Episode Details

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/metis-and-bodybuilders

Fitness researcher Menno Henselmans writes about optimal program design for bodybuilders. His thesis is that peer-reviewed studies prove bodybuilder lore is wrong in lots of places. For example:

Traditional bro wisdom holds short rest periods of 1-3 minutes are optimal for bodybuilding. There never seemed to be much of a formal argument for why other than that people traditionally trained this way. The real reason was probably that bodybuilders chased the pump and burn they get from shorter rest periods. Later the idea of chasing the pump was rationalized into the theory of metabolic stress. Yet there wasn’t a single study to support that shorter rest periods actually benefit muscle growth.