We Were WRONG (5 Fitness Beliefs We've Changed Our Minds About)

Foreign.

What's going on, everybody? And welcome back to the Built With Science podcast. You are here with your host, as always, of course, me, Max Coleman, AKA Coleman, et al. And sitting in front of me, as always, dpizzy P. Daniel Plotkin, AKA Double Quarter Plotkin with Cheese, AKA Danny Boy. And today we're going to be talking about changing our minds, why we change our minds, how we go about changing our minds, why our minds change throughout the course of learning about this stuff. But, Danny Boy, why don't you go ahead and start us off with why our minds change and why it's not necessarily a contradictions when we do change our mind.

Yeah. So science is the process of disproving ourselves. So we hold a lot of hypotheses due to a range of things. Either we observe something in the wild, or we know some mechanism that makes us think something works a certain way. And then we test whether that outcome will occur in the real world doing randomized controlled trials. And then we see whether our hypotheses actually come true. And then we constantly try to disprove more and more hypotheses. So as we, we test things, we shift our beliefs. So early on, we have really strong beliefs about things that we probably shouldn't because we don't really know how to interpret evidence well. We don't know why we believe what we believe. We don't know what goes into testing specific things. And then later on, as we learn how and why things are studied, we start to have usually weaker beliefs or beliefs that are commensurate with the level of evidence. So it becomes more of a dial and not a switch in terms of how we go about applying things, particularly in our field of exercise science, which, one, is very young, and two, it's really hard to study mechanisms and why things are occurring in a system where thousands of things are occurring at the same time. And it's hard to tease apart what's going on in isolation.

Yeah, that was really beautifully said. And just to piggyback off of the young thing, and I may have touched on this previously in this podcast, so I'm sorry if I'm repeating myself to any of our loyal listeners out there, but exercise science was officially created and officially became its own scientific discipline in the 1960s, which doesn't sound that young, obviously, to a lot of people here. I mean, that's. That's 60 years right there. However, if you think of, if you compare it to other disciplines.

Right.

People have been studying the human body, so anatomy and physiology for a very I mean, there are some reason to believe that even individuals living in, like, caveman times were. Had some rudimentary understanding of, like, where the heart was and why the heart did what the heart did and stuff like that.

Right.

So that just kind of puts it in perspective of truly how young this field is. And with that, with, like, acknowledging how young the field is in general, that kind of lends credence to the idea that it's hard to have very, very strong opinions in this world, in this field in general, because the evidence there isn't commensurate. There's. There's very little evidence in any discipline within exercise science that allows us to believe very strongly about any particular thing. So for any of the kinesiology undergrads out there, you've probably heard of Henneman size principle, right? Where when you contract a muscle, the smaller motor units contract first and then larger motor units start contracting as is necessary.

Right.

But there's even some reason to believe that that's not necessarily a perfect model for how things contract.

Right.

And, Dan, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but it's just an example of how we're not super certain about anything.

Right.

And then I also kind of want to say that changing your mind in a lot of realms and a lot of disciplines in life in general, is often seen as a bad thing or, like, contradictory, or that you're flippy floppy.

Right.

We talk often about how politicians change their mind depending on who.

What.

What audience they're speaking to about a particular issue.

Right?

But within this world, within the scientific world, someone who is willing to change their opinion or change their mind about a topic based on new evidence that comes out is highly indicative of someone being a scientific thinker and being an empirical thinker, someone who's willing to put their biases aside and accept new evidence that comes out.

Right?

So for instance, this new volume study that just came out that says 52 sets a week is better for growth than less, Some people are screaming and they're up in arms about how that cannot be the case, while others are like, yeah, it's new data. We take it with what it is and we move on. Right, okay. So with that word vomit out of the way, let's talk about early on in our journey, our learning journey. I started lifting and getting into, like, the fitness scene when I was like 12 or so. Danny boy, I think you were slightly later than that, like 15 or so, if I. If. Correct me if I'm wrong, but what are some opinions that you held in those first couple years lifting that you've just not slightly changed your mind about, but you realized you were just wholeheartedly wrong in the first place.

Yeah. So I'm not even sure who I was following at the time that I think I might have just got this from, like my gym teacher who introduced me to weight training. I believe that heavy weights and really heavy weights are not even like a moderate rep range. I thought that like three to five was what was going to get me size, because obviously if you need to lift heavy things, you need big muscles. If you need to live light, lift light things, you don't need big muscles. Like, come on, use your brain.

Well said, well said.

So I mean, it's seen, seen the plausible to me. So, yeah, I think I was convincing my friends. I mean, I made pretty good progress early on. And obviously you listen to the person that's bigger than you, so I convinced a lot of my friends to just lift in the 3 to 5 rep range. And we only did compound lifts. So that's another thing. We just did squat bench, deadlift, overhead press, barbell row, and not much else for the beginning of our early lifting, I think, I mean, we didn't like scorn machines, we just believed that they were strongly inferior. Like they were the cherry on top of a session as opposed to being anywhere near the bread and butter, producing enough stimulus to get us our best gains. So I think in terms of lifting, those were like the two strongest beliefs I held when I, like really first started, based on nothing other than my gym teacher was really jacked, like just absurdly jacked. So obviously I'm not going to question the man. Like, his biceps were enormous and he, he claimed that he stopped training his legs for. And, and I kind of believe him for the last seven years. But when he flexed his quad, it was just absurd. So I was like, not only is this man jacked, but he stopped training and maintained all of that size. I mean, he must know what he's talking about.

So, yeah, that doesn't speak to his genetics in any way at all. Yeah. So. So early on, obviously our minds are going to change quite often just based on who's the bigger person giving us the advice. Right. And this kind of goes with not only size of like their muscles, obviously. And now, because at the time when we were kids, like, yeah, that was kind of more so who we were believing was the most jacked person. But now it's who's the most jacked person or who has the largest Instagram Following, Right? And unfortunately, Instagram, both Instagram following and muscle size seems to have zero correlation whatsoever with knowledge on the subject of. Of getting jacked or getting stronger, whatever it may be.

