Quick explanation of why all our gyms look like that
Paris health dispatch 2: Doctors with biceps
Hello—this newsletter is now posting more regularly. Onto the work:
Was in Paris most of the summer lifting and working, and as usual when I stay there for a while things change. I wrote about diet here, and how there’s smaller portions, easier access to clean groceries. The exercise component is… similar. There’s less of a gym culture there. Many people don’t lift. And, while I hit a Barry’s over there, and there are gyms and pilates and everything, the vibe is smaller. No CrossFit “boxes”, no supplement stores—no protein coffee, none of this:
People on the street aren’t as big; at my gym in Paris, you’d wait to squat (like in BK), but only for people to finish repping out pull-ups on the rack’s overhang bar. Compare this to America: more people than ever regularly work out, and so many are “big.” People constantly go to classes. Strenuous/muscle building exercise is no longer silo’d to men; and as lifting weights has expanded to all genders—it used to be kind of just be bodybuilding—it’s become medicalized (OK’d/accepted by doctors) and studied more. Still, at my normal Brooklyn chain gym, I’m consistently the smallest person (bicep circumference) there compared to lifters like me who move weight. I even see muscle waddles now and then.
While these are mostly anecdotal/n=1 observations, it’s also kind of semi real. While the food is a lot different in Europe, the facilities and people’s underlying body chemistry are not. So why do people move differently there compared to here? Why is working out in America—be it pilates, weights, calisthenics—so much less chill?
There is a difference
It’s because, I think, strength and bodily health are defined in America, roughly and culturally, in terms of hypertrophy. That is, in terms of big muscles. Even if that’s not the goal. While in Europe it’s defined more by movement.
Hypertrophy, refers to, scientifically and roughly, muscle size and mass: getting big. When you train a muscle—and feed it, and rest it—it grows. And as it grows you get stronger. This idea is best expressed through bodybuilding, a pretty scientific approach/sport in which workouts and diets are maximized to create the biggest, most symmetrical muscles a body can have.
But what’s wild is that it’s through this lens that most of us—gen pop folks, all genders—think about muscles—lifting, or even getting strong. Stories about lifting for new people might answer the question “will I get bulky or big?,”—will I bulk up and look like Arnold? In the past few years, though, things have changed, and stories have begun looking at whether “lifting weights will make me skinny”—as doctors have come aboard, so has everyone else.
Roughly, this is because putting on muscle—not necessarily Arnold-size numbers—has been shown in research to lower rates of morbidity, improve bone density and movement, lower rates of blood pressure, protect from diabetes, even improve mental health. On the other side of the health spectrum, an increase in muscle mass—definitely not Arnold-size numbers—has been found to help in aerobic activities/sport, like running, which used to have a real low body mass bias. It used to be runners couldn’t be too skinny; now it’s been proven that runners who strength train regularly and grow their core and leg muscles can better achieve their goals.)
Still, even as doctors and writers and run coaches prescribe more and more strength training, they’re doing so in the old limited way. Strength work is prescribed across bodybuilding lines—leaving movement on the table… and making us stress, still, about getting big.
Why is it like this?
In France, roughly/anecdotally, people move; in America we use hypertrophy to make up for not moving. That’s the way the structure’s set up. Gyms are built on this principle, research is spurred, roughly, by old bodybuilding writing and programming (instructions on how exactly to work out), and, for regular people, the writers (and podcasters etc) on this topic, downstream, defining medicalized strength as a shrunken down version of the… Arnold way. It’s systemic and hard to overstate.
The history is this: Physical culture—lifting/working out regularly on top of push-ups or jogging—wasn’t widely accepted in America until the 1970s and Pumping Iron; before this that stuff was for freaks. While city gyms have existed since, roughly, the industrial revolution*, lifting blew up at the same time as a couple of other activity movements did. (Specifically, Dr. Kenneth Cooper’s late 1960s writing on aerobics, and his book of the same name, and the rise in running and jogging in the mid 1970s.) Fifty years later, it’s hard to overstate the impact of Pumping Iron and Arnold Schwarzenegger had on the country and the culture: his fame and the movie’s success took working out from a niche thing—if you were big in the 1970s, you were weird; like you might be in France now—to a movement that more and more people did—and a business. And while aerobics and jogging/running have themselves changed a lot, nearly everyone who works out in America works out like Arnold. Some might work out as a counter to Arnold, but most of us lift like Schwarzenegger, whether big or not, all genders, because of how gyms here are built.
*And before, obviously, in India and Persia, calisthenics, etc.
Which deserves a second here. In the movie, these are freaks, outliers, comically giant people working out in a dingy room that’s all men—screaming, not wearing shoes, short shorts, feathered hair. But if you look at the gym equipment:
You’ll notice it’s nearly identical to what’s in Equinox, Blink, Planet Fitness, the Y, etc.—you’ll see it’s the same thing. While newer gyms have nicer color schemes, better mirrors, newer dumbbells, more mirrors, are cleaner and have a different crowd, they’re not, from an equipment standpoint, very different. Just about everywhere we work out in in America has the same dumbbells and barbells as Gold’s, and the same cable machines—the same floor plan as the gym that’s in most of this movie. Which is great if you’re one of the people at my gym who wants to get giant. But what if you want something else?
