Ep. #106: Bret Contreras on understanding nutrition & exercise science

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Hey, everyone. This is Mike. And I’m back with another episode of the muscle for life podcast. And in this episode, I interview Brett Contreras, who’s a scientist, author, coach, and really one of the leaders of the evidence based fitness movement and an all around pretty cool dude to boot. Now, if you’ve heard of Brett already, you probably know him as the glute guy that can teach you everything you need to know about building a great body.

But, and while that’s true, that’s not what I wanted to talk to him about because I figured he might enjoy a change of pace. So that’s why this interview is about something else all together in it. I chat with Brett about nutrition and exercise science and get his thoughts on all kinds of things ranging from what makes for good and bad science to how to become more scientific in your own thinking to his favorite researchers and labs and how to reconcile conflicting studies and more.

I wanted to do this interview because these days there are more and more fitness, quote unquote, gurus that are appealing to science to sell their ideas and sell their products and services and so forth. And it’s just getting harder and harder for everyday people to distinguish the Hucksters from the genuine articles.

So I hope you find Brett’s thoughts on these subjects insightful. And here’s the interview. Brett, thanks for coming on the show. I’m excited to have you. Thanks, Mike. I’m excited as well. Yeah, no, it was great talking, before. It’s fun to meet people that are like minded. And like we were saying, it’s hard to come across sometimes in this space.

So I’m looking forward to our conversation here. Me too. 

Brett: I think we could have spoken for three hours and that could have been another podcast. It 

Mike: would have been like random thoughts on random things, but somebody would have found it. At least somebody would have laughed a few times. 

Brett: We may have had a sensor out a few things.

Mike: Nah, nah, who cares? Whatever. Just put the explicit label on it and move on. All right. So let’s get into this talk, which is going to be on the subject of, we have to say actually exercise science because even nutrition science is, can be confusing to people. If we look at the health and fitness space on the whole, we’re seeing more and more people that are appealing to science to sell their ideas and their.

methodologies. And I think this is good on the whole. I think it’s a, at least it’s a good trend, but it also is creating a lot of confusion for just, everyday people that are looking to get into shape. Because on the surface when, if you’re just like somebody who doesn’t really know that much and you’re trying to educate yourself, it might seem that science supports all kinds of conflicting opinions and methodologies and ideas about how to eat and train and supplement.

And the average person is not, they’re not able, they don’t know much about scientific research. So it’s not like they can just dive in and form their own judgments on, what’s right and wrong. And it’s easy then just to get lost. And who do I listen to? What, who’s, what science is good and what science is bad.

And so I get asked about this fairly often, so much so that I actually. Later in the year, I would like to, excuse me, something I would love to talk to you about actually produce a simple kind of course to just increase people’s scientific literacy a little bit and help them understand a bit more about how research is conducted and designed and conducted.

And. And, just for the people that really want to be able to go to the next step of educating themselves. But anyways, this is here’s a, this is our initial foray into it. So I was going to pass it over to you. So why is that? Why does, why is this? I wouldn’t say it’s just exercise too.

I’d say nutrition as well, because you have guys like Gary Taubes out there who says now that like anyone that talks about calories in calories out is. Basically a quack. And this is these are the relics of our scientists the ignorant past. And now we know it’s all about insulin or this, that, or whatever.

And so that confuses people. And then, it just goes on from there, right? If we’re still arguing about energy balance, then we can argue about everything. 

Brett: So there’s so many aspects to this question. Yeah. And I, we can talk the whole time on this. It’s so important. And it’s such a, and it’s something I think there’s nothing out there.

So I agree there does need to be a product of put together an outline already on how to become more scientific and smart. So the one thing I want to say right off the bat is. Think about when you first started lifting weights. We sucked. Our form sucked and nothing felt right. I was uncoordinated I’m sure most people can relate you didn’t just start especially compound movements You didn’t start doing squats and going god this feels so smooth.

Yeah, I wanted to round back my deadlifts I wanted to Shoot my hips up in the squat. The bench felt so wobbly. I couldn’t stabilize the 

Mike: shaking bench days 

Brett: over time. You get coordinated and you get used to, it was just like anything. When you start anything, you’re not, public speaking. You’re not Nat, you’re not.

Yeah, it’s uncomfortable. You get better at things and that’s the same way science works. So you get better at it, but you have to start somewhere. So how do you start out as a scientist? And like what you said, there’s so many conflicting things. How do you make your own, how do you make your own decision?

Come to your own conclusion as a 

Mike: layman too, where they’re never, if they’re not going to have a PhD, like you, they never will that fortunately they don’t necessarily, they don’t need to, at least to navigate, I think to learn to navigate the space and avoid. Coming to the conclusion that eating 15 avocados a day is the secret to everything or something.

Brett: So I think the, you want, the goal should be for everyone to become their own authority, become your own guru. Don’t listen to the, don’t, you don’t, you like, I shouldn’t say that because knowledge is specified now, so niched. I can’t I have a research review and I did this on purpose and I remember telling my partner, Chris Beardsley, who I do the co founder, Chris Beardsley, who I do it with.

I said, no matter how popular I ever get, or if I start making way more money. I never want to outsource this because doing this each month, I go through 92 journals every month. Wow. And these are journals in strength and conditioning, biomechanics, physiology, anatomy, motor control. Yeah. So that’s how 

Mike: you keep yourself sharp.

That’s how you stay. Physical therapy. 

Brett: Yeah. Physical therapy, nutrition, sports medicine. So it’s all aspects of health and fitness. And even then. The guys who I speak with around the world, Brad Schoenfeld, knows more than I do about hypertrophy physiology. I know more about biomechanics, but that’s why we get along, because our stuff jives with one another.

Alan Aragon is my go to guy with the nutrition stuff. Even we have researchers we look up to, and they know more about certain things, but they might not know How it applies to bodybuilders or something. You need to know. So it’s so there’s guys who will know more practical things. There’s guys who know more scientific things.

There’s guys who are better communicators of the science. And so you have to have people who you trust. I have my trusted team. But even then, I’ve caught them, we’re all wrong about things. Brad’s my, one of my best buddies and I don’t agree with everything he says. I just know his intentions are true.