Right?

So just to give you guys some of. Some of mine, I. Early on, I was. I got in kind of early to the fitness game and. Which means, like, I was watching for the older listeners out there, like Scooby, the Hodge twins, Elliot Hulse, the buff dudes, all the homies, Right? And kind of just took their word as oak because, I mean, they'd be lifting for a while and especially Elliot Hulse would use like, the. Just the name of muscles. And that was enough to impress me. Right? So instead of saying, like, your quads, he would. He would specifically say a particular muscle or. Or something, or he would use his anatomy book, Right? But I would say that the one that I've probably changed that, like, that's been the biggest 180 for me with respect to. I had a very strong opinion about this when I first started out, and I had a very strong opinion about this for. I mean, wow. It wasn't until the last two years that I started really questioning this ideology, Right? So I can't say that this was something early on I changed my mind about, but it was something that I strongly believed early on that I no longer believe at all, really. And that's just the notion of bad positions in general. So when it comes to things like posture or like you posture outside of the gym, so sitting with. Sitting more slouched or standing a little bit more slouched or whatever it may be. And then, of course, positions in the gym. So make sure, like, this is kind of an Elliot Hulst thing, you know, make sure that you can balance a PVC pipe on your back while you're doing a deadlift in that starting position, because God forbid you see any spinal flexion whatsoever while you're doing a deadlift, because that's just a surefire way to take you to Snap City, to quote the Hodge twins there right now. Fortunately, I don't really hold that opinion super strongly anymore. Actually, I don't really hold that opinion at all anymore. And I want to, you know, kind of like, as a disclaimer, I am not a physiotherapist, not a physical therapist, not an occupational therapist. I study how to make people jacked, and that's it. Right? So I do have a very rudimentary understanding of stuff like that.

Right.

I'm certainly not well versed in the physiotherapy literature. However, thank you to. Thanks to individuals like Adam Meekins, Nick Licamelli and Noah Mandel. Shout out all three of them. They are physiotherapists and they're all strong believers of kind of this overarching umbrella of what I've changed my mind about, which is the anti fragile.

Right?

And if you look up Anti Fragile or team Antifragile, I think, I think it's a K pop group. So it's kind of hard to find, like people talking about this realm of anti fragile if you just look that up by itself. So look up those three individuals if you want to learn more about positioning and stuff like that. But basically now I'm under the belief that there are no quote unquote, bad positions. And generally when we experience injury of any kind, because for a very long time, like Danny Boy said in our last podcast, I have pretty joints, unfortunately, I have pretty shitty joints. And I'm especially earlier on in my lifting career, I was very susceptible to injury in general.

Right.

And often I thought that was because I was slouching too much outside of the gym. I was not perfectly lordotic in my spine while doing a squat, whatever it may have been.

Right.

And now I'm much more under the belief that if there's an injury that occurs, it's very likely that it's due to a misapplication of capacity and load.

Right.

You're simply working outside of your body's capacity for recovery.

Right.

Rather than it be a specific position that someone holds.

Right.

Like, so if their background's a little bit in the deadlift, they don't necessarily look at that as a negative thing anymore. But again, not my area of expertise, just something that I've changed my mind about in kind of a 180 way. You want to touch on that at all, Danny Boy? You got anything to say about that?

Yeah. So I think we were following slightly different people, but with, you know, the same opinion. So Stuart McGill, who was, you know, at the time, everyone was citing him and he was a prolific scientist in terms of the amount of publications that he put out, and Kelly Starrett, who hold a lot of these or held a lot of these same beliefs about making sure that you keep a neutral spine, really, really strong beliefs about keeping your feet forward during a squat and things like that, where now I think we hold a similar belief that most of the time it's about being able to ramp up to a specific load or a specific position even. So it's. It could Be that you weren't ready to do a particular load in that position. And that specific position was probably not right for you at the time. But that's because you probably didn't have a graded exposure to that position. So it seems like our bodies are very, very resilient in what they can tolerate. And there are obviously positions and loads that we will never tolerate. So it's not like, you know, everything goes. But within the realm of exercise and gradient exposures, there's way, way, way, way, way more resilience than a lot of these so called experts might, might lead you, lead you to believe. So I think we both kind of did a full 180 where I was having clients, like if they went out of neutral even for a second, we lower load. And another thing, honestly that is kind of mind blowing is that being able to actually visually assess neutral is actually impossible. So there's always a level of flexion that is going to occur during really any lift, even when somebody looks super neutral. When you actually use tools that are sensitive to changes in joint angles, you see that flexion is just a normal part of movement. So yeah, once you start realizing that many things are deceiving to the naked eye, you start questioning your strong beliefs more and more.

Yeah, I think so. I think that's called an inclinometer. Do you know what I'm talking about? Is that.

Yeah, correct.

I know goniometer for like your appendicular like appendages and then things like inclinometers which I've actually seen people using. Basically it's like a, it's a level that you would use similar to carpentry, but for assessing spinal flexion and range of motion in the spine. Ridiculous. Ridiculous stuff. Yeah, no, I think that. Thank you for piggybacking off that. I think that, I think that was really well said. And basically don't worry about if you're in particular positions, it's not necessarily a bad thing.

Right.

That's kind of the takeaway there. And I do want to clarify with respect to load, when we say a misapplication of load and capacity.

Right.

It does not necessarily mean weight. It could mean any form of load. So the amount of volume that you're doing, the number of times you're exposing a muscle or a joint to a position, it doesn't necessarily mean that you did something too heavy and it might mean that you did something too much, even if it wasn't heavy at all.

Right.

Anything else that you want to touch on for things that you, you've changed your mind in a somewhat 180 fashion since we started lifting.

