There’s some interesting points raised, regarding inherent genetic limitations, the greater involvement of athletes from a wider talent pool from across the world, and the influx of both drugs and “technological solutions” into sports.
Most interesting:
“Future limits to athletic performance will be determined less and less by the innate physiology of the athlete, and more and more by scientific and technological advances and by the still-evolving judgment on where to draw the line between what is ‘natural’ and what is artificially enhanced,” [Berthelot] wrote in his paper, published in 2008 in the British Medical Bulletin.
If this is true, then it’s going to mean some very obvious – and depending on who you are, troubling – implications in the coming years, namely in the area of performance-enhancing chemistry and gene-therapy.
Of course, this says it all:
But performance based on science, not natural ability, may have less public appeal. And athletes who never improve may no longer hold our interest.
Most of us know the Deadlift as an exercise that works the lower back, along with its effects on the glutes, hamstrings, traps/mid-back, and just about everything else.
Nearly everyone stresses the importance of keeping the lower back extended or at least neutral while deadlifting, or doing any other movement for that matter – that is, keeping your back arched or, better, flat. Stuart McGill, one of the foremost experts on the spine, considers that neutral spine position to be both the strongest (from the standpoint of minimizing damage) and thus the healthiest.
Accordingly the deadlift is taught with a flat lumbar spine. The rationale is to protect and stabilize the spine – which is the role of both the spinal erectors, the numerous abdominal muscles, and most everything else in the trunk. This is good advice, in general. However, there’s reason to question the notion that you must never let your back round under any circumstances.
A whole lot of very strong deadlifters have lifted with form that would make any armchair Internet coach cry, from Bob Peoples to Vince Anello to current favorite Konstantin Konstantinovs. It appears that theory tells us one thing – that the lumbar spine is weakest and most prone to injury in a flexed position – while the empirical evidence from strong-ass deadlifters is showing us something else.
The reason for all this roundbacking, empirically speaking, is simple: when you’re pulling weights that some multiple of your body weight, it becomes a matter of optimal leverages. In all cases, you want to maximize your ability to apply force and minimize the distance the bar will travel. When deadlifting, that means keeping the bar close to your shins and keeping your shoulders and scapulae directly over the bar at the start, and keeping the bar close to your center of gravity as you pull.
When you pull a heavy deadlift, it’s much more efficient to keep your hips high and effectively stiff-leg the weight. With the hips high, you’re basically getting the knees out of the way; as a result, the bar stays closer to your center of gravity and the bar path is reduced as a result. It’s much easier to brute-force the weight up that way, as compared to the more technical style normally taught.
This is different than in a clean, where you’re trying to get the bar into a specific position for the second pull, the explosive phase of the lift. You need the bar somewhat out in front of you, to get around the knees and into the proper position; in fact, analysis shows that both the clean and snatch-grip pulls follow an s-shaped movement. In a deadlift, that particular goal is absent; less bar travel is a more efficient and much stronger pull. You get a shorter, straighter line this way.
In this light, back rounding isn’t happening so that your back will lift the weight (which really is a no-no). Instead, it’s to keep your hips in the optimal position while getting you closer to the bar and shortening the distance it will travel. The hips are ideally doing most of the work, not the lower back.
What you’ll tend to notice with the low-hip or clean style that’s commonly taught is that, as the weights get stronger, your hips will “shoot up” when you begin the pull, which wastes movement and can kill a heavy lift. If you’re coming into it convinced that high-hip and round-back pulling is bad, you’d probably notice this happening and try to lower the weight to work on your form. That’s one option I guess, but I wouldn’t expect that to carry you very far if your goal is to improve your maximum deadlift strength.
I’m going to suggest a different approach here. I don’t think the hip-shooting is a cue to reduce the weights; I think it’s a cue that your hips are in the wrong place to begin with. High hips aren’t a form defect; when hips shoot up before the pull, it means that 1) your body’s trying to achieve the best pulling position and 2) you have a poor setup because your hips aren’t already where they need to be. This is a case of your body defaulting to its strongest position, in other words.
