Weights and Plates Podcast - #103 - RESEARCH FOR MEATHEADS

Episode Date: September 19, 2025

In this solo episode, coach Robert Santana takes a hard look at exercise science research—what it really tells us, and where it falls short. He dives into the history of lifting, the rise of “evidence-based” fitness, and why so many studies don’t translate to real-world results. From sample size problems and lifestyle confounders to the obsession with volume over load, Robert explains why lifters can’t blindly follow the latest paper or guru. Instead, he breaks down the principles that actually build muscle and strength: progressive overload, smart programming, and the smell test of what works in the gym.   If you’re tired of fitness “science” complicating simple truths, this episode will cut through the noise.   Subscribe for more episodes of Weights & Plates where we cut through the noise and get real about strength training, nutrition, and long-term progress. https://weightsandplates.com/online-coaching/ Follow Weights & Plates YouTube: https://youtube.com/@weights_and_plates?si=ebAS8sRtzsPmFQf- Instagram: @the_robert_santana Rumble: https://rumble.com/user/weightsandplates Web: https://weightsandplates.com

Welcome to the weights and plates podcast. I am Robert Santana, and I am your host, and today I want to talk about research. Before we get started, if you've been tuning into YouTube and you like what you hear, please smash that subscribe button. And if you have not been tuning into YouTube, well then start tuning in and smash that subscribe button. Now, let's get started. You know, I've done a few episodes with Dr. Steph Bradford on this topic. I'm going to do this one as a monologue because I haven't done that

yet. So to start out, let's just go over a little history lesson here. You know, lifting weights was historically something that blue collar guys did. It wasn't really a white collar activity like tennis or golf or recreational sports like that. That could also be competitive, you know. It was not something that people did. It was a blue collar sport. My good friend Mark Ripito has referred to powerlifting specifically as a trailer trash sport. It's kind of made me laugh the first time makes me laugh today. But power lifting is one contest that involves lifting weights and it's a sport. You know, it's a sport contest.

And then you have the pageants, bodybuilding, physique, and all those other divisions that they now have. But when people started lifting weights in the 20th century for recreational purposes, it wasn't very popular. It was, again, it was a blue collar thing. It wasn't something that people went out and did, probably until the 80s, because Arnold and Joe Wheater popularized weightlifting in the 1970s and through the 80s and 90s and odds. And to this day, you still have muscle and fitness. I don't know what form that's in today because of social media and the internet. But I'd say all the way through the odds, the Wheater publications were very popular.

Then you had actors becoming more muscular for roles. who started seeing muscles in the movies in the 80s, and the overall physique changed through the 90s, and I've talked about that extensively on this show. We went from Conan, where Arnold was 210, which by some people's standards is not that big. He says he competed at 260, but for his early acting roles, he was 210. He claims he's over six feet. I don't know exactly how tall he is.

That kind of morphed into Brad Pitt and Fight Club, where he was probably 160 pounds. And from there, we've had to look somewhere in between the two. Typically, these guys are about 185 pounds, 9 to 12 percent body fat, sometimes leaner. You know, I'd say Hugh Jackman was probably 6, 7 percent. He was pretty lean. They're not very heavy. They're not very large. Again, the type of person who lifted weights in the early days was typically a blue-collar person.

You know, you didn't have highly educated people doing this. You had some, of course. It was probably a number greater than zero, but it just wasn't popular like it is now. At some point in the odds, or early 2010s, CrossFit was formed and became popular. And that generated a lot of interest in barbell training, either Olympic weightlifting, powerlifting, as well as all their gymnastics movements and calisthenics. But weightlifting and powerlifting movements were part of it. So it got more people under a bar than any other fitness trend that has popped up in the last 50 years.

But the way this pertains to research is, because people weren't very educated, they relied on practical experience to figure out what worked and what didn't work. The other part of that was that because the majority of people lifting, at least in the early days, you know, we had health clubs later on where people went in try to lift weights, but in the early days, there were more competitors probably than non-competitors. And I think that started to change in the 80s and 90s. But still, it was a small niche of people that even went into a weight room. So because of it, you had people relying on experience and the experience of others to gather information. Nobody was really studying this. There were some studies in the 1980s and the 1990s on strength training. It wasn't as well studied as endurance training.

George Brooks and his colleagues studied the hell out of that in the 70s. More continued in the 80s. They were funding it because of its cardiovascular benefits. The health care side of research became interested in endurance training. But strength training wasn't really well studied. And as a result, most of what people did came from gyms and fitness publications. You also had the confounding variable of antibiotic use. You still have that today.

But back then, one could argue that especially in the 60s, 60s and 70s, there were more people in weight rooms that were using them for competitive purposes versus recreational purposes. There wasn't this idea of lifting weights for your health or for health benefits. That just wasn't a thing. People typically lifted weights for some sort of competitive sport or pageant. There were, of course, other people like movie stars that would try to get in shape for movies. They'd do some combination of lifting and other things. You had athletes that lifted weights, traditional athletes, football players, etc. Bruce Lee was known for lifting weights to improve his martial arts.

So you had some semblance of strength and conditioning for other sports. So the idea of strength and conditioning for other sports was also starting to form at that time. but you really did not have just your average Joe going in the weight room in large numbers. And you didn't have research dollars being thrown at this. You still really don't. It's not like these studies that exist are being heavily funded, like some of the aerobic studies of the past. But there is funding available for it. And then on top of all of this, many college professors of the 80s, 90s, odds, even through the 2010s, were former endurance.

athletes. The exercise science professors, I should say, were former endurance athletes who were interested in learning the science behind their sport, whether it was cycling or running or whatever it was. So the research on it was scant. But then a new generation started graduating, getting masters, getting doctorates, and involving themselves in the professional research process. And these people were lifting weights and wanted to study lifting weights and came up in the Wheater era, as I like to call it. I don't know that we're still in the Weeder era. I don't think so.

