Alex Bromley is WRONG about Exercise Science.

Alex Bromley is WRONG about Exercise Science.

Welcome back today we’re reacting to Alexander bromley’s take on exercise science and why it’s killing your games now as a sports scientist Dr Milo wolf I would like to react to this video because I think I’m someone who has some experience actually conducting research and I have read plenty of studies and

Therefore I should be able to provide some useful and insightful responses to some of the critiques that Alexander Bromley is making I haven’t watched this video before I’ll be reacting to it completely unprompted all I’ve heard is that it contains some hot takes regarding Sports Science and I wanted to

React to it so let’s dig into it applying physics chemistry engineering to the real world requires certainty if you have the incorrect model it gets you exposed quickly and in a big way it’s a company failing to invent the next billion dollar tech product or faulty architecture costing this is very

Dramatic so these Sciences only Thrive when everyone is stress testing these ideas applying skepticism and double-checking each other’s work with the utmost Precision but it’s important to note all academic disciplines are not created equal the further you are from the fundamental pieces of reality the more complexity you have to contend with

And the more mudded I mean he’s not wrong so far but I think that it would be remiss to compare a an applied physiological science like sports science to something like theoretical physics social sciences don’t have a method for tracking the efficacy of their mod mod they don’t tend to reward

Skepticism and they base many of their assumptions on weak evidence or outdated models like the blank slate Theory now these acem dep oh man [ __ ] on sociology psychology and like is not a good look uh it just betrays that you have a certain bias usually a pro

Quantitative bias you have people who do many isolation movements over many repeating sets and you have those that do barbell only work you have those indeed there are a variety of approaches and all of them are reason ably effective they may only be different by a few percentage points and thus in

Practice because there are many more important factors you’re not necessarily going to see that person X following X approach is getting more jacked and person y following y approach because their approach isn’t really even what’s dictating the results as much as nutrition or sleep or stress or genetics or P

Use now the scientific literature has settled on a few staple recommendations that seem to hold all of these different tribes under its umbrella hell yeah that’s this is correct I mean for hypertrophy anyways I’m assuming this is for hypertrophy but uh not three no no not three reps that’s likely outside of

The maxim effective rep range Continuum for hypertrophy and 30 is likely on the lower end as well in fact we have a study about Brad shenfeld comparing seven sets of three to three sets of 10 and seven sets of three resulted in the same hypertrophy except they spent about

Three times the time in the gym so on a set per set basis doing a set of three is not nearly as effective as doing set inste of 10 otherwise you would see like 2 and a half times as much hypertrophy so clearly three reps isn’t enough to maximize hypertrophy as evidenced within

The study number two the importance of effort five is often repeated as the magic amount of reps in reserve the basic idea is that if you are within five sets of momentary muscular failure the conditions for hypertrophy seem to be better than if you are outside of it

And that coincides with fair enough I mean you will probably see more hypertrophy as go closer to failure but five reps in reserve will still give you a training effect as often as the point before the effectiveness drops off with a caveat that rest periods are sufficiently long enough and this also

Fits a wide variety of trading approaches as some of the bodybuilders who do many sets in a workout like Jay Cutler often use very short rest periods and didn’t rest very long number four dose relationship of volume per week now this is one of the most widely cided

Bits of information in exercise science as there have been a shout up renfeld for this meth analysis tending to result in more growth doesn’t actually mean anything here either on average it does or it doesn’t these are all very big ranges like certainly a big chunk of trainees

Are doing something between three and 30 reps with high effort between 10 and 20 sets per week they don’t all just see permanent growth without stopping they no one ever claimed it was going to give you permanent growth that’s a common misconception it’s like yeah you might find a better training approach through

Science but it’s not claiming to give you infinite gains no one ever made that claim hopefully inability research to answer these questions conclusively is really just the tip of the iceberg it turns out that there are a lot more problems than just overly vague they’re not overly vague it just means that a

Variety of approaches are reasonably similarly effective science studies often struggle to find a sample of people who are representative of the typical trainee many studies use untrained subjects were notoriously sensitive to any growth stimulus for someone who has never lifted weights cardio actually that is true and on the

Other hand there is a massive Darth of accom lifters represented in research that is true as well if I said to you f I have this great study shout up shonfeld what a beautiful man this is true as well this is part of the reason why it’s so difficult to get