If you look at the deadlift as a “hip hinge” movement (thanks to IGx for that one), instead of a squat or a clean, this makes more sense. The deadlift isn’t a squat with the bar in your hands. It’s not a clean. It’s a deadlift. These are all different exercises with different needs, so I’m going to suggest embracing the style instead of considering it a fatal flaw that must be fixed.
The only issue that can be raise here is safety; after all, isn’t this potentially dangerous? It can be, yes, but there’s a lot of issues we have to look at first. Namely, if the biggest guys are rounding their backs, to at least some degree, and we aren’t seeing them destroy their backs, then clearly there’s something else going on here. Remember, observations are what drive the model; the model doesn’t dictate reality. This isn’t proof by itself, but it is a good starting point.
Konstantin Konstantinovs, Svend Karlsen, Jouko Ahola, Ano Turtiainen, Vince Anello, Bob Gaynor, Bill Kazmaier, and of course Bob Peoples are all examples of this mindset in play, whether they’re doing it on purpose (like Peoples was) or whether they just pull without worrying about their form like a frantic hen.
Yes, form-warriors, I know that Konstantinovs’ lumbar rounding isn’t very pronounced in most of his videos, which is because he’s smart and doesn’t take the dreaded Side-Angle Deadlift Video. He still rounds, and he admits he pulls that way on purpose.
In any case, Konstantinovs is not the only one. Lifters have been pulling round-backed since at least Bob Peoples, and Peoples was advocating the style back in the 1940s; he also pulled over 700s lbs weighing under 200 at the time. Strongmen have little choice but to pull round-backed on events like the Atlas stones, and you can see in Karlsen and Ahola’s videos that they deadlift that way too.
Cat-backing: Round-backing’s Ugly Sister
I will concede that this style is not for newbies, and beginners should be taught the “correct” deadlift style. Newbies that pull with a round back most likely just don’t know what they’re doing. It’s a lack of knowledge, lack of body awareness, or both. Not knowing any better is not an excuse for cat-backing the weights.
This is equivalent of the guy that’s completely sedentary outside his job, then bends over one day to pick up a 10 lb box and hurts his back. Of course he’s injury-prone with a flexed spine; he’s done absolutely nothing to prepare himself for the strain. If you got this same untrained, sedentary person to squat with maximal weights, you can almost guarantee he’d hurt himself doing that, too.
With that in mind you have to distinguish between cat-backing and round-backing. Cat-backing is when you start to pull and it looks like somebody scared a cat. The back is arched due to weak muscles and simply not knowing how to keep tight. What you’ll see is guys that either start right out with a rounded back, or their back will round as they start the pull. Neither is good; it’s a compensatory movement. This should be highly discouraged, because it will inevitably mess you up.
There’s a difference in cat-backing and in pulling round-backed intentionally and knowingly when you’ve developed the strength to handle it. Strength is not only an adaptation of the muscles and nervous system, remember. Connective tissues have to adapt as well. Just as an experienced powerlifter can handle 1RM squat weights without injury, it’s just as possible that experienced strength athletes will adapt both anatomically and technically to a round-backed style of pulling.
With that in mind, my argument here can be summed up as such: teach the “correct” style, but don’t freak out when a guy starts to get some rounding as his deadlift climbs over 400 lbs. You can either keep resetting to 135 and hoping that somehow light weights will carry over to max lifts (they won’t), or you can deal with the cards your dealt and adjust to the style.
The big concern is that rounding will wind up hurting you sooner or later – even if you don’t feel it now, you’re racking up microtrauma and one day you’ll get hurt. Appeal to consequences aside, this is despite no actual data to back up that claim.
Indeed Stuart McGill himself recently examined the spinal loads generated by several competitive strongmen across multiple events (PMID: 19528856). Strongman events aren’t the same thing as a barbell exercise, no. In fact, they’re arguably worse if you’re from the school of thought that sees the body as a fragile thing that must never move outside its preferred positions. Strongman events are odd lifts that put the body into weird positions.
In this study, McGill and co. look at several of these events, including the stone lift (or Atlas stones). The interesting parts:
The [stone lift] case study shows how the spine is fully flexed and remains flexed for the majority of the lift. The spine is “hooked” over the stone and remains hooked as the stone is rolled up to the thighs. The extension of the hip and spine is used to place the stone on the platform. The world-class strongman once again used total torso stiffening to lock the spine, whereas the club strongman moved the spine and had distinct phases in muscle activation, compromising both performance and protective stiffness.
