Kill Your Fragility, Build More Muscle

Chapters:

00:00 Intro

01:20 1: Warm-Up

03:32 2: (Post-workout) Stretching

05:33 3: Exercise Order

08:18 4: Carbs

09:57 5: Injury Prevention & Recovery

11:57 6: Pre-workout Supplementation

14:03 7: Posture

15:45 8: Training Splits

16:57 Outro

Transcript:

The pursuit of optimization has left many lifters fragile. If you can’t be productive without your two hour morning routine – that’s fragility. If you can’t have a good workout without your 20 minute warm up and your pre-workout supplement – that’s fragility, not optimality.

In Nassim Taleb’s classification, any system or strategy that suffers from volatility or things not going according to plan is defined as a fragile. Stronger systems or strategies are robust: they are unhampered by volatility. The strongest systems, however, are antifragile: they get stronger from things not going according to plan. “Because that’s all part of the plan.”

Our bodies are the ultimate antifragile systems. When we exercise we deliberately put a stress on the body and it recovers and compensates from that stress, making us stronger in the process, instead of weaker. This video will help shed the fragility in your training and nutrition. As a result, you will save time, effort, and a lot of anxiety.

The point of this video is to focus on the big picture fundamentals that really work, not the minutia. So I will generalize a little bit more in this video, and I will be a little bit less detailed than I normally am. I will refer to other sources where you can go into more detail if you want.

The first part of your training, where many lifters can shed a lot of fragility is the warm-up. According to most PT certifications warming up is basically sacrosanct. It’s something holy that you just have to do and you cannot question it. However, a new study found that warming up didn’t actually benefit performance.

The researchers had a group of trained lifters perform four sets of leg presses and four sets of bench presses to failure at 10 rep max loads, 3 different times after 3 different warm ups: one time with no warm up, the control group, one time after one set of 3 to 4 repetitions at 75% of 10 rep max, so that’s just one low rep set, and then one more time with 2 sets of 3 to 4 repetitions at 55% and 75% of their 10 rep max. So basically one set, two sets or zero sets of warming up. Total repetitions performed were basically identical between the conditions, suggesting that the warmup didn’t improve performance at all.

If you’re new to this line of research this may sound shocking, but there are actually numerous previous studies that also found that warming up has very little effect on performance. Most of the effects, if they occur at all, are for things like 1 rep max’s on the squat, which are technical, or things that are technical and explosive, like the clean and jerk.

Most of the positive effects of warming up are because of – you’d never guess – temperature. You don’t have to have a complicated warmup with all of these different foam rolling, dynamic stretching routines, whatever… Anything that gets your core temperature up basically gets the job done for most intents and purposes. If you’re a recreational lifter, something very brief that just gets your temperature up in any way is basically fine.

Warming up should matter, if not just for performance, then maybe for injury prevention, although there’s also no good research that warming up actually reduces injuries. But we do know, theoretically that warming up improves things like nerve conduction velocity, and it makes tissues more elastic, which helps reduce tears and strains. Overall, it’s clear that you don’t have to obsess over your warmup. You can warm up largely by feel and focus simply on getting your actual temperature up. Anything that achieves that is probably fine.

You wouldn’t sink into a 1 rep maximum squat with 400 pounds without any warmup, but you also don’t need to do more than what makes you feel ready to perform that 1 rep max.

Speaking of sacrosanct things that we feel like we have to do because they’re good for us, even if we can’t articulate why exactly: A new meta analysis of 15 studies found that post-workout static stretching or stretching in general had no effect on muscle soreness, strength development, or performance. These findings indicate that post-workout stretching doesn’t improve recovery. Earlier research has also found that stretching, and adjust post-workout stretching, doesn’t reduce injuries.

The reason for that is that most of the effects of stretching are neural. When you stretch a muscle, you improve neural stretch tolerance, but you don’t actually lengthen the muscle fascicles. You need very extreme protocols of stretching to increase muscle fascicle length. That is not something that a typical yoga session will achieve. Consequently, stretching mainly just makes you better at stretching.

If you are stretching for a specific skill, like being able to get your hands under the bar for front squats with a clean grip, or if you want to get in a more tight grip on back squats and you need to do some stretching to get into position, or if you’re a ballerina or a kickboxer and you need to do high kicks, stretching can have some positive effects on specifically these tasks, and then your stretching should be specifically tailored to getting better at that specific thing that you’re stretching for.

However, for most intents and purposes, for the average recreational lifter that just goes to the gym to look better and get stronger, stretching really doesn’t achieve much at all. Personally, I did tons of stretching, dynamic stretching before the workouts, static stretching after the workouts, and at some point I started questioning whether it was all worth it. I stopped doing all of it from one day to the next and I noticed absolutely nothing.