He’s a good scientist and he would change his mind given enough evidence. You mentioned Gary Taubes earlier. I was there when Alan Aragon debated Gary Taubes and Alan said, Just out of curiosity, Gary, if enough evidence came out against this, sugar being the root of all evils, would you change your mind?

And he said, no, would you? So that there end of story. What? He said that in front of a big crowd of people. And it’s okay, what is that? 

Mike: That’s just wait a minute. Did you just say that on live TV kind of thing? You just 

Brett: say that, so it was like, when you hear that person’s no longer a scientist.

They are a fanatic. They are a whatever, you’re a charlatan. You’re a guru. You’re a guru is actually a good meaning. We, I’ve turned it into me in a negative thing but 

Mike: at that point, it’s more about selling an ideology that’s just doing science. 

Brett: You’re looking to defend your, to confirm your bias.

You’re not looking to uncover the truth. But anyway, 

Mike: There’s a funny quote. I don’t know where I got some, but basically like it’s, if it’s in someone’s, if someone’s like. Livelihood depends on not understanding something. Don’t expect them to ever understand it. It’s just so when you build your, as a personal, as a person, when, especially if you’re out making money and your whole brand revolves around something that’ll, that that, I don’t, that person’s never abandoning that ever, right?

Brett: It’s funny cause I’m popular in the industry for my glute stuff and my hip thrust exercises and I published research on it, but. I’ve been asked to peer review two papers on hip thrusts now, and I have to be very impartial and I have to say, Oh God, am I being am I seeing what I want to see?

So I work very hard to be impartial and it’s hard because yeah, my popularity is based on this. What if, there’s some colleagues I heard of a study showing that bar, they did heavy barbell hip thrust for eight weeks and it didn’t improve speed development. And I’ve been coming out with this.

So I haven’t seen the paper yet, but if it gets published, I have to say, okay, why is this? First of all, I did a study for my PhD thesis that showed that it did improve sprint speed. So what’s the, how do we reconcile these? But ultimately, if I’m a scientist, then there’s no emotions. It’s just logic.

It’s just science. It’s no, there’s no, how dare you researchers come across publish this. It can’t be true. It’s. Thank you guys for, adding to the collective 

Mike: understanding. 

Brett: Yep. You add it to the collective understanding and hopefully a couple more studies come out and then we can figure out maybe it works well for a certain population or a stage of development.

Maybe it works well when you combine it with this we have, there’s so much more research that needs to be done just in that area. But anyway, so you want to have your trusted people. But even then. Even with Alan Aragon, I might go to him for nutrition related stuff like meal timing and everything.

And but if I really want to form my own opinion, I have to pull up all the research and read the studies myself and scrutinize their methodology. And then, read the discussions, read what the authors had to say, talk to Alan about it. And then, you might, cause you might find something unique in that, in those studies Where you’re like every time they did this happened.

So you might come to a slightly different conclusion that happens a lot. And let me tell you about just the guys in strength and conditioning, just the guys who study hypertrophy science. There’s myself, there’s Brad Schoenfeld, there’s Stu Phillips, there’s Greg Knuckles Andrew Vygotsky, Eric Helms.

James Krieger who else? We all disagree with each other. All of us. Yeah. And different 

Mike: on different things. Sure. 

Brett: Menno, Hanselman, Zia, like we all disagree with each other on certain things. And we’ve all read the same studies, but we all have different practical experiences. We have different genetics.

We have different experiences, training ourselves, training others, different interpretations of the same data. I know an Eric argue about protein. They know these studies like the back of their hand and they just interpret it differently, but they’re both scientists. I trust them both.

I know they’re not lying. Also, 

Mike: what we are looking at they’re not arguing that. You need to eat pro. They’re not saying that no, you didn’t, you don’t need proteins. You just need Brazil nuts. , 

They’re arguing 

Brett: about whether it’s, whether it’s like 0.7 grams Exactly.

Per pound of body versus or a gram, which is 

Mike: Funny ’cause people email me on that in particular. Cause I generally, I tell people if you’re around 0. 8 to one gram per pound, you’re good. There’s maybe a little bit of evidence if you’re somebody that’s muscular and you’re lean and you want to get really lean, that eating a bit more might be beneficial.

So I’ll get people that will email me not to challenge me to be like what about like this 0. 7 where I’m like, honestly, okay, fine. If you want. But if you, is it really that big of a, do we really care? You 

Brett: know, the grand scheme of things, that’s not right. And I think there, we talk about flexible dieting.

And it’s like your protein should be flexible a little bit. You don’t need to be so hardcore that every day I get one gram per pound. People get so caught up with their macros that they, you can be flexible with your macros. Yeah. So that’s why I’m like, I tell people like, how 

Mike: about this? Just be around a gram per pound per day and give or take some, and I think you’re going to be fine.

Brett: It’s like a three day rolling average. If one day you’re at 0. 7, one day you’re at 1. 2, it’s fine. But that’s a whole other topic. So about this science thing. 

Mike: So yeah, so just for example I just know even from someone years ago when I first got into the more of the evidence based and away from, I decided to really educate myself on really is so if you’re looking at the landscape out there, one of the things that, I had first had to get a sense of is a bit of the basics of scientific research.

And, we’ll talk about, for example cause it first, when I was from a newbie, basically outside looking in, or I’d be like, so how exactly is that work where like you have. This study is gonna conclude one thing and this study is going to conclude the exact opposite to like, there’s some, sometimes people will even get emailed with people, send me an email, some study, and there’ll be like, see, look, you can’t build muscle on low reps.

This showed that and then on the other hand, you can’t build muscle on high reps, see this, and then, so that’s confusing for people. Maybe you can lend a little bit of insight in terms of what’s going on behind the scenes with, study design and execution. And then even 

Brett: before, even before we get into the study design stuff, let’s talk about the process of trying to become more scientific because that’s hard.

So I, you follow my evolution in the fitness industry. I was a personal trainer on the side. I was a high school math teacher. And eventually I realized I want to do this full time, but I was mainly a personal trainer. I did not have higher. I had a master’s degree in education, curriculum instruction. I had no experience with reading scientific literature, but I was always a scientifically minded person.

My grandpa was an engineer. He gave me like. I’d always loved science, but he gave, he’s got me a subscription to discover magazine and books by like Einstein and Richard Feynman or Feynman, say it like, so I was scientifically minded, but even then, and I can tell you’re the same way, Mike, you’re very scientifically minded, but we had to go through that whole, you first started searching online.

