OVERRATED: The Worst Fitness Advice Ever

in this video I'm ranking 19 controversial Fitness topics as either overrated or underrated and for some extra scientific credibility this time I'm pulling in exercise scientist Dr Mike isrel who not only has a PHD in sport physiology but is a competitive bodybuilder himself I'm giving us 15 seconds each to explain why we think each item is overrated or underrated and we'll be covering three categories training nutrition and hot fitness topics here we go the first category is training cheat reps also known as ego lifting go first it is a journey without an end or a

purpose when you think it through cheat reps are stupid on almost all counts you end up having a higher probability of injury a lower probability of stimulating the target muscle and a very difficult time tracking I I agree that they're overrated I think for the most part people should use good technique I would argue that on certain exercises for example bicep curls if doing a little bit of cheating and slight momentum allows you to get another rep and then you control the Ecentric that might be an extra control decentric that you wouldn't have gotten if

you hadn't used that little bit of momentum so I think that they can have some value but I would still say overall mostly overrated muscle soreness I think it can be a good proxy that you did actually hit the target muscle it can be an indication that the muscle you were trying to hit was in fact stimulated um but I think a lot of people are under the impression that if you didn't get sore that means you didn't have a good workout or you didn't grow muscle which is definitely not true and in that sense

I would say it's overrated I think it's become fashionable lately in the evidence-based Community to say that soreness is overrated or more specifically that soreness doesn't really mean anything and orus is only a side effect of novelty I think that fails on about seven or eight logical grounds when you do more volume more intensity proper progression when you come closer to failure when you generate a lot of metabolites when you focus on the Ecentric when you train along muscle lengths all of those things tend to cause more soreness and to me that sounds like a

very very close link positively to hypertrophy it's okay if you're not getting sore but if you're not progressing and you feel like you're under stimulating trying to get sore is probably a good idea and if you're getting sore you have 99 problems but stimulus is not one M okay training each muscle only once a week also known as a bro split there are better ways to train than training one muscle group once a week especially if you're talking about small muscle groups like if you train your rear adults once a week or your biceps once

a week there's absolutely no way they take that long to recover you just missed opportunity uh at legs or something or if you have a huge back back is fine once a week but it's also not optimal I think you should train muscles when they recover that generally occurs anywhere between every day or two times a week yeah I agree a little bit of Devil's Advocate the latest frequency research does show that a bro split is a viable approach but I would say it's probably not the optimal approach don't spend two hours per workout 5

days in the gym to do a perfectly fine approach no one in here in the gym right now wants perfectly fine they want jacked it's the same number of days a week you show up and not do a bro split you get better results what about training to failure so I think overrated I think that the research shows that there's not a huge difference in terms of hypertrophy or strength if you go all the way to failure or if you stop a couple reps shy I think people think going to failure is super super important

and I think that you have to know what failure feels like but I do think overall it's overrated and not as important as a lot of bodybuilders think agreed and I would add that most of the people that are saying that failure is super important coming from an egotistical perspective in which they need to emotionally drain themselves in the gym and it's more cathartic and psychological and less to do with what gets optimal results nice okay so so I'm here editing this video now and I kind of want to update my answer just a little

bit I still kind of think that training to failure is slightly overrated however there's a brand new meta analysis that did find that on average training to failure was better for muscle growth than not training to failure that doesn't mean that every set you do needs to be taken to failure but I would say it's important if you don't take any sets to failure I would say you are leaving gains on the table if I had to update my answer training to failure is properly rated to slightly overrated but I'm going to give Mike a

quick call and see if he wants to give an update hey Mike in our last video you said you thought training to failure was overrated I'm just wondering if you'd want to update that yes training to failure is even more overrated probably more overrated than ever because of that recent meta regression that came out that said that trained a failure was Superior for hypertrophy but it turns out that's only the case if you train with very low volumes you're not trying very hard you're smaller you're weaker and you don't train very often if you train

a lot and you're really serious and you're really trying in that very study they say training to failure has no Advantage because most people didn't read the study almost no one read the study I guess then it's more overrated than ever thank you so so much I really appreciate it okay the mind to muscle connection you go first I think that people who prefer to talk about mind muscle connection sometimes are right in a nuanced way but often are doing a mind muscle connection at the expense of good technique and uh a lot of load