Resistance training is already inherently a form of dynamic weighted stretching, and research finds that resistance training makes you more flexible. It also actually increases muscle fascicle length. Moreover, any warmup sets that you do are inherently also a form of weighted dynamic stretching that help prepare you for the exact movement that you’re going to do. So most lifters that don’t do some other form of sports really don’t need to do any stretching at all.

Another part of the workout where many lifters suffer from high fragility is their exercise order. Many lifters feel that when they start training, they have their exercise order. It is “the plan” and they have to follow “the plan” exactly in that specific order. You really don’t have to. The most recent meta analysis of the literature found that exercise order had no significant effect on muscle growth. For strength development it is generally the case that exercises that you perform earlier in the workout gain more strength. When you are less fatigued it seems easier to build strength because performance is higher.

For muscle growth, however, while there are a lot of caveats in the available research, generally the conclusion seems to be that only your total work output matters. So your exercise order might matter if it affects your total work output, but it’s not a major effect. There are many ways that you can program a workout exercise order in a more flexible manner without any detrimental effect on your gains.

My favorite method that I use in my app as well is probably combo sets. I explained combo sets in more detail in this video, but briefly, a combo set is a series of exercises that don’t target any related musculature, so you could be thinking of an overhead press, a squat, and a chin up that you can all do in the squat rack, and you do those essentially as a circuit with rest in between. So it’s not a superset where you don’t rest at all, you do catch your breath and you have some rest in between the sets, but you do a set of squats, a set of chin ups and a set of overhead presses, and then you go back to the squats. But you do rest and catch your breath in between all of them. The end result is that your rest interval between sets of squats often ends up very large, which is great for muscle growth.

So the quads, after being trained, have a lot of rest before they are trained again. This means that your total work output is actually often very high, and we’ve seen in research that longer rest intervals when they increase total workout, they make you do more reps, they also lead to more muscle growth and more strength development in multiple studies. When you use combo sets in this manner, the quads, they get a lot of rest, but your total rest periods are actually relatively short. You basically just have to catch your breath. As a result, by the time you get back to squats, you have rested maybe a little bit longer than you would have if you had not done any exercise in the rest interval of squats. However, in that period, you’ve now done your chin ups and your overhead presses as well, basically cutting your workout length roughly in half or even a third.

And research indeed confirms that you can save an enormous amount of time when you program this way without any negative effects on your gains, and like I said, if your rest intervals go up because of this, it might actually improve your gains. So use combo sets and don’t be a slave to your exercise order. In fact, you can largely think of a combo set as a series of exercises where the order doesn’t matter.

Fragility can also show up in our diet, especially when it comes to carbohydrates. Carbs have a well documented placebo effect. When you tell people that they consumed carbs, even when they haven’t because they were consuming a shake or a gel in some study, they perform better. A new study even found that when you tell people that carbs improve performance, they have a bigger placebo effect.

Placebo effect might seem nice, but every placebo effect has a dark twin. The nocebo effect. When you believe you need carbs for performance you also become reliant on them. This creates a nocebo effect, when you no longer have your carbs, you become reliant on your pre-workout carbs to have a good workout, even if there physiologically wasn’t anything going on to begin with. And that might very well be the case.

In contrast to mainstream wisdom, I recently compiled a research overview where I showed that most research finds that carbs do not, in fact, improve performance, and over the long run the vast majority of studies have not resulted in actually improved strength gains or increased muscle hypertrophy. Most of the effects in any studies where people do think higher carb diets improve performance or muscle hypertrophy, it’s the case that they actually had a higher total energy intake. In studies where energy intake and protein intake were equated between the groups, we see no effect of carbohydrate intake on muscle growth or strength development. For most lifters that don’t do some other sports, like kickboxing or soccer, where the requirement for carbs is a lot higher, the amount of carbs and fats in your diet is really not that important.

The big picture things to get right are your total energy intake and your protein intake. When you have those covered, the carb to fat ratio of your diet is fine tuning and best.

The area where we see perhaps the most fragility is injury prevention and recovery in general. When people think about recovery, they think they need to go into an ice bath, they need a hot tub, they need a massage, they need to do foam rolling… In reality, none of those things have compelling evidence behind them to improve recovery. But you know what does really reduce injuries? Strength training!

A new systematic review of 40 studies looked at what reduces sports injury risk the most. Strength training won by far. All of the most successful training techniques had strengthening in common. This included Nordic ham curls, high intensity neuromuscular training and what they called “warm-ups” that actually involved a high degree of strength training. Most other recovery techniques are based on whazy woozy ferry dust. In contrast, resistance training has multiple established mechanisms of action on how it reduces injury risk.

First and foremost: It literally makes all the tissues stronger. Resistance training increases your bone density, it increases tendon size, all the tissues become stronger and thereby harder to damage.

