Science OR Experience: Why pick just one?

2010 March 23

By Matt

The eternal debate: what’s more valuable, scientific research or the wisdom of experienced lifters?

Simple minds like simple dichotomies. Black and white is easier to deal with than shades of grey. The unfortunate problem for our friends is that the world isn’t so easily classified. It would be a lot easier if it were.

Let’s look at the two contenders:

The Labcoat

The Labcoat loves studies and research. He loves science so much that it hurts. The Labcoat wants to worry about things that are largely abstract, impractical, and useless in the gym. If there’s not a research study to support it, the Labcoat doesn’t want to hear it.

The Bro

The Bro doesn’t need any of your damn textbooks or your “science”*. The Bro has been lifting for at least 30 years, has won championships in every sport there is, and has trained at least 100 Olympic champions. What the hell is your “science” going to tell him?

* You have to put “science” in quotes, otherwise it’s not demeaning enough.

These are obviously caricatures (to a point…), but they do demonstrate the most common thought processes you’ll find whenever this argument turns up.

As much as I hate to make the “truth lies somewhere in the middle” argument, in this case it’s pretty much spot on.

Science has flaws

I know, I was the first one surprised! But it’s true, science is hardly infallible. You know what though? That’s kinda the whole point.

To think scientifically means you have to abandon some preconceived ideas you may hang on to.

Firstly: a “theory” is not “something I thought up while getting high”. A formalized scientific theory is something that has been tested fairly rigorously and has held up to scrutiny over time. Gravity? You better believe that’s a theory.

But gravity’s a fact, you say. That’s right, it is. That’s what “theory” means in science – it’s been tested over and over, and proven itself right so many times that it’s taken for granted. There is no controversy to a theory. If you walk off a 30 story building, you’re going to accelerate towards the ground at a set value until something (usually the ground) stops you.

Anything else would be properly called a hypothesis. A hypothesis is closer to the “stuff I was thinking while drunk” concept; it’s a statement or assertion that is put out there and needs to be tested. If a hypothesis is proven true, repeatedly, it may get promoted to theory. But if I say “the sun is a nice shade of turquoise,” well, I’m free to make that suggestion, but the instant anybody goes outside, that hypothesis is going straight to the trash bin.

That’s a central tenet of science: things are only considered true and factual if they stand up to repeated scrutiny. In order to do that, any theory or hypothesis must be open to scrutiny in the first place – it must be falsifiable. In science, we must leave the door open to the idea that a piece of information may be incorrect.

What am I getting at here? Well, the main thing is that science is only as good as the hypotheses being generated, the methods used to test those hypotheses, and the people that interpret the results of that testing. On top of that, the entire point of science is that anything we currently hold true runs the risk of becoming false as we learn more. As you can see, there’s a lot of potential weak links there.

The big problem in exercise-related science is that it’s currently very limited as a field. Most of what we rely on in contemporary strength training comes from older Russian/Soviet research which is pretty much inaccessible to us Westerners, beyond the few snippets that have made it into our little sub-culture. Modern Western science is catching up, but we’re still stuck in that “go run and you’ll be fit!” mindset in some ways.

The net result? We know a lot, but we don’t know everything. As I’m fond of saying, science can only ever give us boundaries. Science can tell us in a very broad sense what’s not likely to happen, and from that we can make reasonable guesses to fill in the blanks.

For example: I can tell you with some certainty that if I take a high level strength athlete and have him stop weight training, then go run a few miles every day, he’s going to get weaker and lose muscle. I can say that because I know that weight training is required to build and maintain muscle and strength, and that large amounts of aerobic exercise tend to work against muscle and strength gains.

What I can’t always do is tell him that doing 4 sets of squats is better than doing 5 sets of squats. How the hell would I know that? What study can I look at that will give me that answer? I’ll tell you: there isn’t one.

Those two examples highlight the real issues we face: the first case is an issue of the Big Picture. I’m looking at that athlete in a global sense, considering the broad factors that affect his training. The second case is a matter of trivia; it’s a relatively unimportant detail, and something that science just can’t fill in right now.

Science is good for showing us the big picture. It sucks for the detail work. When it comes to the big picture, what we know is sufficient to set some pretty hard rules; things that won’t change no matter what. The details, that’s where science loses its explanatory power. The data is just too fuzzy to pull out the kind of fine-grained recommendations that everyone seems to expect.

Your experience is great, but it still has to follow the rules

Good or not, your credibility in any physical/athletic kind of activity is going to be determined by either how you look or what you can do in said activity. There’s some logic to this, if you think about it: you wouldn’t be the best looking bodybuilder or the strongest powerlifter or the fastest sprinter if you didn’t know how to train for those activities, right?

You’d be surprised at how much athletic ability for any given sport is tied up with genetic ability, at least in the absolute sense. What I mean by that is, there are people that are never going to run a sub-10 second 100m sprint, no matter how hard they work. There are people that won’t ever win a Mr. Olympia title, or set an IPF record.

To perform at the world level, that takes genetics above all else. Yes, you still have to train your ass off to get there (most of the time), but if you didn’t have genetics to do it in the first place, you’d never make it happen no matter how hard you worked or how many drugs you took. Genetics are a permissive thing; they don’t guarantee your success but if you don’t have them, you won’t get there at all.

That’s why looking at performance in absolute terms is misleading. What you have to do for the experience argument to work is look at relative performance. A guy that started off tiny but blew up to be a pretty decent-looking bodybuilder, not world-class but maybe competitive in regional shows and certainly a cut above the “average gym rat”, certainly had to work his ass off in and out of the gym – and be smart about it – to get where he is. That’s a guy worth listening to if you’re a small guy trying to get in the best shape you can.

