Don't Start a Fitness YouTube Channel

Warning: This is not a rant about training and you probably don't care.

The fitness industry, including and especially the part that labels itself as "evidence based", is a gigantic shithole in which most people are two-faced assholes that should be set on fire and punched in every genital they own. They say, I want to help other people achieve their goals, and only mean it as much as they need to for branding and to rope in suckers. Sometimes they have even convinced themselves at the surface level that what they're doing actually is about helping other people, even though it is absolutely not.

I had the opportunity to meet Greg Nuckols a couple of times around the time (I think) he was just getting started making a name for himself. One of the reasons I think Greg has become such a powerhouse is because he is one of the few truly genuine people in the industry, and it shows in pretty much everything he does. That was the impression I walked away with from the times I hung out with him - This is a dude who is legitimately good - and he has reinforced that in the intervening years. I mention this because Greg, being somebody genuine, who grew in popularity and respect because he is legitimately adding value to the lifting community in ways nobody else does, is the perfect contrast I know of to everything I hate about nearly everybody fucking else.

I was also just getting started as a mod on Reddit, which is obviously the far more prestigious position, at the same time I first met Greg. Over the years I have watched the number of people on various lifting subreddits that use him as a reference when giving advice skyrocket. And in all that time, you know what I never saw?

I never clicked on Greg's Reddit account and saw 50 posts to 50 different lifting, fitness, and health communities all linking to the same article he just wrote, or video he just put up. The reason for this is that Greg is not a fuckhead.

I grew up as the internet was growing up. As I've gotten older, things I used to think were amazing and incredible are things I have come to hate. One of those things is how easy it is for any idiot to throw up a blog, website, or YouTube channel and start vomiting useless information onto the digital carpet.

This rant is a conglomerate of things I have said to these people over the many years I have been forced to pull out a mop and bucket to clean up their shit.

Doug Stanhope makes this joke in one of his really old standup routines:

You ever get stuck reading somebody's poems? That girl brings her ratty ass notebook out from underneath the bed, I'm gonna let you read my poems! hehehehe! I never let anybody read my poems I'm so embarrassed but I'm gonna let you read all of my poems! ...O..h, oh thanks. Wow... you musta been dumped by a lotta guys...

And I think it's perfect for this, because every time one of you sad, lonely, boring motherfuckers starts up a fitness video diary (or "vlog" as people who should be choked would call it), this is what you are doing. You are pulling your ratty ass notebook out from underneath the bed and trying to make other people read your poems. But nobody wants to read your goddamn poems.

If you are one of these people and you don't understand this, try to think of the last time somebody wanted to tell you about the dream they had last night. They were probably really into it, it was probably a big deal to them. And you were probably polite and smiled and nodded and went, Oh whoa yeah that's sooooo crazy man. But inside you were begging for it to be over, and possibly death or a concussion, because that's how much nobody wants to hear about somebody else's dreams.

That is what a fitness vlog is. Wait so let me get this straight, so you went to the gym today and you did a workout and you went to make your shake but you spilled the milk and lol it was the last milk you had so you were like shit I have to go to the groceries but then you walked out the door and you were in your 7th grade Math class taking a test and all the numbers were jumbled and your pencil was a samurai? Who the fuck do you think wants to listen to that story?

A concept that a lot of parents need to be better at helping their children understand is that by default, other people mostly don't care that you exist. They don't care about your life, they don't care what you did today, they don't care about your feelings - none of it matters unless it affects them in some way. And most importantly, that isn't wrong and doesn't make them bad people. Here's an example: Try answering the question "How's it going?" with detailed honesty. Nobody wants it. They want you to follow the social script where you say "Oh you know, same shit different day, how about you?" so they can say "Yep, that is how it is" and move on. It's 100% bullshit but it's the grease that keeps the gears turning. You telling them about how you just spent 30 minutes cleaning up the shit in your pants because you drank too much preworkout before testing your squat max, meanwhile, is a wrench.

