MASS Office Hours Episode 11 (with special guest Dr. Brad

Here is one for algorithm monsters.

It was interesting to hear that even Schoenfeld and others "might have to come up" with research targets like "bed-ridden patients that can't move their muscles" to (I assume) justify the hypertrophy researches as well. Like it's almost a field where everyone knows they're doing it for the beauty and performance benefit of building muscle, but the funding is all about helping the "few" people that have really life-changing problems and actually need it so you need to pack your interest in a useful, necessary, context.

I wouldn't be TOO concerned about liver king in terms of he's a weird monster and people queue to see weird monsters. Like a circus in social media. I bet many don't even train. After all it's a lifestyle brand more than training information. In comparison I have quite a few friends who have started training in the recent years and none of them could be attracted to this type of content, they couldn't possibly be interested in watching for example an hour long talk that gives you all the tools to train successfully for the rest of your life and build your own programs. And people who start training, they find an influencer with a video where you do the workout with them (and that's fair, most of those workouts will work for years just fine and have nothing critically wrong, just might create mislead expectations and images of what you shold be able to do, and be a bit narrow on tools). It doesn't matter what the exercises and structure is, as long as you have someone to do it with you so you don't need to figure it out and make decisions about what's good and what's not. Just had an example of that happen a while ago. They were grateful when I gave a couple of pointers on how to judge the content and directed them to a couple of interesting and useful snippets from Stronger by Science podcast and a couple of short Renaissance Periodization infopacks on the key factors you want the program to follow (and Israetel's sidenotes on what you DON'T need to do or stress about which is extremely helpful for a beginner).

To summarize, people are fascinated by freaks even if they don't train and when they start training they just want something easy to follow and wouldn't care to dive deep and get education on the topic (even if it's just some tens of minutes on youtube), they prefer the action.

personal experience: going too close to failure often is hard for cardio. I get out of breath. So that is one reason to caution on extreme failure training. And then also, I generally am bigger than my other lifting friends. Not drastically, but a bit. And the biggest difference is I have a little higher volume and a little more effort. Thats all I can really say.