For me, exercise used to be the equivalent of button-mashing an arcade console. I’d show up, do some random stuff, or maybe something I read out of a magazine or off the internet or something. Maybe it was high-intensity interval training, maybe it was bro-splits, maybe it was kettlebells, or some bad-form Olympic lifts. It was this hodge-podge of random flailing with no record keeping, so any progress I made was purely from showing up and working kinda hard and getting a sweat.
If you show up to console and throw quarters at it, just by virtue of some pattern recognition you will make like some improvements, but if you keep changing characters and you don’t really remember what you did, it just keeps eating quarters. Not only that, I didn’t even know anything about the overall strategy of strength training, let alone any special moves like rest-pause sets or blood flow occlusion (which I haven’t done yet but it sound just as hideous as it is ingenious when we think of the practical applications for preventing muscle atrophy).
Once my job as a kitchen manager left me with plantar fasciitis, about 40 extra pounds, and sub-par eating habits (such as standing over a trash can shoveling a mis-fired phat Thai in my mouth as fast as humanly possible before the next ticket came in), I realized I had to figure out how to get healthy and exercise and stuff, for real this time, not just button-mashing. Thankfully I have a graduate level education in biology and molecular genetics, and there’s Youtube.
The first videos I saw were from Alan Thrall from Untamed strength on deadlifting technique. My back was sore from work, I figured it was weak and underdeveloped. I wanted to make it strong, or at least stronger, so I could eliminate it as an excuse, and deadlifts are a great way to fix that. So I found the video from Alan on deadlifting, which was where I was introduced to the sport of powerlifting. Apparently, there’s this sport where they test how strong someone is at doing 3 basic lifts: the squat, the bench press, and the deadlift for 1 repetition.
There’s weight classes and stuff and rules and federations and it’s a whole thing. I figured since the goal of the entire sport is training to get stronger, and I wanted to get stronger, I should probably start doing some of those exercises. That was the first major level I got in my got in my training: training using the principles that the biggest, strongest people use to get big and strong, simplify my workout routine to heavy compound basic exercises: squat, bench, deadlift, rows, overhead press, and variants; do 3 sets, 5 reps each set, squat, bench and deadlift, 3 times a week. Add 5-10 lbs to the bar every session, focus on good form.
From there I did more searching, and the youtube algorithm brought me to Omar Isuf. His video covered more topics at the time than Alan’s, as there were videos on nutrition, programming, in addition to exercise demos and quality guest contributors. Some of the more notable guests that I can recall were Greg Nuckols, Dr. Brad Schoenfeld, Alan Aragon, Dr. Mike Israetel, and Dr. Bret Contreras, and many more. All of them are significant contributors to the field of sports and exercise physiology and physiology, as well as strength and conditioning, and science education.
Greg Nuckols is awesome. Go read the work on his website Strongerbyscience. It used to be called Strengtheory, but unfortunately not enough people were cool enough to get it. After reading his webpage and watching the content he had made through youtube, I purchased the books Greg Nuckols and Omar Isuf collaborated on called “The Art of Lifting,” and “The Science of Lifting.” Both are very good introductory books for understanding key principles in exercise programming and physiology with topics like fatigue management, overtraining, volume load, and other stuff that start to get at the guts of strength training and exercise.
To supplement my education further, I purchased “The Lifting Lyceum,” which was a series of videos on how to execute the squat, benchpress, and deadlift, as well as videos for programming for strength, hypertrophy (muscle growth), and work capacity. There is equivalent content at this point throughout the internet, but it requires diving around and doing research. I’m glad I got it as it helped me learn a bunch of technical aspects of the lifts including variations for individual lifters, and troubleshooting weak points and technical failures.
After hearing Omar and Greg mention the name Dr. Mike Israetel a few times I figured I’d try and find his content. That’s when I got introduced to Steve Hall and his podcast “Revive Stronger” (formerly the “Macros, Bodybuild and Powerlifting podcast… which is wordy). It is an amazing podcast, Steve gets great guests and provides a platform for some of the best evidence-based information in the strength training community. His show introduced me to bodybuilding… as a sport. I mean, it makes sense, they compete, but to think about it with an offseason and a competition… which means a training strategy and stuff. Another thing, so we just assume that bodybuilding is just like for steroid users and people with freak genetics and stuff, and a lot of it is. But, there is also a growing sport of natural bodybuilding, where the competitors are drug-tested and polygraphed and stuff to make it more legit.