I think if you were to ask a 22-year-old kid who Joe Weeder is, he probably won't know, but he'll know who Sam Sulloch is. I think it's safe to say that despite the fact that the Weeder company is still probably sizable. I don't think we're in the Weeder era anymore, but I make this point because it's important and it comes up later. People that grew up in the Wheater era, like myself, went on to get advanced degrees and go into academia and study weightlifting and the effects of weightlifting on various markers. Typically, they're trying to figure out how to get more jacked. One of them had a good quote where he said, unfortunately, nobody, and he means the federal government, I'll come back to that, nobody is going to fund a study to figure out how to get jacked guys more jacked. And I never forgot it because it's a good point. In academia, the most desired research dollars come from the federal government in the form of grants.

And they spend those grants to answer questions, typically questions that the feds want answered. So he said that, you know, and he's got a point because everybody knows that a novice is going to get more jacked doing virtually anything for how long and to what extent that can vary. and we have our biases here. If you push a novice hard on the basic barbell lifts, I believe that's going to work better than trying to design a six-day split that isolates every single muscle or every single joint action.

Instead of designing a six-day split that isolates every movement you can think of in the human body. Can I prove that? Probably not. It's just a study that's not going to happen, and it's one of those things where you have to ask yourself what makes the most sense and if it's going to work quite well and you can follow it then why wouldn't you if you could gain muscle quickly for six to nine months all across your body doing a handful of exercise why wouldn't you unless you simply

don't like it and that happens some people cannot handle those first few months where it's not that hard but you're improving because your neuromuscular system is improving and becoming more efficient. It doesn't really get hard until month two, month three, and onward. So yeah, to his point, research dollars to study how to get people stronger and more muscular that are post-navice, that's just, it's not there, you know. There's, there's no money for that. But that's a rabbit hole in it of its own, you know. Today I want to talk about the basics so you understand what people are throwing at you. But that has its own rabbit hole. The point is these guys started of getting into academia and studying lifting a little bit more. And as a result, we have more papers

published now. Papers published. We're going to talk about that in a little bit. That's a important phrase that I use. So we have more papers published. And now you have a more educated audience. No longer do you go into a gym that's a hole in the wall with a bunch of what we call lifers, who are pretty much going to be lifelong lifters, that are beating the hell out of themselves, trying to figure out how to get stronger. That's a relic of the past, although we still exist. I would put myself in that category. Now we have a very educated audience of people who have other things in their lives that are more important.

They live normal lives. But instead of going for a jog like they might have in the 1970s, 1980s, now they are lifting weights and they are pursuing certain results, typically on the aesthetic side. They want muscles to get bigger. And because they're educated, they are going to cite research and they're going to cite things that their favorite guru with a PhD says. And I'm not singling any one person out. Like I said, many people graduated with PhDs in the last 20 years that study exercise science, as they call it. Some stayed in academia and published. You don't see too much of them on social media, but some spent a little bit of time in academia, graduated, and started a social media channel, developed a following. And now because this person is a doctor,

a research scientist, the assumption is that this person is credible. And some of them are and some of them aren't like anything else, right? But what's the problem we have? Well, the problem we have is that much of this research doesn't carry forward practically. And, you know, I'm going to get a bunch of trolls jumping on here, you know, saying that, oh, I have no evidence of that. The study I like to pick on is one by Craig Goodman and his colleagues back in 2008. I don't know any of these people, so I'm not picking on anybody. I'm just citing an article that was written that reported that there was no difference in strength. I think they measured that by 1RM between bench pressing on an unstable surface versus bench pressing on a stable surface.

So a stability ball versus a bench press in English. That's what they did. you can just look at this without opening the paper and know this is bullshit, right? You know, for one, we've looked at the paper and critiqued it. You know, I can go through those critiques, and I will. But the problem I've been seeing on the Internet is that everybody wants to critique papers. So I can give you several critiques of this paper, and then somebody else is going to come back with counter critiques. So is the problem in an individual paper or is the problem in the system itself?

I'm going to go with the latter because I think there's just a poor understanding. of what research does and what research doesn't do. Since you're curious and you've listened this far, I'll tell you what's wrong with this study. For one, there's only 11 participants in the study. Three of them, I believe, were female. You know, don't quote me on that. I don't have the paper in front of me,

but I have most of these details memorized, especially when it's a small number like that. I think it was two or three females in the study. So you have a sample that is tiny, that is mostly men, and on top of it all, the heaviest bench press lifted was 253, which, for those of us that have been in the power lifting world, is not that heavy. As of September of 2025, Julius Maddox has the heaviest raw bench press completed at 795. So 253 on a stability ball, what does that tell us?

A novice could have a 253-pound bench press depending on how he's built. But if everybody's a novice, everybody improves. And the rate of improvement is probably similar for a period of time, regardless of what program you're putting the novice on. In this study, they define their population as recreationally active. So what does that mean? I could tell somebody, I could tell a researcher that I go to the gym and I've been going to the gym for a year or two and I'm recreationally active, right?

Like I'm a lifter, right? I'm not a novice, according to them. Remember, how do we define novice? And for those of you listening to the show for the first time, a novice is defined by how long it takes to set a new PR. That's the simplest way to explain it. So if I hit a 5 rep max squat on Monday, and then I hit a brand new 5RM max squat on Wednesday and do it again on Friday, I'm a novice because I'm recovering from my maximal efforts within two days. An intermediate lifter takes longer than this, and an advanced lifter takes even longer than that.