Advanced trainees in your studies the guy who is currently out of shape who used to bench 315 back in the day but can barely do 10 push-ups right now you will slingshot closer to those old numbers with just about and whatever group you were in is

Going to look good as a result now all groups in a study tend to have high and low performers represent so I’m not sure what his point here is is his point that the people signing up for studies all see artificially High results because they’re usually coming from a layoff if

So that’s very very untrue I think a lot of participants as he mentioned earlier are just beginners or relatively untrained people and sure there are going to be cases where the results that you find in less trained people do not generalize to more trained populations however there are a lot of

Reasons why researchers use untrained participants one they’re a lot easier to recruit as he mentions in the video getting untrained participants who don’t have an attachment to training a certain way or to optimizing their results is a lot easier than getting someone who’s been training for 10 years and wants to

Add a tiny bit of muscle for their next competitive season in bodybuilding so you can get more people that way and guess what if you get more people in a bigger sample that allows you to have more power in your analyses or essentially be able to determine with

Greater accuracy how big an effect is for example of using length and partials versus a four- range of motion by having more people in your study by recruiting untrained participants who are more willing to take part we’re able to have greater Precision in our estimate of how

Big the effect really is reason number two because these participants are untrained you usually see higher effect sizes or essentially you see changes or effects more readily which again allows you to have a greater Precision or power in your analysis finally and much to the dismay of our whole niche of very very

Advanced trainees I’m sure most of the people watching this video have been training for 2 or 3 years at least most people who are in the gym haven’t been training for that long a lot of people lift for like a year and then stop lifting I know that’s not me

That’s probably not you but a lot of people are that way and so when it comes to actually producing results that will apply to most people in the gym seeking to get results studying people who’ve been training for 6 months or 12 months or what have you is going to be a lot

More relevant to most people than studying people whove been Lifting for 10 years and plus again add on to that that those people aren’t going to be willing to participate in research in the first place the conclusions that get summarized as this protocol was better than that are simply an average of the

People in the study I’ll give the same program we working averages before we go on I just want to clarify that when a research group typically claims that this intervention for example link partials was better than this intervention for example for range motion they don’t claim this merely on

Account of differences in the average gain between groups they also claim this on account of how much of a difference was there between participants in their improvements in each group for example if in a length and partials group on average there was a 10% increase in muscle size but there were people who

Lost half their muscle size and people who quadrupled their muscle size so there’s a huge spread of responses versus in the 4ange EM motion group responses were more homogeneous or more consistently same between participants that also plays into whether or not one group was significantly better than the other in terms of statistical

Significance variance or how much of a difference there is between participants in the responses does get Incorporated so it’s unfair or uncharitable to say that we only look at averages because when we claim this intervention was better than this one we do also take into account variants or different

Responses to a given intervention okay okay so individual predictions are hard to do so let’s say we’re going to foro those predictions for individuals and lower our standards to just finding what tends to be best for a population of diverse individuals just interject assuming that there is a huge amount of

Individual response to give an intervention needs to actually be analyzed first with any biological phenomenon pretty much there is going to be some variance some people are going to respond differently than others right some people might see a better training effect or a worse training effect however whether or not a specific

Intervention results in more variants than others is the topic of ongoing scientific study and there has been a call for specific analyses to be performed to look at whether or not there truly is individual response when it comes to specific intervention so I wouldn’t just say you know oh why are we

Deal in averages when there’s clearly hugely individual responses for a lot of phenomena lifting can actually reduce the amount of variance that you see in for example muscle growth so just because you put 100 people who are sedentary and you make them lift weights most of those people will actually get

Closer in terms of how their muscle mass changes over time it’s kind of an equalizer rather than something that people have a huge individual response to what I fear is going to happen here what Alex bromy is going to say and this has happened in the past in for example

Medicine is that well exercise science only deals in averages not in the individual responses and therefore when it comes to your training you dear viewer of the wolf coaching YouTube channel it doesn’t really informing as to what you should do and so it’s useless the truth is in all likelihood

Just by virtue of the nature of averages you are going to be close to the average responder if you’re completely different from the population being studied and the circumstances being studied yeah you’re probably not going to be the average however for a lot of people you’re not that different from the

Average person taking part in the study unless you’ve been training for 20 years and you’re looking at a study where people have been training for 6 months however even when there is a substantial difference between how long you’ve been training for or your circumstances and the circumstances within the study just