Yeah. So we talked a little bit about lifting. So nutrition was something that I really loved and still do, obviously. And I held some wonky beliefs on nutrition. I think a lot of us that entered the space early on and didn't know how to interpret evidence probably did as well. So I was pretty staunch on low carb to the point where I think I convinced my parents for a couple of years that unless they went low carb, they could not lose fat. And so the carbohydrate insulin model essentially posits that if insulin is high, insulin forces nutrients into the cell. That creates a double whammy of one, more nutrients in the cell means you get fatter, but two, more nutrients inside the cell means there's less circulating nutrients, which makes you hungrier and you eat more and usually you eat more carbs. So it's a never ending cycle of nutrients getting into the cell and making you hungry and causing you to get fatter and fatter. And it seems pretty plausible. You're like, yeah, well, insulin is just like the thing that's partitioning nutrients into fat cells where I don't want them to be. So obviously if I keep insulin down, I can lose fat and be happy. And unfortunately that is, or I guess fortunately, that is not the case because you can eat a wide variety of, of macronutrients and you'll lose the same amount of fat if calories are equated. And that has been shown through now very rigorous metabolic word studies. And interestingly, a lot of the things that we hold the strongest opinions on in this space come from other spaces. So like physics, you know, the conservation of energy and things like that. So I think early on we were talking about how we don't hold strong opinions on a lot of things in this space. The things that we do hold the strongest opinions on usually come from principles that are also tested directly in humans. So principles in other areas, so principles of physics and chemistry and so on that are then tested to make sure that we're not missing something. And then once we see that both of those align, we can be very confident that those things are going to continue to hold.

Yeah, yeah, I think that was really well said, like the corroboration of fields outside of exercise science that then those principles apply to human models as well. That's when you can be like, okay, we are like, the laws of thermodynamics are not broken because of insulin, fortunately. So, like, that's an example of how something outside of the world of exercise corroborated with something that we found in, like Danny Boyce said, those metabolic ward studies. Right. So we can be very confident. It's a great point actually. We can be very confident that calories in, calories out.

Right.

The energy balance model of, of that is something we can be incredibly confident about with respect to our opinion.

Right.

We're very certain, very certain that there's really no way of breaking the whole calories in, calories out model.

Right.

Things get a little bit more complicated when we start talking about muscle growth specifically.

Right.

That that's where it gets even nicher. And you can't necessarily even more niche, I don't know. And you can't be necessarily as confident as you can be with something as simple as weight loss or weight gain.

Right.

Now, Danny boy, early on we're talking about, we held these opinions that we had very strongly. Not necessarily because it was our interpretation of the literature itself.

Right.

It wasn't like we were going to PubMed and we were reading all these studies and being like, okay, yeah, yeah, definitely. This pig cadaver study has shown me that I should never round my back in the deadlift ever.

Right.

It was more so that we were just listening to individuals that we saw, we saw as much smarter than us, much more informed on the topic. Like for instance, Elliot Hulse, which to be fair, Elliot Hulse was much more informed than me on the topic of exercise science when I was 12 years old.

Right.

But now let's move towards kind of like the more intermediate stage of our learning career.

Right.

Where we're no longer just relying on something that a YouTuber or jacked PE coach said, but more so we're kind of looking to more evidence based sources in general, still kind of relying on expert opinion, but we just like to think that that expert is actually an expert as opposed to just the most jack guy at the gym. You, you kind of want to talk about more. So the, the next step in learning after just relying on authority, I suppose.

Yeah. So I guess it sort of depends on which authority you decide to follow. So I think the lowest rung is following people who are either more popular or more jacked. And then the next rung is typically once you realize sort of what science is and what it can and can't do, then you start following people who are quote unquote, evidence based, who base their opinions on evidence. So it makes sense that you're like, okay, they're reading the studies, they're interpreting the studies and they're basing their opinions on those studies. How can they be wrong? So typically what happens there is that most of the things that they're saying, and this is not always the case, but especially when it's a consensus amongst people who actually ran the studies and actually know how to interpret the evidence, they know how to interpret the statistics, they're usually not super far off from the truth in that they might state things a little bit more strongly depending on the actual medium. So let's say it's a YouTube short or whatever, a TikTok or even an Instagram video. You can't give all the nuance. So sometimes in order to save people from being eternally bored or just grabbing people's attention so that they actually listen to you instead of the person that essentially doesn't know what they're talking about at all, but is extremely short and convincing, many of even the experts in the field that know all the caveats and know all the limitations to what they're saying, they still will say it in a way that doesn't cover all the bases and tell you exactly how weak the evidence is that got them to that opinion. So I think what we did, and I don't want to speak for you, but I think this is true. What we did in sort of like that middle area where we started to read studies and we started to understand where information comes from, we still held really strong beliefs around what an evidence based person said and just integrated that into our knowledge system without really thinking too critically about how they came to that opinion. So if you want, you can get into some of the things that you believed when you were sort of riding the coattails of a lot of the evidence based individuals. And to be clear, I just want to underline that this is not a bad thing to do in that I think you'll end up in a place that you'll be training or doing something that makes a whole lot of sense based on the evidence the majority of the time. But I think if you layer on a bit of skepticism and realize that we do have weaker and stronger evidence for certain things, and realizing when it is weak and when it is strong would be helpful in making decisions for your training and nutrition and so on.

Yeah, yeah, I definitely agree. And that's kind of a third stage, right. Of you're still looking to expert opinion, but you're doing so with a degree of skepticism.

Right.

But the second stage, right, It's I would like, I guess I'll call this like the Replacing the guru stage. Because what you're doing in this like middle stage to a certain extent is you're replacing the guru who is the most jacked or has the largest Instagram following with a guru that just sounds the most scientific to a certain extent.

Right.

