Okay, I’m just gonna chime in with my 2 cents.
Hindsight being 20/20, getting big is simple.
Foresight, not so so much.
I mean, my dad and uncles are all big dudes. But I had no idea how they got that way. The way my family always talked I assumed they were genetically jacked. I never bothered to ask them about training. I never saw them training. All I knew is that they did a lot of running in the army. I didn’t think that they trained outside of that.
I stumbled upon the stronglifts site. I thought Mehdi sounded pretty intelligent and knew what he was talking about. So I followed his program. I got good results, kept on reading the stuff he was writing, learnt about olympic lifting and then found a coach in my area, found this site and that opened up my training and knowledge to the level it is now (still not that great).
I could have just as easily stumbled upon PT Schmuck’s fitness blog, thought he sounded intelligent and knew what he was talking about and spun my wheels for 3 years doing senseless shit because I didn’t know any better.
And therein lies the problem. A lot of people don’t know any better. Just because you don’t go to a fancy weightlifting campus to learn about increasing lifts and putting on muscle and get a degree saying you know these things after 4 years doesn’t mean you never learnt them. A lot of stuff I learn at university is shit simple. But I still have to learn it. Lifting weights/putting on mass, just like everything else is something you have to learn.
You wouldn’t expect John Doe off the street first year physics student to know string theory, and so you can’t expect John Doe off the street brand new trainee to know all thing inherent about the gym either.