AmpedTraining Blog
2010 February 5 | 3 Comments »
By Matt Perryman
I’m guilty as hell when it comes to spreading the use of the term “bro-science”. I don’t know for sure that I was one of the originators of the term, but I strongly suspect I was. This isn’t a bad thing all around; people need to be more aware of how they’re thinking about topics, instead of just repeating things or making things up like most fitness “professionals”. The term “bro-science” is a convenient way to package up a specific collection of fallacies that are almost always trotted out in any debate argument over exercise-related subjects.
“Bro-science” itself was a term originally coined to note the complete absence of science and/or logical reasoning to back up a claim – the “bro” came from the habit of people on forums referring to everyone else as “bro”, and since it was usually one of these guys making the argument, the term just kinda stuck. The definition is straightforward:
Bro-science is when someone makes a completely unsupportable claim, not backed by either science or any form of reasonable speculation, and when challenged on that lack of support, the person instead points to his pictures, his lifts, or the phenomenal number of Olympic athletes he’s trained as support for the claim.
As you can see, “bro-science” has a very specific meaning, and there are very specific criteria that must be present for the word to apply. In effect “bro-science” is a particular kind of distraction fallacy, a red herring that introduces irrelevant information in order to move the burden of proof away from the person making the questionable claim.
Bro-Science is Not Anecdote
This needs to be said more than anything else, because the term is getting out of hand. It’s not bro-science when someone shares an anecdote. It’s not bro-science when a lifter shares methods and approaches that have given him results. Bro-science is not what happens when somebody disagrees with you, or because you don’t understand the research you’re citing.
Bro-science only happens when someone basically makes up some bullshit, then instead of conceding it’s made-up bullshit, tries to make up excuses for why he’s right because he’s big/lean/strong.
Anecdote is perfectly valid, especially if it’s a user-end kind of anecdote. Listening to high-performing athletes is almost always a good idea, because you can at least get some direction even if copying the exact program isn’t a good idea. If there’s no research to give us hard data, and there really isn’t when it comes to programming, anecdote is usually all we have to go on. Anecdote is not a problem, and it should never be a problem as long as we realize what anecdotes mean.
Bro-science enters the picture when a claim blatantly contradicts known, testable science. Working your abs doesn’t bring out “cuts”; that’s been tested and shown to be false. The body doesn’t spot reduce fat. Bro-science happens when a guy claims doing crunches brings out the cuts in his abs, and then says “just look at my abs” as proof.
Bro-science shows up when a claim is assumed to be correct because of pictures or lifts; it ignores causal relationships and relies on non-sequiturs. If the phrase “well it worked for me” enters the argument, especially if accompanied by pics and/or lifting numbers, that’s real bro-science.
The Fitness Industry Needs Some Bro
“Bro-science” has proven itself to be a double-edged sword. Now it’s easy to dismiss anything you don’t like, by claiming it’s bro-science.
But that’s just not true. Genuine bro-science requires genuine bro.
On the other side of the coin, we actually do need a little measured amount of bro-logic from time to time, because we just can’t rely on science for the answer. Theory is not complete enough to tell us a whole lot about practice, especially when it comes to strength training.
If you rely on research exclusively, you end up doing things like squatting high and never benching with your elbows past 90 degrees because some physio completely misinterpreted a study and decided that a full range of motion was dangerous. In that regard, even physios have their own Bro-Science – just repeating things without any form of analysis, and then appealing to research when you call them on it – even when the research they’re pointing to doesn’t actually back them up.
This kind of practical gym-experience isn’t bro-science, though. It’s just learning. It’s observing how things work, testing what gets results, and then refining your workouts accordingly. You don’t need a study to tell you things like this; personal anecdote, if approached rationally, can tell you far more then appealing to poorly-applicable studies.
To me, it’s not about the actual “science” component, in the sense of needing real research to back up any and every claim. Anything discussing physiology, especially if it contradicts physiology, should be scrutinized from that angle. Anything dealing with “lifting weights” need not apply.
Instead, you should be science-minded. You can still approach weight training rationally and empirically. That’s not bro-science just because it’s anecdotal. It’s only bro-science if you’re completely 100% right because you’re the strongest person in the conversation.