and the right movements and especially progression so as long as your Technique is good you have progression then mind muscle connection becomes important but it's very much a quat or tertiary variable I completely agree I think it's one of those things that matters and is generally good but I think people overstate how much it actually matters you can get a good mind muscle connection and not necessarily have a sufficiently stimulative set if you didn't push that set hard how do you feel about pumps m okay I'm going to say properly rated I think pumps are

fun and they make training more enjoyable they probably have some connection to hypertrophy and I think people think that pumps are good and fun and they are so yeah properly rated sure I just mean underrated is and I think pumps are great and in the evidence-based space I think pumps are underrated whether or not you got a really good pump is a good gauge of if the target muscle was hit if it's the right place that the gearing pumped and also a good gauge of volume the next category is nutrition let's start with dirty bulking

I think dirty bulking can be fun it can lead to strength gain but overall it leads to vastly disproportionately more fat gain than it does muscle gain and for that reason I think it's overrated I mean I have the stretch marks and loose skin to prove it so I used to do it I thought it was great it was a lot of fun it caused a lot of irreversible side effects and I wish I would have stayed leaner and it sure would have gotten me laid more often in college natural testosterone boosters go first yes

this would be super simple there's no such thing if you want to boost your testosterone take in the needle I mean even if there was an over-the-counter herb that could boost testosterone there's no evidence that it would do anything significant or noticeable for muscle mass right which is why most people I think take it also the thing is is that if herb boosts testosterone you have to ask by what mechanism is it doing that if your own body detects that a serum testosterone increases occurred it usually downregulates its own production so if you have a

combination herb that also keeps your testosterone naturally producing higher that is a pharmacological multicompound drug that is not something that grows on a tree right sorry one gram of protein per pound of body weight oh I'm gonna do the Jeff Nipper it's just a little bit more than enough protein than you need for almost all cases and because it's just a little bit more than enough if you need a relatively balanced diet it obviates the need to pay high attention to protein quality and it's a really easy number to remember and if you live in

the great nation of the United States of America then you do pounds God damn but grams for food still okay I'll say properly rated as well I like 1 G per pound with the caveat that it is actually more than you need in almost instances when cutting I would say 1 G per pound is a good rule when bulking you probably only need like 0.7 or 0.8 G per pound what about body recomposition also known as recomping I think recomping is underrated because most people in the general population can very reasonably expect to build muscle

while losing fat at the same time even though a lot of people in Fitness culture tend to say oh you need to cut in bulk I don't think that's actually true for most people I think those are great and valid points I'm coming at slightly different perspective just because you can do something and it is effective doesn't mean there's not a better way to do it almost all goals that you could achieve with recomping you could do better with dedicated cutting and bulking if you want to be Jack jacked or lean lean then recomping will

only take you so far and after it runs its course which is probably in about a year of dedicated recomping you'll get almost all of it that you will after that you're going to have to pull some bigger triggers what about diet soda diet soda is by almost all research accounts essentially completely nert with regards to your health and it tastes delicious and it's amazing and it's awesome and it's underrated by people who think it's really bad for you or who think it's as bad as regular soda or who think it's worse wor and they're

just pure make belief wrong so even just switching from regular soda to diet soda can result in weight loss in a lot of people it can be so good for satiety and reducing Cravings on a diet it's a very underutilized tool y diet breaks I'm going to say underrated there really shouldn't be any like major rush to get lean I think in general people try to rush fat loss too much and they'd be better off just like chilling out a little bit taking the foot off the gas every once in a while allowing your training

to improve allowing your muscles to fill back up people could take a week or two off and and just put their calories up to maintenance or even slightly above and it would actually benefit them in the long run I think people like to lose all the weight they need to lose all at the same time and generally when it's more than 10% of your body weight and even that's a high figure you're going to have to take a long multi-month diet break for all of the diet fatigue to settle before you go on so I

think lose you know 5 to 8% of your body weight take two or three months of Maintenance and then try again what about clean eating H controversy I think it's overrated because for one it's really really hard to Define everybody has a different definition defition of what eating clean means if you take it to the extreme you can get some really disordered eating behaviors ultimately it can become so clean that there's nothing left on the menu I think it's better to focus on an inclusive approach to diet so you want to include a variety of