The significance is that, with powerlifting and bodybuilding as sports, that means there’s a goal. If there’s a goal, there needs to be a strategy to get there. If there is a strategy, that means we can organize our training to meeting those goals, as opposed to going into the gym because “it’s good, and stuff.” And then we button mash all the machines, get sore AF and wonder if we did it right or something. Even if we don’t compete, we can use the same principles and techniques bodybuilders and powerlifters use to get big and lean, or get strong, because that’s the entire point of those sports, respectively.
And you might be saying, “But Eli, I don’t want to get big and strong, or gross and muscley, or inflexible or lose my stamina or whatever.” My answer, as follows:
1. If you are here reading this, you might not have a basic understanding of strength training and have no idea how your body is actually going to adapt.
2. You might not have any understanding of how dedicated you’ll have to be to training to match the image of gross-giant you in your head.
3. If we are losing weight, in order to retain muscle, we must do strength training.
With Steve Hall and his podcast, the goal became very clear: I need to lose weight and build muscle. So, the next step was figuring out how to do this the most effectively.
Dr. Mike Israetel is a very smart man, and a rather big one. He was a former professor at Temple University in sports science stuff. He now works exclusively for his company Renaissance Periodization. He is also a competitive bodybuilder and jiu-jitsu grappler, as well as former competitive powerlifter. He is like a machine. The Q&A sessions he does on Steve Hall’s podcast, as well as more recent roundtable discussions, have answered long-standing questions I had about training, even when I was still button mashing and just trying to learn some special moves.
In particular, the theoretical concept of Maximum Recoverable Volume came up with a framework that help organize how much training to do. Essentially, it states that there is a certain amount of volume of work a person can do on a given skill or attribute such that if they try to maintain that volume, they will burnout and die (overreaching is the sports term, and it has its merits). Likewise, there is a minimum amount of volume we need to do to maintain skills and attributes, and a minimum volume in order to get better at a skill. For strength training, volume is measured as “hard, working sets that are challenging.”
So, from this, we learn that there is a certain amount of sets that we can do per muscle group week in order to grow. As the training cycle goes on, we need to do more volume to make things harder because we have adapted, which means we do more sets. What it also means is that, when we start feeling like garbage and we need to take a break, RECOVER, and hit it again. That’s when I realized why I got plantar fasciitis and why everything went to crap when I was working as a kitchen manager: I did not give my body time to recover.
I purchased the books Dr. Mike et. al have written: The Scientific Principles of Strength, The Renaissance Diet, and the Volume Landmarks book. These are game-changing books that build off of the other material I had read prior and have really allowed me to effectively program exercise and nutrition for people at a variety of skill levels and training ages.
At some point, Dr. Mike and Renaissance Periodization started a membership, called RP+ that gave members access to college-level video lecture series on things like biomechanics, nutrition, sports periodization, all from a staff of Ph.D’s R.D’s, CSCS’s, and other awesome titles and backgrounds. Most importantly, there was a weekly webinar with Dr. Mike and his gassy cohort Dr. James Hoffman where they answer member questions. This was perfect because I could get rapid feedback on any questions that I had from papers I read or technique or programming questions. It’s a really great service and I strongly recommend signing up if you get really deep into strength training.
At around the same time, Greg Nuckols teamed up with Dr. Eric Helms and Dr. Mike Zourdos to write the publication MASS, Monthly Application in Strength Sports. They do all the heavy lifting for me by going through all the peer-reviewed journal articles each month and do reviews. It has really been a great publication and I would encourage anybody that is really interested in sports science to check it out. MASS and RP+ have helped tremendously in getting me the most current evidenced-based information, and they are just two of the many publication and membership groups that exist in the fitness world.
With all this information, my button-mashing days are over. Everytime I go into the gym, I know what I am doing, why I am doing it, how to execute the lifts correctly, how to modify my volume and workload to make progress, what I am going to do next week, next month, in 3 months, and so on. It gets fuzzier the further out I get, but that’s fine. I know how to adjust things when I get there.
So, this is how to stop button-mashing: study evidence-based material, practice in the gym, find people to ask questions to, and maybe get a coach. You don’t need to go out and get a degree in this stuff. We already learned for you, let us help you reach your goals and teach you how to do it. That way you get the results you want and still have time to be cool.