And like you said, this is generally a net positive because those that use science as a marketing tool, Right. They are doing the wrong thing to a certain extent. Like you shouldn't use science as a marketing tool and you shouldn't say that science has clearly shown us anything because that's generally not what happens. But like you said, they're generally these gurus more so are pointed in the much more correct direction than the ones that are just jacked for whatever reason.

Right.

So I guess, yeah, this is an instance where you're still, you're still not doing the research on your own, you're still not going and looking into the literature yourself, but you're just putting a little bit more trust into someone who's displayed a reason to trust them a little bit more.

Right.

So like for instance, individuals who cite sources for their reasoning for why you should be doing what you're doing. The gym.

Right.

And I would say that I kind of reached this stage. Like I said, I started lifting at 12. I would say I got to this stage, it took me a while. To me, like I would say I was around 18 or 19 when I kind of switched to the. More like listening to the Greg Knuckles, the Mike Israel, Derek Helms of the worlds.

Right.

And kind of just instead of the Jeff Cavaliers, Athlean X and, and Hodge twins and Elliot Hall Snow Bash on them, but moving away from them to more of the evidence based side thing. And, and, and I'm in this stage, I would say that at least for myself, I don't want to speak for you. You still hold strong opinions, maybe stronger than they should be based on the evidence that we have.

Right.

So just to give some examples.

Right.

For me, of course I'm going to talk about deloads, as I always do. I thought that for a very long time, from that age of like around 19 to even like 23, 24. I'm 25 now for context, I thought that you absolutely had to take breaks from the gym every four to six weeks because if you didn't, you would run into some sort of anabolic resistance.

Right.

And this was something that was proselytized by a lot of people, like a ton of people, like including all of the people that I just mentioned, like Eric Helms. Mike is Retail Greg Knuckles are all Greg Knuckles. I can't speak to as much, but I know Eric Helms and Mike Israel for sure would talk very often about why deloads are very beneficial for muscular adaptations.

Right.

And there is good mechanistic read. There are good mechanistic reasons to believe that, right? There are some. There is some data that we have. There are some data that we have. I hate that word. That would lead you to believe that there is some sort of really good value in taking periods away from the gym to resensitize your muscles to growth.

Right.

However, the research was just that it was mechanistic and pretty weak. So. And we'll talk. I guess we'll get on this later. But now my opinion on deload has changed a little bit. Not so much a 180 like the stuff like bad positions or low carb, but more so, like, do we really need a deload every four to six weeks? I would say probably not. Is there a benefit to it? Probably so. Like not every four to six weeks. But is there a benefit to taking breaks and periods of lower volumes away from the gym? Probably. If not for anything other than psychological health at all.

Right.

We can, we can break that down a little bit more. Another example here, I think is full range of motion.

Right.

For a very long time, we believed that lifting with a full range of motion was your best bet for growing muscles as much as possible.

Right?

And to be fair, this was commensurate with the amount of evidence that we had on the matter. Because most of the studies that we had during this time period, right. Like in that when I was 18 to 23 range, when I was kind of in that intermediate stage, did say that full range of motion was generally better.

Right.

And it wasn't until the last couple of years that we've started thinking, oh, maybe full range of motion isn't as great as we once thought. Maybe these length and part. There's something to this lengthened partial literature that would lead us to believe that that's still a good idea.

Right.

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Okay, so I kind of talked a lot there, but do you want to talk a little bit about that intermediate stage of learning and maybe some things you've changed your mind about less so than the stuff that you held very strongly early on?

Yeah. So I think just to piggyback off of that, a lot of those things that you did probably wouldn't change your training too much and honestly wouldn't change the amount of gains that you make too much. But just holding those strong opinions could hold you back in many situations where let's say you felt great. Oh, I do need to take this deload at this time because I've been training for whatever, five weeks or so and you, you might be leaving some stuff on the table and even psychologically you might be limiting yourself, but if you continue to train that way forever, you probably aren't leaving that much on the table. So again, like, once you reach a stage where you're following evidence based individuals, you're probably holding yourself back to a certain extent by being staunch. But it's not the end of the world. As opposed to believing the exact opposite of what is true by many gurus who have absolutely no, no idea what they're talking about in terms of some of the examples that we gave where you could actually be nocebo ing yourself into injury or pain if you really believe that positions are injurious and thinking about things the wrong way. So for me, somewhere in the middle stage of things, I think around the same age as you, 18 or 19, is where I sort of transition away from this stage, but definitely up until there, and even probably into early 20s, like probably 22 or so where I felt comfortable sort of having my own opinions on, on things based on the evidence. So yeah, I was doing similar to you. I was doing plan deloads. I was not training to failure as much because I believe that the fatigue cost of going to failure wasn't worth the benefit near failure. And now we know that there's at least some questions around that. I, I don't hold the opinion strongly in the other direction anymore. And we'll sort of talk about this as we go along. You don't have to hold strong opinions on everything and you probably shouldn't hold strong opinions on things that have really weak evidence.

Which is like 99% of the things that we talk about in the gym.