Sidebar - You might think this is extremely pessimistic, jaded, and negative, but I've found that it is actually a good thing. One benefit, for example, is that you're not constantly getting angry that your expectations of being cared about aren't met by people who were never going to care. It's a big load off to not constantly feel obligated to care about every other person you encounter and their shit that has nothing to do with you. That's just personal benefit. One benefit to the rest of the world, on the other hand, is that you aren't producing shitty content and then throwing it all over the place for other people to clean up.

This is a long walk but fuck you I do this stream of consciousness. 

Let me guess, fitness vlogger - you're an 18-30 year old out of shape male with low self esteem and poor body image who has always wanted to be muscular like some third party you idolize. Is it Zyzz? I bet it's Zyzz. You've done a lot of research and you're gonna lift super hard so you can wow people at some event in a year or whatever, OR, you just got done with your T R A N S F O R M A T I O N and now you want to share everything you've learned with the world. You wanted to start your YouTubes to help people achieve their goals just like you did / are totally going to. You want to bust through the myths and scams and snake oil.

You made a video about the best chest exercises? And it's bench press, incline bench press, and flies? Your favorite biceps exercises are curls, preacher curls, chinups, and 21s? No fuckin way. You're gonna give us another explanation of creatine and how much protein you need to eat? Fitness truths that include such earth shattering revelations as cardio doesn't kill your gains, compound lifts are really useful, and man lol aren't squats the greatest roflcopters my oats hip drive amirite? Hit yourself in your head with your video camera until one or the other is broken, please.

Nobody cares. None of that is interesting because neither are you. You're a nobody. When you are trying to break into the YouTube fitness space, you are trying to stand next to world class athletes and the people who coach them, PhDs and researchers, people who have been training for decades, people who have overcome enormous obstacles. What do you have to offer that they aren't already doing better? The answer is nothing. 

Inevitably the defense will be that you are just trying to help other people, man, why so hostile, who hurt you?

Because I know you don't actually give a shit about helping anybody even if you think you do.

And here's how I know - Because I see every day in the r/Fitness Daily Thread what actual helping looks like, and it's not an unaccomplished nobody firing off a bunch of self indulgent videos, sitting in front of a camera and talking for 40 minutes about their meal prep and workout, reminding people to Like and Subscribe for more amazingly banal content, and trying to get others to see themselves as the authority they should get their information from. You do that because what you want is fame, attention, recognition, and eventually money from ads and a sponsorship from some fly by night supplement company.

Just like the fact that Greg Nuckols is a good dude who really wants to help shows through in what he does and how he does it, the fact that you are in it solely for yourself shows through in everything you do.

And what you do is take a shit, tell yourself it's gold, then try to get everybody else to play Emperor's New Clothes right along with you. But it's still just shit, somebody has to clean it up, and that somebody is often me, because Reddit is run by a bunch of fucking morons who think a "user" that posts a hundred links to their YouTube channel a day is a "content creator" that they want to keep on their platform, and the fact that nobody on the website wants their shit is the problem they need to solve. Can you tell I resent Reddit's administration? It definitely doesn't have anything to do with spending six years trying to keep my communities spam free only to be - and I cannot make this shit up - eight paragraphs of chewed out by their head of community for saying "lol fuck off" to a cunt who threatened to sue and prosecute me for harassment and gender discrimination, crimes that are apparently committed when one bans a woman from a forum for spamming her shitty Yoga channel everywhere.

But I digress.

I am sincere in my convictions that at this point, anybody who tries to be a new strength training content creator is being an asshole. Looking at you, Greg Douchebaguette, you shifty charlatan fuck. I can grant, at least, that that shithead has done something, though. If the world doesn't need a former pro bodybuilder making more content - and let me tell you, when it's that content it really, really doesn't - it definitely doesn't need some skinnyfat mid-life crisis, only child asshat doing it. 

And if for some reason you're really, seriously too stupid to figure out that you're boring, at least clean your fucking room and get some lights in there first. God damn.

-

The potential irony of using a blog to rant about how nobody cares about your blog is not lost on me. Does it make me more self aware, or less, to call that out? 