And you come, you first, the first people you’re going to come across are the more marketing types who know the right search terms and stuff and stumble on their blogs and their writings and then you take it as gospel because they’re very convincing. 

Mike: And also that might also look the look like you look, you’re like, Hey, I don’t know.

It’d be like if you’re trying to get into golf and you’ve, someone’s really good at golf, you’re going to be like, yo, so teach me something. Cause you’re obviously good at this. 

Brett: That’s so true. If they look the part, if they’re shredded. Or they, females want to do the program of the pro, whoever has the body they like most, they want to be doing her program.

Men do that too, but even more so with females and there’s such a genetic component to things that person made. I always do this in my seminars. I show them Jen Seltzer. She’s popular for her butt her belfie. It’s probably fake though. 

Mike: Come on. 

Brett: I think it’s real, but it’s such good.

Yeah, I do. It’s just such good glute genetics. I always show her program which is on bodybuilding. com. It has her workout and I could tell it’s like her real workout I don’t think it’s her workout. I don’t know But it’s like it would not even be a good warm up for mike it’s like it wouldn’t even be a good warm up, but that’s all she has to do And if she did my program, maybe she’d look too, I don’t know, I always, maybe I’d make her look not, you can’t say how someone should look, but for her liking, it might be too muscular for her liking.

She might get too muscular all over and not have as much of a feminine look as she likes. But for the average person with regular glute genetics, you have to do everything possible. To yeah, to just get into work to get to glute shape, but so let’s say you’re Looking at how much protein should I eat and you start typing in search terms into Google?

That’s how we all start out and you get on these blogs blog posts and it might be someone legit. It might not be But you just start reading blogs for the most part, cause that’s all you know. And then as you keep progressing, you stumble upon more experts and you realize they disagree with one another.

This guy thinks this guy thinks this. And then if you keep and they might 

Mike: be citing scientific research too, which makes it even more confusing because you’re like, I don’t 

Brett: know. 

I remember Mike, we talked about this before we started the podcast about intermittent fasting and how you’re going to see a little bit better.

Yeah, maybe you get to see 85 muscle gain through that, but you have 15 percent left on the table. If you spread your protein out more frequently. And I remember talking to Alan Aragon about that. And I just brought it up to him and he’s Okay, so this was like five years ago and he says, Okay, so there’s three studies on the topic right now.

The first study says this, and he summarized it for me. The second study says this, and yet The third study says this. So here’s what the intermittent fasting community clings to this study. And then these people, the, higher frequency people cling to this study, but really they should be considering all three studies.

And so here’s the problem. The average person, first of all, they don’t even access, have access to studies. You can’t read them unless you, the reason why I can access studies is I still have my AUT login from my PhD. So I can log into my university library, online library, and download the studies. If you can’t do that, they’re so ridiculously priced.

They’re like 30 to buy the study. Who the hell is going to do that? No one. Yep. Do you know, 

Mike: Do you know deep dive deep? It’s deep D Y V E. Oh, does that help you get studies for free? Yeah. And yeah, not for free. No you pay like it’s a legit, it’s a legit service. You pay a, I think they switched to a monthly model actually now.

And it’s, but it’s affordable. So I’ve liked deep dive yeah, I’m not for, There’s 

Brett: research gate, but 

Mike: this is where I just like deep dives because it’s a, it’s actually affordable and it, you are paying and the money is going to where it needs to go. Like it’s a legit service.

Okay. So just throwing that out. That’s 

Brett: a good solution because otherwise you’re going to be paying an arm and a leg and no one will do it. You just won’t even do it. So you’ve got to figure out a way to access the studies. But then even if you can access them you don’t have the skills to scrutinize those studies.

And this is where I said, it takes time. I’m really good at scrutinizing strength and conditioning training studies because I’ve been a personal trainer for so many years. So if I see a study that’s using one training intervention versus another, and I can say Okay. That group’s actually doing more volume than the other.

That group’s doing more. This isn’t set up fairly, or maybe it’s, yeah, that’s perfect. That’s a perfect study design. I’m not so good at critiquing, studies out of my interest, and I’m not that good at statistics. So first of all, just to read the, you read the methods and then you read the, how they are, how they’re going to conduct their stats.

And then you read the results. And then. That’s another thing. Even the best data statistics people, they all disagree with one another. And so the statistics in of itself is this daunting field where you got, so you have so much to learn and I’ve learned enough about certain things to form my opinion about post hoc corrections and things like that.

And I’m going, this is so stupid. Why would I do a comprehensive study? measuring 10 different variables, if I have to then divide alpha by 10, and now my p value isn’t 0. 05, it’s 0. 005. It discourages good research, and you just trade the likelihood of committing a type a type 1 error with a type 2 error.

But I don’t, but that’s all stuff that you learn as a researcher, as a, that probably didn’t make sense to anyone listening to this. Exactly, 

Mike: that’s the, that’s what they run into, where they’re like, you say that stuff and they’re like 

Brett: okay. Okay. Yeah. Great. Now, and it made him feel horrible, but what I can tell you is in eight years of being in fitness, right?

I think I’ve started blogging eight years ago, but I started personal training when I was 20. I started lifting when I was 15. So I’ve been lifting for 25 years. I’ve been personal training for 20 years. I’ve been becoming more scientific for eight years and you can, we’re going to, this is our field.

We’re going to be in it for a long time. The cool thing is it’s just like with your physique. Yeah. You might not reach your dream physique ever, but you might not reach it for five years. But each year you look better. Yep. And each year as a scientist you get better. Yeah. And I can, I don’t post a lot of my older blogs on I, I’m embarrassed by them.

Cause I learn so much every year that it’s like embarrassing to me. Yeah I’ve gone through 

Mike: stuff I’ve written previously and just rewritten it. Honestly, 

Brett: yeah. 

Mike: Just because, certain articles were popular that they weren’t, it’s not like they were terrible, but there’s just things where either I now have learned new things that basically like this needs to be updated or I just think it needs more context or something.

