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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   2545 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for March 27, 2024

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

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I'm always torn on weightlifting and sports science studies. There are just so few really quality scientific studies done for weightlifting that even involves people at my pathetic level of skill. I'd love to only do what is scientifically guaranteed to work, but that just doesn't exist. Even the most basic bromides turn out to be based on pretty bad studies. I'm willing to be engage with anecdotal bro-science from people around me who are stronger than me, and guess-and-check to find what works.

Protein powder, water, sleep, healthy eating, lifting heavy weights often but not too often. There is no mystery to it. I was benching 1 rep max 350 as a 160 lb 6' dude in college using just this. Unless you're trying to win a contest you don't need to optimize. Helps to be a bit fat first and lose some weight.

I think that's a fine approach, what gets my goat is the people who conflate that with science. Let a thousand tongkat alis bloom, but it's laughable to pretend that there's scientific backing or that these studies should be taken seriously. The venn diagram of "works" and "science based" is not a circle.

I'd love to hear an AAQC post from you on the topic. In theory, science should be able to prove anything that works, with sufficient resources and time. So it's the case that if it works, it is science that hasn't been proven yet. Which I think is where the confusion sets in.

I suppose there is some subset of people who are automatically fooled by Dr. BroScience having Dr. in front of his name, but Hubes generally does a pretty good job of going over his material and what is scientifically proven, the state of the studies. Is he perfect? Probably not.

But with everything in the Rogan-Verse, I'm reminded how profoundly stupid the advice a man got in 2004 or so happened to be. Nothing is going to be 100%, but the attempt to gather knowledge is so much more advanced. The average bro is so much more educated, and conceives knowledge as so much more important, today than in 2004. That trend is important.

I'm not sure I have an effortpost in me about this, but I'll give it some thought.

In theory, science should be able to prove anything that works, with sufficient resources and time. So it's the case that if it works, it is science that hasn't been proven yet.

I'd disagree, science is fundamentally a process for discovering true facts. You can discover true facts via other processes, but that's not science.

Nothing is going to be 100%, but the attempt to gather knowledge is so much more advanced. The average bro is so much more educated, and conceives knowledge as so much more important, today than in 2004. That trend is important.

It's true, but how much more do we know about e.g. tongkat ali today than 20 years ago? Probably 20 years ago no Westerner had even heard of it, but all we have now is a small handful of low quality studies. The attempt to gather knowledge is more advanced but at the same time there is so much more to gather knowledge about, and there are so many things on the fringes that we know practically nothing about.

Eh... I was a bro in 2004, it was pretty much the same shit.

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