Gym myths are my favorite. The best past is the extreme prevalence of survivorship bias, with most of the bad advice coming from people who have succeeded but are themselves mistaken about why.
i.e. Massive bro is adamant that everyone should be taking BCAAs, beginners are inclined to believe it because it looks like he knows what he’s talking about.
I think the fitness industry makes most of its money this way tbh
My wife is one of these consumers. She shes all these influencers pushing working out products and she uses everything she can get her hands on. Then she wonders why when she trains for, and runs a full marathon, she doesnt lose any weight. Well you take thousands of calories of supplements… just run
Yeah you can’t run off a bad diet, you do need to make sure you are getting enough protein aligned with your goals, and some fats, but outside of that, you just need to eat less than you burn.
Running might help increase the deficit a bit, or give you some extra food, but you’re probably going to struggle to cover thousands of additional calories.
And now they’re pointing at that guy who was taking in absurd amounts of calories from meat per day, because they don’t realize he had a nutritional deficiency that meant most of it wasn’t getting processed.
You can do a similar thing on rice, as it happens, because rice doesn’t contain enough B1 and you develop beriberi.
It would depend quite a lot on what meats he was eating and in particular if he was incorporating organ meats, but in general to breakdown protein and fat you need magnesium, potassium, and vitamins B and D.
There’s also the fact that your pancreas can only create so much lipase and protease in a day. It doesn’t matter what you do, there’s going to be a maximum amount of fat and protein your body can absorb.
In Butter Boy’s case he (a Florida Man) was literally excreting cholesterol through his skin.
I will give him this, though, people with beriberi can literally starve to death while eating the same amount of calories in carbs because they can’t break down the carbs at all after a point. Meat and dairy has enough nutrients that you’ll be functional until your heart explodes.
Or to put it another way, if you need 5 units of magnesium/D/B/whatever to process 2,000 calories of your butter and meat diet but you only get 2.5 from the diet you can “solve” the deficiency by eating 4k and excreting the other 2,000. Traditionally, or through your eyes, whatever works.
Compare that to needing 5 units of B1 to break down 2k of white rice but only getting .5 units from the rice or whatever (you’d have been fine in B1 from brown rice btw)
That’s… Not really a good explanation but it explains the basic principle.
The short version of that: it’s nearly impossible to out exercise poor diet but much less difficult to out diet poor exercise. (obviously, you still need exercise, but you don’t need to train like an olympic swimmer to lose weight if you make better dietary choices)
running is sometimes fun (the rush you get from beat your PB) and let’s you eat things that are delicious. I’m in a perpetual calorie debt because I run so much and I’m poor 😭
I’m not sure supplements are ever fun … but they can help with getting enough protein if you’re lifting or an additional energy boost via creatine … protein powder can taste nice but you need to watch out for macros if it’s too delicious, I’ve never had a nice creatine.
Or by fun do you mean preworkouts? I think there’s limits to preworkout value when what you really need for workout energy are easily digestible carbs over caffine or other cruft.
the “sad” reality of fitness is that it just boils down to “do exercise, eat 2 hours before an intense workout, creatine helps give a little strength boost”.
There’s no magical thing you can do to make things easier/faster other than just going harder or, you know, steroids (which has obvious downsides). And everything else that people tend to worry about, like the precise amount of protein to eat, is just… like yeah it has an effect but if you just do shitloads of workouts and eat when you’re hungry it’s basically impossible to not get stronger.
Fundamentally you’re right. If you get absolutely everything 100% scientifically perfect for you, your circumstances, your genetics, etc you will always see better results than the person eyeballing it. But its like 200% more effort for an extra 25% gains, the minutiae of this shit goes as deep as you care to look and thats what drowns a lot of new enthusiasts.
I personally take it a step further and question whether the extra 25% is worth it at all.
Even creatine has its downsides, in that it’s a powder you have to pay for and remember to choke down every day. And in the end, all you get is the same progress you would have gotten anyway, just a bit faster.
For me, who cares if what took you 5 years could have been done in 4 if everything was “optimal”? Why are we so obsessed with “optimizing” everything, when in reality this mindset just results in 90% of people giving up?
*I should add I have no critique of someone who wants for themselves every possible advantage, or educates others about it. But presenting these things as being synonymous with the gym is a huge public disservice. It would be like aggressively trying to funnel every single person who wants to buy a car into becoming an F1 driver
unless you’re struggling to buy food i would say creatine is 100% worth it, it’s not that expensive really and you can just mix a teaspoon into your morning drink.