I did that with my books as well. I’ve gone through and revised and I’m fine with that. I’m fine to say I’ve absolutely been wrong on things in the past. And. I’m probably wrong on things right now, but at least I’m more right than wrong. So that’s good. I think at least with the things that matter the most in terms of getting the results I want to get with people, I’m more right than wrong and I’m continually striving to get more right.

Brett: And you’re open minded to the fact that you’re wrong about things. That’s what’s huge. That’s what I tell people in my seminars. I always say I’m, I guarantee you I’m wrong about several things. I’ll tell you today five years from now, I’ll look back and go, Oh God, that was wrong.

That was wrong. We were wrong about a lot of things. And that’s what the term bro science has become popular. Oh, that’s bro science. You can, okay. So picture this, I want to get jacked and I can either, and my two options of getting jacked are Go to the gym and talk to ten, or talk to five jack dudes and just follow what they tell me to do.

Or, start reading about hypertrophy and like fat loss on PubMed. And researching it. Yeah. I will see so much better results if I just listen to the five jack dudes. Because they can tell me all sorts of good advice. The problem is they’re not scientists and so some of the stuff they tell you will be complete wrong.

Yeah. Completely wrong. And this is what I like about what I’ve learned along the way about getting in shape. It doesn’t have to be as hard as we thought, like certain things we’ve been wrong about. I can think of a bunch of things, hormones we used to say, and I was the King of this. I told every client, you’ve got to do squat.

You want big arms, squat and deadlift because squats and deadlifts. Jack up your testosterone levels and that courses through your bloodstream and attaches to the receptors of everything grows. Every muscle cell and everything grows. That’s why big dudes who squat and deadlift, they’re always jacked.

That’s not true at all. It gets the muscles that are worked more muscular and it doesn’t have an effect on your biceps or the muscles that are not activated during this, the squat, right? We were wrong about that. We were wrong about if you want to lift, you want to get jacked, you have to lift heavy.

There are now about 20 studies that show whenever it’s light loads, Versus heavy loads, as long as they’re close to failure, you see the same exact amount of muscle growth. There’s about 22 studies on the topic. Now we’ve been wrong about fasted cardio is not more beneficial than non faceted cardio meal timing.

We used to think you need to eat six to eight meals a day to stoke the fire. We were wrong about that. And so you can eat three times a day if you want, or Eight times a day. If you want, you can, you, you can, I remember reading all the bodybuilders and it was like, I’m like, God, they all eat chicken and like lean beef and tuna and like boiled steamed broccoli.

The steamed broccoli and the veggies and the bodybuilder 

Mike: and a Jimmy’s go to his thing was tilapia. So you tell everybody that’s what all you need to eat tilapia and asparagus. 

Brett: And they don’t, he 

Mike: was actually insane. 

Brett: They don’t season their foods and they just, and that all the carb sources were always like brown rice or oats or whole wheat pasta or like the whole wheat or something.

And. And it’s God, what if you wanted like a yogurt? What if you wanted some orange juice? What if you wanted, it was like, couldn’t I just, I remember thinking this way back in the day going, why can’t I just have, why couldn’t I just substitute I don’t always crave potatoes. I don’t always crave sweet potatoes or whatever.

I don’t, sometimes I just want to have I crave like sweet things. Sometimes I want fruits. Sometimes I want what if you like to drink a lot of milk? Does that, Can you just decrease some of your meats and some of your carbs and substitute the milk in and the bodybuilders back in the day when I was like 15 with would say no you have to eat these foods you have to eat clean and then like it’s interesting to see this flexible dieting thing get more popular because You know you see like Ronnie Coleman video DVDs back in the day And it’s like he’s put putting barbecue sauce on things and he’s Eating his french fries, and he yeah He’s doing flexible dieting whether he knows it or not and it’s the same with some of these other body goes and then you realize that it doesn’t make a big difference if you Substitute as long as most of your foods are because most people aren’t like okay I have to get I can get 300 grams of carbs a day.

I’m going to get them all from pop tarts. Most people don’t, most people, but it did. The reason why it’s important is because it increases adherence. You stick to the plan. And I used to be a terrible trainer. I thought I was amazing, but when I had my personal training studio, they all stuck to the BC diet, it’s what I call it, my initials, it was like a palm sized portion of meat and then fill the rest of the plate with salad or veggies.

And eat that six times a day and people would get shredded and it was so irresponsible of me because they get shredded and then they’re like binge time right and then you know month one they lose 25 pounds and they’re so psyched well if they’re overweight obviously some people need to gain weight and if they need to gain weight I’d have them have car a bunch of cars but like I gave him this rigid system that They’d be on the system, they’d see great results, they’d get off the system, and they’d blow up.

I did not teach them a sustainable system. I, my dumb ego at the time, I thought, God, they need, these people need me to see results. It’s pretty pathetic. But when they’re with me, they see great results. When they’re not. That’s my dumb ass fault for teaching them, for not teaching them a flexible system.

I was feeding them a fish, not teaching them how to fish. And so I’ve learned a lot, From those days, what, 10, whatever, 10, 12 years ago. But this is how we all evolve. We all start, if you don’t look back at the stuff you were saying five years ago and cringe a little bit, then you’re not learning enough.

You’re not studying enough. And so how I 

Mike: think that applies to any area of life. I think if you look back at your world view and the ideas you have about pretty much everything and, if not much has changed in five years or if you’re not looking back going oh, that was pretty dumb then you’re not growing as an individual.

Sure, there are some principles and values and things that we should probably just stick to and shouldn’t change all that much. But, maybe how we manifest them or embody them can change. But I think that applies to a lot more than just what we’re talking about. 

Brett: But so how can someone, how do you become more scientific?

How do you all right, you gotta use, learn how to use Google PubMed and Google Scholar to search for things and try to find the studies. If someone’s mentioning a study in a blog post, type in the title that, highlight the title. And hit search, search on Google for it. And 

Mike: also if you add file type colon PDF and then put the title into Google, just throwing that out there.

If it is just out there somewhere, Google will pull it up. 

Brett: Cause a lot of times someone uploaded this to a forum or a server somewhere and you can actually get the full paper. Yep. So it’s nice. So then you can peruse it. You won’t understand everything, but like I said, becoming a good scientist takes time.

