Real T-Men Speak Out: Part 2

2009 August 24

By Matt

Continued from here:

http://www.ampedtraining.com/knowledge/monday-morning-censorship-protest-real-tmen-speak/

So it seems that the laughs have continued in the T-Muscle thread.

King Bro himself, under the screen name “Professor X”, has contributed the following gems:

Agreed. The smallest most judgmental people I know…are the ones claiming their efficiency at study-reading…which is hilarious to me considering my education actually includes quite a bit of scientific research yet most of these guys are just lay people with little formal education.

I learned more from the big guys in the gym than I ever did in a medical journal. Science has always been largely BEHIND bodybuilders to begin with (for instance, finally jumping on a “low carb” bandwagon after bodybuilders had dieted like that for decades previous).

Anyone who truly lifts only according to research doesn’t really understand what a poor master they serve.

You know, barring a few meta-analyses in recent years (from Rhea & Peterson’s team, and the other from Matthias Wernbom) and one very old paper from John Atha, there really is nothing in the research that would give you any idea of “how to train”.

So I have no idea where this moronic conclusion comes from in the first place.

He claims he’s been exposed to scientific research, but pretty much every post the guy has made says otherwise. He seems like every other douche that “understands research” while cherry-picking abstracts to make a point.

On top of that, this doesn’t even address what’s being argued – which is a reasonable limitation for total muscle mass gains and a reasonable rate of mass gains in natural (which means non-AAS using) individuals.

Train hard and you’ll be the champ is a stupid line of reasoning from the get-go, let alone this strawman.

More laughs:

Because the person in question LIMITED his own research to bodybuilders of the 50′s and 60′s that he assumed were natural and used that as a baseline for all others who have gained muscle since that time period.

It ignores that the most logical life route for someone with physical ability to gain more muscle than average and be stronger than average is a pursuit that actually financially rewards that individual more than most bodybuilding contests can.

ie. that means anyone trying to come up with some genetic ceiling while ignoring big football players, baseball players or anyone in any other athletic endeavor that is NOT bodybuilding is creating a false conclusion if they try to apply this to all humans. The data is too limited in scope to begin with to be take as a rule applied to all human beings.

Then why do Casey’s assumptions line up with this?

Fat-free mass index in users and nonusers of anabolic-androgenic steroids

A sample of 157 athletes, roughly half natural and half drug-users. It’s even adjusted for height!

Bias here, too?

Then when called for an example, the good professor links to another T-Mag member who’s only 22 and has exceeded this supposed ceiling.

The member in question is quite impressive, without question. I’ll even concede that this guy could be the real thing – that is to say, a genetic wonder that’s never touched a drug. I’ll leave it that because the guy isn’t in the debate and I have no reason to run around accusing people of steroid use.

Don’t worry though, there’s plenty of logic errors to laugh at.

Firstly, Professor X didn’t give the guy’s stats. He’s visually impressive, but without height, weight, and bodyfat percentage, who knows if he’s even out of line with either Casey’s equations or with the FFMI numbers?

For that matter, Professor X hasn’t exactly given his own stats, either. Would his argument still apply if he was 8% body fat? I’m not talking about Internet bodyfat percentages, either.

Secondly, and more importantly, nobody has claimed anything but averages here. In statistics, you tend to end up with a bell curve distribution. Most people will be clustered around the middle, but there are also going to be exceptions out in the tails. They’re just rare.

Or in other words, there very well may be exceptions to the rule. Nobody has claimed that either Casey’s limit or the FFMI limit were hard ceilings that could never be broken. It’s a rough average, not the damn light-speed limit.

Of course Professor X is naively assumes that n=1 generalizes to the population at large, in a mistake that anyone familiar with basic statistics wouldn’t make. You don’t assume that somebody three standard deviations from the norm reflects the population at large. That’s moronic.

I’m further unimpressed with his basic premise of Bro-argumentation in the first place. Apparently your knowledge and ability to get results correlates to your pictures. That’s an interesting choice of ad hominem argument, but it’s what you expect from a narcissistic idiot.

I usually have little patience for people like this. They are simply looking to make themselves feel better for what they can’t do and trying to degrade everyone else who claims it is possible while never showing their own progress.

Talk about cognitive dissonance. This guy is the textbook definition of “Bro-tard”.

The “Professor” needs an introduction to Occam’s razor and basic reasoning. “I’m big so I’m right” is about the dumbest argument you can make. He has only a cursory understanding of research, applicability of research, and logical argumentation – just enough to sound competent while relying on the same fallacies as every other idiot on the Internet.

No big deal though, for all his e-tough guy talk he also sits on a moderated forum behind the protection of moderators. Go figure.