Bodybuilding has lied to you – the fallout

2010 January 12

By Matt Perryman

The piece I wrote yesterday – Bodybuilding has lied to you, and that’s why you’re skinny – was a big hit. In particular, it was posted over on BB.com’s teen forum, which is the digital equivalent of dropping a roach bomb in a the middle of New York City. The hilarity that was generated has been off the charts.

A quick view of the thread reveals that a few guys thought it was solid info; they actually read it and saw the points I was making. A much larger segment of the respondents thought it was bunk, of course. It’s interesting that these guys all had their stats posted as being between 130 and 180 lbs, if they were average height, or around 190-210 if they were taller.

In other words, they went out of their way to prove me right – still skinny, still weak, and still telling me I don’t know what I’m talking about. You don’t pay money for better comedy, folks. I flat out said, in the article that they read, that it would happen – and they did it anyway.

But you know I can’t just let things rest at that, because just pointing out that they’re skinny and weak, and will remain that way until they wise up or go on the juice, isn’t how I do things. Instead, I want to take a few of the objections that were raised and dissect them.

Strength is Size

This particular argument is as old as arguing on the Internet, and maybe even older. There are so many misconceptions about this that I actually devoted a whole section in Maximum Muscle to debunking the common myths; so I’ll just give a brief summary of those points here.

1. “Strength” does not mean training like a powerlifter. Everybody immediately defaults to this position without even thinking about the argument. Powerlifting is a competitive sport that requires specialized training to increase strength in the three lifts. Training to increase your 1RM in the squat, bench, and deadlift qualifies as getting stronger, yes – but that is not the only way to define ‘getting stronger’. Increasing your strength might mean increasing your best set of 8 reps; or it might mean going from one set of 5 to four sets of 8 with the same weight; and it can even mean going from a maximum set of 5 to a very easy set of 5 (by using the relative feel of the set as an indicator).

“Getting stronger” can mean lots of things, and fundamentally all it means is that your muscles have added the ability to handle a workload. While I do think powerlifting overlaps with bodybuilding in many ways, they don’t have to be defined as the same thing. That’s an epic black/white fallacy which includes no other options between Sheiko and five-day Bro-splits.

2. There’s a difference in absolute strength levels between individuals, and relative strength gains for any given person. In other words, you can’t just compare all 600 lb squatters or 700 lb deadlifters and say “see, he squats X but that guy is bigger and he only squats Y”. Well no shit.

People have different bodies. A guy that’s only 5′5 with tiny wrists and ankles will never have the same potential for raw size or the lifts of a guy that’s 6′5 with big joints. We’ve all heard about the freaks that can walk in the gym their first day and deadlift 500 lbs; and there are other guys that take 5+ years to hit that number. Some will never get there. Which means that comparing absolute strength levels is pointless.

What is relevant is the relative strength gains over your lifetime. If you’re a small guy that brings his squat from 100 lbs up to a raw or mostly-raw (say belt + light wraps) 550 lbs, you’ve grown. You had to have grown to move that weight. And I’m banning the first one of you that complains about ‘neural efficiency’. I don’t want to hear that shit. If it was about neural efficiency, every one of those 150 lb kids could just hit the gym 4-5 days a week with singles and eventually ramp up to that load. Why doesn’t that happen?

Moving heavy weights around requires muscle mass.

3. Specialized training yields specialized results. This is why we can all point to ’small’ powerlifters moving gangsta weights around. Those guys have trained themselves to maximize every advantage in leverage, equipment, and they’ve trained for months or years to lift that way.

If you’re seeking muscle mass, you’ll want to do things a little differently. Nowhere in yesterday’s article did I say you shouldn’t train with an emphasis towards bodybuilding, which is why I’m surprised (not really) that so many idiots read me saying ‘train like a powerlifter’.

I think that bringing in powerlifting as a comparison is the wrong choice, honestly, because it always seems to lead to this nonsense. I think we may do better to start phrasing this as ‘basic strength training’ or what Rip calls his Basic Barbell Training. This differs from powerlifting in that there’s no specialization towards lifting 1RM weights in the big three. Instead, you’re focusing on those lifts, but also trying to improve other stuff to build well-rounded general strength.

Obviously there’s a lot of overlap, but basic strength training doesn’t have the specialized elements of competition involved. As per point #1, you can most definitely train for strength without specializing into powerlifting – even if you’re using the same exercises and similar programs.

4. The biggest guys are always the strongest guys.

Seriously. Just come the hell on now. Training for strength clearly means you’ll never get big, right? If only these poor men knew how to follow a proper bodybuilding routine.

Dante Trudel, perhaps better known as ‘DoggCrapp’ of DC Training fame, has the best outlook on this. Dante’s system emphasizes getting stronger above all else – yet it’s still a very popular and successful method for turning out excellent bodybuilders. And that’s because Dante realized that time and again, the best-built guys were the ones coming from a strength background that later switched to bodybuilding.

Shocking, right? You’d almost think that years of heavy-ass lifting and eating builds a ton of muscle.

5. ‘Strength athletes are fat, and I don’t want to be fat. Besides, if you diet these guys down they won’t have that much muscle anyway.’

Well, hard to argue with that one right? Everybody knows powerlifters are fat. Just look at poor tiny Konstantinovs up there. Or how about these poor fat fellas:

Yeah. No muscle there at all, right?

I mean, I guess if you’re used to seeing dbol-bloat as ‘gains’, and you think a bulked-up guy ‘doesn’t even look like he trains’, you’re the kind of idiot that would think this. Unfortunately, you’re just wrong.

Hell this even works with girls. Back when I was coaching figure girls, I had them emphasize strength training in the off-season and the early phases of contest prep. Why? Because it builds a nice foundation of shapely muscle. When they diet into shape later, guess what happens? It turns out that women develop that nice ‘athletic, toned’ look they always seem to be chasing when they train for strength and then eat a reasonable diet to get in shape.

This meme of the eternally fat powerlifter is yet another stupidity bought into by the skinny forever crowd – the idea that if you’re fat, you don’t have any muscle. Apparently the idea that you can, you know, diet, never occurs to them. If you think fat guys don’t look like they even train, while you’re 150 lbs and that fat guy is warming up with your maxes, you should just shut the fuck up until you realize what it takes to actually put in your dues.

The fat guy can go on a diet. What are you going to do, flex bone? Flash your abs on Myspace?

Let’s just call it what it is – clueless skinny kids that need a way to rationalize staying skinny. It’s easier to hide the fact that you don’t know what you’re doing when you use the excuse of wanting to build ‘a lean symmetrical physique’. Horseshit. Man up, skinny.

I could discuss the diet issues as well, since they seemed to completely misunderstand that as well, but this is already running long enough. I’m really convinced that most of them didn’t even bother to read it, since they only seemed to address points I didn’t even write, but that was expected right out of the gate.