Exactly. Yeah. So I think those are definitely two instances where I probably shouldn't have been. Like, I did a lot of sets at like 2 rir because I thought that that was the most bang for your buck. So I could have probably just done at least a little bit less sets and taken more sets to failure. And I probably would have been the same off, but potentially better off from a just time in the gym standpoint, because I also progress sets for a while where I was doing an absurd amount of sets toward the end of a mezzo shout out to my boy, Dr. Mike Israel. And to be clear, sometimes he didn't even say those things explicitly. And if he, if you looked at his own training, he was progressing by a few sets. So sometimes it's even the misinterpretation of what someone is saying rather than even an appropriate interpretation. So I know what's a Steve hall from Revive Stronger was doing an absurd amount of sets toward the end of his mezzos, and a lot of us have gotten away from that. So there's tons of things that were in that middle ground. Where were we leaving a whole lot of gains on the table? Probably not because we were doing a whole lot of work. But and this is one thing that I really try to underline about science, many people sort of interpret or try to use science to tell us what to do, and that's okay. But a lot of the time it doesn't necessarily tell us what to do in a very guided way, but it gives us a lot of wiggle room and many times tells us what's not needed. So ruling stuff out and giving yourself a lot of options based on the fact that on average it doesn't really matter for a lot of these topic topics is actually a great thing. If we study something and find no differences between groups, then we have a whole lot of wiggle room to say, okay, maybe for this individual, this might make more sense for whatever the rationale may be. So, for example, let's say, let's take training to failure. If somebody can't sleep when they take a set to failure or they take multiple sets to failure, you can easily reason with them and say, listen, there's pretty decent evidence that leaving a couple of reps in the tank is equally effective, or especially if you do maybe a couple of more sets. And even if it is more effective to take a set to failure, it's not that much more effective based on the evidence. So you can use science to tell you why something doesn't matter that much or why something doesn't need to be done at all. So it takes the guesswork out of a lot of stuff in a way that is sort of freeing.

Yeah.

So Instead of being a roadmap, it sort of tells you where you.

Like a checklist. Yeah.

In which you can go. Exactly.

Yeah. I think that's. That's really beautiful. And, and the thing is, like, when you transition to this stage where you're replacing a guru or the scientific guru, right. You're still relying on someone to tell you what to do. At the end of the day, you're still hoping that someone is telling you what to do. Exactly. And that you're just a little bit more confident that they're probably right as opposed to the person that just has big biceps.

Right.

And to, like, further clarify, like these things, like these things that we're. We've changed our minds about a little bit. They're not 180s, which is to say that we don't hold strong opinions on, you shouldn't train to failure because it's way more fatiguing. We don't hold strong opinions on, you shouldn't or should progress sets because one's worse or better.

Right.

We don't hold strong opinions on needing to use a full range of motion because all of the evidence that we have is very loose on all of those topics. Right. It's not conclusive on all of those topics. Like it is on the stuff that we talked about previously, Right. Like low carb and lifting heavy to get big and stuff like that.

Right.

Bad positions. There's a lot of evidence needed there as well. So that's, that's not a super, well, research thing either. But you get the point anyway, regardless, in each stage, we're just looking for someone to tell us what to do. And the kind of beautiful thing is, like Danny Boy was just saying, and this is kind of a direct quote from Eric Helmes, is like, research is never ever going to tell us what to do on Tuesday.

Right.

It just isn't. But. And when you went early on, that's really annoying, right? When you're, when you're just looking for something like, hey, bro, just give me the answer. Like, how many carbs do I need after I lift? Like, please just tell me. But when you're in, you get later in the. You get later and later into the state, into, into this learning game. And it's actually just like Danny Boy was saying, it's beautiful. It's really freeing to know that I don't have to train to failure if I don't want to. But if I do want to, no worries. I don't have to do drop sets to grow as much as I can. But If I want to, I can and save some time.

Right.

So all of these things that kind of give you a lot of autonomy in your training should be looked at as a much more positive thing rather than, damn, science can't tell us anything, can it? So, yeah, I think that was really beautifully said, man. Now, when you move, let's talk about the third stage, the third and last stage, which is moving away from a guru in general, where you still listen to these expert opinions because they still are very smart and they might interpret research differently, you, differently than you, and they might think of it differently than you do, and they might come up with ideas that you wouldn't have thought of on your own, except you don't take them on face value.

Right.

This is an instance where I didn't reach this stage until very late undergrad and very early on in my bachelor, in my master's degree, where I was actually like, okay, someone would say something, let me go read the study they're talking about, or let me just read the study first and then I'll go listen to someone else talk about it and I can form my own opinion.

Right.

You kind of want to touch on a little bit of your journey in that, into. Into that realm, and then we can talk about some stuff that maybe we've changed our minds about in this regard, but also the fact that there are some things that we just can't change our mind about at all right now because of the serious lack of evidence that there is on the topic.

Yeah. So I think similar to you probably around, yeah, 20, late college, late undergrad, I should say. So somewhere around 23, 24, I started feeling a little bit more confident reading studies, interpreting studies, particularly in the realm of practical hypertrophy research and understanding sort of all the variables that go into interpreting the research. So just from a sort of high level, considering the amount of volume, considering rest periods, considering exercise selection, which exercise or particular muscles can we say with confidence an acute study will produce longitudinal outcomes? So how confident can we be that muscle protein synthesis will turn into gains? And the technique of muscle protein synthesis that was used in the particular study, EMG data and what it can say about longitudinal outcomes and just getting more and more comfortable with the typical techniques that are used to measure anything in exercise science. So measurement tools for actual hypertrophy. So what's the difference between a BOD pod and underwater weighing and DEXA and ultrasound and MRI and so on. So that honestly will not be a situation that most people are in where they just don't have the time or sometimes desire to actually do that, when honestly you can get most of your gains without having us extremely nuanced understanding of these topics. You can get the majority of things right and get the majority of. You can actually get the majority of things wrong, sorry. And get the majority of the gains that you're going to get. It might come a little bit slower and you might get gain a little bit less, but as long as you're consistent, working hard and making some modifications along the way, you're probably going to achieve the majority of your gains. But if you really want to dive into things just from an intellectual curiosity standpoint, it does take a decent amount of effort to try to understand all the nuances. So I think a useful sort of framework for this is known knowns. So things that we know, we know and then known unknowns. So things that we know we don't know and then we have unknown unknowns, things that we don't know, that we don't know and then we have unknown knowns, things that we or I personally don't know but is known. So there's multiple categories here that you're going to have for every single subtopic. So realize that when somebody changes their mind on something, it could be that they just simply didn't know something that was known and that's totally fine. Like we can't know everything about everything in this space. And then there's also things that. So for example, when genetics was being studied for a very, very, very long time, we didn't know that DNA, the double helix existed. So they were literally extrapolating on evidence and using a framework where they didn't really know what the recipe book was. So a lot of the theories back then can't really be useful to us now that we know the double helix exist and how DNA goes from to RNA into protein. So that was an unknown unknown at the time. So there's tons of unknown unknowns right now that if we end up learning it later on, we'd have to update a lot of the evidence that we have on different topics. So that's all to say that when you're interpreting what an individual is saying, if you decide to really delve into these topics, realize that whatever the topic may be, when even if they do, and often they don't give you their rationale for why they believe something, start to unpack what could be missing there. So somebody can give you a rationale that makes a whole lot of sense, but they've only covered a certain set of subtopics for that one topic, they could be completely missing something that is either known or missing something that we know to be unknown. And that would throw a significant wrench in things. So it becomes a lot harder to actually draw strong conclusions from research when you realize exactly how much we don't know. And then you still don't really hold extremely strong opinions because you realize the possibility that you're just missing something that we don't know. That we don't know based on our technology at the time. So a lot. So going back to the DNA thing, we just didn't have the ability to see with that magnification, with that level of resolution at the time. So it was something that sort of couldn't be known to some extent.