Beginners: Think Less, Not More

Nobutada: Please forgive, too many mind.
Nathan Algren: Too many mind?
Nobutada: Hai. Mind the sword, mind the people watching, mind the enemy, too many mind... [pause] No mind.
- The Last Samurai

You don't have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step. 
- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

I have a theory that I've been ruminating on. I can't tell if - in whole or in part - it is something I found in my brain or my ass. I don't think it applies to everybody. Few things do. Just like with everything, many roads lead to Rome.

This theory branches out from my observation over close to the last decade that the people who think the most about training seem to be the people who are the worst at it. They fuck around the most, they stick with their training the least, they do the least work, they change things too often. It seems to me that the people who are the most successful have a tendency to focus their efforts on really simple shit - eat properly, train hard, train consistently.

The theory is that it is easier for some people to just go do the right things - instead of pursuing the answers to a thousand masturbatory questions - because they were on a sports team as a kid. They didn't get to ask questions. Their coach told them what to do, and they did it, or they were in for it. Through this experience, they learned to just shut up and train.

Let me reiterate - I don't think this applies to everybody. I sure didn't play sports as a kid. But here I am, in Rome.

I'm rambling, but I guess that's what I always do. Rule #1 of doing this blog is that I just write and don't get to go back and edit.

Training is a physical thing. The quality or "efficiency" - excuse me while I spit at that fucking insufferable word - of your plan doesn't matter if you don't go out and do it, over and over, for a long period of time. You can't think or plan or research or optimize super duper hard and then it just naturally follows that you get big and strong. You have to actually train.

Thought and planning are not a substitute for effort and time. I feel like people who think too much somehow cannot grasp this, because they just cannot seem to stop trying to make that sieve hold water.

I sometimes get into arguments about overthinking, over-planning, over-researching. It always seems to be with some bozo who has spent years trying to do it their way and having nothing to show for it. But they still think that they're doing things the right way. And they always ask the same question:

What is the harm in researching and learning more and being more efficient and optimizing?

I have thought about that question more than it deserves to be thought about. I can come up with a lot of ideas. I can argue that it takes time, effort, and energy away from the most important part - the actual training. I can argue that it is often little more than productive procrastination. I could make some analogy about how you don't learn to juggle by throwing 30 balls at yourself on Day 1 that some fucking dildo who has been juggling for a month would WELL AKSHULLY me about. I can drop that quote by Patton about good plans violently executed today. I can say some shit about Hick's Law or how perfect is the enemy of good. I can lob out phrases like "majoring in the minors", "the last 5% that matters", "premature optimization", "analysis paralysis" and "god damnit".

But these people make me tired, and I've decided that I give up. I don't think they even care about the answer - they just want to either do a cost-benefit analysis or prove to themselves that there isn't an answer so they can feel even smarter when they do the thing they were already going to do no matter what you said to them.

I don't know what the harm is. I don't know why it's apparently impossible for so many people to both do a ton of research and learning and actually train hard enough, consistently enough, to get the results that they want. Above all else, I don't know how to explain that a strategy is problematic to someone who can't even get it by looking back at their own history of failure.

I know the harm is there, because I have seen the results of it for years. I know that there are a large number of people who cannot handle both thinking and training. I don't know why, and I've decided that I also don't care, because trying to drag people away from the cliff they're trying desperately to throw themselves off of is exhausting.

You cannot prattle on about efficiency and optimization at the very same time that you are waiting for peak efficiency and maximum optimization to get started. People do this, and it makes me insane.

The act of training is what is the most important. This must be understood. Not the specifics - The act. This is what should receive the most attention and the most time.

If you were to plop a human bread loaf in front of me that would for just once trust that I am not a deep cover Russian agent sent to deliver shitty training advice so Americans will become weak - because I swear to God that is the degree of resistance some people give when asking for training advice - this is what I would tell them:

Find a training program that came from somebody who knows what they are doing. This is not as hard as people make it out to be. Well respected professionals are easy to find and you can pick any of them. Failing that, pick anything in the r/Fitness Wiki. Then do the program. Don't ask questions, don't tweak it unless you absolutely have to because of equipment restrictions, don't think about it at all. Just go and do it. Don't go LARPing that you're an academic researcher, don't go read a bunch of shit about rep ranges and INOLs and MRVs. Don't spend more than a day picking something to do. Don't try to make your own routine.