Although it had been hypothesized that the SL would create the highest compressive load on the lumbar spine, this was not the case. The stone’s center of mass was positioned close to the low back by the strongman, who curled over the stone with a torso “hooking” technique. This required extreme spine flexion, which was maintained until the final hip and torso extension thrust to place the stone on the platform.
In his discussion, McGill reaches effectively the same conclusions as I have:
The SL is an interesting study for the tradeoff between performance and injury risk control. While the spine is fully flexed to hook over the stone, this assists in getting the stone as close as possible to the low back and hip. These are the joints subjected to the most torque and, therefore, are the limiters of performance (notwithstanding grip on the stone). However, full spine flexion is the posture in which the spine has the lowest tolerance or the highest risk of end-plate fracture. However, the spine in the world-class lifter remained in this locked position until the final extension phase needed to place the stone. In this way, spine power was low during the lifting phase (i.e., no spine motion). Low spine power reduces injury risk, and high spine power (both high load and high spine velocity) greatly increases injury risk.
Technique differences were observed between the world-class competitor and the others that led to superior stiffness and hip and back moment generation to enhance performance and reduce the risk of injury.
In other words, lifters that train with a rounded back adapt to it. By developing the isometric strength of the trunk muscles, postural stability of the lumbar spine can be maintained even in flexion. The hips and other related muscles are actually handling the loads, while the spine itself remains stable. As long as the spine power is low, then the risk of injury is low.
It’s a matter of timing, as experience lifters will engage and brace the core before movement begins at the hip, which itself has a protective effect on the spine.
McGill notes that this is a trade-off between safety and performance, which from the standpoint of a professional concerned with safety is completely understandable. For a strength athlete, this means that round-backing isn’t the unforgivable sin it’s so often made out to be. When you’re competing in any of these strength sports, you have to accept that you’re taking on the risk of injury. It just comes with the territory. If you don’t like it, then you’d do best to find a new hobby.
I read this is McGill’s way of saying “don’t do this, newbies, but if you’ve got the wherewithal of a high-level strength athlete, just be careful”. That’s a far cry from the form-warriors that want to appeal to made-up consequences, complete with injury statistics that don’t exist, would have you believe.
How to Round-back and Piss Off the Internet
You know I can’t leave you hanging with just the theory argument, so let’s talk practical gym-applications. First, we can start with Bob Peoples and how he described the form:
On October 4 I finally made a new world record deadlift record of 700 pounds. At this time I was lifting on normally filled lungs. However, I then started lifting on empty lungs and with a round back – that is I would breathe out to normal, round my back, raise the hips, look down and begin the lift. I feel this is much safer than following the customary advice of the experts. By breathing out you lessen the internal pressure and by lifting with a round back you lessen the leverage – all of which adds many pounds to your lift. I have used the reverse grip and also the overhand hook grip but I have now changed to the palms up or curl grip (with hook) and will experiment with it for a while to see if it helps.
Bob Peoples and Terry Todd, surely ruining their spines
That’s the basic sequence of events to follow: exhale and round the thoracic spine, grab the bar, inhale into your gut and brace the spine, then pull.
There is one thing we can all agree on: to make this work, you need devastatingly strong lower-back and abdominal muscles. Bill Starr has long suggested doing Good Mornings, Stiff-Legged Deadlifts, and high-rep back hyperextensions to build the strength of the spinal erectors. This is not unlike the suggestions from Westside, as Louie Simmons has also recognized the value of having a very strong midsection, suggesting a healthy diet of glute-ham raises, reverse hypers, and assorted ab-strengthening work.
If you want to be a round-backer, you need to work the lower back and the abs. When is say work the abs, I don’t mean 100 crunches and then those leg raises where you hang from the sleeves on the bar. Use loaded exercises.
You also need to time your core bracing so that your lumbar spine is fixed into position before the movement begins. McGill notes that this timing is critical to the process, and I can see why. I’d be willing to bet large amounts of money that anyone getting injured from round-backing is either not doing this, such as the clueless noobs that don’t know any better, or simply has trunk muscles too weak to handle the weights.