Be aware that if you’re going to disregard the study make sure you have a sufficiently compelling rationale to do so yes there are going to be differences between someone who’s more advanced and less Advanced however a lot of the same fundamental principles do still apply we actually need in each study to have

Confidence in our conclusions a power analysis hey he’s actually touching on power analysis for this according to James creger in his volume Bible I would need approximately 100 subjects per group to declare a 5% versus 10% gain in muscle size as statistically significant 80% of the time true most individual

Studies in sport Science are underp there’s simply not enough participants in each group to be able to accurately and consistently detect effects that might be there or not be there right and so one thing that’s happening is metanalyses are being used to group studies together and have more confidence about the effect we’re

Estimating with that being said if you ever wonder oh why did this one study not use a power analysis or why did they refer to for example constraint based sample size justification that’s probably because in most sport science studies funding isn’t something you just come by funding is usually something

That is sparse that you provide yourself or you have no funding in the case of my PhD for example for some studies I didn’t have any funding and so it was basically just me working out of my own free will I guess and it was essentially

Limited by how much time could I spend in the lab with participants doing research in a lot of sports science studies that’s exactly what’s happening you only have a select number of members of research team that can actually contribute you only have so much funding

And so it’s not really a matter of let’s get as many participants in as we can because we have all this funding that we can use to get a good amount of power and to be able to accurately detect effects it’s more of a case of okay well

We have this much time we have this many people let’s try and get as many people as we feasibly can and then make cautious inferences and extrapolations based on this one study because in this one study you didn’t have 300 people you might have had 30 to 50 if you’re lucky

And so that’s where metanalyses come in by grouping together multiple studies on the same topic with limited sample sizes in each you’re able to have a much larger sample size and therefore a much more accurate estimate of the effect that you’re observing there wasn’t data to evaluate results based on training

Status whether they were trained or untrained subjects it didn’t take into account weekly volume just what was done in a single session and only counted sets per I feel like out the flaws of a specific paper rather than of exercise science um there are plenty of met analyses that do subgroup analyses by

Training status or do moderator analyses looking at weekly volume as a continuous variable so he’s really just citing limitations of one paper volume and it’s been often cited ever since there’s a more recent metanalysis on the topic so I’m not sure why he’s referring to this one there’s a metanalysis by Bas Balan

Colleagues but again it seems like he’s just pointing out potential small flaws of papers rather than concerned with ex science as a whole have the density of data 10s to well here we go another ad I even purchased YouTube premium to make these videos you know after you so

Successfully funded my YouTube premium I now able to watch these videos during reactions without interruption so thank you for your support the conclusions from these studies are often evaluated as if the observe difference is a new rule that can just be plugged into any system to guarantee a better result that was never

Claim context behind every observed difference in a study take for example this Nipper video tackling the question of training to failure he includes this study by carol which shows less hypertrophy coming from the group that trained a failure and includes it into his columns to make a global decision

About failure being good or bad for size except this study was using athletes in the context of specific athletic training not specific hyperv training so we have a big issue here Alex bronley is essentially making the claim that because he circumstances don’t perfectly reflect what we’re doing in practice

That the findings do not generalize whatsoever or don’t apply whatsoever and this is kind of an example of what i’ call colloquially black and white thinking or dichotomous thinking where either the circumstances the program in the study the people being studied Etc are perfectly relevant to what you’re

Doing and therefore you consider the results or they’re not perfectly relevant and therefore you’re like yep St doesn’t matter it’s ultimately going to continue from being highly relevant in the population of Interest with a training program that’s similar to what you do in practice measuring things that you

Actually care about to a study in animals looking at outcomes you don’t care about and on a time scale that you don’t care about either so it’s all a Continuum of How likely is it to generalize to you and I think this black and white thinking all it really does

Here is Foster an understanding of ah science is useless for our purposes when in reality even this study here like doing compound Lifting for athletic performance isn’t actually that dissimilar from doing hypoy training yes the rep range might be different yes you might be trading closer for different

Failure but by and large you’re performing resistance training if there was a big effect of training the failure on adaptations you would also see it in this study is it the most relevant study ever no but is it still to be considered within answering the question of how does failure impact things during

