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Metis and Bodybuilders

81 points by feross 6y ago

bluenose69 6y ago
I thought the article referred to the Métis people, one of three indigenous cultures mentioned in the Canadian Constitution. It took a few ticks to realize that it was using "metis" in another meaning.
- slibhb 6y ago
  In Greek mythology, Metis is Athena's mother. As an descriptor, it means cunning.
  - jdminhbg 6y ago
    And in this context (I think inspired by James Scott's Seeing Like A State), it refers to local knowledge that isn't necessarily obvious to outsiders. Think of something like "you have to build in retry logic because that API tends to fail every fifth time."
  - Igelau 6y ago
    I had a copy of D'Aulaire's Book of Greek Myths as a kid. My favorite illustration was the full page shot of Athena busting out of Zeus's head in all her armored glory.
- deleted 6y ago
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- sharkjacobs 6y ago
  Same, I was hoping to find an article about some kind of little known bodybuilding metis subculture
- visiblink 6y ago
  I have read a lot of Metis history, and this passage struck me as oddly appropriate, although unintentionally so: "the practical wisdom that comes from being a tight-knit community sharing a common goal, watching each other succeed or fail, and passing down lore to the next generation."
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DebtDeflation 6y ago
Cliffs: Contrary to broscience, longer rest periods between sets (3-5 minutes) are more effective at building muscle than shorter rest periods (30 seconds to 2 minutes). As someone who has been engaged in weightlifting for almost 30 years, this is no surprise. It probably has little to do with the rest period itself and more to do with the intensity of exercise. You simply can't train with weights in the 5RM-10RM range, going to failure or a rep or two shy of failure, and only rest 30 seconds or 1 minute between sets. Such short rest periods will force you to use much lighter weights and stop way short of failure.
- ishjoh 6y ago
  I would also be curious if exercise type needs to be included in this. For example calf raises vs squats. I find that for calf raises since they are so targeted I'm able to recover very quickly, but for squats I typically need to wait that 3-5 minutes
- ajcp 6y ago
  > It probably has little to do with the rest period itself and more to do with the intensity of exercise. It's my impression that the actual point of the article is that even though bodybuilding as a community is perceived and perceives itself as being driven by scientific research, it is still almost completely anecdote driven, even when there are scientific findings readily available that fly in the face of or more accurately explain things than anecdote. It's interesting that you've illustrated this so perfectly. In the article it provides the research findings as to why longer rest periods are beneficial, yet you've still provided your anecdotal impressions as to why it would be the case. I'm not trying to get at you or put you on blast; I really do find this interesting.
  - throwaway_6142 6y ago
    > even though bodybuilding as a community is perceived and perceives itself as being driven by scientific research, it is still almost completely anecdote driven, Well I mean, it IS driven by scientific research, just not research into exercise physiology as much as organic chemistry
lordnacho 6y ago
The problem is that epistemology is still its own thing, regardless of what you're doing. If your thing is lifting weights, you need well designed, large n, unbiased studies about that. If your thing is cooking, you need studies about cooking. Metis seems to boil down to interest and culture. Those are certainly things that might give you some sensible priors, but in the end you know things because the mechanics of discovery are what they are. Note that noise is a big issue. Any given bodybuilder can only follow one program at a time, and can only change so often. So someone who happens upon a working concept might never really know why it worked.
the-smug-one 6y ago
This is pretty weird. Most sources that he uses for what BB:ers think are threads from bodybuilding.com (not a lot of pros spend a lot of time writing posts on there) and some place called outlift.com (never heard of that in my lifting life). This is like listening in on 1st year CS students to figure out what professional software engineers think. If you really wanted to know what BB:ers think about rest time, why not see what they've said themselves? It's not like BB:ers don't talk about what they do and why they do it. Just as an aside: strongerbyscience.com has pretty good articles (owner has MSc in exercise science and at least one guy has a Phd in this stuff, sources are extensively cited).
- Igelau 6y ago
  Well, the pros historically tend to leave out the, ah, pharmaceutical side of the equation when they write about "what they do".
  - femiagbabiaka 6y ago
    That's changing quite a bit, but agreed.
    - Daho0n 6y ago
      The talking yes but not the pharmaceutical side.
  - gameswithgo 6y ago
    worse than that the stuff in magazines and such is often entirely fabricated
  - nordsieck 6y ago
    > Well, the pros historically tend to leave out the, ah, pharmaceutical side of the equation when they write about "what they do". There are tested competitions. I'll admit that that doesn't guarantee that no one uses banned substances there, but the finalists are generally quite a bit smaller than those in the untested competitions, so at the very least they're substantially cutting back.
