The Great Bodybuilding Debate: Should You Trust Scientists Or Trainers?

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InPart 1 of Why Everything Old Is New Again, John Romaniello discussed the golden age ofbodybuilding. In Part 2, he takes a look at the legitimacy of "broscience." Though different definitions of broscience exist, it is just observation pairedwith rationalization: A phenomenon is observed and then an argument is proposed for itsoccurrence. Reasoning is backward-engineered from the result. Sometimes, of course, thatreasoning will be flawed -- but flawed reasoning does not invalidate the result. And thisis something that the fitness industry is finally being forced to admit. As you will see,scientists owe bodybuilders an apology. True Lies: Research Vindicates Broscience

If we are being honest and judging the past by the standard of the present, Arnold andhis crew were certified broscientists in the sense that nothing they did wasscientifically validated. As I stated in Part1, many of the claims or recommendations that came out of that era are consideredfalse, and this has tainted the ones that we can consistently observe to be true, at leastin the sense that they work. This is changing, however, because (ironically)science is now telling us that -- whoops -- bodybuilders do know what they are doing. WhatI mean is that we now have some research that shows that the bodybuilders of yore wereright -- and that even when they were wrong, there weren’t necessarily far off themark. To give you an example, let’s look at trainingfor fat loss. For years, coaches fought against the idea that doing high reps withlighter weights gets you shredded. That idea is often put forth as one of the greatestmyths to come out of bodybuilding's golden age, and that’s fair. In the truestsince, it isn’t accurate; but it’s also not exactly false -- just incomplete.Performing a traditional bodybuilding routine with high reps and low weightisn’t going to get you shredded. But, if you take it a step further and set up theexercises from that routine in a circuit fashion, you’ve got something that looksvery similar to what we now call metabolic resistance training, which those same coacheslaud as one of the most effective training methodologies for fat loss. Can wesay unequivocally that 40 years ago bodybuilders weren’t using circuits or keepingtheir rest periods short? Of course not. But that didn’t stop people fromcriticizing the entire idea. A small tweak to something that we once considered foolish,and you have the foundation of nearly every fat-loss program available these days. Oh,and, yeah -- we’ve got studies to back that up. Still not convinced thatobservation is enough to push progress, or that bodybuilders have been right for a longtime? Let’s take it a step further and look at one of the hallmarks of traditionalbodybuilding workouts: selective hypertrophy. As early as the 1950s, bodybuildershave been staunch in the notion that varying exercises and body positions can targetdistinct areas of individual muscles, preferentially recruiting fibers of a specific areaduring the movements -- that rotating a dumbbell during a curl activates the lateral more,or that leaning forward during dips shifts focus to the chest. But for close to 20 years,we've been told not to do that, simply because there wasn’t research to back it up-- and, unfortunately, being pro-research seems to mean being anti-bodybuilding. Continue Reading

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