And for that little effort and expense you get a free ~10% increase in strength so long as you keep consuming it, which lets you train more faster, resulting in permanent gains.
like it’s not obligatory or anything, but it’s a great way to help yourself get into fitness, just makes it slightly easier. Really the big benefit of it can be said to simply be that it makes you more likely to keep going.
Creatine is LITERALLY the only supplement that almost everyone and every study agrees.
Has a measurable physiological effect.
Has next to zero side effects.
Is incredibly cheap.
Is universally beneficial for anyone training in almost every sport/activity.
Anything else the answer to “Should I take…” is at best “It depends” and in most cases “No”. Its the only one if people arent taking it I’d ask “Why not?”
Sure, if you want to know earnestly some reasons why not.
For starters, it is literally completely unnecessary.
Beyond that, it perpetuates the broader harmful falsehood that lifters need a cabinet of supplements, thereby turning many people away from the gym who are repulsed by the idea.
The above falsehood has personally annoyed me many times. I am visibly very muscular, and have had friends, family, and even strangers warn me, unprompted, about the dangers of supplements lol. I gather there was a news story about lead in protein powder that went viral, and everyone assumes I must be taking all the powders, probably because of how cavalier gym folk are about insisting everyone hop on all the powders
It has a gross sandy texture, upsets people’s stomaches (especially if they try the “creatine loading” phase which is so popularly suggested), and interferes with their sleep (if the countless anecdotes are to be believed).
It does have potential serious side effects in some populations that don’t get talked about often. People with bipolar disorder shouldn’t risk taking it, neither should people with kidney disease.
If you are healthy and ever get bloodwork done, you need to remember to explain to your doctor that you supplement creatine beforehand, otherwise they may think you have kidney disease.
Five grams per day of creatine monohydrate dissolved in a glass of water is cheap. Creatine pills are not. Creatine gummy bears are not. Creatine in preworkout (yet another constantly shilled powder) is not. The massive list of non-monohydrate creatine products are neither cheap nor effective lol. When we say “definitely everyone should hop on creatine!”, a good percentage of people will end up going down one of those paths.
And to top it all off, the beneficial effects for muscle building are dramatically overstated. People talk about it like it creates some cascading compound interest effect you can’t afford to miss out on, when in actual reality, everyone who has been around the block knows you reach the point of diminishing returns very quickly when you are consistent in the gym lol. If you put 5 hard years in without it, there isn’t a soul on earth who could pick you apart in a lineup of creatine users.
Now your response to all this may be “none of this is really that big deal!” and you know what? I agree. I frequently cite creatine as being one of the big three non-scam supplements (protein, caffeine, creatine). They have a real effect, unlike virtually all other gym products. My issue, to put it most broadly, is with the attitude we perpetuate regarding supplementation in general. That it’s so thoroughly and totally taken for granted that every single person should want to pay for and incorporate every single advantage.
That we frame it as being “an advantage” at all, as if the simple love of training is not in and of itself a great joy which transforms the lives of everyone it reaches. No no, instead, as is typical of all “worthy” pursuits, it is an investment to be capitalized upon. Faster is always better, bigger is always better. Do not allow yourself to be captivated by the scenery flying by, if for a moment it distracts you from shoveling ever more coal into the furnace of this godforsaken train everyone insists our life must become.
ahem. Well, apologies for going off the rails a bit there. That’s been stewing in me for a long time. I also don’t take protein powder lmao
my brother in christ you’re responding to “creatine is the only useful supplement” with “it perpetuates the broader harmful falsehood that lifters need a cabinet of supplements”, do you not see how this seems a bit nonsensical?
Funny thing is I can say I’m on steroids when I go to the gym (hormone medication). Though for some reason, the steroids I’m on are never the ones gym bros talk about.
I’d argue the “eat before the workout” advise isn’t right: While you shouldn’t work out directly after eating as your body will direct energy towards digestion, working out on a fasting metabolism is beneficial as fasting comes with high levels of growth hormones. Evolutionary speaking: You’re not hunting when you have food, you’re hunting when you’re hungry. How can you have breakfast before you caught it.
You might not be able to hit peak performance at the tail end of even just an interval fast, but it is going to do all kinds of signalling to your body to put more energy into growing muscle. The growing happens not while you’re lifting, but after you inhaled the chicken you caught.
you’re absolutely hunting when you have food, why would you wait to hunt until you’re hungry? do you only buy more food when you’ve emptied out the fridge?
also not everyone hunts, foraging has historically been arguably a more significant part of how people fed themselves, and even then not everyone is going to be doing that, some people are just going to be staying at camp to take care of the kids and stuff.
what you’re suggesting is something that sounds good in your head, what i’m suggesting is pretty widely accepted practice.