femiagbabiaka 6y ago
Yep. You want to really get your mind blown, see the level of research that the community has done on anabolic compounds vs. the knowledge of the average endocrinologist.
- bedobi 6y ago
  The broscientist bodybuilders are wrong about almost everything they think they know about performance enhancing drugs. Also, to the degree endocrinologists and doctors in general don't "know" about tren, dbol or what have you, it's because overwhelmingly those drugs aren't used or even approved for use in medicine and never have been.
  - perardi 6y ago
    I have to disagree a bit. There have been plenty of laypeople who have advanced the general knowledge of anabolics for purposes of abuse. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Duchaine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Duchaine But: I’d be scared if I had a doctor who know anything about tren. Trenbolone was never approved for humans. It’s for making thicc cows. In fact, if your doctor does know about tren, check the diploma on the wall, because your HMO might have actually put you with a veterinarian to save money. (But then you might be able to score trenbolone and ketamine from that vet. Hmm. Ideas…)
    - bedobi 6y ago
      It's kind of semantics but I guess it depends on the definition of "knowledge". I happily agree bro scientist bodybuilders have advanced our knowledge of performance enhancing drugs in some ways, if nothing else by simply abusing the drugs and observing their effects on body composition, blood markers etc. But most of that knowledge was already available from the clinical trials or animal studies for the drugs anyway. And while the bro scientist bodybuilders like to think they know a lot about what's actually going on in the body, how to combine the drugs and ancilliaries etc etc, their understanding and resulting advice is very often overly simplistic or just wrong. It's unfortunate and kind of important because it demonstrably leads to people thinking they're making informed choices knowing about the risks etc, but still end up making preventable mistakes with potentially very severe consequences for their health and lives.
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atum47 6y ago
I have a huge interest in documenting muscle growth and fat burning. I've been working out since I was 14 years old (on and off again). The most fit I ever got was back in 2015 (the company I was working for was declaring bankruptcy and I had a lot of free time in my hands). During this time I would cook my own meals, eat every 2 hours, workout at a gym and on the street (street workout - calisthenics). I was able to get a 6 pack and some muscles, but I failed to collect data about my process. Ever since then, I dream about getting fat (which I did during the pandemic) and then start the whole thing again, this time, collecting data. I do have a lot of "bro" Knowledge (you get this for free when you go to the gym regularly) but I would love the get the science also.
- browningstreet 6y ago
  You've already proven you can do it.. why are you prioritizing "collecting data" over producing results? I say this as someone who did the same thing in a similar time frame. Lost 50 lbs, set state records for strength, had lean muscle mass. I will say that revisiting that accomplishment, for me, is burdened because it wouldn't be "new". Newbie energy, especially with results, is really strong. I'd be re-visiting some of those tactics at an older age, with slightly different life circumstances. I was single before -- and being hardcore when you're single can seem easier than when you have the distractions of a partner.
  - atum47 6y ago
    Yeah, probably I wouldn't be able to do the proper science, because I'd be testing something once with just one subject (me). But I'd love to know if those gym knowledge holds up.
virtue3 6y ago
The 1-3 minutes comes from a lot of places. I find it -really- amusing that people forget that weightlifting is an olympic sport. There have been -plenty- of studies on it. The main issue tends to be that the russian protocols don't necessarily work for 'natural' athletes. Shorter rest periods are used for conditioning, not muscle growth. You can be a lazy slob and wait 3-5 minutes between each set. But you'll be at the gym forever. What these studies always completely fail to grasp is: If I have 2hrs to do my workout, and I take 5 minutes between sets, how much work am I going to do? What if I just took 1 minute between sets? What if it's close to competition time? Do I want to be huffing and puffing on stage? can I waste time with cardio or should I cut rest time down between sets? There's a lot of variables and not all of them are equating to optimal muscle growth.
- MauranKilom 6y ago
  I've wondered whether you could spend the rest time for one muscle group by doing an exercise for a different muscle group. Is that a no-no, or is it not done for practical reasons (the logistics of jumping back and forth between machines)?
  - blunte 6y ago
    Remember that it’s your brain driving the coordinated electrical signals (and maintaining steadily increasing strength of those signals) which makes the muscles do the work. Your brain needs recovery time.
    - bbarnett 6y ago
