2009 September 30 | 1 Comment »
By Matt
I’m bored and haven’t written anything for awhile, so I figured I’d just ramble about some stuff, if that’s cool.
Surfing around on the forums as usual, I keep seeing the same old questions asked. It’s always about what people should be doing. Should I do this? Should I do that? The names of “this” and “that” change every few months, but it’s always the same theme year after year.
Sometimes I’ll chime in add my two cents. Just as often as not I’ll end up pissing somebody off by not saying what s/he wants to hear. I tend not to give long-winded answers, because there’s a lot of background that goes into my analysis of any program, as far as rating effectiveness.
I can understand why this might irritate some people, but at the same time I’m not going to write out an essay every time somebody wants a question answered. In any case, I figured I’d go into a little detail about why I give the seal of approval or write a hater-post – or why I just don’t care.
When I say something is “good”, I mean a few things. Typically this means “yes, give it a try,” “I think that’s an interesting idea,” or trending towards the neutral “I see nothing wrong with that”.
When I say something is “bad”, I mean other things. This can range from “I have no idea why he’s suggesting that, because it makes no sense” right on down the line to “that’s retarded and you’re going to get hurt”. Note that this won’t necessarily mean ineffective – there are a lot of retarded workouts that have (supposedly) netted people great results.
It just happens that effectiveness is a complex matter, not something we can just attribute to a workout system. Sometimes the cause and the effect become dissociated (see also: post hoc fallacy).
There are things that I’m just “meh” about – things that genuinely don’t matter, like the way people obsess over their weekly workout splits, as if there’s some magical solution you can find that will make you big and strong (or lean and sexy). Or time under tension, that’s another thing that’s effectively pointless to track as I see it.
There’s lot of programs, or more accurately, systems, out there which I feel are very effective. I like Westside Barbell’s powerlifting approach. I like the DC Training system. I like the 5×5 methodology that Bill Starr used (and which has been further refined by Glenn Pendlay and Mark Rippetoe). I like Jim Wendler’s 5-3-1 approach.
I like these systems because they’re simple. They’re built on a few key principles, they’re easy to implement, and most importantly, they work. That’s what I consider to be “good”.
Note that I won’t necessarily do things the same way, or suggest they be done the same way. The specific implementation does not have to agree with my personal approach in order for me to consider it sound. Any program you look, even those based on the same principles, will have a degree of author bias. The good news is that this bias doesn’t matter. I can differ on the details as long as the basics are in place.
Which leads me to “meh”. There are some things I’m totally neutral about, too. If you educate a group of people on first principles and then tell them to draw up a workout program, you’re going to get as many different answers as there are people. Who’s right? Who’s wrong?
I’d suggest that none is any more (or less) correct than any other. Drawing up a program is nothing more than putting principles into practice – in that light, anyone It just happens that there’s a lot of ways to put these things together, and it’s really hard to determine an effect between program A and program B. It’s my suggestion that the weekly program alone is pointless to obsess over; it’s how that program changes from week to week that matters.
In that light, there’s very little use in worrying about your weekly program. It should be sound, but it’s very hard to make an unsound workout routine. This is one of those “meh” things – it really doesn’t matter that much. This is ironic because it’s often the first question people have: “Can you check out my workout?” “What workout would you suggest?”
I can suggest plenty, but that’s the least of your worries. Flip your outlook, and look at the problem from another angle: where do you want to be in a year? Do you have a strength goal? Do you want to gain X lbs of muscle? Lose Y lbs of fat? Some of everything? You need to list these goals, then work backwards and figure out how to get there (this of course assumes a realistic goal; “gain 70 lbs of LBM” or “put 400 lbs on my bench” doesn’t count). The weekly split is really the last thing to worry about in that process.
And of course we just have things that are flat-out wrong. An example that readily comes to mind is this “P90x” program that’s the fad of the moment.
I have to preface this by saying I haven’t actually seen the thing, but from reading the website and people’s descriptions, I’m getting a strong impression that it’s effectively CrossFit Lite. This isn’t unexpected, as the trend towards multi-faceted cross-training seems to be where things are heading in a broad sense, and I can’t say I really have any problems with that. It’s better than having people on assembly lines of machines or doing endless sets of pumping exercises.