Yeah, that was.

But hopefully that was helpful.

Yeah, I mean it was incredibly helpful. I think that unknown unknowns are exactly what gets you known unknowns and unknown unknowns are exactly what gets you to stage three.

Right.

So just to kind of piggyback like just to care like early on you were talking about most people won't get here us because most people on like Danny Boy and I have friends and lives outside of like trying to learn about how to get as jacked as possible.

Right.

So I think that most people will make it to stage two in this journey. Well, actually, I don't know about that. Hopefully you'll make it to stage two. Usually if you make it to stage two, you're, you're in the green and like you can be at least pretty confident that you're doing most things pointed in the right direction.

Right.

Like if, if you're following these evidence based individuals, you can at least be confident that you're doing, you're doing your due diligence with respect to what you should be doing in the gym.

Right.

Like Denny Boy said, research isn't a roadmap, more so a checklist of things that we should be doing.

Right.

And then the rest you get to just fill in on your own. So if you make it to stage two where you're. Most of the people you're listening to are evidence based and they're citing studies and sources and they at least seem logical and rational, you're probably doing just fine. And, and I would be shocked if, if, if most people make it to stage three without doing some sort of higher level of education. Because just like Danny Boy was saying, to really interpret research you have to understand one the kind of basic principles of, of what you're studying.

Right.

But you also have to understand the analysis techniques that are used. So should I rely on a study that uses DEXA when this one has something pointing in the opposite direction that uses mri? You would never know to ask that question if you didn't know what MRI or DEXA was.

Right.

And then it goes even deeper with this study didn't use a very good statistical model for comparing these two groups to one another. Like, that's something that you almost certainly won't know if you haven't had some degree of statistical education in general.

Right.

And that's stuff you can do on your own. I'm by no means saying that you need to go to grad school to do this stuff or even college to do this stuff. Greg Nichols is one of the best interpreters of research in the entire field, and he doesn't have his PhD by any means. Right. So it's certainly not necessary, it's just very uncommon to get to this stage three.

Right.

And once you get here, like, once you get to the point where you're reading research on your own and forming your own opinions, you get to a point, like Danny boy was saying, where you no longer have strong opinions unless it is something that has been researched in and out. And even then you don't have conclusive opinions like, you don't have, like, I know this is. This is unequivocal. I know this to be true. There's no question about it.

Right?

Because you start realizing like that beautiful, whatever Socrates or whatever Einstein, I have no idea who said it, like, the more you learn, the less you know, essentially you get to the point where you're like, oh, wow. So, you know, maybe there is something that could defy this whole calories in, calories out model that we've never thought of. We didn't even know that this thing was possible.

Right.

That one I'm skeptical about. But you get the point, right? So things here, things that when you get to this stage, you start realizing, oh, we might never know the answer to this question because it's just not as easily testable as something like range of motion or deloads or training to failure.

Right.

You want to talk a little bit about stuff that we might not ever know, stuff that will probably remain, at least to some degree, an art rather than a science, at least in our lifetime.

Yeah. So I think this topic is extremely popular and many people don't realize that this will probably be in a category of something that is not definitely not readily knowable, but potentially not knowable, period. With a model that kind of Makes sense. So, mechanisms of hypertrophy. You see a whole lot of Instagram posts about what the mechanisms are, which mechanisms are the most prominent, and a lot of strong opinions in this space. When if you really delve deep into what's going on with the mechanisms, it's really near impossible to tease apart what's going on with the inputs and how that turns into output. So you have mechanical tension, and then what happens with that tension can actually be modified on the front end. So, for example, if there's more cell swelling or there's a larger pump that modulates the amount of tension, so tension alone couldn't even be the only explanatory variable when there's tons of things that sort of input into tension and modify that, and that being the lead domino leads to a whole bunch of other things that occur at the same exact time. So different instances of hypoxia or low oxygen, different amounts of metabolites in different contexts, and so on and so forth. So a lot of these mechanisms are happening at the same time. So knowing whether the mechanisms have an additive effect, so if there's more growth because you have more of these mechanisms at the same time, or if they're redundant with each other in that all these mechanisms happen at the same time, but there is the same effect regardless of whether one occurs without the other, we can't really know because there's no way to remove any of the inputs in a practical way. So you can actually do things in animal models where you can take out a whole protein and or knock in multiple copies of, of a gene and see what happens. But then you're changing the whole physiological sort of picture there where you can't now make strong extrapolations on what's actually happening happening in a human. And so anytime you use a model that isolates something, you're taking it out of the system. So how it works within the system we can have some inclinations on in terms of this matters maybe a little bit more or a little bit less, using relatively weak evidence to get to that point. But having strong opinions about something having no effect on hypertrophy is just really impossible to do at the time. So to put some granular example examples on this, there's tons of people that say tension is the only mechanism and that metabolic stress and hypoxia and.