      This seems sarcastic or wildly inaccurate. To clarify, two things. The brain does not directly drive the muscles. It does not have copper running to them, providing a charge. Instead, cell after cell transmits the signal, from brain to muscle, each cell providing its own charge. The brain expends more energy thinking about abstract ideas, than telling a muscle to move. Second thing, healthy, fit people run for hours, bike for hours, without issue. As a teenager, I'd work on a farm for 10 hours, picking fruit, throwing bales of hay, digging, on and on without tire. Yet just continually walking, uses more "brain telling muscles what to do", than any single heavy lift plus even perhaps 10 seconds of break. Realistically, writing cursive with a pen, typing fast, should use as much brain energy, for fine, detailed control requires many different muscles all being used at once, hence more signaling.
99_00 6y ago
>Traditional bro wisdom holds short rest periods of 1-3 minutes are optimal for bodybuilding. The papers cited don't contradict "traditional bro wisdom". If anything, the time window given by "bro wisdom" is too long. But there are additional factors at play. If a workout takes too long and doesn't fit into someone's schedule, week after week, year after year, they won't work out. A person resting for 1 minute won't see as much growth as someone resting for 2.5 minutes. But they will see more growth than the person who skips workouts or just quit because they have a life and things to do. So giving people a broad range to work with may not be 'optimal' but may result in more people being more successful. What is the difference in muscle gain between 1 minute an 3 anyway? Does it make up for missed workouts and time off?
- hodder 6y ago
  Absolutely, this is a practicality matter. Further, while the evidence on rest periods is mediocre, the evidence on increasing work volume leading to greater hypertrophy is crystal clear. If you have an hour to workout, more reps is clearly going to win out for muscle hypertrophy over resting 5 min between sets and completing only 9 sets or less in a workout. Muscle hypertrophy (as opposed to strength) follows a clear dose response relationship. More volume is better. More sitting around during training sessions equals lower volume. It is asinine to assume total work volume will be equated if rest periods are very long. Cool for studies, but in reality, you use what time you have to lift and then you leave. Therefore smaller rest periods than an outrageously long 5 min will basically always lead to greater total work performed as you will perform more reps x weight in your allocated time slot. If sets and reps are equated, sure resting longer is more effective. In fact, if you are equating reps and sets in a study, the longer rest group will have higher volume, defined by sum of reps x weight, as the lower rest period group will lift lighter because of increased fatigue. I find it hard to believe many bodybuilders would disagree with that statement. However, in real life, sets and reps will not be equated. You use what time you have and maximizing volume wins (reps x weight, assuming the weight is reasonably difficult). https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6303131/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6303131/ In an ideal world for bodybuilders, perhaps they’d sit at the gym for 2.5 hours to complete a workout, but people have lives outside of lifting weights. Even pros. Finally, the author seems to really think bodybuilders are by and large clueless “bros”. While this might be true for some, I think the average bodybuilder consumes far more academic literature than people involved in almost any other activity outside of academia. Bodybuilders are on average fairly well read and up to date on the scientific consensus thanks to people like Mike Israetel, Jeff Nippard, Brad Schoenfeld, Brett Contreras, Lyle McDonald, and Layne Norton to list just a few.
UweSchmidt 6y ago
"Bodybuilders" is a broad term - the top bodybuilders are definitively up to date on the science. Maybe they train with long breaks (but tell their clients (and the fitness rags) that short breaks are ok so normal people can finish the workout in a timely fashion and keep up a routine) or have a complex training (to stimulate growth from an already high level) with variables the studies didn't capture. On the other hand an authority on bodybuilding better be shredded.
blunte 6y ago
If your goal is to get swole (sorry couldn’t help myself), then higher rep lower weight sets with shorter rest periods is the way. But if you want to be as strong as possible and stay in a weight category (best strength to bodyweight ratio), you do small sets of big weights with set rest periods long enough to get really bored and fidgety while you watch the clock hands move. The Russians have known this for a long time, and so have the best performing competitive lifters. It takes remarkably little besides a lot of food and a caveman simple lifting regime to outperform most of the pretty boys who obsess over the hype programs.
- porb121 6y ago
  > then higher rep lower weight sets with shorter rest periods is the way In the comment section of an article about how bodybuilders use unsupported folk wisdom, you posted completely baseless folk wisdom with no evidence. > The Russians have known this for a long time, and so have the best performing competitive lifters. The USSR had the best weightlifters decades ago. They don't have especially remarkable powerlifters compared to anyone in the USAPL (or untested feds) today, and they don't have especially elite weightlifters today (see: being banned from the '16 Olympics for doping sanctions).
bseidensticker 6y ago
The author seems to ignore the fact that "1m rest periods is best" and "5m rest periods maximizes hypertrophy when volume is kept constant" can both be correct when you consider that: - Volume is EXTREMELY important - People have a finite amount of time to lift weights The person doing 30 work sets in 60 minutes is going to get more gainz than someone doing 10 work sets in 60 minutes.