Lifting absolutely it ends up in a simplified chart where failure it’s a thumbs up or a thumbs down as if the noise created by different contexts don’t wash away all the meaningful conclusions you could make we have a problem with how popular noise absolutely plays a role but nevertheless

That doesn’t mean you throw away a study just because there’s some noise in it there’s noise in every measurement of differences while shenfeld kerger Helms and others can pull double duty telling people the limitations of these shout out to shenfeld shout out Helms shout out ker oh God

Now this is where shade is going to be thrown Greg Knuckles put it more diplom the W paper a criticism that I do have of not great resarch researchers in our field um is relatively poor statistical literacy uh the the Maier folks like the one who did the study finding that 85%

Of exercise science papers had statistical errors in them which ly McDonald called directly [ __ ] show the relli McDonald is not really an authority on anything hypertrophy related I’m sorry the low volume weight training and beginners needed like 37 to 45 sets to grow uh it’s it’s garbage dat quick

Guide to Alex or ly whoever else just wants to throw out a study don’t like the results just collect garbage data and move on and disregard that study for the rest of all time it’s very good especially when you have other studies broadly finding the same thing it very

Much make sense to just disregard studies because they don’t align with your bias neatly now there’s an obvious disparity in rigor with exercise science compared to other there really isn’t most other Arenas have similar issues if you think Sport Science is unique try reading some of the psychology data try

Reading some of the data in most other fields you’ll see that most other fields also have methodological concerns that doesn’t mean we throw them out all together that doesn’t mean that these individuals aren’t smart but it speaks to the global standards held in the field now I’m sorry if that’s har but

There’s a ton of cloudiness in the research yet people still get to their first 400 lb deadlift and Mr Olympia winners still weigh 280 lb on stage nobody who is conducting yet another study comparing cess to failure or not with halfs serious college kids actually believes that anything Paradigm shifting

Is going to come out of it come on dude like sports science was never about being Paradigm shifting or it’s very rarely is most studies are just about Shifting the estimate we have of a given effect a little a little bit closer to what reality is so we have a little bit

More of an accurate estimate of for example now how much more growth failure seems to give you or how much more fatiguing failure seems to be these sorts of effects have to be estimated and measured somehow each additional study provides us with a bit more accuracy regarding what the effect truly

Is and in certain areas like range of motion there are only relatively few studies so while it’s not Paradigm shifting and no one is claiming it is and by the way very few papers are Paradigm sh sh in in general this is the case in physics this is the case in

Every science you want to site most papers just have a small effect right on the overall consensus within the field Sport Science was never meant to be just Paradigm shifting and to claim that oh well it’s supposed to be Paradigm shifting but studies aren’t really doing all that much that’s probably because

Your interpretation of studies isn’t that good if it were you would first up realize that none of these studies would be Paradigm shifting anyways a consensus is built up paper by paper study after study that is a limitation of sport Science that each study doesn’t have a

Huge sample size and not a huge amount of power but that’s why you look at multiple studies broadly showing the same thing and guess what most of the effects as you’ve mentioned earlier in the video that we study just aren’t that big the effects of say doing 15 versus

20 sets a week on a hypertrophy probably not that big and that’s why we need studies with decent sample sizes to be able to measure them and that’s why even people with a variety of approaches in the trenches in the gym are still getting results in spite of not

Following the science or having seemingly a wide disparity in their approaches now that takes us to the more Insidious problem in this field and that’s fraud many okay there’s been a few studies of barbalo yeah barbalo is one of like two instances of fraud that I can think of

Within Sports Science if you’re dealing with hundreds and thousands of authors and you can only think of two instances fraud isn’t a rampant issue and certainly not a reason to disregard Sport Science alog together there are also accusations of outright fake numbers where compound movements like squats are done to momentary muscular

Failure I did that pretty much it does work you can do it once again allow McDonald no one can squat five sets of 8 to 12 to failure right it was listed as a rep max load on 90 seconds it cannot be done so it’s been

Uh about a week and I’m still wai out you hear me I got a th000 bucks too so you know shout out L McDonald thank you for the money one video no edits prove me wrong thousand bugs these protocols can’t be done thing broadly speaking they can pretty much all be done however

If you’re reading these papers and you notice that they say participants did sets of 8 to 12 rep Maxes with 90 seconds rest that generally nowadays it’s being specified a lot more for example in this recent study by nson colleagues that I actually did a session

