Why It's Confusing

Joel Jamison, whom I referenced in a post last week, stating that his book was a staple on most strength coach’s bookshelf made this post earlier this week, and it’s everything about why the fitness industry is confusing, and why headlines are always making us rethink what we thought we knew.

To be clear, this isn’t specifically a dig at him. I don’t think he did anything wrong, but it shows how citing research studies doesn’t always translate to real life as fluidly as we would like to believe.

Here’s the post:

“If the main reason you’re lifting weights is to live a long and health life, research suggests the benefits max out at only 40-60 minutes per week. After that, more lifting is likely NOT any better.”

A few questions popped in my head, and the first comment on this post I saw was from Rob Wilson. I’ve been to his gym in Virginia Beach and met Andrew Huberman there, but that’s for another day.

Rob asks:

“Is that time the ACTUAL working time lifting weights or total session time including rest periods, warm up time, and other non-lifting specific activities that are engaged in during exercise time. That's a big differentiation. A very hard set of 5 deadlifts is 30 seconds and that's at a tempo of 1 rep/6 sec. Pretty slow. So three sets heavy is only 90 sec of work but there might be 2-3 minutes of rest.”

Jamison’s response to the comment:

“The paper is a meta analysis that look at several different papers, each with its own methodology, but in general it is self reported time doing strength training.”

That was such a great question! To Rob’s point, there is a big difference between spending 30-40 minutes in the gym, and actually lifting for 30-40 minutes, and this meta analysis cited is unable to answer that question because all the data is self reported. Meaning, each person could be counting their self reported strength training time differently.

Obviously I agree, time in the gym is beneficial. But the claims from the data are misleading, or confusing at best. As always, the best thing to do is get to the gym and figure out what works on you.

Justin Miner

@justinminergain