- mrits 6y ago
  He does mention that in the article actually.
  - bseidensticker 6y ago
    It is mentioned that volume matters, but I am saying that this conclusion is wrong: "The bodybuilders had lots of opportunities to experiment and tinker, with lots of skin in the game, but they were still getting things pretty wrong..." All they did was mistakenly attribute success to short rest periods when it was actually about volume.
perardi 6y ago
”Online fitness advice. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be cautious.” The amount of contradictory advice slung online in regards to fitness is immense. (Same as it ever was, the old muscle magazines were bad, too.) Lots and lots of “evidence” amalgamated from rumors, second-hand sources, that old guy at the gym, and teeny tiny studies that have never been replicated. As you go on a fitness journey (it hurt to type that), you go through decision paralysis, overbearing overconfidence that you know what’s up, and you end up with humility that boils down to “iron ain’t gonna move itself”.
- porb121 6y ago
  This seems like a notion lots of people have, but I'm not sure it's true. What is the evidence that online fitness is any more fraught with contradictory advice than, say, online finance, or online self-help?
  - fierro 6y ago
    it's not so much that it's contradictory, but rather dishonest. One example is that a lot of athletes hawking supplements are actually taking exogenous hormones and androgenic anabolic steroids and fail to mention this. Also, it's in the interest of the online fitness community to make their advice as complex and complicated as possible as is re-entrenches their "expert" position while the truth tends to be much simpler, as your parent comment alluded to
- deleted 6y ago
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oh_sigh 6y ago
Is it possible that what is best for bodybuilders is not what is best for average joes? Look at the first 4 bullet points that list the studies. Two of the studies look at "recreationally trained men", one of the study looks at untrained males, and only one study looks at "well trained males". But for the well trained males, their 1RM max bench press was ~100kg and 1RM max back squat was 120 kg. I cannot even begin to fathom what male can not even bench 2 plates and would consider themselves well trained with respect to weight lifting. I do olympic lifts and power lifts, and literally the first squat I ever did in my life with a bar on my back was more than 120kg. The general problem with bodybuilding knowledge is that literally everything in someone's life will affect the results they get. Their genetics. How their sleep is. How their stress levels are. What kind of job they do. Whether they've trained before. Whether they do other exercises. What their diet is like. All of that will have an effect regardless of what you do in the gym. So maybe someone hears slightly suboptimal advice about rest timing, because the person giving it has the rest of their life on point and appears to get good results from their suboptimal timing.
qvrjuec 6y ago
This is interesting, but the author focuses mainly on the hormonal benefits of different rest protocols. These benefits are completely negligible when bodybuilders are pumping themselves full of exogenous steroids/hormones. I'm interested to see if a study like this could be performed on hormonally controlled test subjects
dnhz 6y ago
I think weightlifting (and also nutrition) have an intersection between one's choices and the scientific literature. From what I've seen of bodybuilders on youtube, there are many that base their programs and recommendations on what they believe is scientifically optimal. In most other areas of personal decision-making, you won't find wisdom in academic literature. For instance, remodeling your kitchen or dating. You might seek out advice from various sources, but those sources probably wouldn't include academic research. The other thing about this article is that in using forums and websites to gauge the view of the bodybuilding community, you end up sampling more dedicated people who are interested in this sort of discussion. There might be people following all sorts of weird stuff ("woo") based on what their buddies at the gym are doing. I wonder whether there are political issues where the "literature" is ahead of where natural intuition is. For instance, the minimum wage. Microeconomic intuition says raising the minimum wage reduces the number of jobs available. I think there are lots of studies out there saying that this intuition is false. The minimum wage's effect on jobs is something fuzzier than scientific fact however, and it kind of falls outside the concept of metis too. Also, the majority of comments here seem to be focused on the question of rest interval, but that's not the main point of the article as I see it.
legohead 6y ago
> The 3-minute rest group achieved greater muscle growth. How much greater? Is it significant, like 50% more? Otherwise, why can't we just say "do whatever feels comfortable for you." I think the real goal would be to do whatever keeps you happy and coming back to the gym. Long rest periods make me feel bored/annoyed, while short ones make me feel stressed.
fierro 6y ago
The only reliable way to find truth in fitness and bodybuilding is to experiment for yourself and find what works for you given your genetics, diet, recovery regimen, and supplementation (including use of AAS) or lack thereof.