So take your deep breath, brace the core, and pull.
Everybody likes to have a plan. A well-written, well-designed workout means you don’t have to think too much when you go to the gym. You just show up, do what the plan says, and go home.
I won’t lie; I like a good spreadsheet. It’s fun to fiddle around with the numbers and see how things crunch when you put them together in a program. It’s a useful way to track progress and see how things work together.
Here’s what prompted me to write this piece, though. What I want to know is how you’re using a spreadsheet to calculate percentages for the 5×5 routines, when those programs specifically state they don’t use percentages to calculate weights.
Clearly this is heresy. You’ve downloaded the Intermediate 5×5 spreadsheet we’ve all got, and seen mad gangsta gains. You downloaded that Stronglifts 5×5 workout and now you’re way stronger than you were doing bodybuilding workouts. I must be stupid.
Or not. Bill Starr’s original 5×5 programming made no mention whatsoever of percentages. Neither do the newer 5×5 workouts that are all the rage these days, whether you’re talking the Starting Strength novice routine or the Texas-method intermediate system.
Let me transcend the 5×5 for a moment. It’s been specifically reiterated over and over again that percentages are inherently inaccurate. Percentages are somewhat useful to more advanced lifters that have to plan things out and track progress over large swaths of time. Percentages are useful for those that have to peak for a contest on some planned date. For the rest of you, those of you without competitive goals and those of you in the off-season, percentages lose their shine. Even at their best, they’re a guideline, not a hard and inviolable rule.
Bill Starr’s writings mention percentages occasionally but he never really seemed to use them. In his widely-known workouts, you work up in sets of 5 to a heavy set, one day each week, and the other two days use your third and fourth set, respectively, to establish top weights for the day. So if you did 135×5, 185×5, 205×5, 225×5, and 255×5 on Monday, you’d do the first three sets on Wednesday (the light day) and the first four sets on Friday (the medium day). Simple. Effective. Not a percentage in sight.
That same simplicity carried over through all of his different levels of programming, using exercise choices and other variables to plan workouts instead of calculations. Whether you were doing 5×8 or working up to a heavy triple, Starr seemed to use that same basic, simple approach to figuring out the weights.
The same applies to the newer 5×5 workouts that are the big hits now. If you’re using the “Starting Strength”novice program, you don’t necessarily know your 1RM and linear progression doesn’t require it anyway. With that approach, you just do 3×5 each session and add more weight each workout.
If you’re using the Texas method – the variant with 5×5 on Monday and one heavy set of 5 on Friday – you don’t particularly need to know it either. The same idea applies: you add weight as you can, and when you hit a new PR you back off and start over with 80-90% of your previous bests. Or you shift gears to emphasize the Monday session or the Friday session, instead of both at once. Again, not a percentage in sight; you’re using other strategies to regulate progression and workload.
I understand why the spreadsheets have come about for these programs. People are addicted to numbers, and to precisely-planned workouts. There’s something about having a written plan in front of you that gives a psychological safety net, a kind of certainty that you’ve got something there to back up what you’re doing at each workout.
That’s well and good except for one crucial problem: your body doesn’t give a shit about your plan.
The 5×5 systems, whether Starr’s or Rip/Pendlay’s, are based around informally planned training cycles. That is, there is no set length of time to spend any given training cycle. You just add weight as you go; you might peak in three weeks, or you might peak in 12 weeks as progress allows.
If you’ve got a spreadsheet telling you what to lift and when, then you’re forcing your body to adapt to the program. Unless you have an upcoming contest, it is always preferable to let your body dictate the program, rather than letting the program constrain your results.
Don’t take away the impression that I’m saying these planned routines won’t work. If you’re showing up at the gym and busting ass, of course they’ll work. It’d be stupid of me to say planned approaches “won’t work”. I’m arguing over relative efficiency here, and that’s easy to demonstrate.