Yep. If you do this for a couple of years, you’ll start to figure it out. You’ll start to be a, become a lot better at it. I would also 

Mike: say, I don’t know if you agree, I’d interject and say that it will really helped me is diving into the terminology and the jargon and understanding the words, like I started there, what are the words these people are using and what do they mean?

I was sensitive to that. So 

Brett: look up words, don’t just skim over if you’re studying biomechanics and 

Mike: Let’s start with biomechanics. Make sure you understand 

Brett: what that 

Mike: word means. 

Brett: A lot of like things have acronyms, RFD. What does it, don’t just skim over that, go back and find what does RFD mean?

Rate of force moment. What does that mean? Okay. It’s the slope of the, so but I D okay. In a perfect world. We would have there’d be 30 studies on every single thing we wondered about. Yeah. And enough to have a meta analysis. Yep. And review papers where you’re like, okay, what, think of a topic.

It’s all just 

Mike: tied up with a nice little bow and 

Brett: Yeah. And we can read it and go, okay, this is pretty obvious. It’s pretty clear that this is superior to this is what I need to be doing. But a lot of the, for research, a lot of it’s what gets funded because, follow the money, the people need money to conduct research.

Universities need money and things like that. So the things that get funded the most are like cancer research and obesity, problems in the world that are crises. And a lot of our stuff, 

Mike: not having big biceps, unfortunately, 

Brett: doesn’t rank very 

Mike: highly. 

Brett: It’s not the highest list of the priority. So I don’t know if that’s on 

Mike: the CDC anywhere.

We have a small biceps epidemic, 

Brett: a good predictor of I’ll I’ll cause mortality or something and, you, but anyway, not getting late 

Mike: enough. 

Brett: So there’s not always a lot of studies. Sometimes there are no studies and that’s what’s frustrating for me.

Sometimes I’ll be like, okay, there has to be a study on this topic and I search for it and I can’t find it. So sometimes it’s because you don’t know the right terms to search for. And that’s a whole skill in and of itself is. What the hell terms do I use? So if you’re thinking of the pump is getting a good pump, good for hypertrophy.

So what the hell do you type in? So I’d start it with Google and go is the pump good for 

Mike: you? Yeah. Maybe even like study muscle pump or something and then see if you can just get lucky basically. 

Brett: And, but the studies use the term self swelling and that’s what Brad Schoenfeld linked. So this self swelling research, so it’s not cutting, but Brad and I have a paper called the muscle pump That’s published in SCJ, but I actually don’t think that’s linked to PubMed So you’d find it on Google, but not necessarily PubMed, but you have to learn the terminology and that takes time So over time you want to learn the best researchers on the topic you want to learn the best labs You want to learn the best journals?

And you can even do you 

Mike: want to drop any names just in your like, people are wondering, I’m sure. 

Brett: Yeah. So for hypertrophy it’s Brad Schoenfeld and Stu Phillips, but the best journals, if you’re studying, want to study hypertrophy, there’s Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research.

There’s EJAP, a European Journal of Applied Physiology. There’s. Scandinavian journal of sports medicine. There’s journal of science and sports medicine. What else? I know I’m missing some, but anyway, you got to learn these. Oh, medicine and science and exercise. Like the MSI, I always just know the acronyms, but anyway, I go through all these journals every single month in a month out, you 

Mike: should tell people about, cause this is I’ve found your work in this regard very helpful, and Aragon’s review helpful, and okay 

Brett: if you’re, okay first of all, there’s good people to follow online, like my colleague Chris Beardsley.

He makes infographics every day of these studies. It helps make sense of them. He also has an awesome blog, if you’re into strength and conditioning and biomechanics. But you should be following these people on social media because they’ll and Twitter is actually really good for following scientists I follow so many of them and they whenever they publish a new study they link it and So that’s important, but 

Mike: so I mean I think a good takeaway here is immersion You have to immerse yourself in it You don’t want to it’s not enough to Even I would say if just reading some of my stuff like if that’s all you’re doing if you’re personal listening That’s not enough if you really Want to get to the level where, like Brett was saying, where you’re becoming your own guru, you have to really fully immerse yourself.

I don’t pretend I’m a scientist. I just am trying to disseminate good facts and serve a certain market place and help people, get into shape and so forth. And I do what. What bright is talking about where I read a lot of stuff and I follow people who I trust and that helps a lot.

And I’ll throw one other thing out that helped me along the way is looking for me to analysis and review papers on things that like, if I want to know about something, I’ll start there. Cause if there is something I’ve found, those are they just helped me a lot. Just get my feet wet and get an understanding of, where we’re at.

In the, not all, of course, some are better than others, but it just definitely helped me because it also written, I found like a bit more conversationally and you don’t need to have tremendous technical knowledge necessarily to at least understand what you’re reading about. Yeah. There are some words you’re going to have to clarify, but it did it that that, still helps me today.

I still do. I still do that. 

Brett: So this is where it gets a little intimidating and daunting, but it is important to know this. Okay. So let’s say I wanted to. Let’s say I wanted to say what’s better for my quads the leg press or the squat. Okay? How would I answer that question as a researcher? I could have them I could use a force plate and show that oh, they’re pressing more They’re utilizing more force with the leg press than the squat.

So that’s better I could utilize EMG and put electrodes on them and say Actually, their vastus lateralis and medialis activity is actually higher in the leg, in the squat than the leg press, so that’s better. I could use all sorts of tools that we have in sports science. We utilize force plates, EMG, ultrasound isokinetic dynamometers motion capture we utilize.

We have our tools of the trade and we have our ways of answering things, but these are all mechanisms we’re studying. Really? You need a training study because we can come up with all sorts of cool, nifty theories, but that Richard if theory does not match experiments, that it’s wrong, no matter how eloquent or how logical it sounds, it’s wrong.

So the experiments have to match. So you have to have training studies. We call them. So mechanic, there are mechanistic studies, which are cross sectional. They. These are good for like researchers, because they usually can, you can collect all the data in a couple of weeks. But when you do a training study, which is longitudinal, now you have to have an intervention, and it’s a pain in the ass, because you’ve got to train And just to 

Mike: define that, meaning it just, it’s over time, it’s going to take 

Brett: Huh?

Mike: Yeah, just so people know what you’re talking about, yeah. 