What you should be learning first is the process of shoving your shrieking brain into a corner with a gag in its mouth, and going out to execute a plan with ferocity and dedication. This is a skill and a tool that every person should have in their toolbox. It is not the right tool for every job. It is the right one for this job.

Get into the habit of training consistently without dwelling on what you're doing, where you might be in six months, what you might be doing wrong, what you could do better - learn how to train based on trust. Your results are measured on a time scale that is long - you have to be able to pick and stick with something for a long time so it has time to bear fruit. Think about refining your approach to training later, when it matters. Because it may never matter.

This is a thing that I believe strongly - Most people can achieve their training goals by doing nothing more glamorous than walking in someone else's footsteps, and it is not until one is at a competitive level that it begins to matter which someone that is or where the footsteps are. There is no shame in painting by numbers, because reinventing the wheel is stupid. Using a wheel someone else already created and refined ahead of you is much smarter than pretending you can replace decades of trial and error and experience with a few days of reading.

You do not get bonus gains points for making up a routine on your own instead of doing an existing one - and I'm here to tell you, after looking over years worth of routine critique posts, none of you are making anything new or interesting anyway. All the hours you are pouring into doing research and carefully crafting optimal volume and exercise selection and timing is for shit, because what you're producing from it is also for shit. There are only two answers to 99% of routine critiques - "It's fucking retarded" and "It looks like one of any of two dozen existing, proven routines except you picked a different kind of curls".

I'm rambling again.

When I was growing up, I was "one of the smart kids", and everybody told me this. Looking back now, I can say with certainty that it did more harm to me than it did good. I understand the shackles of needing to be "smart" in everything by thinking, researching, and planning, and I know that I am more useful as a person having taken them off. These things are just tools and they are not the right tool for every job. "Being smart" is not found in trying to use the same tools to tackle every problem.

If you need to know what the harm in thinking too much is in order to take this advice, I don't have an answer for you. What I have is that I have watched tens of thousands of people spend so much time trying to be smart that they forget to do the most important thing in reaching their goals, and so fail. I have fallen into that trap myself. I do not recommend banking on the idea that you might be the kind of person who can think without sacrificing training.

Think less, act more. Act now, think later. Train constantly, think intermittently.

More Questions Strong People Don't Ask

There is a kind of person who is determined to be mad. They don't seem to care what they're mad about, they just want something to be mad about. It's been my experience that those same people tend to also be dummies who can't think good, and I suspect that is why they spend so much time being mad.

-

A point of clarification: There is a difference between pursuing, having, and challenging others to have strength of will, character, and mind, and literally being Biff Tannen.

There is a model sometimes called the Force Continuum that mostly comes up when discussing uses of force by law enforcement. A self defense coach I used to train with once said that everyone has a maximum level of force they are comfortable with, and most people will consider anyone comfortable with a higher level to be an asshole or abusive, and anyone only comfortable with lower levels to be weak or cowardly. In my own experience I have found that to be pretty spot on.

I feel this is relevant to think about, because one thing I have learned from the internet is that there are people who have lost their ability to tell the difference between the above two types of person. Put another way - a duckling knows no difference between a wolf and my son, the toddler. Both are bigger and stronger, but one wants to eat him and the other just wants to give the quackie some of his Fruit Loops.

Put yet another way - A stack of baby bunnies in a hat and trench coat aping at being a fully formed person knows no difference between someone with strength, grit, and resilience, and the machomasculine bully caricature that mostly exists only in movies written by guys who probably got beat up in high school. I know this because guys who I know to be very good people get consistently called toxic bully gatekeeper macho meathead assholes on the internet the moment something they say reflects that they are not made of glass and don't think anyone else should be trying to be.

So, here is a final word - Preference for strength and disdain for weakness do not make a person a bully. Neither do expressing them, giving advice to others based on them, or writing rants in one's personal blog. Conversely, having disdain for those who are strong is not a virtue - it is simply sour grapes.