From you can check that out here but nowadays it’s being specified more but back in the day they wouldn’t specify that between set sets you would drop the load in order to actually make the sets feasible obviously if you just did a set to failure you’re not going to be able

To do the same set again in 90 seconds if you’ve read research before broadly speaking this isn’t news to you this is something that kind of everyone just knows except for people who are not really in the field like potentially L McDonald or Alex Bromley in this case

For instance the discussion of training effort gets watered down that’s not true failure or not to failure but there’s a lot of real estate in there that matters he has a point in some older metanalyses we treat a lot of variables as if they’re binary right like we’re either

Talking about high volume or low volume and low volume for example might mean below 10 sets and high volume for example above 10 sets or we might talk about failure AKA actually hitting failure or non-f failure anything that is not failure three Ops Reserve six Ops Reserve

Everything that is a limitation of older metanalyses and from looks of things that’s all Bromley really ever looked at right like the shown f metanalysis kind of categorized volumes as opposed to treating it as a continuous variable where you’re not saying well there’s certain categories that volume falls

Into that were defining it’s more of a numerical number right like how does hypertrophy change when we go from 5 to 10 sets from 10 to 15 from 15 to 20 and kind of just viewing it as a number rather than something they need to categorize into low medium and high and

More recent met analyses like for example the most recent met analysis on training to failure by Robinson and colleagues did exactly this my range of motion metanalysis also looked at variables not dichotomously wherever possible but rather as a continuous variable so just keep in mind that he’s mentioning some limitations here but

They’re almost entirely applicable to only very old studies and presumably only the ones that he’s actually read so again only older studies your back is particularly weak getting close to failure on a squat is not going to have the same effect on your quads as a leg extension and let’s forget the music’s

Very sort of positive all of a sudden there’s a spectrum with effort that is important to Define hit followers go well beyond the point of failure and most volume-based bodybuilders still actually reach momentary indeed and the most recent paper on failure by Robinson colleagues looked at pretty much exactly

All this finally there is stopping short of failure at some r or reps in reserve any coach who works with the average population will tell you that there is a oh man no it does not oh man the paper that’s most relevant to the topic is one of been involved with I

Was a co-author on this paper it actually looked at every study that’s previously tried to look at how accurate are people at gauging RP or reps in reserve long story short people are off by less than one rep in their estimate of how many more reps they could have

Done on a given set so people are actually quite accurate above 12 reps or so people start become less accurate but on average we’re talking about being off by less than one rep so claiming now that coaches know in practice you know people are wildly inaccurate I don’t don’t think that’s necessarily true

There might be a difference between how accurate people are in Lab conditions when they have people looking at them and they have to be honest about their RP but ultimately I think that most people are accurate enough the big thing here is I wouldn’t site this paper I

Would site the actually most relevant paper because the most relevant paper is actually looking at how accurate are people at gauging reps and Reserve versus just what load do people on average do a set with similar studies with RP show he’s portraying a consensus here that simply isn’t true as I just

Mentioned the some topic says the opposite any accuracy of effort in any research that is supposed to compare word so answer we don’t first of all people are generally reasonably accurate at least within the context of these studies right like the studies that we have looking at how accurate people are

Are done in a lab the studies that he’s referring to now in exercise science where people are supposedly not accurate that’s the same condition so they are going to be pretty accurate and here’s the real mind [ __ ] just because you think you’re going to failure and you

Actually fail a rep doesn’t mean you truly failed and in fact no one observing you from the outside could ever really truly tell how close to failure you were even if you fa a rep how do you not know that you just kind of gave it a halfast effort you didn’t

Really give it your all there’s a good chance that you didn’t right especially if your aim is to go to failure a lot of people might just slow down their contraction speed as a means to make the set end earlier so while Alex is saying here well all of these studies should

Have people train to failure because that’s the only way we know that they’re actually training hard and to failure the truth is even when participants fail or even when Alex fails in the gym or even when I fail in the gym we just don’t truly know whether he hit failure

We just don’t know so first off participants are accurate enough at repone Reserve or rpe that it doesn’t usually matter whether we have them trained to failure or not generally we do have them trained to failure just because it increases the stimulus from every given set all right so if we just

Want to see is there a difference between for example 4 in of motion and length and partials making them train to failure just means you see larger effects but more importantly even if you think you go to failure there’s no way of knowing if you actually went to