When talking evolution it’s not just humans, and human behaviour. The fasting metabolism, hunger hormone system etc. is shared through pretty much all of the animal kingdom. We had it before we left the seas. Fish don’t stockpile food, they store it in adipose tissue with about exactly the same mechanism as we do, there might not be much food around, that means increased competition, that means you need to be active, not lethargic, when hungry, and the level of exertion experienced during that fasting time will be taken by the body as the signal how much to bulk up, that’s why growth hormones are highly active at that time. We’re dealing with a truly ancient mechanism.
You can trust that I read up on the stuff or you can do it yourself or you can trust an army of gymbros to have done it.
BCAA’s are essentially bullshit 99% of the time because if you’re getting adequate complete high quality proteins from food (including whey or quality plant protein shakes) they contain all the amino acids your body can use.
Honestly, the flavor is all down to the brand. But water just gets boring as shit if you’re drinking a lot.
Basically just seconding what Delphia said; if you’re getting adequate protein from food sources than BCAAs are a waste.
I just tend to drink >2L of plain water a day as a baseline, so when it comes to the gym — I’d rather have something with flavour. It’s best to just think of it as gymbro-cordial, with added caffeine on occasion!
It’s like the cosmetics industry. Keep shifting what products will give you the look you want, whether it be beautiful hair or massive pecs. Tell you all the lies about what the product might do for you, then tell you to accessorize the product with whatever fringe benefit you’re looking for, and constantly keep changing the “science” so you jump from product to product for the latest and greatest thing that will make you look good.
Don’f forget to add fucked up exercises, grips, and positions to your workout, too, that place you at a greater risk of injury. Broscience.
The Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA) is a blight upon the USA supplement scene.
It’s no surprise it was sponsored by Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah. That state is the proud inventor of just about every worthless vitamin and nutritional supplement out there.
Gym myths are my favorite. The best past is the extreme prevalence of survivorship bias, with most of the bad advice coming from people who have succeeded but are themselves mistaken about why.
i.e. Massive bro is adamant that everyone should be taking BCAAs, beginners are inclined to believe it because it looks like he knows what he’s talking about.
I think the fitness industry makes most of its money this way tbh
My wife is one of these consumers. She shes all these influencers pushing working out products and she uses everything she can get her hands on. Then she wonders why when she trains for, and runs a full marathon, she doesnt lose any weight. Well you take thousands of calories of supplements… just run
Yeah you can’t run off a bad diet, you do need to make sure you are getting enough protein aligned with your goals, and some fats, but outside of that, you just need to eat less than you burn.
Running might help increase the deficit a bit, or give you some extra food, but you’re probably going to struggle to cover thousands of additional calories.
And now they’re pointing at that guy who was taking in absurd amounts of calories from meat per day, because they don’t realize he had a nutritional deficiency that meant most of it wasn’t getting processed.
You can do a similar thing on rice, as it happens, because rice doesn’t contain enough B1 and you develop beriberi.
What was the deficiency in the meat?
It would depend quite a lot on what meats he was eating and in particular if he was incorporating organ meats, but in general to breakdown protein and fat you need magnesium, potassium, and vitamins B and D.
There’s also the fact that your pancreas can only create so much lipase and protease in a day. It doesn’t matter what you do, there’s going to be a maximum amount of fat and protein your body can absorb.
In Butter Boy’s case he (a Florida Man) was literally excreting cholesterol through his skin.
I will give him this, though, people with beriberi can literally starve to death while eating the same amount of calories in carbs because they can’t break down the carbs at all after a point. Meat and dairy has enough nutrients that you’ll be functional until your heart explodes.
Or to put it another way, if you need 5 units of magnesium/D/B/whatever to process 2,000 calories of your butter and meat diet but you only get 2.5 from the diet you can “solve” the deficiency by eating 4k and excreting the other 2,000. Traditionally, or through your eyes, whatever works.
Compare that to needing 5 units of B1 to break down 2k of white rice but only getting .5 units from the rice or whatever (you’d have been fine in B1 from brown rice btw)
That’s… Not really a good explanation but it explains the basic principle.
Right. I walk like 5km a day and I lost 30kg. Secret eat less than you burn.
The short version of that: it’s nearly impossible to out exercise poor diet but much less difficult to out diet poor exercise. (obviously, you still need exercise, but you don’t need to train like an olympic swimmer to lose weight if you make better dietary choices)
Yeah but supplements are fun and sometimes delicious. Running is neither.