So the rate of adaptation determines what your status is, not how long you've been swiping in and out of planet fitness. that doesn't determine your status. You might be an advanced novice because you've fucked off enough to make some adaptation, but you're probably still a novice, right? So, you know, this study is an example of one of many. You know, there's other studies that are better designed and that have better controls in them that tell you a little bit more, but I don't want to talk about individual studies. I don't want to critique them.

I don't want to get into a debate over one study. What I want to talk about is what a professional research. study does, its assumptions, its limits, and also what it doesn't do. Okay. So let's first discuss what is a study. So what is a study? Typically a research study for the purposes of this show is categorized as observational research or experimental research. What makes a research study experimental is the random assignment to groups. So treatment or control groups, right? Or if you're randomly assigning subjects to a treatment or control group, it's an experimental study. An observational study looks at a snapshot in time. There's no randomization and you are

just following people for a period of time. An observational study is typically observing ongoing phenomenon. You're not manipulating anything. You're not introducing a treatment, for example. Within observational research, you have epidemiology. That's where you're studying population-wide data. You might follow a group of people for years and decades. They did a lot of this in the 20th century and look at how various health outcomes change. You're just observing them, collecting data, and making correlations between data points. You're trying to see if there are relationships between two variables, but you cannot determine if one variable caused another variable to move.

So if you follow a group of people for 20 years that lift weights and you see that their muscle mass increased, but that they also take more shits, you can't say that gaining muscle mass is going to cause you to take a shit because you don't have the information to do that, right? In contrast, when you're doing an experimental study, if you assign somebody to a lifting group and you assign somebody to a non-lifting group and you track their muscle mask, so the lifting would be the treatment in this case, so one group lifts, one group doesn't lift, You randomly assign them from one group to another, and you track their fecal matter, then, yeah, sure, you can, you know, draw some sort of conclusion about this sample and say, yeah, the guy's in this sample that lifted took more shits. So the lifting might be causing you to shit more. I don't know if such study exists. I'm pulling things, no pun intended, out of my ass right now. But that's the general gist of it. So you have quasi-experimental research, too, where you assign people to groups, but it's not.

not random assignment, and you can't infer causality from that. You can't determine that one thing caused another from data derived from a quasi-experimental design. Within observational, we talked about epidemiology, epidemiological studies. There's longitudinal studies where you follow a particular group over time, and it may not be a giant population of people, like a country, a city, a state. It might just be a group of people that you're interested in in the 20th century, They had the Framingham Heart Study where they followed this group of people and looked at various health outcomes to try and see if there are relationships between cardiovascular-related health outcomes and certain behaviors. Then you have cross-sectional designs where you might have somebody come in for a day, measure a bunch of things, and see if they're related. So I might have you come in for a day, do a bunch of bicep curls, and look at the size of your bicep right after and see how much arm circumference of pump gives.

you, right? But I cannot derive a cause and effect relationship from that. I can just tell you what happened there, right? So it's a snapshot in time. So that's kind of how you want to look at it. So observational research, you're just observing things and you're getting correlations from it. Experimental research, you're trying to look for cause and effect. But hold on there because I know some of you are thinking, well, experimental better. I can know that one thing causes another. Slow down under what conditions, right? You can derive. a cause and effect relationship from the sample that you studied. So let me repeat that.

You can derive a cause and effect relationship from the sample that you studied, provided that you've sampled enough people and you've put enough controls in into place, right? So we've talked about random assignment. Why do we randomly assign people to groups? Why does that allow us to derive a cause and effect relationship? Well, because when you randomly assign people to groups, you know that the people in that sample. Let me repeat that because this is important because the people in that sample had an equal chance of being assigned to one group or the other. If you cherry pick which participants go to which group, now everybody did not have an equal chance of being assigned to one group or another.

So if you have people that tend to respond better to the treatment or more poorly to the treatment in one group versus the other, skews the data, right? So that's why we do that. We do that to make sure that everybody had an equal opportunity to be sampled into one group over the other. Okay. Then we also have this concept that tends to get ignored. It's called random selection. That is where you randomly choose people from the population you are studying to participate in your study. That is not the same thing as random assignment. Okay. Random assignment ensures that the people that were already sampled, regardless of the sampling method, have an equal opportunity to be in one group over the other. Random sampling is a method of how to get those people in your study to begin with.

And it's a method we don't use with human subjects because it's not ethical. I can't flip a coin and choose an address and make the person at that address participate in my study. People have to volunteer. You know, there's a bunch of ethics and just common sense reasons why we don't do that. But for thought experiment purposes, what does random sampling do? That random assignment does not? Random sampling ensures that the people in the group you are trying to study or in the population you are trying to study that they all had an equal chance of being recruited into the study. So in most studies, we have what's called convenient samples. And that is a fancy word. for people that volunteer or people that you recruit, you solicit people, right? And the drawback

with this is you can't really generalize or a more familiar word is transfer what you find in the study to the broader population. So if you are looking at a neighborhood and you have people volunteering from that neighborhood to participate in your study, right, everybody in that neighborhood did not have an equal opportunity to be in that study because some people aren't interested. Some people didn't hear about it. There's lots of reasons that people don't enroll in studies. So now you have people that don't enroll and people that do enroll. And there could be differences there that you're losing out on, right? So when you run your study and collect all your data and analyze it and start drawing conclusions, you can't really say that what happened in the

study is going to happen outside the study because of your sampling method. This is just by design. you can't randomly sample, not practically at least. And let's say that you did randomly sample and you forced people to participate. Well, now you force people to participate. So being compelled to participate in a study, that affects how you're going to behave, right? You're going to affect your behavior as a human. It's going to affect your stress levels and all sorts of other things, right? So even if you could randomly sample by force, there's drawbacks there as well.

