This is a place to share your habits that you believe in, hypothesizes with no real reason, and strange ideas that shouldn’t work, but do. Exercise, lifestyle, diet, supplements and timing, it’s all fair game.
There might be a few diamonds in the rough to be uncovered.
Kind of a meta post but I think “bro science” is roughly as good as “real science” when it comes to most lifting. Saw a video the other day with a guy using an EMG device to see how effective an incline dumbbell curl was on the long head of the biceps. Like holy shit, even if it is true, it doesn’t really matter.
I generally like the guys videos and that isn’t going to turn me off because fitness on youtube (social media in general) is a cesspool but if it is between going and banging out some reps or using Electromyography to measure long head stimulation to make sure it works, I’ll take the reps all day.
This would seem a bro-science area.
I have long been an advocate for bro-science, even long before it was called bro-science. I cannot imagine that either of the above falls into the bro-science category.
If the hypothesis isn’t based on some expectation, it might be a bro-science “experiment”, but it isn’t yet bro-science. I was never one to experiment with something no one had found success, or was based on solid science.
Strange ideas that shouldn’t work fall in the “experiment” arena. Not for me either.
I’m a liberal arts guy, so this just sounds like linguistic masturbation.
Share it - I’d love to learn.
I view full " bro science" as somthing that might be indvidual . Like doing somthing that i find gets me results. ( for what ever reason) Which i might not pass onto someone else.
But i find there is different levels of " bro science " the stuff that makes sense thats time tested and just hasnt been tested or studied academically enough . Either to prove or disprove on the other hand you have pure bullshit out there.
Of course in my current situation with my oldest… this subject is getting brought up more often for debates.
Rep ranges to target muscle fiber types.
The idea is you can use low rep and to target fast twitch muscle fibers, medium reps for intermediate fibers and high reps for slow twitch fibers.
Science tells us that it doesn’t work, you can’t target fibers types, and even if you could, there are like 30 different transitory types anyway.
But somehow, if you lift heavy, medium and light weights, you get an awesome, productive workout.
And it works for everything, from powerlifting and bodybuilding to ballet dancing and sprinting.
“Bro-Splits” (one body part/day/week) work quite well provided the intensity is high enough during that body part focused session. They work well even if you are not using exogenous test. I think most who don’t see results from this split are either a) not training hard enough or b) not eating enough or c) both a) & b).
HIIT is overrated for most people/endeavors. The juice ain’t worth the squeeze and the risk of injury increases.
My most bro-sciency belief: People rest too long between sets for hypertrophy. 1 min to 1:15 max (usually it’s 45 sec to 1 min for me) is perfect. Yes, you may have to lower the weight on subsequent sets, but the amount of cumulative fatigue on the muscle is greater therefore so is the muscle response during recovery (this is the bro science part).
I see so many people in the gym for 1-2 hours a day never getting results. I am in an out in under an hour even on high volume days.
Pretty much everything i do in training is bro science based.
Or at least, it was, until science actually caught up with HIT - 50 some years later. (Someone owes Mentzer an apology)
It’s interesting to see the same basic principle in the way our distance training runs were structured.
Except instead of heavy, medium, light, it was “short, medium, long” where the speed/intensity was inverse of the distance/duration.
What I observed over 3 decades of competing added to what some consider bro-science today, the only certain thing about bro-science is that is evolving continuously.
The medical community’s science of building muscle started when I began lifting with “we aren’t interested enough to bother” and began growing about like all Scientific Method knowledge grows from floundering around, to getting more on track, to the point I would say it has just about caught up with bro-science.
One bro-science principle that I still firmly hold to is “Lift heavier weight for around 5 reps to get stronger so that you can lift with heavy enough weight for higher reps for hypertrophy.”
Jelena Abbou wrote an article about this when the figure athlete site was a thing. Cardio was one day of sprints/fartliks/HIIT, one day of 20 minutes hard going for distance, and one day with an hour of relaxing SS cardio. It’s stupid smart.
I agree. Trying to add 2.5 lbs or one rep each workout sucks. Bro science says that only making 45 lb jumps is better. You get a hypertrophy phase once you get to 10~15 reps, add a plate to each side, then you’re back to 5 in a strength phase. Biofeedback will tell you.
Interestingly according to my oldest most of the current research to date has been aerobic based and is oversaturated with studies. Research related to anerobic activity is wide open and is actually pretty behind.
It comes in threes!
So the hypothesis that we originally discussed- tribulus & other test boosters before bed. The idea is to get it in and get the desired response at the time when your body produces the most.
. Thats my bro science, and I’m sticking to it.
Weighted pull ups and dips are the best compound movements for upper body hypertrophy.
Lifters in general can tolerate much more cardio that they’re led to believe.
I’m gonna try it. I usually have “pulses” of supplements. Anything I want to soak in with being calm and passive I’ll take at night, anything I want to be active in my system that I feel increased movement will help blood flow to absorb it I take in the morning.
I’ll expand on this later.
Cool! Let me know if/how you notice a difference.
Yeah. I’ve seen this firsthand. I lifted with two guys that were training for the Iron Man at Lake Placid and lifting at the same time. They were pushing the limits of their recovery capacity, but were recovering and getting stronger. They were not at their absolute limit of natural development, and were training clean.
One guy finished in good placement for his class, the other got washed out in the cold rain, cuz he hates cold and rain.
Very heavy squats and deadlifts temporarily impair cognitive function and inhibition