Second: active recovery enhances blood flow. Most other techniques, like massage mainly seem to work to the degree that they work at all, because they simply improve blood flow. Going for a walk has the same effect.

Third: neuromuscular improvements increase proprioception and joint stability, basically, making the muscles take more of the force of movements that you’re doing and the connective tissues like your tendons and your joints less.

Fourth, and probably most underrated and actually most important based on modern pain sciences and physiotherapy, exercise reduces kinesiophobia, fear of exercise.

The bottom line is that most recreational lifters really don’t need to bother with anything for their recovery, other than just having a good diet and getting enough sleep. Beyond that, just go live your life. The reduction in stress, in the increased well-being that you get from having a happy life, arguably, is far more than all of these other techniques that I mentioned.

Another major source of fragility is pre-workout supplementation. There’s really only one active ingredient in most pre-workout supplements other than creatine, which is not really necessary to supplement pre-workout and could be supplemented at any other time, and that’s caffeine.

Ironically, caffeine has mostly mental effects, as I explained in this video. In fact, in research, we see that people have more effects from caffeine when they believe they are on it, but they’re not actually on it, then when they’re actually on it and they don’t know that they’re on it. Expectation of being on caffeine and the belief that you are consuming an energy drink is more important than the actual physiological effect of the caffeine. So it’s mostly a mental effect.

Likely because the effect is mostly mental, caffeine is one of the few drugs in the world where we see no dose response effect. That means that if you consume more caffeine you might feel more energized, but the actual effect on performance does not increase in the vast majority of research. Ironically, there is a dose response of the placebo effect, so when people believe they are on a higher dose of caffeine the placebo effect actually increases. But when you just give them more actual caffeine, the actual performance benefit does not increase.

Nevertheless, you might make the argument that caffeine does improve performance. Indeed, numerous meta analyses have shown that caffeine supplementation before a workout does increase performance in the workout. The effect is generally very small and not very reliable, but it’s there. However, research is also quite clear that caffeine supplementation over the long run does not improve muscle growth, strength, development, or fat loss, according to multiple studies. Part of that is likely because the effect is mental, and part of that is likely because there is tolerance and habituation to the effect of caffeine over the long run.

Regardless of how you interpret the findings, the bottom line is that you don’t actually need pre-workouts to have good workouts or to make good gains. If you like consuming a pre-workout, by all means have your coffee, have your energy drink. If it makes you feel good, if it makes you motivated, go for it, but don’t become reliant on it.

The seventh source of fragility I hope to kill with this video is the obsession with perfect posture. Tons of social media content from physiotherapist follows a playbook that is well known in marketing. You convince people they have a problem they didn’t know they had and then you sell them the solution. Research surveys have found that basically nobody believes they have perfect posture. But if they don’t have any symptoms, they don’t have any pain or dysfunction, what exactly is wrong with their posture?

Nuttin. That’s what.

Most research finds no significant relationships between people’s posture and pain or dysfunction, even for low back pain, where we see so many claims that it’s caused by sitting in the wrong way, or having the wrong posture or lifting in the wrong way. A systematic review of systematic reviews, basically the ultimate umbrella review found no significant relationships between posture, active or passive, and back pain. Instead, modern physiotherapy research teaches us two major lessons.

First and foremost: There is no perfect posture. There is no optimal posture for everyone. There is a very wide range of postures and structures for the body that can be perfectly sustainable and valid for functioning and pain reduction. If you have no pain or clear dysfunction, there is probably nothing wrong with you. Even if you have some degree of forward head posture or anterior pelvic tilt, or a limp length asymmetry. Absent pain or dysfunction, all of these things are completely normal. Just as normal as not looking like a ten out of ten fitness influencer.

Second, neither active nor passive posture is consistently associated with muscle lengths, tightness, strength, or pain or dysfunction. So when it comes to your posture don’t go looking for problems and things to fix that aren’t broken.

The final source of OCD fragility I hope to rid you off is your training split. Many lifters feel that their training split is something very important, and they start their program by thinking of what splits to use. Generally, they have very few splits in their mental vocabulary of splits, if you will, and they either select full body, upper-lower or push-pull-legs. That is completely backward.

What you should do is optimize your training volume and your training frequency per exercise and per muscle group for all muscle groups. Then you put all of that together, and then you get whatever comes out of that. Your split doesn’t need to have a name, and split itself is completely irrelevant for muscle growth. Muscle growth responds primarily to sets per week, per muscle for that specific muscle group. So an ideal program actually has essentially a sub program for every muscle group, and then you have to join them all together to find something that fits for all of the muscle groups at the same time. That’s a problem of combinatorial optimization.

And you know what’s really good at that? My app. So if you want an optimized training program, you can get a two week free trial for my app with the link in the description. Or if you want to learn how to make your own programs, you can also learn that in my online PT course.

I hope this video helped make you more antifragile.