81 points by feross 6y ago

I thought the article referred to the Métis people, one of three indigenous cultures mentioned in the Canadian Constitution. It took a few ticks to realize that it was using "metis" in another meaning.

slibhb 6y ago
In Greek mythology, Metis is Athena's mother. As an descriptor, it means cunning.
- jdminhbg 6y ago
  And in this context (I think inspired by James Scott's Seeing Like A State), it refers to local knowledge that isn't necessarily obvious to outsiders. Think of something like "you have to build in retry logic because that API tends to fail every fifth time."
- Igelau 6y ago
  I had a copy of D'Aulaire's Book of Greek Myths as a kid. My favorite illustration was the full page shot of Athena busting out of Zeus's head in all her armored glory.
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sharkjacobs 6y ago
Same, I was hoping to find an article about some kind of little known bodybuilding metis subculture
visiblink 6y ago
I have read a lot of Metis history, and this passage struck me as oddly appropriate, although unintentionally so: "the practical wisdom that comes from being a tight-knit community sharing a common goal, watching each other succeed or fail, and passing down lore to the next generation."

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DebtDeflation 6y ago

Cliffs: Contrary to broscience, longer rest periods between sets (3-5 minutes) are more effective at building muscle than shorter rest periods (30 seconds to 2 minutes). As someone who has been engaged in weightlifting for almost 30 years, this is no surprise. It probably has little to do with the rest period itself and more to do with the intensity of exercise. You simply can't train with weights in the 5RM-10RM range, going to failure or a rep or two shy of failure, and only rest 30 seconds or 1 minute between sets. Such short rest periods will force you to use much lighter weights and stop way short of failure.

ishjoh 6y ago
I would also be curious if exercise type needs to be included in this. For example calf raises vs squats. I find that for calf raises since they are so targeted I'm able to recover very quickly, but for squats I typically need to wait that 3-5 minutes
ajcp 6y ago
> It probably has little to do with the rest period itself and more to do with the intensity of exercise. It's my impression that the actual point of the article is that even though bodybuilding as a community is perceived and perceives itself as being driven by scientific research, it is still almost completely anecdote driven, even when there are scientific findings readily available that fly in the face of or more accurately explain things than anecdote. It's interesting that you've illustrated this so perfectly. In the article it provides the research findings as to why longer rest periods are beneficial, yet you've still provided your anecdotal impressions as to why it would be the case. I'm not trying to get at you or put you on blast; I really do find this interesting.
- throwaway_6142 6y ago
  > even though bodybuilding as a community is perceived and perceives itself as being driven by scientific research, it is still almost completely anecdote driven, Well I mean, it IS driven by scientific research, just not research into exercise physiology as much as organic chemistry

lordnacho 6y ago

The problem is that epistemology is still its own thing, regardless of what you're doing. If your thing is lifting weights, you need well designed, large n, unbiased studies about that. If your thing is cooking, you need studies about cooking. Metis seems to boil down to interest and culture. Those are certainly things that might give you some sensible priors, but in the end you know things because the mechanics of discovery are what they are. Note that noise is a big issue. Any given bodybuilder can only follow one program at a time, and can only change so often. So someone who happens upon a working concept might never really know why it worked.

the-smug-one 6y ago

This is pretty weird. Most sources that he uses for what BB:ers think are threads from bodybuilding.com (not a lot of pros spend a lot of time writing posts on there) and some place called outlift.com (never heard of that in my lifting life). This is like listening in on 1st year CS students to figure out what professional software engineers think. If you really wanted to know what BB:ers think about rest time, why not see what they've said themselves? It's not like BB:ers don't talk about what they do and why they do it. Just as an aside: strongerbyscience.com has pretty good articles (owner has MSc in exercise science and at least one guy has a Phd in this stuff, sources are extensively cited).

