Back in the golden era of bodybuilding people like Arnold built world class physiques with years and years of hardass work and playing around with various tricks and methods, all in the hopes they would get better results.
And for a long time, this was just how things went. People tried things in the gym, some old bros might try something novel, get some decent results, and pass that knowledge along to other older bros. They in turn, would tinker and refine the process.
This worked for decades, and many a world class physique was built this way. But at some point experimenting and trying things out wasn’t enough.
Average gym goers and dedicated lifters didn’t just want to know that something worked, they wanted to know the how and why behind that something. And for a lot of things, this is a great thing.
It wipes away a lot of bullshit pseudoscience that we don’t need to pay attention to. But there are certain staples of physique transformation that were thrown out with the bathwater and written off as broscience. Or, in other words, shit that science says doesn’t work the way everyone thought.
Like I said, part of this is good. It led to a lot of people making changes for the better. But there’s also a dark side. In the quest for optimal, people started casting aside tried and true bodybuilding methods that had worked for decades, solely because they might’ve seen one study cited somewhere once before.
So in case you’ve been interested in broscience at all, here are 3 pieces of traditional broscience that absolutely work.
- Eating every 2-3 hours.
I am personally guilty of railing against this one on a number of occasions because from time to time I prefer intermittent fasting for myself and certain clients. However, I’d be plain wrong to say that eating every 2-3 hours doesn’t work. In fact, I would argue that for most people it works better than eating 3 traditional meals or fasting.
Part of the reason is obviously keeping your insulin levels steady throughout the day, so you have more energy, and therefore wind up having better lifts. Another reason is it’s just mentally easier for a lot of people to eat a throughout the day in a structured regimen. This allows them to mentally buy into the plan a bit more, which is going to increase overall adherence, leading to more results.
- Timing your carbs.
To this day it still blows my mind that there are reasonably jacked bros out there who blatantly argue there is no reason whatsoever to time your carbs. It’s true that as long as you get them in within a 24 hour period your glycogen levels are replenished, but that isn’t the full story.
Getting your carbs in around your workout helps provide much-needed energy to push through grueling training sessions, as well as causes a dramatic insulin spike, which serves to help shuttle amino acids into the muscle cells, leading to more gains.
- Changing the angle, weight, or load on various parts of an exercise can lead to selective hypertrophy.
That was a long point, I get it. But all it’s basically saying is that you can focus on different parts of a muscle with different exercises. Sounds relatively obvious, right? Because intuitively it is.
However, there are still arms of modern day science that disagree completely. Which, as we know, isn’t exactly right. And the only way you need to know to prove it wrong is by doing something like more incline bench. When you do more incline bench, your upper chest grows. So one would assume that incline causes the upper chest to grow, right?
Except, as I’ve said, not all scientists agree. And while more and more research is coming around to this idea, it’s still not out of the woods yet and is still classified by many as broscience.
There are many reasons for people to hate on things that just don’t make any sense whatsoever. But don’t write off broscience completely. You might find that some things get you better results than you ever imagined.