You may actually be limiting your own progress if you’re using planned-out 8-week cycles. What if you’ve got 12 weeks of progress in you and you stop at 8 because the program says? Or what if you’ll benefit from shorter cycles and more frequent peaks? In that case 8 weeks ends up being too long. In both cases, your 8-week program has failed you from the standpoint of efficiency; yeah, you almost certainly saw gains, but they weren’t the best you could have achieved.
Of course, the caveat to that is obvious: sometimes “the best you could have achieved” isn’t on the table, due to injury, outside commitments, what have you. And that’s a fair enough excuse, too. If you’ve got some mitigating factor like that and a planned-out routine works for your situation, by all means have at it. We have to temper our drive for efficiency and effectiveness with reality, too. Beat up old men have different needs entirely.
But if you’re not in the “beat up old-man” category, if you’re a youngster or otherwise a relative novice to strength training trying to complete the quickest line between the two points of “beginner” and “pretty strong dude”, then you need to keep this in mind. There is no such thing as “an 8-week routine” for you to finish before jumping to the next fad workout. There’s only training and incremental changes to your training with time. The sooner you understand this, the better off you’ll be.
If you want to use a spreadsheet…
There actually is a good way to do use spreadsheets that doesn’t involve locking yourself into percentages. The good news is that you can still get all anal-retentive about tracking your numbers and precisely-measured loads. The bad news is that you’ll still have to adjust it pretty regularly based on what you do in the gym. I know, it’s horrible to have to think and write things down, but this is the price we pay.
With something like original Bill Starr routine, this is simple enough to do. What you need is to establish your working weights on the heavy session, since that sets the tone for the week. Assuming you’re working with the suggested 5 sets of 5 reps, ramping up to a heavy set with roughly equal increments, that’s simple enough to code in to Excel or OpenOffice.
Input a starting weight (probably 60kg or 135 lbs for most exercises), then input your targeted weight for the heavy set. To determine your working sets, you need to get an idea of the increment for the jumps between each set. So subtract your starting weight from your heaviest weight, and then divide by the number of jumps. With five sets, you’ll be making four jumps.
So if you’re starting with 60kg and wind up at 125kg, you get a difference of 65kg. Divide that by four, because you’re making four jumps, and you get 16.25kg per jump. Most gyms can’t support that kind of awkward weight increment, so you’d want to round to the nearest increment of plates. In this case you’d jump 15 to 17.5 kg per set. Your numbers for this workout will look like so:
Set 1 60
Set 2 77.5
Set 3 95
Set 4 112.5
Set 5 125
This way you get nice, even jumps. To determine the light and medium days, you just use the first three and four sets, respectively. Light day would go 60×5, 77.5×5, 95×5. Medium day would go 60×5, 77.5×5, 95×5, 112.5×5. Simple. Effective.
That gives you the weights for your week. To plan progress over time, well, that’s easy too. If you’re doing a big lift like a squat or deadlift, you can probably get away with 5kg/10lb increases per week. Smaller lifts will probably need 2.5kg/5lb increases. So add that to your weekly lifts. When it gets hard and/or when you’ve reached a personal best, reduced those weights by 10-20% and start over.
Or you can use the recommended micro-loading strategy, by getting special small-increment plates, and reduce your weekly progress to a more manageable rate. In the long run, I’m not sure you’ll see a huge difference. Some people will prefer grinding it out with small increments; others will prefer to cycle the weights. This will probably change as you get stronger, too.
Note that this strategy applies to the Texas method and most anything else, too. If you’re just unable to calculate an extra 5-10 lbs on your lifts each week, you can plug this into a spreadsheet and it will tell you the answer. You can see right off the bat that this isn’t going to give you an “eight week cycle” or whatever; you won’t know when to back-cycle until you get there.
Frankly I think most of you need to get into that mindset anyway. Your body doesn’t operate on pre-programmed cycles, and neither should your training. Auto-regulation is where it’s at, folks. Work up each week, preferably building to a new PR, then back it off and start over. No fancy math required.
But I used a spreadsheet and…
Yes, yes, I know. You got great gains. I don’t deny that spreadsheets and planned training cycles can work. I’d never say they can’t, because they do, and my dirty secret is that I use loosely-planned training cycles myself. There is something to be said for planning out weights, even if it’s just as a starting point, in some circumstances; this is what we call “cybernetic periodization”, and while it’s not as cool as time-traveling kill-bots, it’s still pretty awesome.
