Carl-Richard

If you have a literal globe on your desk where Europe is on top and the text and labels are aligned for reading it that way, then turning the globe upside down is retarded.

Some aspects of science-based lifting might work perfectly for some people. I like the deep stretch microreps/pause at the end of some sets. And this is reflected in how in virtually any measurement in an exercise science study, you have big variation among individuals. That's another point Lyle makes, that the modelled group means belie that individual variation (and we know mathematically that different measures of central tendency treat individual variation differently). So unless you find a study where you believe your particular individual sensitivities are adequately represented (and you believe the methods are not completely flawed), science can only serve as a probability space and a range of suggestions.

It's like some of us are hitting the Piñata of Truth and sometimes we hit each other in the head at the same time.

This is just the beginning 🫣

Mine are too after sneezing and realizing I caught my third virus in 3-4 weeks (yes, I also got sick before the flu virus one but comparatively less). This vessel lacks immunological conformity.

Ok. There is conformity and then there is retardation.

I consider myself very open for what you can use science for (and that you can use science meaningfully; I'm not someone who has "deconstructed science" and thrown it all in the garbage). For example, I think studying psychic phenomena and far-out there stuff like breatharianism are legitimate areas for science. However, curiously, these two examples are currently in the stage of merely proving that the phenomena is possible. The buck is set much lower here in terms of straightforwardness compared to comparing very minute differences in exercise volume or movement patterns (e.g. full stretch, slowed eccentric, etc.) or level of intensity and determining which configuration of those factors is best. It's an entirely different level of investigation that science might not be well-equipped for in any situation, and certainly way less in the current situation where we are essentially using bananas to measure acorns. Randomized control trials are not well-suited for exercise science. The ecological validity is just way too problematic, the lack of blinding of participants and scientists is problematic, the timespan (usually 8 weeks) is problematic, the study population (usually untrained individuals) is problematic, the list goes on. Once ESM for exercise science and objective measures of workout intensity are established, then we're approaching the level of research in other behavioral sciences, but we'll still be stuck with the "minute difference" problem. And there are other things worth looking into, like flow states and how to measure these objectively in an RCT (let alone acquiring participants that regularly enter flow). I believe flow is the number 1 metric for performance in terms of hypertrophy training, as it is in strength training, as it is in general athletic performance. But this is 40 years too early.

I took guitar lessons for about about a year or so and then I spent the next 15 years just improvising every time I play. If you ask me to play a song, I will actually struggle to find one I can remember in its entirety (although I learned essentially Metallica's whole discography the first year or so, then some Opeth, Tool and Death songs, but really, so few songs). I remember one of my cousins (he is much older) came to visit at my dad's place back when I had been playing for like two years or so. I showed a song that I had made as an assignment in music class, and it was some kind of metalcore-inspired song where I took elements from a blues progression I had learned from my guitar teacher and integrated it with something that sounded like a rip-off from some Bullet For My Valentine song. But in the middle of the main riff, I went from an E-scale to an A-scale, and my cousin who is a math nerd and classically trained musician (and on the spectrum), told me "yeah that was very wrong, but it sounds cool 😅". And my dad was like "hey ". And internally I was like "but teach me then". After that, I developed a severe complex around whether or not I was playing music "properly" (in terms of Western music theory), and it took like seriously 10 years before I realized that all my musical idols essentially didn't give a shit about that and just played whatever they thought sounded cool.

I swear I did not read your comment before I left mine @Natasha Tori Maru Help :,<

You're just thinking about "New Agers" again My experience was that my memory became much more accurate for things that are actually useful or relevant, while irrelevant things are basically just gone.

That's what I'm saying. "Threshold of volume", without any specifics, is essentially "you have to lift to gain muscle", and nobody disagrees with that. It's the claims that as volume increases, gains increases, seemingly ad infinitum, that's what is disputed. If the 20 studies all use flawed methods that don't reflect the generality of their conclusions (which I think is very possible), that means it doesn't matter how many studies you do or whether they agree or disagree. They are all flawed at the very foundation. This is not just a critique I'm making of exercise science. It's a critique people have made of all behavioral science. Any jump from specific research design to general conclusion could be problematic, and it's a difficult argument to argue against. But in exercise science, the problem is usually so severe that I think you're bound to run into problems. That said, I think there are some research designs that could be much less problematic, but I don't see anybody doing them (e.g. correlating bodybuilding competition placement with self-reported training style). While correlative and self-report designs are generally considered lower quality than experimental designs (e.g. RCTs), the very problems in exercise science are seemingly exclusively tied to the experimental design setup. Alternatively if you can develop an Experience Sampling Method (ESM) for exercise science (allowing for better ecological validity) and objective measurements and monitors for workout intensity / proximity to muscular failure, then maybe you can circumvent some of those problems, but that of course won't happen overnight and without serious investment, if it's even possible. I'm still waiting for that one "serious scientific study". By the way, feel free to address any of Lyle's points also. I really recommend the video I linked.