Brett: So you have to take however long you make the training study, maybe it’s eight weeks long. Yep. You’ve got to pre test them, train them for eight weeks, and then post test them. And there’s so much involved in these studies, but everything has a, an inherent flaw with it.

EMG, EMG measures the electrical activity of muscles. It doesn’t exactly predict the growth. There’s more things to muscle growth than just the electrical signal. And there’s things that can impact the electrical signal too, especially with fatigue force plates. Cool. That shows you ground reaction force, but it doesn’t show you the muscle for the individual muscle forces.

Yeah. Even with things like muscle modeling, where you use. These complex models to determine things well that relies on assumptions made by the author to model things you have to make assumptions When you do review papers, that’s these authors interpretation of the research. You might have a different you’re they might have biases Even in review papers, even in meta analysis, you have to set the guidelines as the parameters 

Yeah the parameters of what you’ll accept and it might You might, it might be a 

Mike: hundred percent bias.

Like you’re saying, like that could be the research, there’s an agenda here and they are going to be pre selecting for what they want type of thing. 

Brett: No, the good thing is most researchers are in it for the right reasons, 

Mike: especially, I would say, I think, I don’t know if you’d agree, but in, in the strength and conditioning space, it seems like if we were talking something with a ton of money involved, like pharmaceutical then maybe it’s harder to know really what’s going on.

And some cases when you have billions of dollars floating around. 

Brett: Absolutely. And you do have, rumors come out of this person’s a bad egg and but there really are not most of us. And I think the guys I mentioned earlier, all the guys who I follow and they follow me. We give each other benefit of the doubt.

We don’t always agree with each other, but we know that, that we, we talk a lot and we’ll, you wouldn’t do that if you weren’t trying to uncover the truth. We’re all like in the matrix trying to figure out what the hell the answer is. And we’re trying to figure out, we all know we don’t have all the answers, but we.

It’s good to have colleagues and that’s something that took me a lot of time is when I started out, I had no friends in the industry and now I’m friends with all the top people and I’m, I do not take that for granted. It’s, I’m so lucky to have. A phone call away all these people, but anyway, what do you do when there’s conflicting studies, which you mentioned earlier, one study shows this one study shows this and the average person is not skilled enough to say, okay, this study had only 12 subjects.

This study had 

Mike: that I think that’s a good segue into, do you want to give a couple examples of what, poor design or poor execution might look like? And if you have any examples come off top of your head. Sure. If they’re. I’ll tell you, I think of one classic one that I 

Brett: always talk about.

This one made me so mad because it got all the Olympic weightlifter types like posted on Facebook and social media to say look, Olympic weightlifting is superior to kettlebells. And what made me mad is that the study design looked at like an Olympic weightlifting protocol versus a kettlebell training protocol on functional performance, like vertical jump and things like that.

Okay. for that. Okay. If you were going to do that, you would say, all right, you have to equate like load and effort as much as you can. The problem is there aren’t kettlebells that go up and up, but in this study, I think the heaviest kettlebells they used were like 16 kgs or something. That’s 35 pounds.

Yeah. So here you have one group doing like front squats and hang cleans and stuff with a shit ton of weight. Yeah. And then the other group using is light ass kettleballs to do doing goblet squats or something little goblet squats and swings with and it, and that would be all fine and dandy if they didn’t make heavy kettlebells.

But they do. I have a 203 pounder. I have 106 pounder, I have 157 pounder. So you could have just used heavier dumbbells or heavier kettlebells in this. Yeah. Make ’em work. And then it would be more, my guess is that you’d see very similar results. So then 

Mike: the, so the question then is like in a person, I’m sure people listening to me so why does that happen?

Isn’t that pretty obvious? That’s just simple and logical. You don’t need to have a PhD to be like, yo. So does that make sense that they’re using 30 pound kettlebell kettlebells and then, lifting heavy ass weight. 

Brett: So you, you expect, okay. So it’s, so because of humans. So science is.

Perfect. Science is the study of the way stuff works in the universe, but humans are flawed. Our brains are flawed. We have biases. We have bank accounts. We have bank accounts. We have the Dunning Kruger effect. We have, we think we’re a lot smarter than we are. We don’t know we’re unaware of what we’re naive about.

And so is peer reviewed research better than blogs? Hell yeah. Is it perfect? Hell no. And so you just need to understand that know that so to get published, you got to conduct, you got to get ethics approval, you conduct the study, then you submit it for publication, you go through rounds of peer review, they come back to you, they almost never said, yep, we accept this, that’s never happened to me, it’s always either minor revisions, major revisions, or rejected and you work with the peer reviewers and then hopefully you can satisfy them and then it gets accepted.

But the peer reviewers might be, in that case, they were lax. Yep. Or maybe 

Mike: they just, maybe that wasn’t their thing. Like they wouldn’t, they don’t know enough about training to really know why that’s so important. 

Brett: Ideally you can get peer reviewers. That no, the subject matter. But that’s peer reviewing is free.

It’s not, I get asked to peer review all the time and I always accept, I always have one article on peer reviewing, but I have to reject a lot because I don’t have time. So there are flaws with research because of humans and it’s good, but like I said, you might if early on in your career, you read that study, you’d be like, Oh, Olympic lifting is way better than kettlebells.

And then, as you become more advanced, you could see the flaws in the study design. And that’s one good thing about forums. Forums, they can be good and they can be really bad, but sometimes in forums, you can have a smart guy that just likes to show off his knowledge and he can help point out, but, any 

Mike: forums that you personally participate in or that you’re like, 

Brett: no, and I’ve never been highly involved in any forum, but I don’t, I can’t recommend any cause, but anyway, I think that’s where you can have someone who’s cause it’s like you, I, ideally we’d all have someone to teach us.

Okay, here’s the problem with this study. It does show this. It doesn’t show, Brad just posted, just published a paper last year, the year before on rest time in between sets and showed that three minutes was better than one minute. Okay. For both strength and hypertrophy. He didn’t look at two minutes, maybe two minutes was ideal.

He didn’t look at that. And the other thing is. So the three minutes, good, it’s better for hypertrophy, but it takes longer. So they equated volume, or they equated like number of sets, but what if you instead took a different look at it and said, in 20, I’ve got 30 minutes to work out. Should I be resting three minutes?

They didn’t equate I have a 30 minute window. Yeah, they’re 

Mike: saying, you have infinite time, who cares. 