***

Another point of clarification: There is a difference between curiosity and wondering about a thing, and then actually asking about it. Every question a person can think of does not need nor even deserve to be discussed, heard by others, or answered. A good life skill to develop is being judicious about which musings that bubble up uncontrollably in your skull are allowed to percolate out of your mouth (or finger-mouths).

Actual thoughts are largely beyond our control. To head off some bozos who are gonna act like I'm pretending to be Emperor Stoicism - no. Incredibly stupid questions come up in my own brain all the time, just as they do for everyone. It is the inability to recognize that a question is stupid or worthless, to let it go and carry on without asking it of others, that separates some people from others. And it is an uncontrolled need to ask some kinds of questions - and to care about the answers - that, in my opinion, is a red flag for potentially being... wimpy? Fragile? Cowardly? An L.7. Weenie? A wet blanket?

Below are some such questions.

***

"Is that person taking steroids?"

If you care about the answer to this question enough to want other people to weigh in on it, there's a good chance you don't have it in you to succeed in training - unless your only training goal is "Don't do nothing", at which point I don't know why you care about anything because nothing you do matters.

There is no point in knowing the answer to this. It doesn't change what you can achieve or what you need to do to achieve it. The only thing you can do with this information is tell yourself "I can't get that because I'm not steroids", which is a statement that has absolutely no value in the pursuit of success - only in the pursuit of being a sad bastard and dragging your ass.

"Should I bulk or cut?"

What you should do is be a god damn adult.

You have eyeballs. You can look in the mirror, decide which kind of shit you look like and make a decision about what to do about it. There is no good reason to outsource this decision to other people. There are no crack experts in bulkorcutology. No experience is necessary to eyeball Play-Doh wearing a person suit and tell it it needs to get leaner. You do not want "the advice of veterans", you want someone else to bear the responsibility of deciding because you are a coward.

If you want to blame something other than yourself if you bulk/cut and don't like how you look at the end, dart boards and dice are very inexpensive.

"Is [thing that is not remotely like strength training at all] an ok substitute for leg day?"

No. Unless it's this:

Dear everybody: Stop trying to get out of doing strength training in an entire half of your body. It's not that bad, you are just being a baby. If you want to be a baby about training your legs, just be a baby. It's ok. Your all biceps, chest, and abs routine wasn't going to trick Tinders (or Grindrs, I don't judge) into climbing into bed with you despite the gaping holes in your personality anyway.

"What would happen if I did X but didn't do Y?"

You'll explode. Every disc in your spine and the spine of everyone in a 20 foot radius will herniate, your knees will spontaneously reverse themselves, and the Doom Slayer himself will descend into your shoulder and tear your rotator cuffs asunder. You will contract leprosy, and your ass will grow taste buds.

Or nothing. Or, most likely, you'll get worse results than you could otherwise, and you already know that, so why the fuck are you asking?

This is a type of "What can I get away with?" question that's about tackling one factor well and another factor poorly. And if you dig into it with the person, the reason not to do Y is always just "I don't waaaannnnnaaaa". It's never "I can't eat vegetables because I live on a remote island in the Pacific and I have no way to acquire them" - It's always some childish shit like "vegetables are yucky and I forgot salt exists". It's never "I can't change my diet because my best friend framed me for treason and now I'm imprisoned in Chateau d'If", it's "I gave up after a day because cookies are too good to not eat whole boxes of".

"I saw somebody [doing thing], what's that about?"

Only a person doing a thing can tell you why they are doing that thing. If you really have to know - and here's a hint, you don't - ask them directly. But you won't. You will go onto the internet and ask strangers to speculate on a vague description of what you saw instead. You will tell yourself that it's because you didn't want to be rude, and that's not entirely a lie, but it's really just that you are afraid to say words at another person.

This kind of question reminds me of how my son likes to run up to me and say "Daddy whayoudoon" and then run off. It is something that a toddler does out of necessity that an adult should not feel a need to do and should also know better than to be doing - and even then, my toddler asks me directly when he wants to know what I'm doing. Now, granted, he does that because toddlers just don't give a fuck. But as an adult, you should do it because you're not to be afraid of dumb shit like talking to other human beings - or simply recognize it's a question that doesn't deserve to be answered and just move on.