I like Lyle McDonalds advice on running: Don’t, unless you’re being chased.
running is sometimes fun (the rush you get from beat your PB) and let’s you eat things that are delicious. I’m in a perpetual calorie debt because I run so much and I’m poor 😭
I’m not sure supplements are ever fun … but they can help with getting enough protein if you’re lifting or an additional energy boost via creatine … protein powder can taste nice but you need to watch out for macros if it’s too delicious, I’ve never had a nice creatine.
Or by fun do you mean preworkouts? I think there’s limits to preworkout value when what you really need for workout energy are easily digestible carbs over caffine or other cruft.
the “sad” reality of fitness is that it just boils down to “do exercise, eat 2 hours before an intense workout, creatine helps give a little strength boost”.
There’s no magical thing you can do to make things easier/faster other than just going harder or, you know, steroids (which has obvious downsides). And everything else that people tend to worry about, like the precise amount of protein to eat, is just… like yeah it has an effect but if you just do shitloads of workouts and eat when you’re hungry it’s basically impossible to not get stronger.
Fundamentally you’re right. If you get absolutely everything 100% scientifically perfect for you, your circumstances, your genetics, etc you will always see better results than the person eyeballing it. But its like 200% more effort for an extra 25% gains, the minutiae of this shit goes as deep as you care to look and thats what drowns a lot of new enthusiasts.
I personally take it a step further and question whether the extra 25% is worth it at all.
Even creatine has its downsides, in that it’s a powder you have to pay for and remember to choke down every day. And in the end, all you get is the same progress you would have gotten anyway, just a bit faster.
For me, who cares if what took you 5 years could have been done in 4 if everything was “optimal”? Why are we so obsessed with “optimizing” everything, when in reality this mindset just results in 90% of people giving up?
*I should add I have no critique of someone who wants for themselves every possible advantage, or educates others about it. But presenting these things as being synonymous with the gym is a huge public disservice. It would be like aggressively trying to funnel every single person who wants to buy a car into becoming an F1 driver
unless you’re struggling to buy food i would say creatine is 100% worth it, it’s not that expensive really and you can just mix a teaspoon into your morning drink.
And for that little effort and expense you get a free ~10% increase in strength so long as you keep consuming it, which lets you train more faster, resulting in permanent gains.
like it’s not obligatory or anything, but it’s a great way to help yourself get into fitness, just makes it slightly easier. Really the big benefit of it can be said to simply be that it makes you more likely to keep going.
We can discuss the merits of specific supplements all day, but I find this mindset paradoxically results in worse progress for most people
Creatine is LITERALLY the only supplement that almost everyone and every study agrees.
Anything else the answer to “Should I take…” is at best “It depends” and in most cases “No”. Its the only one if people arent taking it I’d ask “Why not?”
Sure, if you want to know earnestly some reasons why not.
For starters, it is literally completely unnecessary.
Beyond that, it perpetuates the broader harmful falsehood that lifters need a cabinet of supplements, thereby turning many people away from the gym who are repulsed by the idea.
The above falsehood has personally annoyed me many times. I am visibly very muscular, and have had friends, family, and even strangers warn me, unprompted, about the dangers of supplements lol. I gather there was a news story about lead in protein powder that went viral, and everyone assumes I must be taking all the powders, probably because of how cavalier gym folk are about insisting everyone hop on all the powders
It has a gross sandy texture, upsets people’s stomaches (especially if they try the “creatine loading” phase which is so popularly suggested), and interferes with their sleep (if the countless anecdotes are to be believed).
It does have potential serious side effects in some populations that don’t get talked about often. People with bipolar disorder shouldn’t risk taking it, neither should people with kidney disease.
If you are healthy and ever get bloodwork done, you need to remember to explain to your doctor that you supplement creatine beforehand, otherwise they may think you have kidney disease.
Five grams per day of creatine monohydrate dissolved in a glass of water is cheap. Creatine pills are not. Creatine gummy bears are not. Creatine in preworkout (yet another constantly shilled powder) is not. The massive list of non-monohydrate creatine products are neither cheap nor effective lol. When we say “definitely everyone should hop on creatine!”, a good percentage of people will end up going down one of those paths.
And to top it all off, the beneficial effects for muscle building are dramatically overstated. People talk about it like it creates some cascading compound interest effect you can’t afford to miss out on, when in actual reality, everyone who has been around the block knows you reach the point of diminishing returns very quickly when you are consistent in the gym lol. If you put 5 hard years in without it, there isn’t a soul on earth who could pick you apart in a lineup of creatine users.