The problem
To be sure, the blame here isn’t on Arnold, or any of these O.G. knucklehead gyms. (They’re great, and Arnold, magnetic in the flick, was correct: his Bodybuilding Encyclopedia is a masterpiece, still in print 40 years later, and the principles he and his fellow bodybuilders worked off get more true every day.) And, if you want to get nerdy about it, there’s a relationship between muscle size and strength that’s been proven. And besides, of this is meant to dissuade people from working out hard.
Instead a new fallacy has come up. As weight training—not necessarily Arnold-like numbers—has become more prescribed, it’s been stuck, still, around the path taken by Arnold. When a person is told to get strong, the advice becomes bodybuilding-level complicated about it. A runner or someone who’s gone to a doctor can’t just move around. They need a program. They should only lift a few days a week. They can’t just do lunges, air squats, pull-ups and push-ups. If I google Huberman workout, I get a page like this:
Which is all correct, and would make sense to any bodybuilder and to me seems like a very sensible set of reps and sets and exercises. But for a regular person without deep musclehead literacy it feels very off. Why is the doctor here communicating like a bodybuilder? What workouts exactly—what’s a set, what’s a rep? What do I do after 10 to 12 weeks? But more than this, no one’s answering the question—what if I want to just move? It makes sense that putting up Arnold-like numbers takes precision and can get complicated. But should a normal person have to work out like an athlete or a nerd?
Cracks in the facade
It all feels very American: health, but through an appeal to authority. (The structural reasons there would beget another essay.) But while the scientific processes that lead to muscle growth are certainly very complex, the prescription above feels needlessly tricky. There definitely are other, less structured, less uniquely gym-focused ways to ramp up strength. There’s a hint of it in this clip, a viral video from spring that reminded me of scenes I saw in my gym in Paris—wiry guys doing pull-ups with 50 lbs. on their waist. In it a light-weight rock climber (160 lbs.) outlifts powerlifters/bodybuilders twice-ish his size:
It’s a wild one (full video). The powerlifter hosting the video says “my mind is blown,” his buddy (even bigger and stronger) concurs. It’s a wild video because the rock climber, despite his comparative lack of size, breaks all the rules of the medicalized hypertrophy-strength relationship. He moves better, which is great, his posture is better, he might even look better, and, most concretely, he expresses his strength outrageously with the gym-only lifts. Watch this couple a few times and you’ll start looking for answers. Is this guy just a freak? Why’s he so much stronger than these big guys? Are we lifting wrong since we’re lifting like them? And, most immediately, question, what’s displaying the strength here? The answer to that last one is in fact kinda close to pilates or running, and lies in the brain.
Brainiac
Well, more correctly, it lies in the brains and in the muscle—the neuromuscular connection between the two. Which is, very roughly, the answer. An improved neuromuscular connection—which I wrote about, years ago, here—is often the main driver of strength until we get big. Very simply, when the rock climber in the vid tells his arms to pull down the machine, he can go all the way, because he’s both strong and coordinated, and is incredible at moving his body through space. Some of this expertise in strength expression comes from the rock climbing itself, which at this guy’s level may train strength better than bodybuilding work, since it involves grip, and hanging and jumping through space, kinda like steroid pilates. All of that requires massive core strength as well as unilateral (one-side) capability—and all those long holds and hangs are also great for fascia and tendons.
Another, more conservative explanation—one beyond this lifter and video—is that people, at the beginning of their workout journeys, get comparable results from their neural adaptation and their hypertrophy gains—from, roughly, their bodies doing what they say quicker, as opposed to massive muscles—and that at much higher levels, like the levels this climber operates at, neural adaptations from training can help people break serious plateaus.
To be sure, this video display isn’t immediately replicable: this guy is a freak—he does special forces workouts for fun on his YouTube channel. But so are the powerlifter and the bodybuilder whose workouts trickle to us downstream. What’s puzzling to me is if we’re following experts and expert programs, shouldn’t we preference one from a normal-looking person who can move?
This is the root of the problem. Every gym is set up to make us reach Arnold-style numbers, and even the most with-it doctors suggest programming our workouts in Arnold-fashion too. This is in part because traditional strength training works (it’s still great), gyms make money, and because the reams research around this type of training lately have made this type of training easier to professionally support. Ultimately, complicated bodybuilding tables are easy to understand for researchers—more than whatever this climber is doing.
But again, even if these programs are great (and they can be) they are often tough to adhere to. They require oversight and coordination, and an OK from someone every 10 to 12 weeks. They are not always fun. So what should I do if I want to just move the other way?
So how?
Well, I’ll be straight up that the details are below the paywall, since this newsletter required serious research and it’s what I do. But if you’d like, the free answer is bodyweight work, the Pavel article linked above about greasing the groove, and maybe training a sport like boxing—doing away with the program and efficiency dynamic and just breaking a sweat by mood every day, which can be found in a number of classes if that’s your thing.
The specifics, though, are where things get fun. The add-ons and neural stuff is much more holistic—it involves fascia and tendons and problem solving, in addition to muscle—and so can be done more often than the strict three day a week bodybuilding bulk work. It’s not three workouts and nothing. It’s moving like you do in the day, only more; breaking down the wall between normal life and clearing a chair with a jump. It’s both more easy than the doctor stuff, as well as more hard and more fun.
