Each of us is the product of the interaction of our biology (genome, epigenome, etc.) with our environment (culture, climate, family of origin, etc.).  Of course environment changes, shifting over time with the flow of history. Imagine a thought experiment:

A very distant future you, with access to technology far beyond what’s available to us today, seeks greater “self-knowledge” so you decide to investigate the influence of “nurture” across time on what is means to be “you.”

You clone yourself at the state of a (fertilized) zygote and stealthily travel back in time, “implanting” genetically identical versions of you across various epochs and cultures representing a wide breadth of the human condition.  We’re talking about examining the effect of technology, language, harshness of living conditions, wealth, childhood nuturing, etc. with control over the genetic starting point.  (In each instance, it’s “you,” living a different life.)

Naturally, with your time machine and mind-reading technology, you can then immediately go back and harvest the knowledge, worldview, and cognitive capacities at any point in “your” various lives, storing this information so that you can then experience with perfect virtual fidelity (cool technology, eh?) what it was like to be each of those versions of you.

Of course, you’d be a different you, each time.

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Now imagine “you” growing up just about one generation later, specifically as it relates to learning and gathering information. You grow up not knowing anything other than instant access to the largest collection of human knowledge (and ever expanding data) that’s ever existed: The Internet.  The value of learning the meaning of a new word is framed in the context that you can always look it up (bound paper dictionaries are a thing of the past).  You relate to others via your phone, social media (and blogs), and can send links and files to share experiences instead of pull them from memory and engage in conversation and story-telling.

On the other hand, sorting through all this information can be a formidable task, one that you may have never been been taught how to do: Search engines provide thousands of “hits” and the information is often very contradictory.  “Experts” often rise to the top of the information heap based upon the number youtube subscribers, Facebook followers and Instagram likes.  News stories about notions of science very often don’t reference the original studies they speak of and online authors most often don’t see the utility in referencing their sources, either.  (And very few consumers of information bother to test the veracity of sources, so why should you?…)  You are left trusting what you know to others, missing out on a certain kind of processing of information.  Because it is accepted behavior in the world you live in, you may even see very little reason for first hand gathering of opinions, facts and data or interpretation of the validity of scientific information.  Everyone else is swallowing the blue pill, so you do, too.

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So what does this have to do with bodybuilding?…

It’s my belief that there is an intrinsic value that comes from taking a critical mind-set to the various aspects of bodybuilding: training, diet, supplementation, etc.  This simply cannot be had by naively gobbling down information one is fed from google, youtube experts (or even me, of course).  Naturally, one relies upon expert opinion because there are only so many hours in the day, but the process of ingraining information, by performing the mental gymnastics of piecing together the story of how muscle grows, how one loses body fat, etc. fosters deeper understanding that simply is not available other wise (at least with current technology that I’m aware of).  Exercising one’s cognitive abilities sharpens them, and processing information in this way seats understanding in a way that you can draw upon it to interpret and problem solve in the future.  By analogy, memorizing the location of the major skeletal muscles from a book is a far cry from actually finding, palpating, and performing intuitive muscle testing to determine each of these muscles’ action(s).  The former is very passive process, whereas the latter is actively engaging in the learning process. (Which learning style do you think would help the most in figuring out how injuries occurred or in coming up with new exercises in the gym?…)

Give a man a fish, feed him for a day.  Teach him to fish, feed him for a lifetime.

Earn It!

I chose “Earn It!” as the mantra for Fortitude Training because it reflects that idea that one must earn bodybuilding gains through hard training, but also because of the value in “earning” knowledge by fishing for it oneself.  Knowledge that one has come to by “earning it” is knowledge that one owns and can use to foster further knowledge. One know the depth and breadth of its roots, its limitations and its application.

So, in my opinion, there are no “stupid” questions – a question just implies ignorance, which is the ground state we begin with when it comes to certain areas of knowing.  (I’m putting aside inborn fears, reflexive actions, etc.)