Igelau 6y ago
Well, the pros historically tend to leave out the, ah, pharmaceutical side of the equation when they write about "what they do".
- femiagbabiaka 6y ago
  That's changing quite a bit, but agreed.
  - Daho0n 6y ago
    The talking yes but not the pharmaceutical side.
- gameswithgo 6y ago
  worse than that the stuff in magazines and such is often entirely fabricated
- nordsieck 6y ago
  > Well, the pros historically tend to leave out the, ah, pharmaceutical side of the equation when they write about "what they do". There are tested competitions. I'll admit that that doesn't guarantee that no one uses banned substances there, but the finalists are generally quite a bit smaller than those in the untested competitions, so at the very least they're substantially cutting back.

femiagbabiaka 6y ago

Yep. You want to really get your mind blown, see the level of research that the community has done on anabolic compounds vs. the knowledge of the average endocrinologist.

bedobi 6y ago
The broscientist bodybuilders are wrong about almost everything they think they know about performance enhancing drugs. Also, to the degree endocrinologists and doctors in general don't "know" about tren, dbol or what have you, it's because overwhelmingly those drugs aren't used or even approved for use in medicine and never have been.
- perardi 6y ago
  I have to disagree a bit. There have been plenty of laypeople who have advanced the general knowledge of anabolics for purposes of abuse. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Duchaine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Duchaine But: I’d be scared if I had a doctor who know anything about tren. Trenbolone was never approved for humans. It’s for making thicc cows. In fact, if your doctor does know about tren, check the diploma on the wall, because your HMO might have actually put you with a veterinarian to save money. (But then you might be able to score trenbolone and ketamine from that vet. Hmm. Ideas…)
  - bedobi 6y ago
    It's kind of semantics but I guess it depends on the definition of "knowledge". I happily agree bro scientist bodybuilders have advanced our knowledge of performance enhancing drugs in some ways, if nothing else by simply abusing the drugs and observing their effects on body composition, blood markers etc. But most of that knowledge was already available from the clinical trials or animal studies for the drugs anyway. And while the bro scientist bodybuilders like to think they know a lot about what's actually going on in the body, how to combine the drugs and ancilliaries etc etc, their understanding and resulting advice is very often overly simplistic or just wrong. It's unfortunate and kind of important because it demonstrably leads to people thinking they're making informed choices knowing about the risks etc, but still end up making preventable mistakes with potentially very severe consequences for their health and lives.

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atum47 6y ago

I have a huge interest in documenting muscle growth and fat burning. I've been working out since I was 14 years old (on and off again). The most fit I ever got was back in 2015 (the company I was working for was declaring bankruptcy and I had a lot of free time in my hands). During this time I would cook my own meals, eat every 2 hours, workout at a gym and on the street (street workout - calisthenics). I was able to get a 6 pack and some muscles, but I failed to collect data about my process. Ever since then, I dream about getting fat (which I did during the pandemic) and then start the whole thing again, this time, collecting data. I do have a lot of "bro" Knowledge (you get this for free when you go to the gym regularly) but I would love the get the science also.

browningstreet 6y ago
You've already proven you can do it.. why are you prioritizing "collecting data" over producing results? I say this as someone who did the same thing in a similar time frame. Lost 50 lbs, set state records for strength, had lean muscle mass. I will say that revisiting that accomplishment, for me, is burdened because it wouldn't be "new". Newbie energy, especially with results, is really strong. I'd be re-visiting some of those tactics at an older age, with slightly different life circumstances. I was single before -- and being hardcore when you're single can seem easier than when you have the distractions of a partner.
- atum47 6y ago
  Yeah, probably I wouldn't be able to do the proper science, because I'd be testing something once with just one subject (me). But I'd love to know if those gym knowledge holds up.

virtue3 6y ago

The 1-3 minutes comes from a lot of places. I find it -really- amusing that people forget that weightlifting is an olympic sport. There have been -plenty- of studies on it. The main issue tends to be that the russian protocols don't necessarily work for 'natural' athletes. Shorter rest periods are used for conditioning, not muscle growth. You can be a lazy slob and wait 3-5 minutes between each set. But you'll be at the gym forever. What these studies always completely fail to grasp is: If I have 2hrs to do my workout, and I take 5 minutes between sets, how much work am I going to do? What if I just took 1 minute between sets? What if it's close to competition time? Do I want to be huffing and puffing on stage? can I waste time with cardio or should I cut rest time down between sets? There's a lot of variables and not all of them are equating to optimal muscle growth.

MauranKilom 6y ago
I've wondered whether you could spend the rest time for one muscle group by doing an exercise for a different muscle group. Is that a no-no, or is it not done for practical reasons (the logistics of jumping back and forth between machines)?
- blunte 6y ago
  Remember that it’s your brain driving the coordinated electrical signals (and maintaining steadily increasing strength of those signals) which makes the muscles do the work. Your brain needs recovery time.
  - bbarnett 6y ago
    This seems sarcastic or wildly inaccurate. To clarify, two things. The brain does not directly drive the muscles. It does not have copper running to them, providing a charge. Instead, cell after cell transmits the signal, from brain to muscle, each cell providing its own charge. The brain expends more energy thinking about abstract ideas, than telling a muscle to move. Second thing, healthy, fit people run for hours, bike for hours, without issue. As a teenager, I'd work on a farm for 10 hours, picking fruit, throwing bales of hay, digging, on and on without tire. Yet just continually walking, uses more "brain telling muscles what to do", than any single heavy lift plus even perhaps 10 seconds of break. Realistically, writing cursive with a pen, typing fast, should use as much brain energy, for fine, detailed control requires many different muscles all being used at once, hence more signaling.

