No Truths

You’ve probably heard the age-old saying: “Don’t let your knee pass your toes when you squat.”

It was probably one of the first pieces of advice I got when I started working out, and it was given to me by my old high school football strength coach.

That advice was my first truth for two reasons:

• He was the strongest human I knew at the time.

• By following the program he wrote for all of us, I put on 100–150 lbs on most of my barbell lifts in 6 months.

For probably 4 years, I stayed true to that advice without daring to try anything contradictory out of fear that my knees would blow up.  

4 years passed and I made my athletic transition from organized sports into powerlifting and finally lifting for physique development. By the time my quads stopped growing, I watched every YouTube video and read every e-book and blog post I could find on how to grow my quads.

Eventually, I came across information from Renaissance Periodization. They preached that maximizing quad growth requires allowing the knee to pass the toe and bury your hack squats, barbell squats, and leg presses. This isn’t exactly revolutionary information if you’re read up on hypertrophy training, but information on these concepts wasn’t as easy to find back in 2013–2017 as it is now, and misinformation online didn’t and still doesn’t make it easy.

At around the same time, I had just started my undergraduate degree—a time I believed statistical findings and any conclusions made by a published journal under a peer-review process to be as true as the truth gets.

Then I attended one of the most influential classes I took in my degree…

The professor who was instructing an advanced research methods class gave us a journal article to read with the most damning name you could label an article in the scientific community: “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False." (1)

As the title suggests, the author of the journal, John P. Ioannidis, made this claim because of the presence of an alarming number of studies that were publishing false-positive findings using small sample sizes, flexing their study designs, methods, and outcomes. Although critics of Ioannidis’ claims about the number of false studies considered his claims to be exaggerated, a replication crisis in the scientific community warranted credibility of his call for reform (1)

That article made me go from reading just the abstract of the study to background checking the study design, methods, and whether the study was preregistered at the very least.

The reason I’m sharing these two stories isn’t to say “don’t listen to the strength coach on your sports team or that you shouldn’t listen to anything published in PubMed.” It’s actually the opposite.

You’ll still develop your lower body even if your knees don’t pass your toes, and that medication you’re researching might still do something more than placebo.

Instead, don’t be afraid to challenge pre-existing ideas and read multiple sources to get closer to the “truth” that is as close as possible to the “truth” that benefits your quality of life.

If your family doctor is recommending you get on X medication, it’s okay and responsible to go and read up on it as much as you can, consult with multiple professionals, and come back to them with a decision. Adopting the way of thought below is what made me a more informed consumer, coach, and just someone who is always hungry for more knowledge:

There are no truths, in almost any discipline. As professionals, we formulate our approaches based on the practices that reliably result in the outcome we want. And we adjust our practices based on emerging evidence either in our own day-to-day or from other professionals.

Scientists continue to study certain phenomena after hundreds of articles have been published in that area already as a means of being “less wrong.”

There’s advice I gave out to clients back when I started as a coach that I cringe at now… and I’m sure there’s advice I’m currently giving out either on the gym floor or through content that I’m going to look back on and cringe at in another 5 years.

That is easy for me to do and say because I come from an academic field and grew up in an academic household. But that’s why I’m passionate about what I do and encourage anyone to be as autonomous as they can be when it comes to their health. It’s also why I’m an advocate for greater public access to the necessary tools for people to be their own informed health consumer.

References

1. Ioannidis, J. P. A. (2005). Why most published research findings are false. PLOS Medicine, 2(8), e124. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124