There's limitations there as well. So the one thing that I want you, the viewer and listener, take away from this is that what is found in a study may not be what happens outside the study because of this reason. There is no random sampling in human subjects research. So because of this, you cannot take what is found in the study and assume that it's going to work on everybody, on everybody in that group. So that which brings me to the next point, one group may respond differently than another group, right? If you just kind of think back to when you were in school, some people were much smarter than you, some people were much faster than you, some people can jump higher than you, some people were taller than you, right?

And then if you consider the various ages that people die and the various diseases that kill people, right? We all have very different sets of genetics, and some people are more prone to some diseases than others. People from certain parts of Africa, for example, are prone to sickle cell anemia. And then you have people from other parts of the world that live very long and smoke a lot of cigarettes. I think of Italy as an example. Well, then when it comes to cigarette smoking, you have certain people in certain countries in Europe that smoke tons of cigarettes, don't get lung cancer, and others that get tons of lung cancer. So in academia, they try to narrow their group down by race for this reason, because people of certain ethnic groups are prone to some chronic diseases while others aren't. people in northern Europe tend to have higher VO2 maxes.

They're more aerobically fit, for instance, right? So if you're looking at a study of aerobic fitness and you throw a bunch of these guys in with, let's say, people from a part of the world that aren't as aerobically fit, you're going to have some funky data there, right? So one of the things that you have to do is identify your population, kind of like if you are marketing, you have to identify your target audience. Some people have zero interest, negative interest in lifting weights. right. So if I'm trying to bring a training service to market, I'm not going to market to those people. I'm going to try and exclude those people for my marketing. It's the same thing when you're doing a research study. When you're trying to market your study, to use a more familiar term, when you're trying to market your study, you want to find an audience that makes sense for. You want to narrow your audience so that the people are as similar as possible so that differences between groups don't start to interfere with the data you're collecting. collecting. Big mouthful there, basically. To bring the point home, you don't want a lot of inherent differences between your subjects, because if there's a lot of inherent differences between your subjects, then you have to explain those. Those can serve as confounders and

influence your data in ways that have nothing to do with the thing that you're trying to study. So you might have some Eastern Europeans in your study that are gaining muscle very quickly, and now you're saying that it's the training, but really they're just jacked dudes that are becoming more jacked because they respond very well to strength training, right? So if you're trying to study that group, that's great. But if you're trying to study a group that has a harder time so that you can help hard gainers, then you probably don't want to have these guys in your study, right? Because remember, things can happen for a variety of reasons. That is something I really try to teach people on this show. Some people become muscular without even lifting

ways. So this can apply to any type of treatment, if I may, that you give to somebody. They could see changes for reasons that have nothing to do with the treatment. So keep that in mind. So you want to try and minimize that. So there's lots of different things people try to control and studies to make sure that if there is a desired effect that they can confidently say it came from the treatment, right? So in this case, the lifting caused the muscle growth. The lifting caused the increase in strength. It wasn't the novice effect, for instance. although a lot of the time in research it is, but the way we think about it is, if we want to figure out the best way to build muscle, then we probably don't want to study novices because they're going to build muscle no matter what. So we want to find people that are true intermediates. And we would probably screen for those better than many academics because something else that people don't realize is many of these guys aren't serious lifters. You know, they might be muscle physiologists that have to use lifting because that influences the size of a muscle, the function of a muscle and all sorts of other things

at the muscular level. And they might hire somebody they deem an expert on the lifting side of it to carry out the programming and the training. A lot of the times that's somebody with a certification that requires no practical demonstration of their coaching abilities. So these are just a few examples of these limits I keep bringing up to research, right? You're making a lot of assumptions. So assumption number one, you are assuming that the person designing the program is the most competent coach there is. And unfortunately, a lot of the time, that's not the case. Sometimes the programming is right. And I've seen training studies where the programming makes some sort of sense. But you've got to understand, most personal trainers are training people

who want to exercise, so they're not getting anybody past novice for the most part, or very few people. Most strength and conditioning coaches are working with people who are gifted athletes, the collegiate level, maybe at the high school level, but they're working with gifted athletes who are very strong and aren't lifting specialists. You know, you'd almost be better off recruiting a powerlifting coach, who at least from a programming standpoint is trying to get these fucker stronger, right? But I digress. So again, you're making the assumption that the person designing the training program is competent. And then you're making assumptions about the exercises.

In many studies, they're using machines and other non-barbell strength training equipment that can't meaningfully be progressed for long periods of time. I mean, how long are you going to progress a rear delt fly with load? Now, I know the hypertrophy bros are going to jump on here and say, well, you can add sets and you can add reps, yeah, but for how long and for who does that make sense for? So it goes back to your audience, right? You know, research is very similar to business and the standpoint that you have to identify your audience, you have to market to your audience, you have to recruit your audience, you have to recruit from that audience, then you have to maintain the people you

recruit for a period of time, and you have to draw conclusions about what they do and what works and what doesn't work so that you can have other people adopt it. Number one, the person who is carrying out the study and who is designing the program, they're not always the same person, are competent on matters pertaining to strength training. They should be, in theory, in practice, I don't know. You know, professional researchers, people don't know this, they're more of a project manager. Their job is to secure grants and get money so that they can carry out these studies, and then they delegate things out to other people, much like a general contractor does in a construction site. And I'm not saying it's a bad thing. It's just how the job

is done. Most people think that day to day, they're sitting in the lab, they're training participants, they're conducting all the exercise tests, and they're writing everything all by themselves. And there's a lot of division of labor that goes on. So these guys act as the project manager. They get the money. They're applying for grants. They definitely participate in the writing of the papers. But they may not be in the lab day to day, watching every subject get trained, testing every subject's max, doing all the exercise testing. They might pop in and out. they see some of it, but day to day, they're not the guy that's doing all the work. The guy that's doing all the work is often a graduate student.

