy zone of about 6 to 12 repetitions. As I’ve covered before on this channel, the real hypertrophy zone is more like 5 to 30 repetitions and possibly even broader as long as you go close to failure. You can find more details about that in this video. For our purposes, though, is it actually harmful if you just stick to the hypertrophy zone? Some arguments can be made that it provides good efficiency. However, some studies indeed do actually find a trend for greater gains when you use multiple repetition ranges, rather than always staying in the same rep range. Using multiple repetition ranges may stimulate somewhat different growth pathways, may allow you to accumulate a greater total volume by having somewhat different sources of fatigue during your workouts, and may have neurological advantages.
The fourth popular bodybuilding fail is training to failure. and looking forward to doing that extra rep, and working past the pain barriers that all the mind. Now, on average, people that train harder in the gym obtain better results. That’s beyond dispute as far as I’m concerned. However, as is often the case, people assume that more is better, so training even harder must be better. This is not true. Again, as I’ve shown before in this video, you can find more details in this video, training to failure itself is not productive for muscle growth, and especially post-failure techniques and constantly training to failure dramatically reduce your total work capacity and have a very poor stimulus to fatigue ratio. So if you want to maximize your total productive training volume, especially as a natural trainee training to failure all the time and using tons of intensity techniques which are very popular among enhanced bodybuilders is probably not the way to go.
Popular but harmful training practice number five from bodybuilders is relying on tons of cardio. And again, research shows that enhanced bodybuilders use even more cardio than non-enhanced bodybuilders. It’s not uncommon to hear of bodybuilders doing an hour or sometimes two hours of cardio per day leading up to their contest. Such volumes of cardio have been shown to be directly harmful for muscle growth and retention by what’s called the interference effect, also called the concurrent training effect. Cardio and strength training, essentially, pull your body into different ends of the strength under a spectrum, especially when you combine them in the same workout or in the same training program, high volumes of endurance training induce the interference effect, reducing muscle growth and strength development according to multiple studies and meta analyses. Moreover, doing tons of cardio can take a big hit on your recovery capacity, which might again not be a problem for enhanced trainees, but for natural trainees doing lots of cardio should be a last resort, not your first instinct.
So why does popular bodybuilding wisdom not consistently align with the truth? Is it because bodybuilders are stupid and we cannot learn from experience, therefore science trumps everything? No, I don’t think that’s the case. many fields, doing what the pros do is actually a really good way to learn, and especially for individuals that don’t know exactly what they’re talking about, just copying what the pros do is not a bad approach. Certainly very time efficient. Earlier, for example, I mentioned chess and investing. Now, there is a crucial difference between chess and investing and bodybuilding, and that concerns feedback. Feedback is incredibly important, an absolute prerequisite to learn from experience. Just doing something does not make you better at it. You have to have feedback to know when you did it right, when you did it wrong, so that you can adjust course. Well for chess I can just look at a player’s Elo rating and I know which one is better than the other. These days we even have chess engines that can tell you objectively what the best moves in a position are. In investing you can look at someone’s long term return on investment, which provides a decent clue to see if they have any clue what they’re doing. The nice thing about return on investment is that it’s also agnostic to how much money they have. If you start with 1,000 or 10,000 €, the person starting with 10,000 € maybe richer to start with, but you can look at their return on investment percentage wise and equate for that balancing out their starting point.
Bodybuilding scores poorly in these regards. Bodybuilding is highly confounded by people starting muscle mass, their genetic abilities, and the usage of drugs. Moreover, feedback in bodybuilding is delayed and very limited. To see if you’re actually gaining more muscle, that takes months. Even in research studies, the use of circumference measurements, for example, have been shown to be very unreliable. Most people don’t even take circumference measurements. So we’re looking at a visual estimate over months to see if the accumulation of everything you did in the meantime was productive. That means actually being able to tell what made you bigger and what didn’t make you bigger is very limited. We can get a rough idea of what works and what doesn’t work at all, but going into the details of what worked better and what’s optimal, that’s simply very difficult to do in bodybuilding for anyone, no matter how hard working and how intelligent they are.
So does this all mean we should only look at science and never what practitioners are doing? No, of course not. We can learn from not just science, but also from practitioners. In fact, there have been two times historically when bodybuilders were ahead of the game and scientists refused to accept it. That concerned protein intake and androgenic anabolic steroids. Scientists were skeptical about both for a very long time, despite them being in use by bodybuilders for a very long time. It took a lot of research to change the minds of scientists. In fairness, though, evidence based fitness wasn’t really a thing at the time. It was only about in the 90s that we really got serious exercise science and nutritional sciences as far as bodybuilding is concerned. Exercise science and nutritional sciences are very, very young fields compared to things like economics and psychology. Still, these examples clearly show that we can learn some things from experience.
In conclusion: To learn how to lose fat and how to build muscle, we can learn from both practitioners and scientists. However, the balance is heavily skewed towards science. The problem with learning from experience in bodybuilding is that our feedback is very limited and delayed, Moreover, individual results are heavily skewed by someone’s individual genetics and their drug usage. The main things practitioners have taught us is that strength training builds muscle, high protein diets augment that, steroids augment that even further, and training hard pays off. When it comes to the details of what’s optimal we’re best off relying on scientific research wherever that’s available. If you like this type of evidence based fitness content, I’d be honored if you like and subscribe.