Keep it in its place, people.
2010 January 8 | 1 Comment »
By Matt Perryman
“When a finger points to the moon, the imbecile looks at the finger.”
Sometimes there’s deep truth in simple statements.
In Buddhism, particularly the famous Zen school, they’re fond of using koans like this to deliver powerful meaning. Koans are short stories, usually no more than a few short sentences, that always confuse Westerners because we’re brought up to be very literal-minded. You can’t look at a koan and try to interpret it literally. At least not if you expect to take any meaning from it.
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2009 September 30 | 1 Comment »
By Matt Perryman
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.
2009 September 8 | Comments Off
By Matt Perryman
I read a lot of science-related blogs and news sources, and I saw this linked on one of them just the other day:
NSF-Funded Ethics Report on Human Enhancement Released Today
SAN LUIS OBISPO, CA – August 31, 2009 – The Human Enhancement Ethics Group today released a new report funded by the US National Science Foundation, addressing such topics as: definitions, possible scenarios, freedom & autonomy, fairness & equity, societal disruptions, human dignity, rights & obligations, and policy & law.
Entitled “Ethics of Human Enhancement: 25 Questions & Answers,” the 50-page report serves as a convenient and accessible starting point for both public and classroom discussions, such as in bioethics seminars.
You can read the whole thing for free here: Ethics of Human Enhancement: 25 Questions & Answers (PDF, 50 pages)
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2009 September 7 | 4 Comments »
By Matt Perryman
Last week, or whenever that last T-Mag debacle was going on, I mentioned something called the Dunning-Kruger effect a few times. I had originally planned to write up a short research review on this beforehand, but the debacle was just to timely to ignore it.
In any case, this phenomenon is an interesting example of a cognitive bias – that is, a thought process which blinds us or distracts us from objective reality. The Dunning-Kruger effect is what you see when someone incompetent or unqualified judges his/her ability as being far higher than it actually is. In comparison, people that are competent tend to much more conservative and underestimate their own ability.
It really is just a formalization of all the old adages about being smart enough to realize how little you know; people really are too stupid to know they’re stupid. I think a lot of readers thought I was just making it up, but Dunning and Kruger have actually had several papers published on the subject. This is a very real thing, and it has some very interesting implications.
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2009 September 4 | 2 Comments »
By Matt Perryman
I’ve been reading a lot of cognitive science and neuroscience related stuff lately, and it’s had me on a kick with updates that seemingly have very little to do with strength training and exercise.
Well, it does, just indirectly; mainly I’m doing what I do best, which is targeting the flawed thinking and decision-making that most people rely on. Which conveniently manifests itself in fitness-related circles.
A recent debate (argument) on a forum got me thinking about how people look at their own thoughts and behaviors. Namely, people really aren’t thinking about how they think. That may sound like a dog chasing its own tail, but there’s something to be said for self-reflection as it applies to problem-solving.
Since program design and dietary strategies boil down to decision-making and problem-solving activities, this tends to hit home in a lot of ways. Read onwards.
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2009 August 26 | 1 Comment »
By Matt Perryman
As in part 1 and part 2 of this little social experiment, I want to analyze some of the T-Logic that’s come out of the T-Muscle forums, in response to challenges made against the outrageous claims of their forthcoming “I, Bodybuilder” program.
The thread that was on-going was finally ground to a halt – posts from dissenting viewpoints stopped getting through the filter, allowing the Real T-Men time to revel in their stupidity.
I honestly never thought I’d see so many people that are not just dumb, but truly proud of being that way. This certainly isn’t a new phenomenon, and as much as I’ve been exposed to it, it really shouldn’t shock me – yet it still manages to do so.
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2009 August 24 | 9 Comments »
By Matt Perryman
Lately I’ve been pretty quiet with my hater posts. Most of my vitriol stays on the Monkey Island, which is probably for the best since it’s off the Google. On the flip of the coin, though, it’s a bad thing because there’s a lot of good righteous anger that probably should be known to the ‘net at large.
Today, I want to rant about this latest paragon of quasi-scientific supplement hustling that plays on the insecurities of males 16-30.
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