Or in some cases, if they have more money, they might hire an actual professional, but they're rarely getting guys like me that train people for a living, full-time, you know, self-employed, to go in there and do this. That's just, that's not typically what happens. Sometimes they might study a pre-existing situation, like they might look at a sports team and work with the strength coach on that sports team. so they have like a pre-existing situation. There's limits there.

But a lot of times they're using students to carry out their labor and students are also learning. So not every person on the team is an expert. So this is a false assumption that the general public makes. They think that the scientist who, you know, has all the schooling and education and competency is doing all the work or that everybody doing all the work is at his level. And that's usually not the case. You know, they might have some professionals in there, but students do a bulk of the work

and those students might be undergraduates that need a credit, you know, and they just want to get it done. They might be a master's student working on a thesis, or they might be a doctoral student that's trying to get multiple publications while he works on his PhD. And you have to consider each one of these people has different incentives. You know, the researcher, it's his full-time job. You would hope it's his passion, and he's trying to do the best job he can. The student might just want to make a grade, especially the undergraduate. You know, the stakes get, you know, the stakes are lower at that level. They don't understand, they don't see it the same way the researcher does.

It's kind of more like at a job, right? If you own the business, you have the most skin in the game. You care the most. As you go down the ladder, it's not that people are bad for this, but people tend to care less, the less you're paying them and the lower on the totem pole they are because of the nature of their responsibility. So the same thing applies in academia. Yes, you have a college student. Yes, you have somebody who should be at a level of intelligence that's at least average or above average. But that doesn't mean that that person cares about this project.

Nobody cares about the project more than the project manager. And unfortunately, the project manager has a lot of things that he's responsible for. This is one of the reasons I am not in academia, I never wanted to work in academia full time. I really just wanted to learn about this because science had become such a big part of our industry. People ask questions about this. People are citing papers. They're talking a big talk using lots of jargon. you know, what's going on here, right? So, you know, I went behind the scenes there and learned

what's going on and this is what's going on. The scientist is not the one doing the labor. He is the manager. He's the project manager. His job is to get money and write papers, just like a general contractor. And then he might have a lab manager that basically is your job site supervisor. And then a bunch of contractors, which are your students, except they don't get paid in a lot of cases. You know, You might have some paid students, doc students are typically paid something, master students sometimes, and then undergraduates, they're usually paying to do this. So you have to consider all these factors because each one of these people has their own set of incentives, and those incentives are going to drive their behavior. They're not hurling accusations. It's just something to consider.

It's a limit, right? It's the human limit. You know, human nature is a limit. So we've established that. If you don't randomly sample people, you cannot transfer what we're. was found in that study to the broader population of interest. Okay. If you don't randomly assign, you can't establish a cause and effect relationship. So then the next thing we talk about are things specific to our field. You know, the questions I always get are about hypertrophy.

The fad in both research and in the gym is that you need all this volume because it's pretty clear that, definitely for a novice, that three sets is better than one set. You know, we've known this since the 50s or 60s. There was an old study, DeLorne, I believe it was. And so we know three sets is better than one set, but you've got to draw the line somewhere. You know, are you going to do 10 sets, 11 sets, 15 sets?

I mean, at some point you can't add sets. If you add too many sets, you're doing cardio. The same thing. You know, why can't we run long distances and have big legs? Why don't these ultra-distance runners have massive quads? like Ronnie Coleman, right? Why don't they walk into the weight room and squat a bunch of weights? Usually the opposite.

They have a hard time squatting. So obviously there is a limit to volume where it becomes aerobic exercise. So we're lifting weights, after all. What differentiates this from aerobic exercise is that there is weight on a bar, on a weight stack, on a dumbbell. You are applying force against an external resistance, a much higher one than your own body weight or something that you can do for thousands of reps right so that's what differentiates it from aerobic is that you have to lift weight so the reps are going to be

much much much much much lower you know fractions of a percent lower than the number of reps you do on a run or a bike ride a long distance bike ride and the weight is heavier the resistance is heavier right so load is the single most important aspect whether you're training for a sport. If you're lifting weights and you're trying to maximize that, the load has to get heavier at some point. Now, yes, you need to do a certain number of sets. You need to do a certain number of reps, but the load has to go up. Like I said, you can't do 25 sets.

You can't progress your program to 25 sets. I mean, you can. You're not going to get very far and you'll learn that, right? You also can add reps. You know, there's evidence that if you add reps, you're going to, you know, get stronger and build muscle. But how long can you add reps for? Those of you who tried it know exactly where I'm going with this.

Eventually, the load has to go up. Even the study that compared reps versus load, they noted in there in the fine print that at some point, you can't add reps and you have to add weight. So load is the central theme here. But we have this ongoing debate that I just keep finding myself getting into, mostly because people hire me and start asking me questions about minute details that don't apply to their situation.

You know, I get a lot of novices that aren't very strong. They're limited by strength, and they're asking about single joint exercises and high sets and high reps and volume and the pump and the burn and all this shit that doesn't apply to their situation. They just need to get stronger. And they're learning this from people that cite research. Well, we've talked about some of the problems with research. You know, if you have a novice, novice is going to improve.

