Back 10 or 15 years ago when I would still talk to other people about strength training and nutrition, there was a mini Cold War in between the “nerds” and the “jocks”.
You had one group who wouldn’t go to the gym without three links to peer-reviewed papers on Pubmed.
You had another camp who spent their time lifting, got all their advice from other bros at the gym or wherever, and probably didn’t even know how to spell sciunce.
Why wouldn’t you want a purely science-based approach to such things as exercise, nutrition, and health in general?
Bodybuilding and related activities turn out to be a fantastic example of the split nature of human beings.
Every one of us is born as a homo sapiens animal, equipping us with a living, organic, biological body, like any other animal.
It happens that the homo sapiens animal lives part of its life in a second world.
Plato called it the realm of Ideas. Immanuel Kant called it transcendental necessity. Whatever you call it, all of our natural, biological processes happen alongside rational thought.
We’re split down the middle, with one foot in lawful nature and one foot in higher form.
Living bodies work by the functions and laws discovered by biological science (and below that, they depend on physical laws). Science gives us a body of objective knowledge about how our own bodies operate.
But being knowledge of an objective and statistical nature, it doesn’t apply easily to you, the single individual person.
What’s going to happen to you, in particular, in the course of your life experience, cannot be decided by scientific formulas and mathematical laws.
The most interesting things in our lives happen where the objective facts of biology and physics collide with the individual experience of life.
We can’t depend on impartial science for everything because there is no external, universal formula outside of our experience of living and acting.
You can’t sit back and read studies and learn everything there is to know. If you aren’t doing the thing for yourself, you simply do not understand it.
There are laws to bodybuilding, like any sport or physical activity. There are limits, boundaries, and rules.
The point is, you’ll never know where they are without putting yourself in the game and seeing what happens.
Matt Perryman
https://matts.email