However, there are poorly investigated questions, which suggests one has bypasses the act of trying to fish for answers.  One might ask oneself:

• Have I availed myself of the easily sources I trust to answer this this question?  Did I run an internet search, start with wikipedia as a overview, search discussion boards and article resources where this information would likely be explained in great detail?
• Am I simply not trusting  myself, i.e., do I already have the answer?   This may indicate you’re nearly ready to be an independent, autonomous fisherman, but just need some reassurance.
• Is there a true controversy or conflicting body of information on this topic?  This may indicate that the real question lies deeper. Get out your heavy duty fishing rod and the answer (or where is would / should / could lie) is likely in deeper waters.
• Is the question I’m asking truly relevant to my situation?  Am I simply asking out of curiosity or it my question coming from a place insecurity based “over analysis?”

Even the master fisherman can learn from others who are baiting their own hooks, and we can’t all be expert fishermen when it comes to catching all varieties of fish in all bodies of water. However, if bodybuilding is the pond you fish in, then learning to fish may not only make you a better informed bodybuilder, it may just make you a better bodybuilder.

Earn It!

Here is something I think is worth noting when reading articles of a generally scientific nature, especially when / if the possibility of side effects of a given substance is being address. When / if you read somewhere something akin to:

“There are no reported cases of X, Y or Z from consuming substance A, B or C” and there is not supporting scientific substantiation (internal citations), I would be wary.

I say this for a couple reasons:

This statement presumes that you should put all your trust the author as an authority when it comes to this point. In the case of micronutrients or sports supplements, for instance, there would likely be multiple reviews and / or position stands on substance A, B and/or C.

This is an absolute statement that really suggests omniscient knowledge, i.e., that the author has essentially infinite knowledge of all potential sources of a case report of X, Y and Z.

A big deal?… Maybe. Maybe not. Is the author trying to be deceptive?… Maybe… Maybe not. Is the author trying to sell you something? Maybe… But if an author were to simply note that he/ she doesn’t know of any reported cases of X, Y or Z, and including references to substantiate that he / she has looked into the issue, engenders a bit more trust in my mind.

Science doesn’t “prove” anything – it simply provides data upon which a decision can be made.  (I cringe when I see advertisements stating “clinically proven.” ) It is still up to the researcher / reader to decide the value of said research.   One might provide proof in a court of law, or derive a proof as a mathematician. I’ll defer to physicists on this one, but one might even say that physics has proven the existence of a certain particle along the space-time continuum, i.e., that such a thing has at least at one time existed.

But in the biological sciences, there is convention to use inferential statistics, based on mathematical probabilities, to make decisions. At the root of many of these methods is a standardly accepted probability value (or p-value), typically 0.05 or sometimes 0.01, which means that the likelihood of the difference or statistical effect in question happening by random chance (not due to the intervention under scrutiny in the experiment) is <5% or <1%, respectively. Whether an effect is statistically significant is based on probability, not on some binary “yes” or “no” mathematical derivation.

My intent is not to make this a statistics lesson. (Kudos on making it through the above, by the way!) The important point that delineating whether or not substance X, treatment Y, training program Z or intervention ABC (the independent variable) improved performance, muscle size, strength, endurance or what have you (the dependent variable) in a given study may not tell the whole story. In fact, when the effect of an intervention is the same, simply having more subjects will reduce the p-value. A 2% difference may be meaningless in a practical sense and not statistically “significant” (p > 0.05) when 10 subjects were studied, Including 100 subjects in the study and the p value will be lower, meaning that one could claim statistical significance simply because more subjects were studied..

What does this mean? It means that, in a certainly sense, use just p-values to gauge the value and significance (see what I did there) of scientific findings does not tell the whole story. If you’re not a scientist, simply looking at the data – the averages and maybe even peeking at the variation among subjects by looking at the standard error bars – may tell you more than p-values. A 0.2 second improvement in 100m dash may have practical significance for a high level sprinter, but fail to reach statistical significance when few subjects were tested. For you a coach or trainer, it may be more convincing to find a p-value of 0.10 in connection with a 15% strength gain in a small study than a p value < 0.001 when group differences in strength are 5% in a large cohort-based analysis.

To get to this level of understanding however, you may have to read the study, or at least look at the pictures (figures). The abstract probably won’t cut it. (Yes, I did it again…) The knowledge you derive from science seems to have something to do with the effort you put into understanding it. (And now, I’m tempted to see if a study has examined this… J )