Before any of that, you can't generalize something from a study to a broader population. And I don't want to hear this shit about, oh, well, you know, if you recruit enough subjects, what's enough? A hundred, a thousand? I live in a country with 360 million people, maybe more. So, a thousand participants, you're going to generalize that to the entire nation. I mean, you know, it's just, it's a small number. It seems like a big number to you, the individual, but it's a small number. Recruiting enough and putting quotations here on the screen.

subjects does not offset the fact that they're not selected at random. So you can't generalize any of it. So that's problem number one. You're drawing conclusions that you cannot draw. Okay. Problem number two. This is a big one. Okay.

We've talked about the mechanics of research and what it does and what it doesn't. You know, a study can tell you whether a treatment worked or not in a particular sample. I can't tell you if that treatment is going to work on you or even your entire neighborhood or your entire city. It worked on that sample of people. So that means it might work on other people, which is, you know, that's fine. I'm not saying it's bad. I'm not saying it's fake.

I'm saying that it's limited to the sample being studied because they're volunteers. They're not being sampled at random. We don't sample at random. So keep that in mind. You know, this is important to understand. Now let's get into research design. Broad, you know, broad things. I'm not going to sit here and go into the minutia and tear apart papers, like I said.

Let's consider this. We're studying human subjects, and we're studying what happens to them when they lift weights. So you get a convenient sample, okay, you randomly assign them. You know, you have them do high volume versus low volume. This has probably been done a bunch of times at this point. It's 2025. They've been trying to answer this question for a while. Well, okay, one group does better than the other.

You can say that in this study, you know, it's probably the treatment. But slow down, slow down, slow down, slow down, slow down. There's a big problem with that. And I think you know what it is. Is training the only thing that influences strength and muscle growth? We already talked about training status. So if somebody's a novice, which I think even when they say they're trained, unless they say they're trained power lifters, I suppose, because the focus is very much

unload. When they say they're trained, that means they've been going to the gym. Okay. Have they been progressively overloading themselves for that period of time they define training, which is usually six months a year or two years? You know, I've seen those three numbers pop up a lot. So training status can influence it. So you, you know, you can try to control for that. It's trickier than it sounds because you have to really understand programming very well and have a good training history on that person. So that's number one. Anabolic steroid use is number two. That can influence how effective a workout is. And sure, they might ask those, so they'll get a verbal, I promise I'm not lying. I don't use steroids question, right? But what do we know about people who use

antibiotic? They're more likely to lie than a Coke addict. They're more likely to lie than a meth addict. You can probably get somebody using meth to admit they're using meth easier than a steroid user to admit he's using steroids. And it depends on the sport. You know, my experience, power lifters tend to be more honest than bodybuilders and fitness models and other people. Powerlifters typically talk about it. I haven't spent too much time with drug using weightlifters. I believe strong men tend to be more transparent, too. You know, the general trend is people deny steroid use when they're using it.

So it's safe to assume that some of these participants are lying about their steroid use. So you have that problem, right? Then you have things you can't measure. So like I said, people from certain parts of the world are more prone. to growing muscle before they even lift, growing more muscle than other groups, right? So I always think Eastern Europeans. My stepbrother was Polish, and he was just muscular, and he would touch a weight and just grow. And there's guys like that.

They're lean, they're muscular, and it has nothing to do with what they're doing in the weight room. And if you have someone like myself do the same thing, I don't see the same response. But I have got myself to grow. I've had to go about it a little bit more carefully, but there are guys that go in the gym and literally respond to anything. they do. So how do you control for that? It's very difficult. How do you know who's going to gain muscle and who isn't, right? So you have that problem. Then there's the issue of the number of muscle fibers a person has that can influence how muscles look, you know, can influence the size of the muscle belly itself. If there's more fibers, you could potentially have a bigger muscle belly. So lots of things there that have nothing to do with training alone. And then the elephant in the room. lifestyle or we typically like to call recovery you know lifestyle recovery they kind of go hand in hand they're two different things but they relate pretty well so you know steroid use is part of lifestyle so we've mentioned that already diet you know you get a food recall from a person

but how honest are people with those and i'm not saying that everybody's deceptive i'm saying people forget things you know you have recall bias then you have what's called social desirability bias. That's where a person is going to tell you they're eating what they think you want them to be eating. So my good friend, Will Morris, follow him on Instagram. I don't know what his handle is, but he's a great physical therapist and strength coach.

Once told me that when he was practicing in the Air Force, every single patient that he saw told him that they ate chicken and broccoli three times a day. We know that's bullshit, you know? So, you know, just figuring out what diet intake is is impossible, you know, unless you're surveilling somebody and feeding them 24-7, right? So you don't know what a person's eating and anybody listening to this show knows that eating can influence your performance in the weight room or any physical activity. I mean, you can feel like shit just moving around as a non-exercising person if you don't eat well, right? so we don't know what they're eating we're assuming that a recall is accurate we know it's probably not what we're just going to say it's bullshit dietary recalls are bullshit they're all bad you

know there's biostatistician i watched speak 10 years ago said this is one of those examples where something is not better than nothing until we have a good way to measure this we shouldn't even bother with it but they keep bothering with it i'll push against it i'll say it's bullshit I think diet recalls are bullshit. I think these studies on training are limited by diet. You know, we can't really fully explain what's going on because we don't know what the person's eating. We don't know if the person's using steroids. We don't know if the person's using street drugs, right?