Cell.

Swelling, muscle damage and just tons of honestly mechanisms that could be at play or could modulate what happens later on just makes no sense whatsoever because not only can it affect the acute tension response, but it Also could modulate what happens later on. So for example, let's say in about you produce X amount of tension and then in the next bout you're still experiencing a lot of those anabolic pathways that from that previous session. And those pathways could be augmented or changed because of the metabolic byproducts from that second session. So it doesn't. It wouldn't even have to necessarily be from that initial session where you got the benefits from whatever input, the mechanism. It could be any of the sessions moving forward. And to take that even further, you could have some things that don't support hypertrophy at all in the short term, but which could support it in the long term. For example, let's say you spend some time doing cardio when your aerobic fitness is low. That could support hypertrophy in the long term, either by recovering between sessions or even recovering between sets. So there's tons and tons of inputs that are happening all at the same time that could affect short and long term gains, where just having a really strong opinion on this would be frankly absurd.

Yeah, I don't know, bro. Marathon training is incredibly hypertrophic, just as hypertrophic as lifting is, according to some experts. So.

Wow.

Yeah. So I think that trying. So that's one example of things that we'll probably never know in our lifetime, which is like what's causing hypertrophy, what is actually at bottom causing our muscles to grow. Which is a crazy thing to say. That kind of gives you an idea of truly how young our field is that we don't know that.

Right.

Another example could be just that, the individual responses to training in general.

Right.

So as we know, as we've discussed ad nauseam on this podcast, like research is based on averages. And that means that. And if you look at different plots and different graphs of individual responses, each data point for each subject within a study before it's compiled into a mean and standard deviation, you'll see very vast differences between one subject, the highest performing subject, and lowest performing subject.

Right.

And there's probably never go. Even if we poured trillions of dollars into research and conducted millions of case studies, it would still not give us insights into how to treat John Doe or Jane Doe at the gym.

Right.

We have to use research as that blueprint, as that checklist we were talking about, and then eventually make John and Jane Doe's program from the. The experience, the observations of their experiences using research as a baseline. Right. So research is probably never going to tell us what to do on a Tuesday, no matter how much time and money we put into it. At least, like I said, not in Danny Boy and I's lifetime.

Right.

And then you want to touch on variation briefly and then we can kind of wrap up everything we've been saying and get out of here.

Yeah.

So one, one topic that's super popular that I wanted to touch upon that really I don't think could have strong evidence, at least at the timescales that we care about, is variation. So there's so many iterations of variation, and this also applies to periodization, actually. So how you structure your program where no matter what you study, you're really only covering one iteration of what variation looks like or of what periodization looks like, where you're always going to have open questions because you can't run a trial on, you know, a trillion things. Just mathematically you couldn't do that. But even if we had unlimited funds and stuff like that, like it wouldn't be possible. But definitely within our field where it's hard to run studies, especially long term studies, you're just not going to have every iteration of what variation looks like in general. So having strong opinions on that is probably also a bad idea. So there's tons of people in the space that say, don't vary your training, just keep the same lifts in. Some people say forever. And that's, you know, to me seems like a fairly bad idea. And some people will say that you should keep it in for the short term. And I think that makes sense, but we don't have super strong evidence to support that. But I think I wanted to use this example in order to say, a lot of the time it practically makes sense to do a whole lot of stuff and you don't have to have strong evidence in order to actually implement it in a particular way that makes sense. So we know that muscles respond to variation because of the fact that different muscles get activated differently due to the different pattern of exercise. So we know that based on a lot of evidence. But what we don't know is whether variation in and of itself is useful for hypertrophy. So because we know the first fact, we're going to want to bake in some variation anyways. So having short stints where we enjoy an exercise and where we're progressing in exercise for, let's say up to 12 weeks, and then we recycle those exercises for some other ones is a good idea, regardless of whether we have strong evidence for variation in and of itself. Because we know that hitting a muscle in a slightly different way will get different results either along the length of the muscle or different portions of the muscle. So many of the questions that we have are sort of interesting, but practically speaking, in order to cover our bases, they're not necessary in order to maximize gains. Really. So many of the questions that you see people argue about are sort of what I would term intellectual masturbation, where it's fun to talk about and it's fun to speculate on, but in practical terms, many of them don't really matter that much. So always keep in mind why a question is being asked and how it would apply to your training when you're really diving into a lot of these topics and whether it's worth your time to even consider a lot of these more nuanced topics. We could spend a whole lot of time talking about this because it's, you know, kind of our job, but passion too. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So those nuances, even if it's like a intellectual pursuit, are still interesting to us, but definitely not something that many of these topics would actually have super meaningful practical ramifications even if we knew in one direction or the other.

Yeah, well, I mean, I'll intellectually masturbate with you anytime, bro. So we can keep on keeping on, no worries. Yeah. So I think that that's just variation. I think that's a really good one to cover because variation is one that is conclusive. If you ask most people, like, they'll have a strong opinion about variation. Why you should vary all the time for muscle confusion, or why you should never vary because, you know, you really want to ingrain those motor patterns, whatever, blah, blah, blah. Someone can come up with a thousand logical sounding reasons why you should or should not vary things, but given the state of evidence that we have, we shouldn't have strong opinions on that. And that's just a good example because it's so well known.

Right.

It's a. What's a common belief versus common knowledge. Right. This like, commonly held notion that something is the case, even though there's not really necessarily a good reason to believe that in general.

Right.

And that goes with you make it to stage three, you'll realize that most things in exercise, especially most things in like the hypertrophy world, are common beliefs, not necessarily common knowledge. Meaning we don't actually know these things that some people will hold as very strong opinions. Right. So do you have anything else you want to say before we wrap this John up?

