2 Things I CAN’T STAND about science-based lifting

Chapters:

00:00 Intro

00:32 1. Exercise technique obsession

04:45 2. Studies contradict each other all the time

04:55 My Online PT Course

05:18 2. Studies contradict each other all the time (continued)

10:29 Outro

Transcript:

After a meteoric rise to popularity in the fitness industry, science based lifting has hit what marriage counselors like to call a rough patch. Mike Israetel and Jeff Nippard have caught a lot of flak in particular, but skepticism is industry wide. In fact, after the pandemic, science skepticism is at all time highs and extends well beyond the fitness industry. In part, I think the comedown of evidence based fitness is deserved. A lot of influencers these days are claiming all sorts of things are evidence based, and there’s one trend in particular that gives science based lifting a bad name: The obsession about exercise technique.

Exercise technique has always been regarded as important, but these days influencers have taken it to a whole new level, coming up with all sorts of crazy exercises that are highly impractical, and there’s no research on whether they’re actually improving muscle growth, but theoretically, they might be marginally superior. Those of you who followed my recent series on exercise comparisons will note that large differences in exercise technique are usually required to make a substantial difference in muscle growth. Moreover, one recent study has specifically investigated how important exercise technique is exactly. The researchers had a group of individuals train one of their arms with “strict technique”, and the other arm with “cheating technique”. They performed biceps curls and push downs. In the cheating condition the biceps curls were performed with a lot of momentum, kind of Arnold style, heaving the weight up. In the strict condition the elbows were kept at the side. Similarly for triceps push downs the elbows were kept at the side in the strict condition, but in the cheating condition they were allowed to kind of turn it a little bit into a dip and press the weight down that way.

After eight weeks both arms grew equally well. There were no statistically meaningful differences in muscle growth in any side. Biomechanically this makes sense in that muscle groups when it’s exposed to tension. Muscle is a slab of meat. You put tension on it – it gets bigger. Only exercise technique that increases the amount of tension on the muscle should increase muscle growth.

Factors that can influence the amount of tension are the range of motion. Typically, you are better off increasing the range of motion, especially to longer muscle lengths. Another factor that can make a difference is whether you are actually targeting the right musculature. So if you’re cheating so much that you’re involving other muscle groups instead of the target musculature, that of course, is also not ideal. However, as long as you are stimulating the target musculature over a similar range of motion, the technique doesn’t have to look pretty. I think a lot of people confuse pretty with good technique. Just like when dating.

This study absolutely does not debunk the importance of exercise technique. It simply means that exercise technique is probably less directly influential for muscle growth than many people believe. Moreover, in defense of good exercise technique, in this study the strict technique leads to similar gains with lower weights, so you could argue their stimulus to fatigue ratio and their injury risk were better. If strict exercise technique allows you to train with higher training volumes without getting burned out or injured, that is a big plus because training volume is well documented to benefit muscle growth, as long as you can recover from the additional volume.

Moreover, this study may underestimate the importance of exercise technique because it didn’t manipulate tempo, at least not on the eccentric. So the eccentric muscle contraction when lowering the weight was two seconds in both conditions. This means that the cheating group was effectively using eccentric overloading, getting the weight up with some momentum, but then still controlling the weights on the way down. If you’re letting the weights fall so you’re doing your Arnold type curls, hurling weight up, but then letting it fall back down without a significant eccentric muscle contraction, then you’re basically omitting the eccentric muscle action, which omits a lot of the muscle tension. Eccentric muscle actions are widely believed to contribute significantly to muscle growth, in part because of signaling via Titin and the ability to produce very high amounts of mechanical tension during the eccentric muscle contraction.

In support of exercise technique mattering at least to some degree, one earlier study found that when people were instructed to perform their biceps curls to just get the weight up, did experience less muscle growth in the biceps than people that were instructed to perform the exercise with strict technique. However, in this study, the strict exercise technique was enforced by focusing on the biceps, therefore also adding a mind-muscle component to the research question. That said, I think exercise technique was much more important than the mind-muscle connection because in that same study, they did not find any effect of the mind-muscle connection for the quadriceps when doing leg extensions.

Leg extensions don’t allow for a whole lot of cheating. Biceps curls absolutely do so it makes sense that when exercise technique is fairly standardized because of the machine, the mind muscle connection no longer has any influence, and it’s the exercise technique that matters. So most people that think that the mind-muscle connection matters, I think in large part it comes down to the mind-muscle connection being a tool or a cue for them to focus on better exercise technique, rather than that their focus on the muscle itself really matters. Because logically thinking about a muscle does not increase mechanical tension in that muscle if the biomechanics of the exercise do not change.