The dose-response relationship between resistance training volume and muscle hypertrophy: There are still doubts. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/376670037_The_dose-response_relationship_between_resistance_training_volume_and_muscle_hypertrophy_There_are_still_doubts Critical Commentary on the Stimulus for Muscle Hypertrophy in Experienced Trainees https://www.researchgate.net/publication/342788680_Critical_Commentary_on_the_Stimulus_for_Muscle_Hypertrophy_in_Experienced_Trainees Comment on: Volume for Muscle Hypertrophy and Health Outcomes: The Most Effective Variable in Resistance Training https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40279-018-0865-9 It's a double-bind: they provide the limitations but still present a general conclusion that assumes the limitations are not important. It's like "yeah, so we used a banana to measure the length of an acorn, we put that in Limitations; in Conclusion, we put 'the results point to a length of less than one banana for an acorn'". And because these are standard practices in the field, you have to question the entire field to question the limitations, and the individual studies can slip past the critique with "we're just doing what is standard". So they keep doing it until a large enough number acknowledges the madness and stops doing it. Show me one "serious scientific study" and I'll point out the limitations, just like with the Schoenfeld study.

In theory, yes, but that doesn't matter for the "dose-response relationship" claim if only one of the between-group comparisons were ever solid. The relationship was ever only solidly 1 sets vs 5 sets; very low volume < very high volume (granted the host of other limitations with the study). The intermediate part of the supposed curve is at best tentative or unknown. If the latter, any conclusions about that part of the curve is speculative and hypothetical, not empirical, not "the science has shown that".

Yep, Brad Schoenfeld's paper showing "a dose-response relationship of higher volume on hypertrophy" is absolute garbage (Brad is supposedly the number 1 expert in the field). The crucial between-group comparisons (3SET vs 5SET) were not significant at all using p-values so they (most definitely post-hoc because Brad had allegedly never done it before) also used Bayesian hypothesis testing. For those who know about the replication crisis, this type of behavior is one of the drivers ("but we gotta publish something") and is bottom of the barrel in that context (but it's not exactly uncommon so it's not really a massive deal, but still, minus points). Most solid papers also use corrections for multiple comparisons for their p-values which requires even stronger numbers for significant results. And even there, the comparisons were not consistently convincing (or even significant) such that you can draw a conclusive straight line from 1SET < 3SET <5SET, making "dose-response relationship" a no longer fitting description. It was at most "weak evidence" (seemingly BF⏨ < 3, which is also described as "negligible evidence" by some scales, and Lyle disputed the evidence as "not meaningful") for 1SET < 3SET and 3SET < 5SET, and "positive" or "strong positive evidence" for 1SET < 5SET, but only for some muscle groups. An accurate description would be "for three out of four muscle groups, we saw evidence of 1SET < 5SET, with a (most definitely) not pre-registered/pre-stated statistical method only chosen due to a lack of significant difference with the standard method; 1SET < 3SET and 3SET < 5SET only showed weak/negligible evidence for one to two out of four muscle groups". And there was no blinding of the measurement taker in the ultrasound measurements (and ultrasound measurements are highly inaccurate anyway and a potent source of measurement bias). That could drive much of the differences seen. And of course, the description of the 5SET condition was a practically impossible workout program (you can't take that many sets at a static rep range and static rest times consistently to momentary muscular failure without basically decimating the weight at the end of each exercise, which they in any reasonable scenario didn't do because essentially nobody trains like that). And this is on top of the other critiques I've made. @Enizeo This is the type of "science" we're dealing with from "serious people in the field".

Because science class in primary school, where you were taught that atoms are at the bottom of everything, was fun, while religious studies class was boring.

Peace of mind forever probably only happens when you end all reincarnations.

"State" is a useful word for conceiving of enlightenment as a thing, in theory, for the sake of utility, even though enlightenment itself, in actuality, cannot be conceived of.

