You may not know this, and if you don’t then I’m glad, but back in 2009 I wrote and “published” a book about muscle tissue and how it grows.
Yesterday, I lit an oily torch and descended into the ancient catacombs in the deepest depths of my hard drive, past the dusty skeletons and cobwebs and giant spiders lurking in the directories of memes from the antediluvian internet of aeons past, until I came across a hidden vault of shadows containing that eldritch PDF file titled MaximumMuscleV1.pdf.
Cracking open this ancient tome was an eye-opener for a couple reasons.
The good news is that the ideas in there aren’t half so bad for a book that never should have been published.
The downside is that the other half isn’t just bad, it’s terrible.
I know I can be a long-winded writer, but going through this thing was even making me impatient. It reads more like a master’s thesis than a book anyone would want to read. Which is why, years ago, I disowned it and swore I’d never release it again.
I was too harsh, really.
The thing is unreadable as a commercial product for anyone looking for life-changing results. But as I skimmed through it, I was saying a silent “thank you” to my past-self. He did all the grunt work of assembling, reading, and interpreting most if not all of the significant research into muscle hypertrophy and strength training up to the year 2009.
That’s an asset that I, present-day Matt, don’t have to reproduce from scratch. Even though the book was not viable as a publishable product, it’s still a tremendously valuable resource for that reason.
I saw that I even scooped Brad Schoenfeld, an exercise scientist who has made a modest name for himself by explaining muscle-growth as a product of mechanical tension, metabolic stress, and exercise-induced damage, by several years.
I am not kidding when I say that ideas I helped to popularize back in the 00s continue to shape the way people talk about training to this day. I have a nose for patterns and spotting trends, which means I’m somebody you really should listen to when it comes to growing muscle, stripping fat, getting stronger, or changing your behaviors to accomplish what you want to accomplish.
Anyhow, the book reminded me of some old ideas that had slipped out of mind, and reinforced some things I’ve already been doing.
I’m not doing an updated version of the book, if you’re wondering. I’m not convinced it’s worth the trouble, and I’ve already written enough doctoral dissertations for one lifetime.
However I am looking at plans to create a series of audio and video trainings which will go deeper into some of those topics, as far as I can make them fun, entertaining, and relevant to the over-40s that I want to help.
My whole mindset and thought process has changed since then, anyways. I’m not interested in scouring The Science for revolutionary ideas. I don’t care if science can or cannot tell us exactly what causes muscle hypertrophy or fat loss.
Those questions are as interesting to me as whether the carpenter installing my cabinets passed organic chemistry. Can he build something pretty and functional and work to a time-table? If so, I don’t care what he knows about the biochemistry of wood.
Most of fitness and nutrition are solved problems as far as I care. We know what to do, and how to do it. What’s missing is not the education, but the desire and the will to make the change happen.
Obsessing over The Science is a great way to theory-craft your way into action paralysis. You can know all the facts you want, but beyond a threshold, knowing more facts doesn’t translate into getting better results.
If you aren’t consistently taking action to put those ideas into practice, testing what works and throwing out what doesn’t, and always struggling to improve, then you’re just a nerd in the stands watching other people play the game.
And if you want to stay on top of that game, you’d do yourself a tremendous service by being on my email list.
👉 Use this link to do yourself a tremendous service
Matt Perryman