Brett: So that’s a whole different design in question. So it takes so long to get to that point, but you get better every month where you can 

Mike: learn to make educated guesses yourself. And at least you’re coming from a place of some understanding.

Brett: And, oh, which by the way, that’s a perfect way to wrap this part up is to say, look, you’re never, I like the term science based or evidence based because evidence is, comes in all forms. It’s not just published research. I always say this, your knowledge comes in your knowledge and strength and conditioning.

And fitness and nutrition, all that comes in three parts. It’s like a pie chart, one third, one third of your knowledge is from what you’ve learned, working with yourself and training yourself, going to the gym, lifting weights. 

Mike: There’s things that no one can tell you that didn’t work or, you know what I mean?

Brett: Trying different diets, trying supplements and you realize that didn’t work. That did nothing. I just wasted my money. And that’s a third of your knowledge. We’re very unique and actually when you publish research, this is what you learn. Okay, this is a whole different topic I don’t want to get too so so I’ll address this in a minute The other third comes from what you learn working with other people if all you’ve done is work by yourself Then you just tell you’re this is my problem with people who go to non coaches on Instagram and stuff And will you write me a program that person will just give you the exact program he does And it may or may not work well for you or he or she.

And they don’t, haven’t worked with enough people to individualize it towards you. And I can’t tell you how much different we all are and how much I’ve learned just from working with so many different people. You learn so much. And when you study the research on genetics and individuality, it’s crazy.

I’ll elaborate on a minute. And the final third is what you learn through reading research, attending seminars and conferences, reading blogs, reading articles, education. Exactly. So it’s one third, one third, one third. So any, if you don’t train people. You can’t you’re missing out on, yeah, you’re missing out.

If you don’t lift weights yourself, I look at some strength coaches who don’t lift weights and I’m like, how can you evaluate a new exercise or protocol if you don’t try it out yourself? And then if you just learn through training yourself and training others and never read anything or try to learn, then you’re missing out.

So it’s all three. And so you’d never want to ignore your personal experiences. You just have to know that. That’s an N equals one or that’s a N equals one means one person. 

Mike: Yeah. 

Brett: It’s not 

Mike: a, 

Brett: it 

Mike: can, it can be, at least it gives context, but it isn’t necessarily, 

Brett: , you could have had an outlier who would respond really well to anything or who wouldn’t respond to anything.

That’s why you need ample sample size to wash out. The effects of, of individuality. But speaking of individuality, when you actually publish data, when you actually conduct experiments, it’s really cool. Cause you can see like I’ve conducted so many EMG experiments on my clients, probably 30 different clients, at least.

And I can tell you that, some people, their glutes activate more when they go heavier and heavier in the hip thrust. Some people do not. Some people top out at 50 percent of one rep max and their glutes don’t activate more. But they can do way more reps with lighter loads. So I’d be stupid to give those people heavy hip thrusts.

Some people use their glutes well during the some people get more glute activation in a light goblet squat compared to heavy back squat Same with kettlebell deadlifts versus conventional deadlifts other people not. Yeah Some people don’t use their glutes to lock out the deadlift very much Some people do and it’s and you look at their form and it looks pretty good Some people get a lot of glute activity versus abduction exercises and other people not And so what I do is I’ll test these people with their muscle activity and then I’ll write them a program based on what works best for them.

And then I see amazing results with my clients this way. But the problem is. There’s no place giving, extensive EMG testing where you can go in, hook your muscles up to electrodes and do a bunch of different exercises and say, this is what works best for me. So how do you, so how do you make judgments?

You use the research, but you also just pay attention while you’re lifting. People are usually right when they say, I feel my muscles working more. When I do it this way compared to this player, I like this technique and I’ve read all the bodybuilders back in the day I would read. I loved reading what they, cause it gave me new things to try, but it didn’t.

I didn’t always like it more. It’s just you try enough things and you learn. I like this technique. I never liked wide grips, seated rows. I don’t feel this at all. Some people love them, yeah, but it’s very arrogant to think, Oh, cause I don’t like them. No one else will. So that’s why you work with people and you get this large toolbox as a personal trainer when you work with a ton of people and I can always find a great program for someone.

I can help them arrive at it because of my toolbox. 

Mike: Cause you’ve been there when they say, yeah, that doesn’t work for me. You understand that. And you’re like, I, yeah. Okay. If that one doesn’t work for you, especially if you understand biomechanics like you do, you can be like, all right, cool. Then why don’t we try this and see if that makes sense.

Brett: But we’re talking strength and conditioning. It’s the same way with nutrition. It’s the same way with. So my buddy James Krieger and I wrote an article on individual differences, and it’s crazy, things you don’t think about. But, oh, real quick, when you publish the data, you see this whole range of responses, and if you plot them, you see this guy, whether it’s EMG or strength gains or, Muscle size gains.

This person gained 20 percent increased hypertrophy. This person lost 3%. He worked out for 8 weeks and lost 3 percent of his muscle mass. How did that happen? And everything in the middle. It’s like 

Mike: mysteries. 

Brett: You have the mean, but then you have the range. The max and the minimum, the extremes. And if I would have given this person this.

And so then you can think of your clients and go, okay, I know that I’ve looked at Brad Schoenfeld and James Krieger’s meta analyses. On volume on frequency on all these things, but I have my client that seems to get a lot of muscle damage She doesn’t recover fast if I give her too much a runner into the ground Yep, the trainer with less volume and less frequency Yes, I’ve 

Mike: come across a lot of people like that probably honestly because a lot of my crowd or I would say mid 20s 30s and above so I’ve seen that with people, not so much in their 20s, but definitely with people, even my age, I’m 32, and then people in their 40s, that yeah, theoretically it might be better if they were to get a bit more weekly volume or even up the intensity, but the recovery is just not there.

Brett: So research gives you a good starting point, but only you can determine what works best for you. Things that people don’t think about, okay, you want to start doing HIIT training, high intensity internal training. Does it make you hungrier? Does it affect your sleep? Does it then make you less motivated during your strength workout?

How did the, does it affect your neat? Are you sluggish the rest of the day? All these things matter. It’s not just this black or white. The research says this. I want to know what happens when you start doing high intensity internal training. If it doesn’t impact your sleep and it blunts your appetite and it tends to get you supercharged the next day.