Thinking that's good.

Okay, awesome. So just to quickly recap here a little bit about what you're talking about one, changing your mind is a good thing. Most of the time, willing to. Having a willingness to change your opinion on a subject based on new evidence that comes out is highly indicative of being an empirical thinker. And that is a very good thing to be able to say about yourself, in my personal opinion.

Right.

So if someone changes their mind on something, it's not necessarily because they're flipping flopping like a politician. It might be that they learned something new that changed the way that they thought about a problem.

Right.

Generally when you go through the stages of learning about any skill, but with respect to this, you, you start with expert opinions and those experts you choose not necessarily on their logical rationales or their empirical soundness of opinion, more so their display of talent in whatever field you might be interested in. So with respect to us, that's just the most jacked person or the, the fitness influencer with the most followers on Instagram, right. And you'll just kind of take whatever their word is on oak as oak and just assume that that's the case. Right. And then hopefully you move towards replacing that guru with. You know, ideally we don't want to replace a guru with a guru, but if you're going to have a guru, it's better to have one that's at least following the literature, right? So going towards the more evidence based side of this field, listening to the Greg Knuckles, the Eric Traxlers, the Eric Helms, the Mike Israel of the world, the Daniel Plotkins, right? Listening to expert opinions, people who are actually going into the research and then, then dispersing that to, to the, to the lay individuals, right. And then hopefully, and not everyone will make it to the stage because like Danny Boyne, I said some people have friends. But you'll make it to the third stage where you're still listening to expert opinions, but you're doing so with a degree of skepticism because you're aware of that There are certain questions that we might not ever be able to answer in this field, right. Like for instance, we might never know how each individual responds to resistance training and what's the most optimal way for that individual to train.

Right.

And then I guess just a fun little wrap up here, just some things that we have changed our mind on. Daniel boy eats carbs now, which is nice. He's. He allows himself to spike his insulin in every once in a while and he lifts even above the 5 to 10 rep range, which is nice as well. I do rounded back deadlifts sometimes because I think it's good for erector growth. I'm trying to get a nice beefy trench back. And then some of the other things, like Danny Boy and I aren't afraid of training to failure as we once were. And we don't take breaks away from the gym as much as we once did.

Right.

But those are just some things that we've changed our mind a little bit about. Anything else you want to touch on.

This might throw another wrench into things as you were talking. So I will briefly say that sometimes experts hold different opinions on things because of the fact that they, based on their model of how they interpret the research, put more emphasis on one thing over another. So that could change how they interpret even the same study. So having differences of opinions on a particular topic doesn't mean that one person is necessarily wrong or right. They're just putting more emphasis on one thing over another based on the weak evidence. So sort of taking all of their opinions and rationales and sort of thinking about which one matters more to me. And this is obviously in stage three, but.

So let's say somebody, I would even say stage two. As long as you're exposing yourself to as many different opinions as possible, you're probably in the green.

Right.

That doesn't mean you have to go do the research on your own, but.

Sorry, that's true. Yeah. So I think that was just a point I really wanted to make because it's important when you hear. Because often people hear different opinions on the same topic from people who are evidence based and I think know what they're talking about. It could be because they're, they're just one of them is just simply wrong, which is totally fine. You can be wrong about things because you can't know everything, but many of the times it's because they just put more emphasis on one thing over another based on their interpretation of the other evidence. So a quick example on this, because it's, it's a bit abstract, is some people believe that you can. Some people strongly believe that a higher set number is better for hypertrophy. So they'll say even over 20. And if you don't value the rest period literature as much, you will hold that belief more strongly and that it seems like the majority of the studies. So three of the four studies that favor higher set numbers use shorter rest periods. So if you don't care as much about that fact, you could say higher sets are better. But if another individual values the limited literature we have on rest periods and says, listen, longer rest periods are clearly better or they believe more strongly that respiratory are better then they would believe that the more Moderate, you know, 15 to 18 or 10 to 20 makes more sense for most people for hypertrophy. So you could have a different interpretation of the literature based on how you value different things in your sort of mental model. And then our mental models will be updated as time goes on. So sometimes the differences of opinion, that's all I want to underline. Sometimes the differences of opinion are due to just weighing things differently in your own head and those will get updated over time. So don't freak out if experts in the field have different opinions on the same topic. One, it sort of probably shows that the evidence is not super strong on the topic, but two, it helps you sort of develop a rationale based on what they're saying and what they're valuing.

Yeah. So I think that the last thing I'll say here before we close out is when you make it to any stage, regardless of what that is, the goal is to expose yourself to as many ideas as possible.

Right.

That'll allow you to form your own opinion on a given subject. But like Danny Boyce said, the evidence might not be super strong. Right. So regardless of its stage one, where you're just listening to the most jacked person, listen to as many jacked people as you possibly can. And then stage two, when you start listening to more evidence based individuals, which to be fair, if you're listening to this podcast, you're likely already on the you trust science side of things, given that you're listening to the Built With Science podcast. But don't just listen to Danny Boy and I. There's a bunch of other incredible fitness influencers or scientific communicators out there that have vastly different opinions than we do that are watching the same movie.

Right?

I've said this before, all of us researchers and all of us science communicators, we're all reading the same literature. We're just forming our own opinion. And it's weird that we view that as weird.

Right?

Because 200 people buy a ticket to a movie, there's going to be about 200 different interpretations of what the movie means and how like what the meaning of the every, every scene was and stuff like that, right? So expose yourself to as many different ideas with respect to this stuff as possible so you can form your own very well informed opinion.

Right?

All good? Sweet. All right, as always, thank you everyone so much for listening to the Built With Science podcast. If you liked what you heard, please let us know. If there's something that you want us to cover that we haven't talked about yet, please reach out to us on Instagram at Built with Science. And as always, thank you so much for listening. Peace.