Bodybuilding stopped being fringe in the late 70’s. It was less fringe in the 80’s than it is now. Guys at the top of a given anything, tend to either be smart or are being handled by someone smart. Arnold is pretty sharp, Magnus Ver Magnussen is quite intelligent and analyzed every single event and had the technique figured out before touching the implement. Alexeyev seems pretty intelligent as well, going agianst a lot of advice and coaches to recover from a back injury and make the national team afterwards to start setting World records. When you are around the top strength guys, you find that they are generally quite bright, even if less polished at times. They do not typically care a lot about the studies or the experts, and when they start getting coaches and trying to “Dial in” that stuff you start to see more injuries and a rapid end to the career (Hugo Girard for example). I am certain that there are many more examples. They figure out what works for them and go all in. My workout is not going to produce the same results in you - which makes it really hard to be a good coach. The coach has to figure out what to change to work for you versus everyone else.
I don’t think I wrote anything about the top guys in either sport.
Completely agree.
Clint is a good guy and under-rated.
The guys that got really big either knew what they were doing, or were listening to someone else that did. The dummies are in the corner doing “Super slow” and not looking any different and still using the same weights 3 years later. Dumb is relative. The hooge guy that seems like he needs velcro shoes to get by, when you talk to him about lifting you find out he’s not as dumb as he seems. He’s just concentrating all of his intellectual resource on one thing. Drugs don’t hurt either, but these guys aren’t as dumb as they seem. And, serously, 90% of it is just lifting and pushing. These guys often have a buddy or a crew to help with motivation, and the idea that you need to get this lift so you can harass your buddy about missing it is enough to help with the results.
I am not disputing any of these, which is why I liked your post. All I was saying was that you don’t have to be very bright in order to succeed in getting big and strong, which is the goal of most of the people in this forum - as in this isn’t an intellectual pursuit. I’ve known smart guys, dumb guys and I’ve really known a borderline retard who were successful in accomplishing this just by maintaining consistency with their diets and putting in the work in the gym.
Read my subsequent posts after the one you took issue with and you will see that this was exactly what I was saying.
I wasn’t particularly trying to take issue, just pointing out that the guys at the top do not tend to be the dummies.
Haha yeah I believe that’s true for any endeavor. Oh course some bitter people can point out a couple of exceptions and act like they represent the norm.
Bodybuilders in the 90s had it pretty good. All they had to do was show up.
All the techniques and equipment had already been figured out/invented by Rational and Empirical guys in the 50 years before them.
They didn’t need to lay on the floor and do vertical leg presses balancing a barbell on their feet or spend time trying to expand their rib-boxes. Or invent 8 hour Sandow style workouts.
The smith machine and preacher curl bench were just there, waiting on them. And they could just ramp up to a top set like everyone else.
Would anyone agree that training is 50% a science and 50% a art.
Yeah.
Some people have a real talent for taking the science and putting it all together beautifully.
I would say 50% art 50% alchemy.
FWIW, I think there might be an argument for rationalism – there are many cases wherein the ‘empirical method’ yields false positives → uninformed trainees who succeed despite their programming, not because of it. In these cases, the ‘rational method’ might produce a better result, if the training were improved through intelligent programming.
BUT
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Is it really a false positive if they get results? Does a result need to be close to an immeasurable ‘optimal’ to be good? It entirely depends on whether ‘it works’ or ‘it works well’ constitutes success (imo, everything ‘works’ if you train hard enough)
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To echo @dt79 … I love intellectualising everything, but I’m not sure that it’s worthwhile in this sphere. By all means, think deeply about whatever most strikes your fancy, but success in this discipline does not require an intellectual approach. If anything, personally, the value of training is quite the opposite – I use it to switch the mind off and focus on being in my body; a rarity in modern society.
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Thinking of training/nutrition/supplementation as an optimisation problem is a one-way street to burnout (mental) and social shittiness. Probably makes you unjustifiably egocentric too, unless you’re actually a competitive athlete. It also abstracts out the fun. I don’t care if it’s ‘suboptimal’ – if I feel like doing chest flies today, I’m going to do some goddamn chest flies
I think using the rational method (analysis of studies) is great for setting your training boundary conditions. It is a general stay in these bounds and if you work hard, you should do well (at least compared to most others). As you progress the empirical method of finding what works best for you in those bounds is likely required for long term progress.
Most studies end up being BS or the differences are so small that there are not even worth fretting over.
Problem is only a fraction of those articles/routines are from the competitor, it is all hearsay.
Agree.
Probably true. Also what Ronnie Coleman did isn’t what a beginner should do, they would likely get very fat and likely injured, and that is even if you followed his diet and workout correctly.
Motivation is huge. Just ask Aron Ralston.
That’s all I have to add. Hardartery, your words are spot on.
I created a thread sometime earlier called Rational workouts versus Empirical workouts. In that thread, I did mention that I will soon show you all a workout concept that I came up with using a process of REASONING (Rationalism) instead of the more common empirical method by most muscle-heads. So here it is, written in paper…
Three syllogisms, three conclusions. For the third syllogism, I grabbed the conclusions of the first two syllogisms and transformed them into premises for the third.
There we go! Theory can work!
What are your thoughts? See any holes in my logic?
I don’t think all your premises are sound. For example, “Everything that pays off is worth doing”. You could have multiple activities that pay off, and it doesn’t make sense to do all of them.