Eric Helms - Does Evidence make you work harder or less hard? Training to Failure Recommendations (Summary Included)

[great_depression]

Summary

Timestamps:

00:52 Adequate Mechanical Tension

01:44 Training too close to failure too frequently

02:40 Supplements that work and the importance of them

03:42 Timing of carbohydrates while dieting

04:34 Protein requirements/recommendations and protein quality

5:15 Training to failure is not a requirement

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Full Podcast

Podcast

04:55 Discussion of the title | "Eric talks about whether evidence makes you work harder or less hard? "

Dr. Eric Helms is a pro natural bodybuilder, PHD, author and coach. This is another Q&A with Dr. Helms. In this episode Eric talks about supplements such as GDA's, HMB, etc., Veganism and if the increased amount of evidence we now have available makes us as trainees work harder or less hard than before?

Timestamps:

00:54 Eric's take on how to manipulate training during a minicut and additionally Eric talks about any changes he has made to his training and nutrition methodologies

04:55 Eric talks about whether evidence makes you work harder or less hard?

12:12 Eric continues talking about changes he has made on supplements recommendation

19:50 Eric shares his opinion on Glucose Disposal Agents and other supplements

22:56 Eric summarises the info on his presentation on plant-based diets

31:30 Eric's take on carb intake peri-workout on a hypocaloric diet

37:42 Eric's opinion on eating similar meals every day, decision fatigue and potential deficiencies

42:15 Eric shares his thoughts on the mind-muscle connection with bench press

48:30 Eric shares his views on counting protein, Ie. high vs low-quality protein sources

51:55 Eric's take on fitness infographics on social media

 

[niecey85]

@great_depression I have a beef with the "working hard" bandwagoners and it's the following:

What they call "working hard" is actually the easiest thing ever, what they dismiss is the real hard work. They're just rationalizing being lazy, so being hypocrites.

What they call "working hard" is usually taking exercises to failure and beyond failure. But you know what? That's actually easy af, quick, clean, the discomfort is very short and most times even gives you a really pleasant feeling afterwards.

You know what's actually working hard, something really difficult? Doing a lot of work. You may try to convince yourself that doing 1-3 sets balls to the wall is working "really hard", but deep inside you know that the real hard work is taking that number of sets to 10 and then duplicating that with another session in the same week, that's why you dread doing something like that.

Working hard after all is nothing but a physics metric: work is mass times acceleration times distance, and to produce that work we have to spend energy, which we're evolved to minimize. Well guess what, when it comes to lifting, acceleration is restricted to a small window, the variation in the amount of mass (weight) we can lift isn't that big to make a big change in the output, so what governs work production during lifting? What's left: distance. And what's distance? Total number of sets and total number of reps. You can maximize lifting speed al you want, you can lift weights as heavy as possible, but if you want to make a big increase in work production i.e. "working hard" then you have to increase the amount of effective reps and sets, it's simple math. [sup]/rant[/sup]

 

[redwolf6]

@niecey85 So often I see comments like "Avoiding failure? You're just trying to train easy!". No, because stopping 1-3 reps shy of failure on a weight I can do 12 of means that I am also doing several more sets than I would had I trained to failure. That means I am spending more time in the gym. I probably spend 30% longer in the gym than I would if I were to train to failure. If my goal were to train "easy" I'd do whatever I could to get the hell out of there as soon as possible.

A trend I noticed with them is they only ever post to tell the OP that they're overcomplicating things, they never post any content themselves and if it were up to them subs like this would be dead because of that. They only post to chime in with their biased opinions and somehow expect their words to be more valuable than the words of coaches with outstanding credentials, success and reputation.

What's annoying is when those bandwagoners try to impart their lifting philosophy on you when you're following recommendations that many of the best coaches use. Meanwhile, you often find that they started lifting a year or two ago and somehow their opinion is supposed to matter more than someone like Helms, Morgan, Israetel, Menno, and many others who all advocate the same things for trainees of my level. Yet I'm for some reason supposed to throw away everything because they think it's too complicated, because "lOl ScIeNcE. jUsT lIfT!"

Here's a quote I like from Nuckols and Trexler::

I started out with the muscle magazines and then started branching out into other online sources and if you do that, eventually you're gonna run into some contradictions. You know when you're just getting everything from a singular magazine with one editing team you're pretty much getting a decently consistent narrative in most cases but once you start branching out you have to run into some uncomfortable questions like "What do we know about fitness?" "how do we know what we know?" and "How well do we actually know that we know what we know?" and as you start getting into those questions eventually it's gonna lead you to science.

The whole purpose, if you were to kind of boil it down, is like figuring out what we know, how we know it, and how confident we are in knowing that. Once you become cognizant of the fact that
epistemology exists, you start saying: "Okay I need to figure out where I'm getting my information, how reliable and credible this information is, and by what standard can you judge that?"

So I think it was kind of a natural, very gradual transition into an evident evidence-based approach.

 

[niecey85]

@redwolf6 Very good quote, couldn't agree more.