And you don’t 

Mike: mind it. You’re willing to do it. 

Brett: Yeah. And it’s not that grueling for you, then great. But if it, for me, it interferes with my sleep, it just puts too much 

Mike: stress on your body. 

Brett: I get hungry as hell and it’s hard because I’m going, you can give me a macro plan and I won’t stick to it because I wake, I have trouble sleeping.

And then finally I’m like, my stomach’s growling in the middle of the night. Sleep is actually more important than hitting my macros. I’m going to eat, I’m going to raid the fridge so I can freaking sleep. And so you have to consider all these different things and everyone’s different and that’s Science is perfect.

It’s the study of the universe and the way things work. This is, published research is one component to science. The scientific method is a component of science. Never blame science itself. You can blame humans and you can blame, but it’s an evolving process and we all should very much care about science.

We all should strive to be scientific because not only will you see better results, you’ll also save a lot of money not falling for gimmicks. 

Mike: Yep. And that, and that’s a big part of what I just that’s part of my story essentially is, and what I was, what I even, why I even got to this was when I originally wrote the first book that I wrote was basically that God, I could have saved so much time and money and just frustration if I would have just known like 10 things.

And so I’m going to put those 10 things in a book and try to make them really easy to understand. And that’s there, that was the beginning was like here’s me writing a book for old, past me whatever, eight years ago, this is what I wish I would have been.

I wish someone would have given me this book because shit, it would have been much I would be much further ahead than I am now. 

Brett: So anyway, this, I think this is a good ending point for we’ve hit of this, we’ve hit this topic really well. And then. Maybe down the road you can have me on and we can discuss other topics.

But I’m really glad we addressed this because it’s such a critical topic and and no one talks about it enough, . 

Mike: Yeah, absolutely. You know what also will make what might make an interesting follow-up discussion is just because you stay on top of the research in the way that you do it might be cool if there were enough material to fill a podcast of.

We have the basics of fat loss and muscle and strength building, at least we have those puzzle pieces on the board and we see how they fit together what the variables are. It’s taped to one degree or another. I think the. If we’re using the puzzle analogy, it’s probably this puzzle.

We just don’t know how far it goes and we don’t know what the whole picture is. And it’s going to continue for the rest of our lives, but at least we’ve come to, I think, a good basic understanding. And now we’re looking at as things just like you were saying earlier with the protein okay, we can all agree that eating a relatively high protein diet is conducive to muscle building and strength gain.

Cool. And now we’re talking about optimizing. So how, okay. So how frequently, how much did it what types of protein and so forth. So maybe we could have a discussion on some of the more interesting research that have, that has come out recently and what’s on the horizon and it’s almost just what is really, what’s got your attention.

You know what I mean? 

Brett: Yeah, some things right away come to mind. Cool. Then we should, 

Mike: we should line it up. It’d be fun. Like I’m interested. I know. I think a lot of listeners would be interested as well. 

Brett: Yeah. A lot of people aren’t aware. There’s some interesting controversies right now in the field.

And a couple of researchers out there mixing it up and we need to get to the bottom of it, but yeah, that would make for a good follow up. Mike, this has been great. I very much enjoyed talking to you before the podcast and talking shop and then having you on it. You asked really good questions. So I appreciate you having me on and I’d love to come on whenever you want.

Mike: Yeah, let’s do it again. And let’s, before we end here, let’s just let everybody know where they can find you. And if you have any particular products or services that you think they should know about in particular, let us know. 

Brett: The name is Brett Contreras. If you don’t remember my name, Brett Contreras, you can type in the glute guy.

I’m big on glutes. This is 

Mike: actually why I didn’t want to have you on to talk glutes. Cause I was like, dude, he’s every, I, he’ll just, I want him to I want to do just for his sake. Let’s talk about something else. 

Brett: Thank you. Yeah. Every podcast is just all glutes. So that’s, I actually thought that would get your attention.

Mike: Oh, someone that actually wants to talk about something other than glutes. 

Brett: This was good. And I love talking about other things, but if you type in TheGluteGuy or Brett Contreras, you get my blog, and from my blog, you can find all my social media channels. I’m on Twitter, I’m on Instagram, I’m on Facebook, I’m on YouTube, and I have a blog, and I have a newsletter, and I never spam people, I don’t do affiliate stuff, it’s just Here’s my articles that I came out with and here’s the stuff I’m working on and so I only send out like one newsletter a month, but it’s all this stuff that I’ve been doing and so you can subscribe to that.

And then the 

Mike: research review again, it’s topical, obviously this is what we’re talking about. 

Brett: Yep. I’ve got the research review which I do with Chris Beardsley, that’s called strength and conditioning research. And that’s a good book. You want to be reading that blog cause Chris puts out really good material on that blog.

Mike: Yeah. So I like how much like it’s, you guys do a good job explaining things in a way that anyone can understand them, which is helpful and appreciated. 

Brett: Thank you. It’s not always easy with biomechanics, but 

Mike: Yeah, I understand. Okay. Awesome. So I think that’s everything. Thanks again, Brett.

Great conversation. I know everyone’s going to like 

Brett: it. It’s under an hour, which is a miracle with me. So same actually, 

Mike: like that’s probably one of the most common YouTube comments I get is yo, these are cool, but they’re like really long. And I’m just like, ah, whatever. That’s that. It’s a podcast.

So I started doing shorter, I started doing shorter videos to appease, I think it 

Brett: was a good strategy. We talked ourselves out a little bit before that we recorded. So 

Mike: yeah, true. 

Brett: We’ve got some fatigue going on. 

Mike: Okay. Awesome. Thanks again. And we’ll line up the next one. And yeah, I appreciate you taking the time.

Thanks Mike. Hey, it’s Mike again. Hope you liked the podcast. If you did go ahead and subscribe. I put out new episodes every week or two where I talk about all kinds of things related to health and fitness and general wellness. Also head over to my website at www. muscleforlife. com where you’ll find not only past episodes of the podcast, but you’ll also find a bunch of different articles that I’ve written.

I release a new one almost every day. Actually, I, Release four to six new articles a week and you can also find my books and everything else that I’m involved in over at muscleforlife. com. All right. Thanks again. Bye.