"How do I train to be functional? I don't want to be a fat waddling powerlifter or a gross mass monster bodybuilder."

You don't. Because that word doesn't fucking mean anything. A function is a specific action. But not to worry - based on my observations, I will answer this question for you with the most common functions that people who ask this want to perform.

• Be a smug knob on the internet: Do some strength training and some running, but deliberately never reach results above low-intermediate levels. Yoga is optional but recommended - bonus points for hot yoga.
• Accuse bigger, stronger people of having a disorder: Same as above, except you stop at mid-beginner level and deliberately never gain muscle.
• Impress unfit people: Learn a couple of basic bodyweight moves that have a skill/practice component. Do lots of unweighted pullups.
• Fantasize that you could be Batman: Do CrossFit, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, and Krav Maga. Train your vertical jump.
• The mundane functions you actually perform in your everyday life: You don't need to train at all.

"Do you count the weight of the bar when you say how much you lift?"

"Good Will Hunting", Part 2 - For Dingdongs

When ZBGBs browbeat me into making my thought-vomit into a blog instead of just leaving it sitting on my computer, I only felt okay with doing it if I first set a couple of hard rules for myself.

I'm breaking Rule #3 with this post, and I think I can justify doing it just this one time because A) This is really short and B) It's primarily for giggles.

I made a diagram for everyone who got all wrapped up trying to "WELL ACTUALLY..." the themes of a Mett Daymin movie because the post was about them, and zoomed past the point.

I hope my use of crayons and bright colors helps.

"Good Will Hunting" is Not a Documentary

How many times did your mother tell you not to touch the stove when it was hot?
How many more times did you touch it after you didn't listen to her and found out for yourself what it feels like?
- Sgt. Rory Miller

If you bury a gold coin in the center of a pile of shit, no one walking by is going to say, "Oh hey, maybe I'll dig through this big steamy pile of shit to see if there's something valuable there." They just see a pile of shit. "Potential" is the worst fucking measure of humanity, and yet everyone bitches about it constantly. Potential is absolutely nothing. Which means a person with potential has absolutely nothing. You're only as good as what you do.
- u/Cammorak 

When this first started brewing in my chamber pot many months ago, it was only about a very specific instance of arrogance. But as it simmered without boiling over, and I've spent time ruminating on it, it's become broader in scope. Looking back, I think it is fair to say that many of my rants are, in one way or another, about this. One might even go so far as to say that this is the All-Rant.

This is a rant about arrogance.

I have a core belief about the importance of direct experience as it relates to a person's ability to synthesize a useful opinion about a given topic. It's odd to me that this ends up being a controversial stance to take because it's something that nearly every part of our society is built on. Pick just about any profession, consider hiring someone from it to perform their work for you, and consider whether you want someone fresh out of education or someone who's been doing it successfully for 20 years. I can't think of a case where there is a contest here. Job interviews don't just want to know what information you can repeat - they want to know what you've done.

I must apologize. I forgot. This is an Appeal to Authority and everything I have to say going forward is therefore false because an infographic said so.

I've spent about 10 minutes at this point thinking about how to transition from where I'm at to the point I want to really rant about. I think that means I'm trying too hard. So, fuck it.

Good Will Hunting is a movie about a nobody janitor who has done literally nothing in his life but is smarter than everybody because he reads a lot. Don't get me wrong, it's a good movie. But that's what it's about. And it's just a goddamn movie, so some people need to stop acting like it's a documentary that was sent back from the future about their life as an internet lifting wizard.

There are people who, in the process of trying to adopt lifting as a hobby, decide that what they need to do to be successful is to assemble an encyclopedia of as many facts as possible, and then use that encyclopedia to construct their plan. I have ranted about this a bit before. What is left out from that rant is that I think this practice is incredibly arrogant. Allow me to explain by expressing in the least charitable way possible what a person is saying when they do this:

I know that there are professionals with many years of knowledge, experience, and/or concrete successes under their belt - professionals who have a solid track record, who have worked with high caliber athletes, who have put together everything they have learned into training and dietary methodologies. But I, a novice and a layman, am smarter than they are, and I can do better. In a short period of time, I will teach myself more than they have learned in decades by reading scientific studies. My encyclopedic knowledge of facts will be equal to or greater in value than theirs, and I will have the best opinions.