What if this person's a closet meth head? And he's not telling us, right? So, you know, street drugs and nicotine and all sorts of other things can interfere with training progress. sleep you know now we have wearables there's data on that it's all over the place from what i've heard but you have wearables i can tell you something about sleep but you know unless we're monitoring this person is are they really sleeping enough is the quality of their sleep good so you have that stress is this you know you got guys fighting with their girlfriends or wives every night you know having toxic relationships you know are a handful of these participants in

that situation are did somebody just get fired in the middle of the study i mean you would want to know that but they may not tell you that uh and a long list of other stressors right are they working 12 hour days and then trying to lift so you can get all this from the person telling you but then are you really getting the whole picture there so i hope i've really hammered this home that one of the biggest limitations to training studies is lifestyle you have no fucking idea how these people live you just don't you're making assumptions based on what they're telling you. So that's a big one because lifestyle can influence how well a program works, especially if you're post novice. I think the novice effect is masking a lot of the negative

things that could be happening in these people's lives. You know, and that could, when I say negative, I mean just not eating enough for one, you know. But when you take a post novice lifter, all that stuff starts to matter more. So remember, in all training studies, you can't control for lifestyle. This becomes even more true in diet studies. So for one, you can't track what's going in. A lot of nutrition research, and I hate to say it because, you know, I'm passionate about this. I spent a lot of time in school.

You know, there was a time where I was really into this and wanted to learn all the ins and outs of this, all the intricacies of this. But when it comes to diet studies, 95% are probably bullshit. You know, you can't draw the conclusions they drew from them is probably a more diplomatic way to say it. I'm not the most diplomatic person. I'd just rather just say that bullshit. But you can't control for lifestyle.

Now, we have some good data from prison studies, the Vermont studies, the one that comes to mine in the 1960s, where they looked at different calorie intakes, how that affected weight, how that affected thyroid, they played with carbs. So, you know, there's some of these things that they've narrowed down in one sample of people that was randomly selected because they were prisoners. You can't even do that anymore, but you could in the 20th century. So, you know, some of these prison studies and these studies on people that were institutionalized, you know, nursing home patients maybe, you know, they might give us a little bit more,

but also remember now you got one are you a member of that group right can you generalize what they found in that study to your situation right because you have to you have to make sure that your group is pretty similar i don't want to ramble about this too much longer because i probably lost 75% of my audience because of how dry this information is so let's let's kind of summarize here what does professional research tell us well it's an attempt to answer scientific questions It's a method of scientific inquiry. It's a method. And it basically tells us what happens in a lab setting.

This scientist tried to answer this question using these methods sampling these people. Because we're talking about human subjects research. I'm not even going into rats or other species. And human subjects research, that's typically what it tells us. Researcher studied these people that he sampled in this lab and found these results and drew these conclusions. what does it not tell you? It does not tell you what's going to happen in your individual situation or what you should use in general when you're training clients. I don't think it's a good source for that because of how limited it is. I think at the individual level and at the coaching level,

you're going to learn more working with people, trying things out, seeing what works and what doesn't work, and going back to first principles. Do you have to lift weights, obviously, if your goal is to grow muscles and get them stronger. Weightlifting is required for both of those things. It has to get harder. Eventually, the load has to go up. You can't do 100 sets and you can't, you know, 100 reps isn't going to work. And you have to modify these variables to make sure that the person can continue progressing. You have to use the principle of stress recovery adaptation. You have to apply more stress when necessary, allow more recovery when necessary. So what do we do with all this, right? You know, because people are always throwing research at you. well take the information in always take the information in i still cite studies i still look at

studies and some of them make sense you know you have to check things against the smell test does bench pressing on a stability ball being equivalent to bench pressing on a bench pass the smell test it absolutely does not pass the fucking smell test but academics will tell you you can't draw that you can't take what was found in that study and apply it to a broader population. And you can't really determine cause and effect from that study because there's not enough subjects to run the statistical test necessary to even infer that. So it's limited in a research setting, but it's also limited in terms of, you know, what you could take from it to advise coaches on. I don't see anything of value there except somebody at the balls to bench press

253 on a stability ball, which, you know, I'm not going to fucking do that, but it's pretty damn cool. somebody did. 253 is not marginal, but it's not heavy compared to what's possible at the competitive level. If you want to answer questions like that, you need to make sure somebody's not a novice. And if somebody's not a novice, you're going to find a lot of people that can lift a lot of weight. You're going to find a spread of results. So yeah, read the paper, look at what people are doing in the weight room, and check it against the smell test. That's what I did. What I noticed was that everybody in my high school that played football got bigger year after year. You know, puberty was happening too, but the point is not all of them looked the same. Some guys were

massive and some guys were not. The point is, everybody got hypertrophy. So I started investigating. What did these people do? Well, they were doing compounds. They were doing squats, cleans, deadlifts, pull-ups, barbell curls. And it was a pretty reliable result. My stepbrother, he was gifted for muscle building, but he also did those exercises and he grew. So that's what I was paying attention to. And what was happening was, these guys were trying to lift heavy weights. When I talked to guys that had been lifting for a while, they were pretty big when I was in my 20s, but right before I met Rip, all of them would tell me, if you want size, lift heavy.

But now we're in this strange time now where people say it's not about load. Load doesn't matter. It's all about, you know, it's all about volume. It's all about reps. You know, people have grown with 30 reps. Well, when they've grown with 30 reps, it's on a single, joint exercise that showed some amount of growth that met what they consider in research statistical significance.