99_00 6y ago

>Traditional bro wisdom holds short rest periods of 1-3 minutes are optimal for bodybuilding. The papers cited don't contradict "traditional bro wisdom". If anything, the time window given by "bro wisdom" is too long. But there are additional factors at play. If a workout takes too long and doesn't fit into someone's schedule, week after week, year after year, they won't work out. A person resting for 1 minute won't see as much growth as someone resting for 2.5 minutes. But they will see more growth than the person who skips workouts or just quit because they have a life and things to do. So giving people a broad range to work with may not be 'optimal' but may result in more people being more successful. What is the difference in muscle gain between 1 minute an 3 anyway? Does it make up for missed workouts and time off?

hodder 6y ago
Absolutely, this is a practicality matter. Further, while the evidence on rest periods is mediocre, the evidence on increasing work volume leading to greater hypertrophy is crystal clear. If you have an hour to workout, more reps is clearly going to win out for muscle hypertrophy over resting 5 min between sets and completing only 9 sets or less in a workout. Muscle hypertrophy (as opposed to strength) follows a clear dose response relationship. More volume is better. More sitting around during training sessions equals lower volume. It is asinine to assume total work volume will be equated if rest periods are very long. Cool for studies, but in reality, you use what time you have to lift and then you leave. Therefore smaller rest periods than an outrageously long 5 min will basically always lead to greater total work performed as you will perform more reps x weight in your allocated time slot. If sets and reps are equated, sure resting longer is more effective. In fact, if you are equating reps and sets in a study, the longer rest group will have higher volume, defined by sum of reps x weight, as the lower rest period group will lift lighter because of increased fatigue. I find it hard to believe many bodybuilders would disagree with that statement. However, in real life, sets and reps will not be equated. You use what time you have and maximizing volume wins (reps x weight, assuming the weight is reasonably difficult). https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6303131/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6303131/ In an ideal world for bodybuilders, perhaps they’d sit at the gym for 2.5 hours to complete a workout, but people have lives outside of lifting weights. Even pros. Finally, the author seems to really think bodybuilders are by and large clueless “bros”. While this might be true for some, I think the average bodybuilder consumes far more academic literature than people involved in almost any other activity outside of academia. Bodybuilders are on average fairly well read and up to date on the scientific consensus thanks to people like Mike Israetel, Jeff Nippard, Brad Schoenfeld, Brett Contreras, Lyle McDonald, and Layne Norton to list just a few.

UweSchmidt 6y ago

"Bodybuilders" is a broad term - the top bodybuilders are definitively up to date on the science. Maybe they train with long breaks (but tell their clients (and the fitness rags) that short breaks are ok so normal people can finish the workout in a timely fashion and keep up a routine) or have a complex training (to stimulate growth from an already high level) with variables the studies didn't capture. On the other hand an authority on bodybuilding better be shredded.

blunte 6y ago

If your goal is to get swole (sorry couldn’t help myself), then higher rep lower weight sets with shorter rest periods is the way. But if you want to be as strong as possible and stay in a weight category (best strength to bodyweight ratio), you do small sets of big weights with set rest periods long enough to get really bored and fidgety while you watch the clock hands move. The Russians have known this for a long time, and so have the best performing competitive lifters. It takes remarkably little besides a lot of food and a caveman simple lifting regime to outperform most of the pretty boys who obsess over the hype programs.

porb121 6y ago
> then higher rep lower weight sets with shorter rest periods is the way In the comment section of an article about how bodybuilders use unsupported folk wisdom, you posted completely baseless folk wisdom with no evidence. > The Russians have known this for a long time, and so have the best performing competitive lifters. The USSR had the best weightlifters decades ago. They don't have especially remarkable powerlifters compared to anyone in the USAPL (or untested feds) today, and they don't have especially elite weightlifters today (see: being banned from the '16 Olympics for doping sanctions).

