From Influencer Pains to Barbell Gains (..or Close Enough)

Resistance Is Futile

Making gains comes down to a few fundamental truths. Contract the muscle you want to grow. Contract it maximally against resistance. Ideally, contract it maximally against resistance in the path that the muscle fibres naturally run. Therein lies the most common pitfall for the anatomically or biomechanically uninitiated.

For whatever reason, there is and always has been a divide between those that know and those that want desperately to believe there’s some hack or trick. The simplicity of choosing an exercise that lines up with the action that a specific muscle produces sounds so obvious – enter the influencer.

The Influence of Influencers

Influencers are charismatic, follow or set trends, and often look or train in a self-affirming manner for their audiences (or at least they do on the internet). Their followers are attracted to them for this exact reason, confirmation bias when paired with physical sensations are a powerful combination to ensnare an audience. All exercise can be categorized in terms of effectiveness on a scale of sensation based to stimulation based. 

Sensation based exercise feels really effective but doesn’t always hold up to the scrutiny of anatomy, biomechanics, and exercise physiology. Stimulation based exercise however, might be comparatively super effective at growing the muscle of choice – but also may seem super lame to the person performing it. The problem is that they exist on the same continuum; meaning, that although exclusively training based upon sensation within a muscle might not be effective long term – it certainly will help someone make progress when they’re first starting.

The Lameness of Science

Sensation is likely the accumulation of metabolites (or the burn) in the general area of the muscle of interest. This burning sensation gives the intrinsic cue that progress must be on the way, and again, a young training age will definitely deliver this result. 

The principles of progress are specificity (train the specific thing you want to adapt), overload (perform a harder challenge than the muscle is accustomed to), and progression (advance the exercise or overload parameters over time). These points mean that the most effective way to grow a muscle of interest could be utilizing the same small selection of exercises for years, slowing chipping away at progress. This can be deflating for those that train because of gains, but also because of enjoyment.

These are the cases where you might run into resistance. In a sense, the absolute correctness of strictly adhering to scientific principles of fitness can be not only demoralizing to a new trainee, but also unfairly dissuade them from training in general. Something being “sub-optimal” does not mean useless. Exercising period, although sun-optimal, is infinitely more effective than not exercising at all.

Bridging the Gap (Hint: Make Gains)

As a trainer, inching a client towards training that follows evidence-based principles is the best way to approach this problem. Appeal to authority (“trust me, I’m the trainer”), especially when it flies in the face of their current beliefs, likely will be met with resistance. Instead, allow the client, friend, or family member to let you know exactly how to proceed. Build off of what they already know and like. Use their current training as the scaffold for more effective training instead of going to the hail mary full conversion all at once.

Personal Training Field Guide

Although there may be circumstances where a full reversal of training style is easily accepted by your target, often it won’t. Try these steps to help them see genuine progress while slowly carving off inefficiencies.

Step 1: Introduce Intensity

Although circuits, booty bands, and hyper inflated volume seem to be common, ripping them apart all at once might induce an existential crisis. Instead, coax the person closer and closer to true muscle failure. Even inefficient exercises or movement patterns are going to have a burst of fresh gains behind them when the intensity is cranked to an end-point more aligned with building muscle. This way, not only are you introducing a training intensity that will remain for the remainder of their workouts there on out, you’re providing an old exercise with new gains. Oh, and they’re definitely going to get some sensation out of this too. Brownie points.

Step 2: Improve Exercise Selection

Don’t start taking things away just yet. Most of their previous choices will be ineffective by this step but also likely won’t be providing any devastating levels of fatigue. Instead, book-end their old favourites and propose a new exercise that you guarantee is going to be the next big thing for their development (.. because it literally will). Choose a more mechanically sound exercise to build their muscles and pair it with the intensity of step 1.

Step 3: Shape The Workouts

At this stage they have more than likely noticed significant changes to their body, at a much quicker pace than the old efficient workouts ever did. This is where you can begin proposing dropping some of the old tricks to save time for the main event. As they have seen progress under your guidance, at this point I doubt there’d be much resistance to any recommendations. Pull back the pointless movements and curate a much more effective workout for them. Rinse and repeat steps 1–3 as necessary.

Wrap-up

People often forget what it’s like to just start. Initially there was a literal void of information and people had to experiment to figure things out. Now, there’s an infinite amount of noise. In an industry where everything you’d ever need to succeed is googlable, still people are inundated with false information that sounds pleasing enough to follow. Use some empathy and basic psychology to aim the person a bit closer to the mark and let their results fuel the fire.