You know, I'm not going to disagree that if you do rear delt flies for sets of 30 and try to make them heavier, that your rear delts will probably grow, but how much is it going to be noticeable? And if you're using five pound dumbbells and you can't do a chin up, is anybody going to notice? Is that going to be a really sizable rear delt? So, you know, you've got to put things into context, right? you know a lot of these studies have looked at machine work and with machine work you tend to do more reps because you can't really do it heavy without having to alter your technique

in a way that it becomes more compound right like you typically can't do machine work very heavy with a few exceptions of course you got leg press and things like that but a lot of the machine work done in these studies is single joint so that eight to 12 range 15 20 30 reps that probably makes sense if you're doing a single joint exercise on a machine. But if you're squatting and deadlifting, you know, you're not going to do sets of fucking 30. You're not going to do that. That's an easy way to get hurt. So, you know, context matters too. So that's the last point I'm going to make about exercise science research is that they don't really narrow that type of exercise are doing. They view all lifting as making muscles contract or relax when different exercises

have different responses. A squat and a knee extension are not the same thing, obviously. And, you know, we can go into why, you know, obviously the squat uses more muscles of the entire body. There's more muscles contracting to stabilize joints, you know, especially in your core. But if you're mixing a bunch of different types of lifting exercises, that, I always argue that that's a confounder. I don't give a shit if muscles contract and relax. We know that. But you get different responses from different exercises and you have to approach them differently. A set of five makes sense on a squat.

That's probably low volume on a knee extension and probably too heavy to maintain form too. So when we're talking about all this high volume shit, I would argue that a lot of it probably does apply if you're doing mostly single joint exercises. But if you're a weak motherfucker, you don't need to be doing a bunch of single joint exercises. If you're squatting 135, you're better off trying to get your squat up to 335. And that's a realistic place to go if you're a young man. And how older men do it. You know, I have had old guys get into the mid fours. I've seen old guys squat over five.

There's probably guys that squat more than that if you go into power lifting meets. But that's irrelevant. The point is if you're a weak human being, you're better served developing your nervous system, doing big lifts that hit everything, and then getting to a point where you can identify those weak points and figure out if you need to do other shit. Like, I have to curl. I'm not going to deny that. I have to curl, you know, elbow, flex.

my weakest fucking joint action, you know, hand grip strength doesn't come natural to me. I have a harder time with those areas, so I have to curl. But then I see other guys that don't have to curl, right? But you find that out by developing a base. You squat, you deadlift, you press, you bench press, you do chinups, you do chinups, or pull ups or pull downs, right? And you do chin ups or pull ups or pull downs, and you add a little bit of weight to the bar. and you do that for a while, see what happens.

It works virtually every fucking time to bring the point home. Consider what you find in research, but also consider the limitations of that research. And I just gave you some examples of how to do that. Before anything else, you can't really carry that forward and assume it's going to work for you because of the sampling method. You're not dealing with random samples and you don't have millions of people in a study. So, therefore, the results of a study on humans is typically limited to the sample that's being studied. That's number one. Number two, you can't control for lifestyle.

So you're limited there. What you're doing outside the gym may not be with those subjects did outside the gym. May not be with the guys at your gym do outside the gym. So that's number two. You're limited by lifestyle. And number three, consider the choice of exercises for studies because they may not be the same exercise. you're doing so when they tell you this much volume this much intensity on what exercises ask yourself that question because not all exercises are equal and last but not least check everything

you read against the fucking smell test will you so that's a 30 giving you hypertrophy if you make any muscle contract and resist force it's going to grow how much it grows varies depending on how you're making it do that. So a rear delt fly and a chin up do different things to the rear delt. Even though you're not isolating, quote unquote, the rear delt on a chin up, it is producing force during a chin up. And when you make that chin up heavier and put weight around your waist, it is producing more force than it did before. So that's just one of many examples. You know, you can make a similar case with a squat versus an e extension, a press versus a lateral raise. I mean, the list goes on.

You know, I could make a few videos about that standalone. The point is the type of exercise is being used matter too, right? The demographic you're studying matters too. Are they old? Are they young? What part of the world are they from, right? Are they sick? Are they not sick?

So your sample matters too, the demographic information. Are you similar to the people being studied? And, you know, probably a whole bunch of other shit that I didn't touch on. And this is a big giant rabbit hole that we can go down. And I think I'll probably do another episode with Dr. Bradford to continue discussing this. But for today, that's what I want you to take from this. Research has its place, but there are things that cannot do. And it's important that you understand those things.

It cannot do because many people in the lay public think it's infallible. And it's not. And sure, anecdotes are certainly not infallible either. You know, us seeing and observing shit. Some people are just good responders, of course. You know, we have to deal with some of the same problems. So a lot of the things that research can't control, we also can't control, you know, but then we try new shit, at least the best of us do. And that's what I encourage everybody to do.

If something is not working, you try something new. But if something works reliably well and you can look around and see that it works reliably well, try it out. Don't follow a study with something obscure that you don't really see being done unless you're fucking bored. curious, you know, and sure, why not? I've done it. I've done some, lots of silly programs in my day. I'm not going to stop you from being a dumbass. You know, sometimes you need to be a dumbass to learn. But, uh, yeah, I think I've hammered that topic to high hell. So I am going to sign off here and remind you also that we're on YouTube now, man. We've been on YouTube for a while and I'm really bad about saying this at the beginning of the episode. But if you liked what you

heard today or what you've heard in previous episodes, please smash that. fucking subscribe button. Now, where can you find me? You can find me at weights and plates.com on Instagram at the underscore Robert underscore Santana. If you're in Phoenix, I still have a gym. Waits and plates gym, we're just south of Sky Harbor Airport. And if you haven't been tuning in on YouTube and you haven't smashed that subscribe button,

you can find us at YouTube.com slash at weights underscore and underscore plates. Thank you for tuning in, and I look forward to the next one. one. Thank you.