Failure we have to accept that we can’t speak certainty speak something scientists don’t understanding the tradeoff between incurring a ton of fatigue to get that last failure rep versus staying a reper too short of failure and maintaining quality over multiple sets actually seems like it would be a productive area of

Investigation for the field of exercise science oh well exercise been something that science has looked at in we’ve looked at the effects of going closer to failure and what effect it has on hypertrophy on a given set we also have a few studies now looking at the effects

Of going closer to failure and how that impacts fatigue at least an unacclimated subjects one area of research I agree there is more need for research in is looking at is failure still fatiguing once you’ve actually gotten used to it AKA if you’ve been training to failure

For 12 weeks as opposed to it being your first time does it still produce more fatigue compared to safekeeping one rep in the tank my hun is it does but the effect on fatigue diminishes with time as you get exposed to it more often and more often as the repeated bout effect

Kicks up given how much of a difference can occur with changes in exercise selection in order Alex Bromley makes these assumptions that I don’t know where he pulls them from I think because this whole video is kind of like a bashing on exercise science and a lot of

Its flaws which a lot of the flaws are genuine I don’t disagree with that but I’m not sure where he gets his information from them because science is ultimately still our best way to get it answers and to essentially measure reality for example he claims that exercise order has a large effect on

Hypertrophy the most recent meth analysis on the topic and we have quite a few studies on the topic doesn’t suggest there is an effect of exercise order on hypertrophy my most published research is false so recently have attempted to quantify the problem by replicating some prominent past results the reproducibility project

A very important project but found only 36% had a statistically significant result the second time around and the strength of measured relationships were on a half those of the original studies an attempted verification of 53 studies considered landmarks in the basic science ofc for what it’s worth it

Generally seems that sports science is a bit more methodologically rigorous than psychology it’s still not perfect by any means but it is a little bit better would be Mass coordination to get the best data but the real Stakes it turns out are just not getting published in this veritasium video shout out verit

Research is wrong Derek Mueller explains how the selection of studies increases the chances of incorrect conclusions being published and how replication studies are actively disincentivized this is true precognition is a classic example of research methods not being very legitimate in the past well surprise surprise the hit rate they obtained was

Not significantly different from chance when they tried to publish their findings in the same Journal as the original paper they were rejected the reason the journal refuses to publish replication studies there’s been a big shift in this recently by the way replication studies are now encouraged

By quite a few journals and though they may not get published as easily as significant findings generally insignificant findings are becoming a lot more easy to publish and replication studies are being encouraged all other sports recognize that the human organism acts like an entire plenty of other sports have extremely poor practices

So actually sh when I think about some of the boxing or football practices on increases ability directly affected by how much fatigue you’ve accumulated and why some sight gains from going from a volume approach to an intensity approach but when you have a lifter that’s been

Training with a ton of volume for a long time and you pull that volume back let him recover a little bit from not you know doing these crazy you know the Arnold typ rtin all realiz the adapt so there absolutely is an amount of volume that is too much for a given lifter

Where they actually see worse strength gains and worse muscle growth however with strength specifically what tends to happen a lot what Alex actually pointed out correctly here is that when you’re trading with high volumes you also generate a lot of fatigue and so in the short term while you’re training hard

With high volumes you may not see your strength gains right away but then when you pull back to lower volumes you’re suddenly training with much lower fatigue and thus your strength is able to be expressed and you see potentially some of the gains they actually accured from when you were trading with higher

Volumes so if you’re overtraining or training with more volume rather than you should cuz overtraining is a separate thing entirely but if you’re training with more volume than you can recover from and benefit from yeah do less but that doesn’t mean that a more intense approach is inherently and

Categorically better than a higher volume approach and ultimately what is high volume is individual this hypertrophy model can’t say anything about complex training splits where a day of work isn’t supposed to be singularly responsible for a fixed this is fair enough right a lot of studies do

Not use a trading program that is similar to what people would do in practice however when we look at the effect of periodization on hypertrophy for example in the most recent metth analysis it just doesn’t seem to play a large role so to assume that periodization would somehow change all

The things that we know reasonably well like higher volumes up to a certain point seem to lead to more growth taking a given set closer to failure also seems to lead to more growth to say that periodization would somehow invalidate all of these broad findings that we’ve

