STUDIES SHOW…

I have been accused of being “anti-intellectual” due to my refusal to care about scientific studies on exercise science.  I will say that it’s not an unfair accusation of me, but I feel that I should clarify why it is I don’t really concern myself with these findings.  My formal education is politics and philosophy, and truth be told, I always struggled with hard science, so it would be easy and quick to assert that I simply don’t understand the findings.  However, allow me this opportunity to explain why, due to my understanding of how studies function, I find exercise science information to be of minimal worth at best.

You know science had to be behind this, because common sense would say "no"

First, let us come to terms with the fact that, in the scientific community, exercise science is incredibly low on the list of priorities.  Yes, we meatheads might think it’s the most important thing in the world, but in all honesty, the rest of the world really couldn’t care less about it.  When we are being ravaged by cancer, AIDS, the ZIKA virus, the obesity epidemic, male pattern baldness, lack of erections, heart disease, poor eyesight, acne, and various other maladies, obtaining “max buffitude” just isn’t a subject that gets a whole lot of funding and grants.  This also tends to mean that the exercise science community tends to be a little smaller and more incestuous than the greater scientific community. It would be fair to say that some people are motivated by passion and some are motivated by money, and when it comes to scientific research, you’ll find plenty of both on the “sexy” studies like fighting cancer and various diseases.  When it comes to exercise science, money is in short supply, which means you’re primarily going to be dealing with those motivated by passion.  That’s awesome for the integrity of the undertaking, but it means that the talent pool is going to be reduced.  The brilliant passionate people will be there, but the brilliant greedy people will be lacking, and in this world, there are a LOT of the latter.

Understanding the limitations of funding and research personnel in the field of exercise science, let us compound that with the confusing nature of actually trying to apply a study to a human population.  Once again, in a field that is constrained by resources (both budgetary and personnel), one tends to observe that participants in studies are those that are cheap and widely available, aka, college students aiding post graduate work.  When it comes to a population of young, virile, healthy people surging with hormones, you could do no better…but when it comes to a population that is easy to control and monitor, you could do no worse.  You can imagine how this confounds the findings of a study on exercise science.  You take 40 college kids, have 10 do low reps, 10 do high reps, 10 do moderate reps, 10 do no reps, and you try to evaluate the results over a 3 week period, only to have 26 of them go on a 4 day drinking bender, 13 decide to start experimenting with acid, 11 spent all their money on video games and are living off 1 pack of ramen noodles a day, 17 sleep 14 hours a day, 14 are so jacked up on energy drink that they never sleep, etc etc, and the findings become sketchy at best.  Yes, we can observe a general trend from this study, but we have to keep in mind that the population they were pulling from aren’t necessarily representative of a normal population, and trying to apply the findings as some sort of universal gospel is silly.

I mean...on the plus side...the ice bath HAS been proven to have restorative qualities

But let’s say we can actually go full USSR on the experiment and control exactly how the subjects eat, sleep, and enjoy their leisure time; we STILL run into difficulties due to the subjectivity of exercise science.  A common approach to a study in exercise science is to get subjects to use a percentage of their 1rm for an exercise…but how often have you personally witnessed 1rms that weren’t actually 1 rep maxes?  I can walk into the gym right now, warm-up, and hit what I perceive to be my 1rm.  On a different day, I can spend a few minutes really getting amped up, crank the music, and hit a higher number than that.  On a different day, I can do the amping up, and then hit the nose tork hard and hit an even higher number.  And what if I decide to experiment with stimulants beforehand?  Or what if I’m having a really good day?  Or a really bad one?  What if I ate 3 meals vs trained fasted?  First thing in the morning versus late in the afternoon?  And keep in mind, I’ve been lifting weights in some fashion for 17 years now, and I at least KNOW this about myself.  These studies love to take “untrained” populations, which just means they’re going to have even LESS of a clue about what their actual 1rm is.  They may be exerting themselves as much as they think they can, but a real meathead knows that this guy has WAY more in them if they just dig a little deeper.  We’ve all seen it happen before.  So now, you have a study using an alleged 1rm which is really more like 80% of a 1rm, and now we’re using 80% of that 80% to try to determine if that’s the most effective loading pattern for hypertrophy.  Once again, we observe the difficulties in trusting exercise science.

And then we get into the issue of quality control.  Let’s say we’re still going full USSR on the subjects, and let’s say they actually have enough awareness to know if/when they hit a 1rm, and let’s say these subjects actually know how to strain and push and have some semblance of idea of how to train; do those CONDUCTING the study actually know any of this stuff?  We like to think it’s a given that someone certified in the field of exercise science knows how to exercise, but think about it truthfully; how long does it take an ironhead to REALLY know how to squat?  To REALLY figure out mind muscle control?  To REALLY understand how to get their bodies to move the way they want to move?  Even those of us that read all the books and saw all the studies still took a long time to get it all figured out on our OWN level, let alone being able to evaluate and asses all that when observing an outsider.  When a study has subjects perform 10 leg extensions to evaluate quad hypertrophy, what are the chances that the observer can tell who is actually flexing their quad to accomplish the leg extension versus who is using their hip flexors?  How well versed are they in evaluating if the squat stance utilized by the trainee is actually the best fit for their anatomy, and that the trainee is actually using the right technique (not form) to generate the right findings?  I am certain their formal education has made them incredibly well versed on the biological processes occurring throughout training, but quite simply, how experienced are they in generating these processes?  And do not take this as an attack dear reader; it is legitimately a question.  There are some out there that, were they to conduct a study, I trust them to be able to accomplish this, while there are others that give me no reason to believe in their ability.  Much like understanding the science, understanding the application is also a valuable skillset that not everyone possesses.

And once you have a mastery of both, you sound so crazy and incoherent you have no ability to pass on what you know

This was a long read, but my takeaway is this; studies can be a helpful tool in understanding trends and extrapolating ideas, but treating them like undisputed gospel is folly.  Just because a study comes out saying something doesn’t invalidate something else; it simply means that, under those specific circumstances of that one study, that result could be produced.  Additionally, if you hear some experienced and seasoned ironheads espouse an idea that conflicts with science, it may simply be that the study has not yet been done that proves what those folks know.  This is still a young field, we’re not even close to discovering all the things we already know, let alone the thing we don’t know.  In that regard, I tend to treat experience with more reverence than science.  People have been conducting their own “studies” for decades; it’s just that the lab was the weightroom, and the results were published on the podium.