Spurn the advice of the talented

vivianimbriotis | Dec. 29, 2022, 2:21 p.m.

"I am famished,” said the elk, pawing at the ground. The mouse nodded in sympathy.

“Perhaps I could teach you to find food as I do?” the mouse offered.

“And how is that?”

“By stealing the cheese and the bread of the men and women of Hobart, of course.”

“I would love that,” replied the elk.

Before long, the elk stood before a high brick wall, a small crack between two of them providing enough room for a small mammal to wriggle through.

“Now what works for me is to sneak through there,” said the mouse, pointing with her tail, “and stealthily scout the pantry.”

“I see now. I must not listen to you, or I will starve,” said the elk. “You were never alike an elk.”

I like weightlifting, but I am not by nature well-suited to it.

There is evidence of a large variability in individual responses to resistance training. Some people will pack on muscle in response to a training stimulus, some will not, and some rare individuals may lose strength from a given programme. I am somewhere on the left of the bell curve – I have trained hard, I follow much of the evidence, I eat large quantities of protein and, at times, kilojoules, and in exchange my strength and physique have not, by and large, improved much.

I’m not complaining! The same lottery that gave me a body with a subpar resistance training response also gave me a mind that is happy and curious by default, which is a great deal. This blog post is not about my weight training, it is about the advice I’ve observed and received that goes like this:

1.   X, Y, and Z were sufficient for almost all successful lifters to improve their strength

2.   Your strength is not improving

3.   Therefore, you must not be doing one of X, Y, or Z

The problem is that the population of successful lifters have another thing going for them; a secret weapon – survival bias. The more easily your body responds to strength training, the more strength and muscularity you get from a fixed training stimulus, the more likely you are to enjoy the process and stick with it. On the other extreme, if you train for weeks and see essentially no improvement, it is very unlikely you’ll continue weightlifting. 

This means that the pool of veteran weightlifters is probably skewed towards people with an abnormally high training response – and since you don’t have any information about your training response before you pick up a barbell, you should expect it to be close to average for the general population. This mean it will probably be lower than the average weightlifter’s!

So the people who seem most qualified to give advice in this area are actually systematically likely to have been in a very different situation than you are if you’re starting out. They likely had a heritable advantage over you – and that means that their advice is likely to be systematically missing the mark for the average beginner. 

I suspect this isn’t just true of weightlifting, but true of many fields. If it took most veterans N years to become so, it will likely take you more. The most successful people are not the best people from whom to take advice, because they likely had advantages that you do not have. Look instead to the people who struggled, as you should expect to struggle.