bseidensticker 6y ago

The author seems to ignore the fact that "1m rest periods is best" and "5m rest periods maximizes hypertrophy when volume is kept constant" can both be correct when you consider that: - Volume is EXTREMELY important - People have a finite amount of time to lift weights The person doing 30 work sets in 60 minutes is going to get more gainz than someone doing 10 work sets in 60 minutes.

mrits 6y ago
He does mention that in the article actually.
- bseidensticker 6y ago
  It is mentioned that volume matters, but I am saying that this conclusion is wrong: "The bodybuilders had lots of opportunities to experiment and tinker, with lots of skin in the game, but they were still getting things pretty wrong..." All they did was mistakenly attribute success to short rest periods when it was actually about volume.

perardi 6y ago

”Online fitness advice. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be cautious.” The amount of contradictory advice slung online in regards to fitness is immense. (Same as it ever was, the old muscle magazines were bad, too.) Lots and lots of “evidence” amalgamated from rumors, second-hand sources, that old guy at the gym, and teeny tiny studies that have never been replicated. As you go on a fitness journey (it hurt to type that), you go through decision paralysis, overbearing overconfidence that you know what’s up, and you end up with humility that boils down to “iron ain’t gonna move itself”.

porb121 6y ago
This seems like a notion lots of people have, but I'm not sure it's true. What is the evidence that online fitness is any more fraught with contradictory advice than, say, online finance, or online self-help?
- fierro 6y ago
  it's not so much that it's contradictory, but rather dishonest. One example is that a lot of athletes hawking supplements are actually taking exogenous hormones and androgenic anabolic steroids and fail to mention this. Also, it's in the interest of the online fitness community to make their advice as complex and complicated as possible as is re-entrenches their "expert" position while the truth tends to be much simpler, as your parent comment alluded to
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oh_sigh 6y ago

Is it possible that what is best for bodybuilders is not what is best for average joes? Look at the first 4 bullet points that list the studies. Two of the studies look at "recreationally trained men", one of the study looks at untrained males, and only one study looks at "well trained males". But for the well trained males, their 1RM max bench press was ~100kg and 1RM max back squat was 120 kg. I cannot even begin to fathom what male can not even bench 2 plates and would consider themselves well trained with respect to weight lifting. I do olympic lifts and power lifts, and literally the first squat I ever did in my life with a bar on my back was more than 120kg. The general problem with bodybuilding knowledge is that literally everything in someone's life will affect the results they get. Their genetics. How their sleep is. How their stress levels are. What kind of job they do. Whether they've trained before. Whether they do other exercises. What their diet is like. All of that will have an effect regardless of what you do in the gym. So maybe someone hears slightly suboptimal advice about rest timing, because the person giving it has the rest of their life on point and appears to get good results from their suboptimal timing.

qvrjuec 6y ago

This is interesting, but the author focuses mainly on the hormonal benefits of different rest protocols. These benefits are completely negligible when bodybuilders are pumping themselves full of exogenous steroids/hormones. I'm interested to see if a study like this could be performed on hormonally controlled test subjects

dnhz 6y ago

I think weightlifting (and also nutrition) have an intersection between one's choices and the scientific literature. From what I've seen of bodybuilders on youtube, there are many that base their programs and recommendations on what they believe is scientifically optimal. In most other areas of personal decision-making, you won't find wisdom in academic literature. For instance, remodeling your kitchen or dating. You might seek out advice from various sources, but those sources probably wouldn't include academic research. The other thing about this article is that in using forums and websites to gauge the view of the bodybuilding community, you end up sampling more dedicated people who are interested in this sort of discussion. There might be people following all sorts of weird stuff ("woo") based on what their buddies at the gym are doing. I wonder whether there are political issues where the "literature" is ahead of where natural intuition is. For instance, the minimum wage. Microeconomic intuition says raising the minimum wage reduces the number of jobs available. I think there are lots of studies out there saying that this intuition is false. The minimum wage's effect on jobs is something fuzzier than scientific fact however, and it kind of falls outside the concept of metis too. Also, the majority of comments here seem to be focused on the question of rest interval, but that's not the main point of the article as I see it.

legohead 6y ago

> The 3-minute rest group achieved greater muscle growth. How much greater? Is it significant, like 50% more? Otherwise, why can't we just say "do whatever feels comfortable for you." I think the real goal would be to do whatever keeps you happy and coming back to the gym. Long rest periods make me feel bored/annoyed, while short ones make me feel stressed.

fierro 6y ago

The only reliable way to find truth in fitness and bodybuilding is to experiment for yourself and find what works for you given your genetics, diet, recovery regimen, and supplementation (including use of AAS) or lack thereof.