Seen across multiple studies not in one low power study but in multiple consistent studies is just to say nonsense that’s me in reality the question of what percentage of your gains a certain amount of volume can give doesn’t make any sense without considering the person absolutely you know if you’re going from

An hour in the gym a week to 10 hours in the gym a week but you’re only getting double with growth maybe that’s no some people diminish returns and then be outpaced by the accumulation of fatigue which will lead to plateau and regression not to be that guy again but

I’m going to cite some more research the concept of overtraining and I I think I’ve made a video about this before if I haven’t I’ll make one in the future the concept of over training is thrown around a lot but at least in the research it doesn’t get observed that

Easily there’s not really many studies out there that have seen overtraining and overtraining being defined as a consistent prolonged decrease in performance lasting months as a result of training too much so while it can absolutely happen and probably happens more in practice than in research I don’t think it’s something you need to

Be overly concerned about for most people who have a 95 job and who can only train for say five 10 hours of week anyways do you call that volume optimal because it grew you in the beginning or do you call it suboptimal oh man you stop responding to it’s not either

Answer that’s silly it’s the question which only allows for silly answers so that’s a whole take because the most recent review paper we have looking at how does your previous volume impact your growth with different volumes afterwards so for example if you start at 10 sets how does your growth change

Going from 10 sets to say 15 staying at 10 or going at to five the evidence we have around that as summarized in a review paper by Hammerton colleagues doesn’t seem to suggest there’s a huge effect of how much volume you were training with previously and your sort

Of future progress so just because you’ve been trading with high volumes it doesn’t mean you’re not going to see good gains in the future that’s a fallacy and I think it’s just something that people who don’t like training with high volumes will just say because

They’re like okay yeah you get get a bit more gains more fast but then in the long term you end up at the same place I think that’s the feest and probably inaccurate given the evidence the idea of volume cycling as perhaps being worth considering which suggests that volume

May not be absolute it may be I don’t think it is as much as L Norton is brilliant I think there are some theoretical benefits to POS I don’t think there is probably I think it probably just has to do with average volume move suggesting that there isn’t

Just a fixed range of training that people should discover and then adhere to Forever really going out on a LM on that one this is on the one hand Alex is like oh scientists nothing Paradigm shifting and they overemphasize the importance of results when in reality it’s plagued

With all these methodological issues and yet when scientists actually use Nuance in their claims as he just cded now he then proceeds to make fun of them a bit of a double standard de corle to substantial long-term muscle growth is progression it’s absolutely King it’s the thing that drives your training

Forward week to week and the sign that your training is doing what it’s supposed to so progression technically isn’t the thing that drives your programm we to weak it’s in fact what happens as a result of good programming you don’t progress and that is what’s driving your program week to week it’s

More so you’re doing good training and therefore you grow a bit of muscle you get a bit stronger and you’re able to progress week to week it’s the other way around essentially when stagnation occurs which it does for everyone continued progression needs to be addressed and you do that by adding

Stress implementing a different stress or allowing more recovery for increasing stress concentrated periods of high amounts of work that might be unsustainable longterm might also be needed to cause growth in the short term when you’ve become resistant to that stimulus this is Lee Haney and Arnold Schwarzenegger talking about their

Hardest training being the 12 weeks leading into the Olympia because that’s when that training was most important and they couldn’t sustain that work year round it’s John Meadow talking about how we did short specialization phases to increase work for weak points while keeping everything else at maintenance two door bmpa writing about

Periodization for bodybuilders and serious strength training Mike isrel using terminology like mesocycles and D Loess to talk about hypertrophy training and in the process actually addressing the need for fatigue management and deliberate inclusion of Novel stimulus it seems to me that Alex is a lot more into the idea of speculating based on

Not too much evidence than on actually relying on the evidence directly the evidence we have the scientific evidence we have tells us a few things for example it tells us that doing more volume to a certain point is probably better for growth at least in a relatively small time frame likewise

Taking a SE closer to failure leads to more growth potentially doing some length and partials leads to more growth than doing a full range of motion it tells us a few things Alex seems to be more into the idea of using a few small studies to make broad inferences about

Long-term periodization I’m not opposed to periodization but it’s just worth addressing that the evidence on the topic doesn’t really support its huge role in progress I think fundamentally Alex Bramley comes at it from a very different epistemic perspective where he doesn’t really regard science as being