different foods for health you want to include a bunch of different fruits and vegetables and I don't think really think any foods should be like strictly off the menu I think everything you said is valid but I would say that clean eating is relatively easy to Define it is the absence of intentionally High palatability processed junk food and I think that taking those Foods mostly out of your diet especially as the fat loss phase gets hard can be really hugely advantageous but in most of the circumstances Mass gaining maintenance and even the beginning of a

diet some fun foods are awesome and a great part of life okay I would agree with that on a fat loss phase you should try to reduce the super palatable highly processed foods that makes sense the third category is hot fitness topics oh jeez I thought these were all Hot Topics how do you feel about Natty or not videos all right I'll take this one from the Creator standpoint I think they're overrated because I believe in innocent and T proven guilty and if you're just speculating on someone's natural status on scant evidence then you could

be hurting their reputation from the viewer stpoint I don't think they actually give you any value apart from just the fun of the drama I guess because the idea is that oh if they're not Natty then it's not realistic for me to look like them but you can't really look like anyone else anyway because of genetic differences right so I think that from both the Creator standpoint and the viewer standpoint super overrated yeah the only thing I'll say is I think true Natty or not journalistic approach where someone who has made a real commitment to

being drug-free and is lying about it I think that's awesome exposing those frauds is a great thing but Nat or not videos are like when you've done zero research you're just yelling at the camera and pretending you know things that you don't about anyone and by the way for context I'm not Natty just in case anyone wanted to say anything fair enough what do you think about the idea that Natty training is completely different from enhanced training who wrote these all right go ahead yeah it's just like a fiction design designed by two people one

natties that need an excuse for why they're not getting jacked and two drug addicted idiots that think that they don't have to read science papers I would say enhanced people can probably recover better um is that not true either it's very nuanced topic it's absolutely true but if you're enhanced that means you're more jacked and as soon as you become more jacked that enhanced recovery difference goes away because you're more jacked you're stronger you're bigger and it's way harder to recover so it just ends up leveling the playing field and you get so big that

you have trouble recovering even though you're enhanced so for all intents and purposes like training principles or training principles yes okay cold showers uh research vetted way to reduce hypertrophy if you think that they offer you an effect of that sort of shock therapy waking you up and being a a sympathetic driver for part of your day because sympathetic parasympathetic balance is really good then you don't train hard enough GO train yeah I think overrated I feel like it's just a lot of hype with very very little evidence except for reduce hypertrophy yeah reduce hypertrophy

it does it does seem to definitely do that okay what about noof fap also known as is semen retention oh bro I don't know where the started but in the wild humans fap and they also fap with each other and the overemphasis on the toxicity of both masturbation and is without research support and there's absolutely unhealthy ways and weird relationships you can get into that the vast minority of people get into that if that's you I feel you it sucks you should be getting looked at in treatment and and backing off but for most people

good God it's just normal and it's just not a big deal and there's no evidence that it that I'm aware of that it like boosts testosterone to a substantial degree over the long term or that it improves training performance all right locking out the knees is dangerous go ahead there's neither evidence nor rationale for that and your knees are designed to lock out and if you control the lock out gently and you don't snap into it like a psycho and turn your muscles off at the end and you're not one of the people with some

sort of laxity disorder you're going to be just fine and you need strong knees again I think it goes back to people approaching training with a very fragile mindset they think if they just move in slightly the wrong way then everything's going to break and it's going to be the end of them it's not true filming in gyms I think underrated I think it's overhated I feel like people people hate on people filming at the gym like oh why are you filming at the gym this and that I film at the gym and it helps

educate people on training as long as you're not disrespecting other people who maybe don't want to be on camera or violating the gym rules I'm all for it I think as the world becomes more technologically advanced and as more of us start to wear eventually VR glasses AR glass say eventually AR contact lenses being out in public will be implicit consent for being on anyone's video and also yeah of course I'm going to film my training and anyone should be able to film the training too and if you walk through someone's camera you will be

on camera because you're out in public anyway are you kidding me and Facebook and Instagram and stuff is just another version of public you were out in the gym weren't you if someone's filming in your own private gym and you don't want to be on there I understand and also oh there's tripods everywhere so what walk around there's also machines everywhere get out of here if you didn't see the last video I did a shoulder workout with Dr Mike I'll put a link to that over here somewhere make sure you check out his channel he

does all kinds of really good mythbusting Style videos so if you're into that kind of thing you'll love Renaissance periodization give us a thumbs up if you enjoyed the video subscribe if you haven't already and I'll see you guys all here in the next one