Professional personal trainers and coaches cant seem to agree on anything, why is this? This post was inspired by a question from Ugo at Sweat4health today who ask:
Having a few personal training sessions and reading more and more left me <em>more confused</em> instead of enlightened. The feeling is that everyone says the opposite of everything: e.g. there’s no such thing as “low protein” vs you’re not eating enough, or intermittent fasting is good for health vs you should wake up in the middle of the night to eat and boost metabolism at all times, or you should do x reps vs 2x etc.. nutrition especially is quite a mystery. We can send people to the moon but we don’t know whether we should eat meat or not.
Here was my answer …
The reason people argue about every little detail is that as much as people love to throw around the term “science-based training” its complete BS. What it really comes down to is experience based training. If you want to win the lifting competition in the olympics you would be a complete fool to hire a team of PhDs who had never lifted to be your coaches. To win, you hire a coach with a high school diploma who has lifted himself and coached hundreds of successful powerlifters – THAT is how you win the olympics.
There are a lot of high testosterone “professional” trainers whose income depends on their puffing their chests out, bragging, and posturing about THEIR ideas being right and everyone elses being wrong. This is the dishonest side of the problem.
The honest part of the problem is that different techniques work for different people and there is no one “best” workout for everyone. There is only a best workout for you at this particular time in your lifting career and I can guarantee you it will be different than the workout that was best for you a year ago or a year from now. This is exactly why I made the AI workout wizard at LeanMuscleSystems.Com to help people find which workout program might be best for them at any given time in their life.
The BEST workout plan is the one that you are most excited about because you will do it consistency and you will give it your top effort. That workout might be P90X today, a FBW 3x weekly next month, and 5×5 the month after that.
Does that help?