My point here, as it almost always is, is that there’s a time and a place for everything. I have specific targets in mind and because of that need, semi-planned cycles are the best fit. If my goal was “just get stronger over time”, then I’d not bother with them; I’d use something informal like I described with the Starr workouts and the Texas method. Pick a program, add weight when possible, then back-cycle and start over when you hit a peak.
In fact, even my planned blocks use some of that informality to a degree. I predominantly use auto-regulation to develop my workouts, adjusting each workout according to what I did in the last session, but I also use spreadsheets to plan out starting points and estimated goals for each workout. I also like to make use of double progression schemes that have you building up the workload each session before adding weight; that’s another viable strategy to use.
This all ties in to most of my ranting in general: your body is too chaotic a system to plan in advance with precise numbers. Percentages and weekly/monthly plans are largely an artifact of Soviet ideology, not any real biological wisdom. Virtually every progressive, and optimally effective, periodization method (defined as “system of organization of training”) does not rely exclusively on hard-wired plans, but on adjusted workouts planned by feedback from the coach and athlete.
There are a few exceptions, of course. Sheiko is a big glaring exception; but even there, I think it can be improved upon with a little auto-regulation. In my opinion, a planned workout should never be more than a starting point. Which means that spreadsheets and plans are far from worthless. You just have to use them when they’re needed; and they aren’t needed for every workout strategy you’ll find out there.
It makes very little sense to use a planned spreadsheet for a 5×5 workout, and I’m honestly confused as to why anyone would find that to be optimally effective. I understand that the vast majority of you out there are used to thinking in terms of precise plans, so I don’t hold that against you. I just want to get the point across that you’re using the programming equivalent of training wheels when you do that. Yeah, it gets you on the bike and it gets you moving, but sooner or later you have to learn to ride on your own.
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.
It’s in vogue these days to hate on bodybuilding and the training methods bodybuilders use. The trend these days is to play up the role of strength-based training and ‘functional’ (sic) training methods, getting away from the older bodybuilding culture that’s dominated the popular conception of weight-lifting since at least the 1960s.
It used to be all about the pump, about feeling and shaping and all of that. These days, it’s more about ensuring proper movement, developing well-rounded fitness, and putting strength-based methods at the center of that balanced program. Specialized goals are then added to that framework, in the same sense that your house can look different from your neighbors even if they have the same blueprints.
I can’t say there’s a real problem with this, because that’s the gist of my philosophy, and in general I think that’s how things should be done. However, this takes us to a dangerous place, a thought process that can be counterproductive; in other words, you don’t want to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
This includes even the most Bro-ish of bodybuilding techniques. I can’t lie here, either. I’ve been guilty of this mentality too; or it least it might seem like it with my pro-strength, pro-rationality views. The reality’s a little different, but people used to thinking in black/white terms tend to label everyone else as thinking in black/white terms too.
“Fitness training for a given sport is not simply a matter of selecting a few popular exercises from a bodybuilding magazine or prescribing heavy squats, power cleans, leg curls, bench press, circuit training, isokinetic leg extensions or ‘cross training’. This approach may produce aesthetic results for the average non-competitive client of a health centre, but it is of very limited value to the serious athlete.”
- Dr. Mel Siff, Supertraining
With all this recent hoopla surrounding ‘functional’ or ‘cross training’, ranging from all the hype over ‘300‘ a few years ago (and the resulting attention that Mark Twight of GymJones fame received) right on up to the, shall we say ‘interesting’, antics of CrossFit, it’s something that’s really stayed off my radar.
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.
Over the last say five, six years, I’ve pretty well managed to wall myself off from gym culture. I do lift in a commercial gym, though I have very little contact with the people there – unless you count staring in slack-jawed amazement at some of the antics and stupidity as contact. I don’t, personally.
Most of the people I talk to in person are real lifters of some sort or another, guys that like powerlifting and strongman and Highland games. The manly kind of sports that you can drink beer with. We don’t always agree 100% on the details, but we also know that the details don’t matter and that in every way that matters, we’re on the same page.
