great_depression
New member
TL;DR
- Learn to recognize and keep yourself away from the traps of black and white thinking in regards to training.
- For the most part, there isn’t a right or wrong way to train. As long as you structure your programming within basic guidelines you can make a good high intensity, high volume, or high-frequency program by just strategically manipulating and adjusting training variables.
- Guidelines aren't rules. If you stay consistent with your training long enough while logging and manipulating training variables over time, you'll eventually find your own "Optimal".
- Evidence-Based Training Guidelines are simple and are all about getting you in a ballpark of the right place to start so that you can adjust from there.
- You are not Brad Schoenfeld. Jumping ship on your programs in favor of new, unreproduced or unapplied research you found/read yourself will just leave you spinning your wheels.
- As will looking at guidelines as absolute rules and/or holding dogmatic or extreme viewpoints fueled by personal bias which keep you from exploring other training strategies.
Good sources (Will update with suggestions from comments)
- https://www.strongerbyscience.com/
- Monthly Applications in Strength Sport (MASS)
- https://weightology.net/
- Renaissanceperiodization.com
- https://mennohenselmans.com/
- https://Jpshealthandfitness.com.au/
- https://Rippedbody.com/
- and others
Criticisms of the Science-Based Community
The community that is negatively referred to as the "science-based community", in lifting, isn't actually science-based but we'll refer to them as such.
They tend to think that they are or can potentially be one step ahead of everyone else because they have access to PubMed.
A quote from /@mrsamiemiller's blog:
[.]
Most novices that claim to be science-based, actually aren't. They search pubmed for a stone tablet that will get them optimal gains. Typically, once a good marketer comes along and misuses science to claim that they have the 100% optimal routine, they jump ship from their current routine and buy-in.
True scientific thinking necessitates, at minimum, the acknowledgment that uncertainty actually exists, and at best the development of comfort with it. This sense of comfort with the uncertain appears to go against our seemingly inherent inclinations toward its inverse. This is likely one of the main reasons as to why thinking like a scientist is such a difficult thing for us as individuals to actually do. It’s worth noting that scientific thinking can be applied to any field or aspect in life. And can be a huge advantage in our lives once cultivated.
Science is not about your views; science is about how you come to your views. In other words, how you think is far more important than what you think. With scientific thinking, you are essentially humbly acknowledging that you are unable to know everything there is to know whilst still striving to make the best decisions possible using available evidence.
As a novice without any education or history of training others, you lack the ability to accurately "make the best decisions possible using available evidence".
You shouldn't base your knowledge or your own training on self-read research. You lack the ability to think pragmatically and lack the education, expertise and training experience to combine research and training together, also known as Evidence-Based Practice (EBP) or in this case, Evidence-Based Training EBT.
Training like the subjects in a study you just read has obvious flaws. When a study is conducted, researchers have to create a program that is not too time intensive for the researchers and the participants, and they have to cater to the lowest capability level of the participant cohort (within the specific population) to ensure completion. The necessity of these concessions results in pretty unrealistic training programs compared to the real world. [.]
If you've been consistently training for a few years while logging and manipulating training variables over time to further your progress then a shiny new routine based on a single instance of not yet replicated research that's results are based on reported averages of many individuals might (very likely will) be worse than what you are currently doing.
This is why consistency within the flexible guidelines we have will yield better results over time, rather than constantly jumping ship on training programs in search for a theoretical "Optimal" without learning anything.
- As you train, you should be accumulating data over time so that you can see what variable is causing what. You change one variable at a time whilst keeping the other variables the same. Prioritize consistency and adherence that way you can consistently see trends in programming as in, when you modify X variable, Y happens.
How science gets misused in the fitness industry
[.]
Jumping from new study to applied practice is also just a bad idea in general. The fitness industry is also no stranger to credentialled BS peddlers that do this as well.
This section highlights some more common flaws that the novice "Science-Based" PubMed-ninja unknowingly has, why education and experience in EBP/EBT matters and how science can be misused to take advantage of beginners/novices that are in search of optimal.
Growing muscle is something that we all care about as bodybuilders. However, the actual measurement of say, muscle thickness, muscle cross-sectional area change or lean body mass change in a research setting is not the same as measuring the mechanism by which we grow muscle.
For example, the mechanism of adding protein, (muscle protein synthesis), is not the same as the actual measurement of muscle thickness by, say, ultrasound. Often times we will see researchers, practitioners and scientific authors who write about studies, go:
That's essentially jumping from mechanism to practice which carries some significant issues because often in the body the final outcome of what we see is due to many many many mechanisms. Even though there might be a dominant mechanism, it can be affected by so many other things and we're only aware of the mechanisms that we are currently aware of.
In terms of how to stimulate hypertrophy, we don't know everything on a mechanistic basis in terms of what's going on to actually cause muscle growth. [.]
Physiology and the body are extremely complex. So when you make the jump from mechanism to practice, it's a very arrogant thing to do and more often than not you'll end up being wrong or at least partially misinformed so that's something that can be problematic.
Optional read
A good example of this is there's a study by Mitchell et al, that found there was not a correlation between muscle protein synthesis and actual muscle gain over the course of a training study.
Now, this doesn't mean that we totally dismiss muscle protein synthesis we just have to be aware of the limitations. So if you understand the way the mechanism is studied then you can start to understand why you shouldn't bet the whole farm on it.
Muscle protein synthesis typically is a study that lasts hours rather than days, weeks or months which is the length that's really necessary to measure the change in muscle growth, instead, it's a snapshot often done in a fasted setting, after not normal training in a laboratory. It's also really just measuring what the movement, kinetics or how amino acids in the blood are taken to and from the muscle. That's not the same as actually building muscle over time.
Really you're just getting a one-off snapshot over a few hours and we don't know necessarily what muscle protein breakdown looks like or how that plays out over the long term or what compensatory things are going on in the body so it's just basically a big leap of faith to go directly from mechanism to practice.
What is Evidence-Based Training?
This is where you need to learn the difference between science-based and evidence-based. Otherwise, you will be taken advantage of.
Source
What is Evidence-Based Practice?Highlighted what I think more should focus on
Evidence-Based Training
Evidence-Based practice in lifting, when done right, is where people with real education, expertise and vast coaching experience, analyze data and combine the best up to date research with their own coaching experience to bring you guidelines and recommendations that can be tailored to the individual so that they can train in a way that is best for them.
The guidelines we have available are ones most agree on. They are very flexible and you can easily manipulate the variables to create a good program that is tailored to the individual.
Real, practical, Evidence-Based Training practices and recommendations that you can get from good coaches/researchers like Helms, Menno, Israetel, etc by example, is in my opinion, the best way to go about it.
Here's in-depth about how to go about getting evidence-based recommendations as someone that doesn't want to read literature or have the expertise required to do so.
Criticism of the Evidence-Based Community
Training Guidelines/Recommendations (