Having this nuanced understanding of why different studies can come to seemingly different conclusions is a big part of what I think is the second biggest problem in evidence based fitness right now: The idea that studies constantly contradict each other. This is simply absolute bullshit. It’s extremely uncommon in exercise science or nutritional sciences that studies, multiple studies in a row in particular, completely contradict each other in the facts that they observe. Interpretations about studies can easily contradict each other, but the observed facts are largely ever completely incongruent.

For example, if we look at the recent surge in activity around lengthened biased training, it seems that range of motion is no longer important. However, what really happened is that we have a bunch of studies showing that greater range of motion led to greater gains, and now we know that it specifically is extending the range of motion to longer muscle lengths that is the source of those additional gains. So rather than contradicts the importance of range of motion, we simply have a more nuanced understanding of what exactly it is that’s contributed to the greater gains in those studies.

Similarly, a lot of studies show that fasting induces autophagy and autophagy is great for your health. However, autophagy is stimulated by any type of catabolism. Fasting is a way to induce an energy deficit. Therefore, fasting induces autophagy and that has certain health benefits. But when we equate for the calorie deficit in research, we don’t see significant differences in measures of autophagy in the limited research that we have. So there are no contradictions between the ideas that fasting is good for your health and the conclusion that you don’t need to fast for good health. Fasting is simply a tool that allows you to induce an energy deficit, and it’s the energy deficit that is good for your health.

Now, you might have heard about the replication crisis in science, and this concerns the use of untrained individuals in exercise science in particular. Many people believe that studies on untrained individuals do not extrapolate to trained lifters. However, this is in large part due to the lower statistical power and the p-fallacy that is used when interpreting research on trained lifters. See, when we do a study, we have to select – are we going to use untrained individuals or are we going to do a study on trained individuals? If we use untrained individuals, then we don’t know if the findings really extrapolate to trained individuals. Historically in science, most of these things do in fact translate, and there are very few examples or things not translating at all. Yet if we use trained individuals, it may be harder to get enough subjects for the study, and the amount of muscle growth we’re going to observe is going to be lower. This causes a problem that is known as low statistical power.

When we compare two groups of individuals that are training, they’re both well trained individuals, you see that one group has, you know, how much growth are you going to get in eight weeks? Very little. The other group has, well also very little growth. In that scenario how are you going to say that one condition was superior to the other when both groups barely grew at all? The result of this is that many times we find something in untrained individuals and then subsequently we have a hard time replicating that in trained individuals. However, it’s rarely the case that the findings completely shift in the other direction. For example, if we look at rest intervals, it’s not like we’ve seen that long rest intervals are superior in untrained individuals, but suddenly short rest intervals so superior in trained individuals. It’s rarely works that way.

So most of the replication crisis is simply null findings that we say are no statistically insignificant. And then people say, oh, you said it was significant in the last study and now it’s statistically insignificant. This is called the p-fallacy. In reality, most studies may have found a positive effect, but it was statistically significant, meaning it was easier to observe in one study than the other. We see this currently with the use of lengthened partials, and lengthened bias training in general. Most of the studies favor training at longer muscle lengths. However, many of the studies, especially in trained individuals, do not reach statistical significance. However, there’s no trend in the opposite direction. There is no trend at all in the research that shorter lengths are better.

So what we see is that longer muscle lengths typically lead to more muscle growth in training. However, the effect is much smaller in trained individuals, and the effect may not be as large as originally believed in some of the studies. And that’s probably because of publication bias. So typically the first study that finds something, they can reach a very large effect size, and then subsequent research finds the effect size is actually a little bit smaller than the first study may have suggested. And that tends to be because more shocking findings or statistically significant findings are easier to publish, and null findings are harder to publish, especially when it comes to a new field. Nobody cares for example, if you research a supplement that nobody has even heard of and you conclude that it doesn’t work.

So the current downfall of science based lifting, I think, is in large part due to a lack of understanding about how to interpret scientific research properly. The idea of evidence based fitness comes from evidence based medicine. And I don’t see anyone going to a hospital and saying: Oh, these studies are bullshit. I want you to give me the medicine that hasn’t been tested in scientific studies. When it really comes down to it, most people realize that science is the best way to answer a question. However, interpreting science can be very difficult. And what we often see is that ideas in evidence based fitness and the fitness industry in general tend to be like the stock market. Underneath there is an intrinsic value, or the truth that is seen in scientific research, but the popularity of ideas gravitates around that. So certain things come and go in terms of popularity.

On that note, I challenge all my viewers to come up with a good example where scientific research has directly contradicted itself not the interpretation of the research, but the actual facts. When have we seen in evidence based fitness that the facts gravitate towards one realm, and then later it turns out it was actually the opposite? Because this is a claim that’s being made when studies constantly contradict each other. Find me an example of studies observing A and then later saying, oh, it was actually the opposite of a. My bad. Come on, hit me. Hit me! – What? – I want you to hit me as hard as you can.

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