Now your response to all this may be “none of this is really that big deal!” and you know what? I agree. I frequently cite creatine as being one of the big three non-scam supplements (protein, caffeine, creatine). They have a real effect, unlike virtually all other gym products. My issue, to put it most broadly, is with the attitude we perpetuate regarding supplementation in general. That it’s so thoroughly and totally taken for granted that every single person should want to pay for and incorporate every single advantage.
That we frame it as being “an advantage” at all, as if the simple love of training is not in and of itself a great joy which transforms the lives of everyone it reaches. No no, instead, as is typical of all “worthy” pursuits, it is an investment to be capitalized upon. Faster is always better, bigger is always better. Do not allow yourself to be captivated by the scenery flying by, if for a moment it distracts you from shoveling ever more coal into the furnace of this godforsaken train everyone insists our life must become.
ahem. Well, apologies for going off the rails a bit there. That’s been stewing in me for a long time. I also don’t take protein powder lmao
my brother in christ you’re responding to “creatine is the only useful supplement” with “it perpetuates the broader harmful falsehood that lifters need a cabinet of supplements”, do you not see how this seems a bit nonsensical?
Funny thing is I can say I’m on steroids when I go to the gym (hormone medication). Though for some reason, the steroids I’m on are never the ones gym bros talk about.
They just don’t understand how sick of chest gains you’re getting
I’d argue the “eat before the workout” advise isn’t right: While you shouldn’t work out directly after eating as your body will direct energy towards digestion, working out on a fasting metabolism is beneficial as fasting comes with high levels of growth hormones. Evolutionary speaking: You’re not hunting when you have food, you’re hunting when you’re hungry. How can you have breakfast before you caught it.
You might not be able to hit peak performance at the tail end of even just an interval fast, but it is going to do all kinds of signalling to your body to put more energy into growing muscle. The growing happens not while you’re lifting, but after you inhaled the chicken you caught.
you’re absolutely hunting when you have food, why would you wait to hunt until you’re hungry? do you only buy more food when you’ve emptied out the fridge?
also not everyone hunts, foraging has historically been arguably a more significant part of how people fed themselves, and even then not everyone is going to be doing that, some people are just going to be staying at camp to take care of the kids and stuff.
what you’re suggesting is something that sounds good in your head, what i’m suggesting is pretty widely accepted practice.
When talking evolution it’s not just humans, and human behaviour. The fasting metabolism, hunger hormone system etc. is shared through pretty much all of the animal kingdom. We had it before we left the seas. Fish don’t stockpile food, they store it in adipose tissue with about exactly the same mechanism as we do, there might not be much food around, that means increased competition, that means you need to be active, not lethargic, when hungry, and the level of exertion experienced during that fasting time will be taken by the body as the signal how much to bulk up, that’s why growth hormones are highly active at that time. We’re dealing with a truly ancient mechanism.
You can trust that I read up on the stuff or you can do it yourself or you can trust an army of gymbros to have done it.
They like BCAAs because they think it causes gains.
I like BCAAs because they taste good.
We are not the same.
They might be somewhat right, but you’re objectively wrong
All the more for me then!
My brother it isn’t BCAAs you like, it’s methyl anthranilate.
I like a whole bunch of flavours, I was just too lazy to google for multiple flavour images.
Is BCAA different from normal protein powder?
Also, why does it taste better for you?
BCAA’s are essentially bullshit 99% of the time because if you’re getting adequate complete high quality proteins from food (including whey or quality plant protein shakes) they contain all the amino acids your body can use.
Honestly, the flavor is all down to the brand. But water just gets boring as shit if you’re drinking a lot.
Basically just seconding what Delphia said; if you’re getting adequate protein from food sources than BCAAs are a waste.
I just tend to drink >2L of plain water a day as a baseline, so when it comes to the gym — I’d rather have something with flavour. It’s best to just think of it as gymbro-cordial, with added caffeine on occasion!
Brilliant, thanks ! To both of you.
It’s like the cosmetics industry. Keep shifting what products will give you the look you want, whether it be beautiful hair or massive pecs. Tell you all the lies about what the product might do for you, then tell you to accessorize the product with whatever fringe benefit you’re looking for, and constantly keep changing the “science” so you jump from product to product for the latest and greatest thing that will make you look good.
Don’f forget to add fucked up exercises, grips, and positions to your workout, too, that place you at a greater risk of injury. Broscience.
The Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA) is a blight upon the USA supplement scene.
It’s no surprise it was sponsored by Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah. That state is the proud inventor of just about every worthless vitamin and nutritional supplement out there.