The best way to arrive at the answer or at the very least the iteration of sport Science that we currently have which is fine it just means that I don’t think we would see eye to eye on most topics the short answer is to throw optimal out the [ __ ] window we can

Hypothesize that a thing called optimal exists but the resolution given in the research doesn’t come close to finding that for you or telling you how to oh man colleting data points all over your body giving real-time data to a supercomputer that Aggregates it against every other lifter in the world might be

Able to tell you something specific about what you should do next claiming that science isn’t going to bring you any closer to an optimal approach versus a non-optimal approach I think is the feest ultimately I think science is a much better tool to get us closer to

Optimal than is just looking around you at a number of anecdotes and seeing what seems to connect them all is there a number of anecdotes that seem to align in some way like they’re all doing the same thing and they’re all getting better results the issue there is you

Have even less control than you do within Studies by controlling for some factors like nutrition like sometimes even performing within subject designs where they’re training one leg with a 4ange motion and one leg with a partial range of motion we’re able to have much greater accuracy of does one thing

Actually work better than another if you’re dealing with the same person or if genetics are equated for on average that sort of stuff he spell temperament very cool around that’s right if you toone in theirs or teen which isn’t hard all them amateur to Elite have gone through long

Periods of no progress punctuated by short periods of quick progress that means that statistically anyone blocked was more likely to have done nothing at all than actually better most people gradually grow slowly and slowly as they get more it’s not this random you progress all they don’t progress unless you start takings for

Example is the difference between or between now and your next training block so with respect to what you do in the gym between this week and next your optimal path is not best out of the field of all possibilities optimal is just nothing and it turns out that there

Are a lot of ways to get the body to do something and absolutely none of it to do with the number of PubMed articles that you’ve read oh man so that’s all I got for today guys I know many of you might be disillusioned to hear my severe

Take on the state of exercise science I’m not particularly disillusioned I have to say I think that Alex Bromley ultimately is overly skeptical of science I think that he’s throwing out Sports Science altogether because of some of his limitations some of which he understands correctly and some of which he doesn’t

I’m going to give this video a solid three or four out of 10 because some of the concerns raised are genuine right like small sample sizes within a study are genuine the generalizability of a given study to your own circumstances can be questionable depending on the study but ultimately a lot of these

Issues don’t mean even if you take them all together in their totality that doesn’t mean that you just throw out Sport Science alog together Sport Science Still Remains our best tool to arrive at the truth to measure does this thing have an effect or not because if

All you’re relying on is real world examples you will have too much noise to be able to tell anything guys that’s the video If you enjoyed the video please like comment subscribe and I’ll see you guys my subscribers in that next one peace no

In this video, Dr. Milo Wolf responds and exposes many of @AlexanderBromley ‘s incorrect claims about exercise science not being a good tool in the gym. Some of the topics discussed include individual responses in studies, training to failure, volume and muscle growth, whether progression is consistent or happens phasically, whether we can accurately gauge RPE/repetitions in reserve, the influence of exercise order on muscle growth, the efficacy of periodization for muscle growth, overtraining and more.

References:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvYgXOFCeGM&pp=ygUMYWxleCBicm9tbGV5 2. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24714538/ 3. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37796222/ 4. https://sportrxiv.org/index.php/server/preprint/view/214/707 5. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35291645/ 6. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/370837310_Exploring_the_Dose-Response_Relationship_Between_Estimated_Resistance_Training_Proximity_to_Failure_Strength_Gain_and_Muscle_Hypertrophy_A_Series_of_Meta-Regressions 7. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34542869/ 8. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30036284/ 9. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32077380/ 10. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35044672/ 11. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32602418/ 12. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/372903859_The_Importance_of_Previous_Resistance_Training_Volume_on_Muscle_Growth_in_Trained_Individuals 13. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38060089/

👇🏼 Get 12 FREE programs at my website!
https://wolfcoaching.com/freeprograms

Follow us on socials for more:
• 📸 Wolf Coaching Instagram: https://instagram.com/wolfcoaching_
• 💥 TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@wolfcoaching
• 💻 Milo’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/wolfcoach_

If you enjoyed this video, please drop a like and SUBSCRIBE to the channel for more!

#drama #alexbromley #exercisescience
“Alex Bromley is WRONG about Exercise Science.”

Music from Uppbeat.

Business Enquiries: milo@wolfcoaching.com