Bodybuilding - Art or Science?

Client Spotlight

Before I start this blog I want to congratulate Muscle Academy client Kimberly Salvador who competed in and placed first at her powerlifting meet over the past weekend. This is a great achievement on it's own but even more exceptional is that it was completed whilst in the middle of contest prep. So I'm extending a special congratulations to Kim on her accomplishment.

Kimberly with her award (top), deadlifting (bottom left) and bench pressing (bottom right)

Bodybuilding - Art or Science?

 

Is bodybuilding an art or science? I think we could finds proponents of both sides but in my opinion there are aspects of each which contribute to bodybuilding. I'm all for evidence based nutrition and training, however I think sometimes those of us who er on the side of science can go too far and completely ignore or disregard where experience and anecdote can provide us with some value. We will ask "where is the evidence?". On the other end of course we have the people (the bros) who are completely ignorant to whether there is any real evidence supporting methods and instead prefer to rely entirely on experience. Ideally in my opinion there is a happy medium.

What I think we do get from science is a good ball park or starting point. Examples could include guidelines for protein intake or training volume (how many reps to perform per muscle group, per workout). When considering this information we should look at the body of evidence, realise what the limitations of the studies may be, look at the relevance of the studied population to ourselves, realise there are usually outliers at both ends of the study data, and draw conclusions. 

 

The conclusions drawn from evidence should not be taken as gospel eg  in regards to training volume "everyone should perform 40 - 70 reps per muscle group, per workout". That is a good starting point but it might not apply to every single person out there. There are certainly people who would make better progress on more volume than that and there may indeed be people who will be best suited to start with even less volume than the general recommendations. In most cases they are a good starting point from which you can then adjust if need be.

Another problem with getting too embedded within a scientific approach is that some will completely disregard anything that doesn't have scientific evidence supporting it even when it is pretty damn obvious in practice. Just because evidence doesn't exist supporting the conclusion that X is true, does NOT necessarily mean X is untrue, it just means that at this point in time we can't say for sure that X is true because we don't have enough information. Of course that is a different story if there are multiple studies suggesting that X is untrue. But a lack of evidence doesn't tend to prove anything for or against. Unfortunately people tend to interpret a lack of evidence as being "against" something when in fact it literally means there is just a lack of evidence. Where there is no evidence I think the best thing we can do is make an educated guess based on logic and anecdotal experience until more research is done and evidence clarifying the situation emerges.

Lastly in regards to a scientific approach one problem I can see is losing sight of practicality and perhaps falling victim to paralysis via analysis. You can create the theoretically most perfect plan that will produce the most strength and size gains possible but if that plan is impractical for your personal situation and you can't adhere to it, then it is fairly useless. And again you can spend your time devising the perfect plan and agonising over the details but if you never actually do it, you never get anywhere. The real results come from the doing, not the thinking of the doing, but actually doing the thing over time with consistency.

Now on the other side of the coin we have the people who don't rely on science at all. There is some merit to their approach and of course there are some big problems too. The merit is that people who disregard evidence are generally less likely to fall victim to paralysis by analysis. They just get in and try things. They also rely heavily on personal experience and the reported experience of others which is good in that they try lots of approaches and take a trial and error approach to progress. That trial and error approach is actually something which is valuable to progress especially when combined with tracking (keeping objective and subjective records of progress) and when combined with consistency. I suppose you could call it learning your body, learning what worked well and what didn't work well.

The problem is that often times the trial and error approach is taken too far. People adopting it want to try everything and so end up introducing an element of randomness and chaos (mixing it up). Training is sometimes completely unplanned and unstructured. If progress is not tracked and too many variables are open to change it's really hard to have any idea what factors actually contributed most to success or failure.

 

Another problem arises because no evidence is taken into account. In such situations it's really difficult to structure something which is ideal because there is no starting point to base it off. How much protein should a bro eat? Big Joe at the gym said that eating seven chicken breasts a day worked for him. Without scientific evidence of any kind we are left to rely on this kind of thing which could entirely miss the mark.

We also have the "it works for me" mentality. The problem with this is that when it comes to something like training for hypertrophy a huge number of things work. But "work" is not an absolute term. By that I mean it's not black and white. There isn't just "it works" and "it doesn't work". Obviously things can work to varying degrees. As bodybuilders and people who aspire to improve our physiques we are looking for what will work best (and then of course tailor it to fit our life).

Personally I think the best approach to take is one that rests on an evidence base for training and nutrition. Being able to adhere to the approach with consistency is also very important. Where there are gaps in evidence fill them with a best guess based on logic and experience. Track your progress and adjust the components based on the results you achieve and to suit the context of your big picture plan.

If you need help, consider hiring a coach to take some of the guess work and decision making out of it and to help you learn. I know of this one guy who does offer that kind of thing ...

Muscle Academy contact details:

Email - info@muscleacademy.com.au
Website - http://www.muscleacademy.com.au
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Instagram and Twitter - @evansoooon

- Evan