Getting back on topic, P90x seems to be the home workout version of these so-called “functional” training methods. Again, no problem with that. But then you read some of the rationale behind the methodology. From their website:
The secret behind the P90X system is an advanced training technique called “Muscle Confusion,” which accelerates the results process by constantly introducing new moves and routines so your body never plateaus, and you never get bored!
“Confuse the muscles”. Really? Somebody just said that, in 2009, and expects to be taken seriously? This is the number one complaint I have with mass-marketed workout system – it relies on utter bullshit. Whether it’s to sell the program to marks customers, or the creator just doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about (or some of both), it really does piss me off to see utter bullshit being reinforced in the popular culture.
Come up with some catch phrases, use the hot models, that’s fine. Cheesy as all hell, but it doesn’t really irritate me. But don’t lie. Don’t just make shit up. Your marks customers won’t see through it, but anybody half-competent knows it’s garbage. When you do that, you risk hater-posts being made in your direction.
However, there’s a balance to take into consideration. I can criticize aspects of a concept without completely writing that concept off. When I say that “confusing the muscles” is a bullshit concept, I mean it. That doesn’t mean there’s not some use for the program. I won’t be recommending it to anyone, because I don’t recommend people that don’t understand what the hell they’re talking about, but this doesn’t make it useless all the same.
This is because we can’t forget the First Rule of Fitness: you’re not getting a damn thing done if you’re still sitting on the couch and stuffing your face. The most important thing is just to get up and move around, hopefully while eating less food. If programs like this can get people up and get them moving around while getting them to eat better, guess what? They’re going to get results from it.
I don’t agree with the rationale, I wouldn’t do it that way, and I’d even dare say I could do it better, but I can’t deny the fact that motivation is an important driver. For a great many people, just doing something (anything!) is an improvement.
Just because I don’t like an implementation, or don’t agree with it, or wouldn’t do it that way myself, doesn’t mean that there’s not some utility to it.
This is a big reason why I’ve changed my outlook on things like CrossFit in the past year or so. Provided it’s done intelligently and safely*, I really can’t complain much about it; it gets people motivated, gets them off the couch, and (caveats included) will expose people to a range of far more effective practices than moving from machine to machine or copying bodybuilding routines.
* These are my two biggest concerns, the random nature of the programming and the fact that form on technically-challenging lifts is often allowed to slip. But that’s another post altogether.
That said, I will argue the “I got GREAT results from this!” testimonial argument. The cum-hoc fallacy is a funny thing – it literally translates to “with this, because of this”. In other words, correlation is assumed to be causation. We can’t make that mistake.
People get results for all kinds of reasons, and funnily enough the exercise program/system they use is pretty low on that list. Even the best-designed programs only work because they make you do the effective things. No program in itself is responsible for your results (or lack thereof).
Somebody with good genes and a great work ethic will look good regardless of the method used. Somebody with a great work ethic will tend to look as good as s/he can, even without great genes. So does this program really work like magic, or did it just happen to get you up off the couch and watching your diet?
There’s also the matter of training economy. Above and beyond whether something “works”, I’d also ask the question “is this really the best use of your time?”
Yeah you might look great from doing 10 hours of cardio, plyometric drills (which are just cardio given a different name), and then some crazy circuit training (which really waters down the effects of both strength training and cardio), but that doesn’t mean a more sound approach wouldn’t have done the same thing.
Correlation is not causation. Effectiveness is not efficiency.
Really the only things I consider to be truly horrible advice are when it’s just completely stupid. If somebody wants to know how to increase his sprint times or his vertical jump and he’s told to do a body-part split, with every exercise done for 5 sets of 10, that’s stupid. If a beginner comes in and wants to improve his squat and somebody suggests the Smolov loading cycle, that’s stupid and potentially dangerous. If a 28 year old girl wants to get back to what she weighed at 17 and you tell her to starve herself, that’s really dangerous.
There’s bad advice, and then there’s “holy shit how do you breathe without choking” advice. In the scheme of things, “bad” and “stupid” are relative – getting somebody to waste his/her time is “bad” but it may still be useful. Telling somebody to do something completely against his goals is stupid. Telling somebody to do something dangerous is really stupid.
Other than that, most everything else boils down to preferences. “Good” things are based on evidence and get results. “Bad” things are made-up bullshit, to some degree or another.
