Rest intervals: how long should you rest in between your sets? (Get it, work out?) So instead of being able to learn from objective feedback, bodybuilders can only rely on the acute feedback they do get, and that’s mostly just whether they feel something in their muscles.Īnd that’s why when they try to rationalize their arguments with silly pseudoscience, we now call this broscience.įortunately, after several decades of scientific research we can now talk about optimal training program design with a lot more evidence than “But the big guy at my gym said…” In this article I’ll cover some of the major broscience myths about how you should train to get jacked. It can very roughly tell you if something works or doesn’t work, but trying to optimize a training program based on anecdotal knowledge is like performing plastic surgery with a kitchen knife. In short, anecdotal observation is an extremely crude tool to determine how to train or diet for muscle growth. ![]() Because people grow at such different rates and there are so many variables to control that the field of exercise science suffers from very low statistical power: it’s hard to isolate the effects of one variable with confidence. Exercise scientists face this problem every day. Hell, even if all your friends at the gym join in for the experiment and you randomly split them up into 2 groups, one training with style X and the other training with style Y, and you meticulously control their diets and track their muscle growth with an MRI machine, it may still not be clear what the best training style is. Did your former program work better because it was actually better or were you just reaping newbie gains with it? There are strong diminishing returns to training as you approach your genetic muscular potential. The bigger you get, the slower your gains come.Even if you stick with your high or low carb diet, you’ll lose size when cutting and gain size when bulking and it’s not nearly all actual muscle size. Total energy intake has a similar effect.This is probably the main reason high carb diets are so popular among bodybuilders and it makes it incredibly hard to see if you’re looking bigger because of your training or because of your higher carb intake. It’s not uncommon for a guy to gain 4 pounds of what looks like muscle when they go from a low to a high carb diet. Going on a higher carb diet increases intramuscular glycogen stores, which attracts a lot of water into the muscles, ~3 grams per gram of glycogen.Even if you’re actually tracking your body circumferences over many months of training, there are several problems with this little n = 1 case study. A large part of the ‘muscle growth’ that occurs during the early stages of strength training is actually edema: water retention caused by muscle damage, not growth of the muscle tissue itself. You think those stiff-legged deadlifts are the best hamstring builders? Maybe they just caused major muscle soreness and you mistook the swelling for muscle growth. You think partial rep curls are the key to a big biceps? Maybe they just gave you a big pump which you mistook for muscle growth. Yeah, you think you can, but it’s too slow of a process that takes too long and is too subjective to observe. ![]() You know what you cannot observe well? Muscle growth itself. That means they base their training on what they can concretely observe and feel, in particular the pump and burn you get during training and soreness the days after. Lots of partial reps, training to failure, moderately high rep sets, training a muscle infrequently with short rest periods (or they try if they’re not too gassed). ![]() In my observation, gym bros and bodybuilders all train pretty much the same way everywhere. People often ask me how they train in Taiwan or Ecuador or some other exotic location. ![]() And after having lived and trained in over 50 countries, I think I know why. Ok, not everything, obviously, but quite a lot of “everyone knows this” ideas turned out to be wrong. Everything the bros told you about how to train was wrong.
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