The take home here is simple: when evaluating somebody’s cred based on experience, you don’t necessarily want to look at the best performers; instead, look at the guys that made the biggest improvements with what they had to work with. Or even better, look at the guys that can consistently make those gains happen with groups of people.

That’s the first thing. The other thing that’s just ridiculous is when some guy will use his pics or his lifts to disprove a research study. No, seriously, that happens.

I mean, I can see maybe if it’s an experiment looking at strength improvements or something, and a guy that benches 500 comes along and goes, “man that’s pretty stupid”. Well, he’s probably right, given that most studies of that nature are done with lazy university students that have never set foot in a weight room.

Here’s the key point: he’s right because it was a crappy study, not because he benches 500 lbs. His experience in the gym will give him some insight as to how the study fails, for example; if they’re using a stupid protocol that doesn’t reflect his experience or the experience of other strong people, then that’s bad science (or to be fair, inapplicable science). That’s fair game as a criticism, too.

But it’s still incorrect reasoning to say “I bench 500 lbs, therefore this is wrong” without any further qualification. That’s all the difference in “making a good point” and “being a meathead idiot”.

Where it gets ridiculous is when you look at a paper on like, I don’t know, say insulin’s metabolism or something like that – something that really would require a lab to test and draw conclusions. You point out that no, that’s not what this means, and what’s the response?

Oh yeah Labcoat? Post ur pics!

…..

No, seriously, that happens.

Look, I don’t care how big you are, how lean you are, or how many shows you’ve won. None of that means you know a thing about insulin metabolism. You can’t just flex away a GLUT4 transporter because it disagrees with your diet plan.

Or how about the complete lack of controls that go along with anecdotes? There are ways to be scientific and analytical with your workouts and diet. You can make changes and pay attention to the effects. The kicker, though, is that you actually have to be honest, which is the exact opposite of most people who recite the mantra “got great gains, bro”.

Ninety-nine times out of 100, the person making statement neither saw great gains, nor could he tell you what the fuck “great gains” means in the first place. He definitely didn’t do anything so radical as keeping records and drawing conclusions based on real data.

In other words, correlation is not causation, and just because some jerk decided he got “great gains” by with some stupid thing or another doesn’t mean this actually reflects what happened.

This is a fancy way of saying that most anecdotes are made-up bullshit.

Anyway: the point here is that your experience doesn’t disprove hard science. If you can point out the flaws in science, fire away; there’s plenty to be found, and plenty of confounds even if it’s not wrong per se.

The difference between a study being “wrong” and a study being “inapplicable” is something I need to talk about as well. Science is just science; they just look at stuff happening, quantify it, and then try to explain it. Contrary to popular belief, exercise science isn’t being done to help out bodybuilders and strength athletes. It’d be nice if it was, but it isn’t.

If you take a study and completely misread it, or don’t read it at all and pick out a nice shiny line from the abstract, of course “science” is going to look dodgy. The results of research are only as good as the person interpreting that research.

Just remember that your own results don’t have any bearing on what the science actually says, and more often than not you can actually reconcile the two if you’re willing to think a little bit. Experience in the gym won’t ever tell you anything about biochemistry, but it can fill in the gaps that science hasn’t filled in yet.

That, good sir, is where your gym experience will absolutely shine.

Think Analytically: Respect Science and Fill in the Details

And finally, to the point.

So I told you that science generally can’t fill in the detail stuff. I’ve also told you that experience is good, but it has limitations, and without science to provide you with some boundaries, experience by itself is just stupidity with a nicer name.

Science gives you boundaries, a starting point if you will. Want to grow? You need to overload the muscles of your body (preferably all of them, not just chest and biceps) with a sufficient degree of tension-time overload, and you need to eat enough food to support the resulting growth.

That’s all science can tell us! Those are the conditions that must exist if you want to get bigger. How you create those conditions is not important.

Read that again. If you need it dumbed down a little: as long as you’re overloading your muscles on a somewhat regular basis with a reasonable program, then none of the other details really matter very much.

So why are all you jerks online arguing over different programs when those programs all do this? Experience tends to lead people to different conclusions with regards to the trivia and the details that science can’t give us, and damned if these different interpretations aren’t still effective anyway.

That’s why time under the bar is important; it teaches those detail-lessons in a way that science hasn’t yet (and probably won’t for some time yet).

Everybody always accuses me of being a Labcoat, but the truth is I’m not. I’m open to experience just as much if not more than hard science, for the reasons I’ve already covered. Solid and well thought-out training systems are what interest me, and what should interest you; that’s what tells you how to train and how to get big and strong. But I’m always mindful of the science, no matter what – that’s how you tell the solid and well thought-out training systems from the garbage.

Truth told, if a workout or program or whatever fits into the set of conditions that will lead to muscular growth – and a lot of them do, even so-called “strength” programs – then you grow. Imagine that, your body doesn’t give a damn about pointless labels. The same goes for any other goal, whether it’s pure strength, endurance, or any other athletic activity.

My point here? Be analytical.

That doesn’t mean blindly read studies (or just abstracts) and use that to tell the strong guys that they’re wrong. If you’ve been lifting a year, you don’t have the experience to pull that off; science doesn’t tell us enough, and you haven’t spent enough time in the gym to have a meaningful opinion.

That also doesn’t mean that you should get stuck in your ways just because you’ve made some good progress in your years of training. Keep up with the science. Be critical of what you do. Keep records, and really test out changes, instead of just assuming that X caused Y.

Being analytical means that you pay attention to the science, but also pay attention at the gym, and most importantly, you use some damn sense. Details are details for a reason. Do things that work. Do things that you like. Experiment and see what works and what’s a waste of time. Listen to the people that have been there, because they’ll give you tons of advice on missing the bumps in the road.