I can hear the voices of a thousand Abstract Warriors crying out, That's just gatekeeping based on a strawman!

It's not. It's the truth of what every novice and layperson is saying when they throw out established methodologies in favor of trying to create their own by reading.

I want to take a moment to say a few words about Brad Schoenfeld, PhD, CSCS, CSPS, FNSCA. Schoenfeld is well known, well respected, and what he has to say about training is valued very highly in the fitness world. Somebody like Schoenfeld is what the really, truly smart people become (or are working to become) - not Will fucking Hunting. But the thing about him is that he also only barely looks like he lifts. But because of everything else he has done in the field, there is no reason to care at all that he is not big and strong.

This would be the part of House of Cards where Kevin Spacey looks directly at the camera.

If you are just a guy trying to learn about training on the internet, you are not Brad Schoenfeld. You never will be. It is arrogant to pretend that you - a layman - can be. Even more arrogant is the claim that all it will take for you to stop being a layman is the ability to parrot articles and study abstracts you've memorized.

See title.

Brad Schoenfeld is an outlier. You are not. Your lane is over there. And in your lane, you have to have done something before you can have anything truly valuable to say. The reason for this is - Lacking experience, your only possible source of words is the rote regurgitation of information derived from the experience of others. There is nothing a layperson can add to the conversation which is uniquely valuable if they also lack experience. What remains is aping something more experienced people are already saying - and likely saying better - which is almost always just noise and rarely signal.

Novice laypersons having the ability to add value to a discussion is a myth, repeated only by novice laypersons who want to participate and feel useful despite that they should not and are not. I know no one experienced who wants to hear from such people about their field(s) of experience. In fact, I know of no person who has not at some point gotten angry because someone who has never done a thing gave them advice on how to do a thing they do all the time.

Imagine asking your great grandmother how to fix your computer. Imagine asking your child how to manage your budget. Imagine asking a plumber to rewire your electricity. Imagine asking a gorilla how to solve algebra. Imagine asking a bartender how to treat your cancer. Imagine asking a 130lb guy who started lifting a few months ago how to bench 500lbs.

Now take the reverse.

Imagine being 100 years old, knowing almost nothing about technology, and telling someone how to fix a computer. Imagine being a six year old, having only the barest concept of "money", and telling your parents how to manage it. Imagine being a plumber and offering to rewire somebody's electricity. Imagine being ZBGBs and telling somebody how to do math. Imagine being a bartender and telling a drunk who just got diagnosed with cancer about the treatment you read about on Facebook. Imagine benching 95lbs and trying to tell a 400lb bench presser how to reach 500lbs.

Most of these imaginings are uncontroversially dickheaded things. But one of them is something that happens in internet lifting discussions all the time. And it should not. But it will. Because there is a kind of person who cares more about being able to (feel like they) win arguments than about actually knowing useful things, and that person thrives on the internet.

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All that being said, there is another side of this coin.

It's perfectly okay to:

• Be a novice
• Be a layperson
• Lack experience
• Lack accomplishments
• Not participate in conversations

There is nothing wrong with any of these things.

What is wrong - what I am raving about - is people who refuse to recognize what their current station is, and refuse to act in congruence with that station.

It is okay bench only 95lbs.

It is not okay to give people advice on how to bench when you only bench 95lbs.

I want to stress this heavily. It is important to be honest with yourself about a lack of experience and thereby a lack of useful knowledge. It is important to listen instead of speak when you lack experience. A person who does this is a much better person than one who denies it and tries to be a Helper anyway. Being silent can also be a way of helping - by not adding noise that others have to sort through or argue with.

If you are inexperienced and want to help others, the best way to do that is to spend time gaining experience that you can speak from when you give them advice. Learn to be ok with not being able to help now, but rather in the future. It makes you more useful to others than just being another dildo who mic drops PubMed links and starts slapfights.