There is nothing in it for them in the sense that you have to give up your identity as a self, as a personal ego identity. And for many people this is not what they expected or wanted out of enlightenment. They thought enlightenment was a way to simply solve all their problems and somehow still remain an ego self. Or maybe they did think they would give up their ego identity, but they underestimated how radical this is. When you give up the ego, you literally give up your entire life; your life as an agent, as a person that makes choices, that has a plan or a future, that has control over their life. Even your very bodily movements are no longer under your control. All control is given over to God. You are simply a witness of God's creation unfolding, completely accepting everything that arises. There are still apparent vestiges of ignorance in the mind and body (because even when you're enlightened, you're not necessarily a saint; that takes time, if not lifetimes of re-writing and re-structuring the body and mind to be consistent with the enlightened state), but you accept even that. What most people really want is a better, more well-functioning life, and then when they get to that point, maybe later they will gravitate to actually wanting the dissolution of the ego identity, because they no longer have anything left to lose; their insecurities have been worked on, their ego desires have been fulfilled (or they see through the fulfillment of ego desires). Basically, they have seen self-actualization, or seen the limitations of it, and graduated to genuinely wanting self-transcendence. Being honest about which place you are at is the only thing you can do for ensuring you get what you want out of life and it's the only way to grow.

"Is Exercise Science a Joke?": I haven't watched it yet but I bet it will be good.

I will. It could have happened before Christmas if I wasn't so busy with the actual thesis and getting sick with the flu a week before deadline 😂 (the universe is such a joke sometimes). That flu stuck with me for a while after too. It will have to be sometime after Christmas as my advisor took vacation recently.

I wrote a MSc on using mindfulness (with music) to treat rumination (persistent, repetitive, self-focused, negative thoughts). I had this belief before I started writing, and it was only strengthened, that 90% of cases where rumination is a serious issue have to be solved through changes in life choices or life situation. If you hate your job, quit your job. If you don't want to be in a relationship, change your relationship. That's actually where your rumination comes from. That's the root of the problem. Of course your mind will tell you something is wrong if you're doing something wrong. That's its job. Using mindfulness techniques to distract you from the symptoms will only provide that; fleeting and moderate symptom relief. Which can be useful for eventually dealing with the root and getting to a place where your mind no longer has a reason to throw up two middle fingers, but you have to indeed deal with the root for that to become the case. The only exception is when you use mindfulness to wildy transform your psychology, which means intense devotion and practice, meditating a minimum 1 hour a day with the goal of literally cracking your mind. Such intense devotion and practice will itself be such an expression of being integrated with your own wants and desires that rumination does not happen; what happens instead is intense obsession or even manic states (which is just the opposite side of rumination: rumination with positive instead of negative thinking just means obsessive, manic thinking). If your actions are aligned with your desires and wants, obsession happens. If your actions are not aligned with your desires and wants, rumination happens. And your desires and wants can be highly complex, layered, flexible, as is the case when you're at higher stages of cognitive and spiritual development, but it is nevertheless the case that if you don't act in line with your desires and wants, you are at conflict with your very being, and that manifests as mental suffering. I'll make sure to bring this understanding to where I'll be doing my work; that there is a difference between "clinical" meditation/mindfulness which is what you do for 5 minutes where you want to forget that your life sucks and you're too scared to do anything about it, vs "religious" meditation/mindfulness which is about essentially transcending your human mind and ceasing the identification with the very thing that thinks those thoughts (the personal self or ego). That said, the study had positive results and we will be publishing it soon.

No.

Let's see how we can best conform to this thread. Meh, actually, neh. Well, actually: My mom has throughout the years talked about the negative health effects of fried or grilled food (how the browning process or charring creates aromatic compounds that are carcinogenic etc.) and that we should try to avoid eating too much of it. Then, in the later years when I eat my bread in the morning, I cut off the crusts (which are of course charred bits of bread). And the times she has seen this, she is like "ah cmon, why you do dis", insinuating it's weird and obsessive because that is not how people usually eat bread (in my country). So choosing to not eat charred food is ok when it comes to things like meat and vegetables, but when it comes to bread, that is suddenly too much. Also, the sheer amount of charred bits in a loaf of bread is probably 10-100x more than in a grilled or fried piece of meat or vegetable.

You're focusing on a particular aspect of life, mostly due to your life situation; the lower part of the stack which we all have but which becomes more visible in some people and some situations. There are remarkable humans out there that you would consider "everyday" humans. The passengers decided to wait to attack the hijackers until they were over a rural area. Why? To save the lives of people they did not know if they were to crash. You know another thing? They decided to cast a vote on whether to attack them or sit and wait for the odd chance that they would come out of there alive. Even in such an extreme situation, the five men who lead the charge cared about what the other passengers thought was the best idea. And those men were also willing to risk their lives confronting the hijackers to save themselves and the plane. They were not cowards. And they were thinking clearly in a state where they were almost certain they were going to die if they did not do something. And they were so close to succeeding.