So I spend a lot of time on cooking internet. Cooking internet is where I go to work every day.
I also spend a lot of time on lifting internet. I follow professional bodybuilding. Don't ask me
why. I don't really know. And I work out myself, although, I'm certainly not a bodybuilder,
obviously. I just like lifting for my health and overall wellbeing. And,
of course, I really appreciate the nice freeing feeling of a very short pair of
shorts. And I like having an excuse to wear them. Anywho, I noticed the other day that cooking
internet and lifting internet have the same basic problem. Similar unproductive arguments and flawed
patterns of thought unfold in both spaces. The discourse isn't great. And I think the problem in
both places has the same root cause, and it's not really anybody's fault. It's just a fact of life,
and here it is. When it comes to both cooking and lifting, everything basically works.
Therefore, everyone is basically right. I mean, I'm not saying you're going to
get Kevin Levrone shoulders by doing this kind of crazy thing. I mean,
not anything works, but within a reasonable range of possibility, yeah, picking up a heavy
thing and putting it back down again is going to pretty much do the trick. Consider side laterals,
which is a ridiculous name for an exercise because lateral literally means of/or relating
to the side. You're calling the exercise a side side, but anyways, somewhere on the internet,
two bros are having this argument right now. One bro is saying, "Bro, you got to internally
rotate on the way up, like, point your pinkies up. Lead with your pinky." And then the other
bro is saying — here, I'll turn for rhetorical distinction — the other bro is saying, "Oh no,
no, no, no, you've got to externally rotate on the way up. You got to lead with your thumbs.
This is the trick, bro." And then the first bro says, "No, no, no. I went on Google Scholar and
I found a study. Internal rotation is better." And if the second bro is smart, what he does is he
clicks through and actually has a look at that study and he figures, "Oh, okay, legit. It's
a recent study from a real university. And it shows that, ah, indeed, humerus
external rotation increases the activation of anterior and medial deltoid." Wow. Case closed,
but if the bro is even smarter, what he does is he looks down here at the actual data,
assuming that it isn't paywalled. Well, look at that. So there's activation of the medial deltoid.
That's external rotation, neutral and internal rotation. This is not a very big difference.
If you want wider shoulder muscles — and I certainly do, my shoulders suck —the
evidence is pretty clear. You pick up a heavy thing and then lift it up away
from your body. Do that over and over and over again until you literally can't do it anymore.
It's good to use a weight that's going to cause you to max out somewhere around 10 or 12 reps, but
there's a lot of latitude there, and that's what you do. You take a rest and then you do it again.
Your results will depend almost entirely on how hard you work, how regularly you work,
your genetics, your pharmaceutical enhancement, or obvious lack thereof, in my case. Compared
to those how big of a factor is your degree of humerus rotation? Oh, and diet is probably a lot
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So, anyway, cooking internet is really just like lifting internet. I guarantee you somewhere on the
internet right now, two cooking bros are having the following argument. "Classical cooking is the
only way. Sear the outside of the steak first, and then bring the interior up to temperature." "No,
no bro, reverse sear is the only way. Bring the interior up to temperature, and then sear
the outside." It's an unwinnable argument because both dudes are right. Both methods, properly done,
will work great. That doesn't mean anything works. If you try to sear a flip-flop instead of a piece
of beef, well, you're not going to get a very good steak, but within that reasonable range, anything
works. And the differences in results would be so small that you couldn't possibly rule out other
little teeny variables that might be responsible. And that's another problem with these
conversations. Outcomes in the kitchen and outcomes here in the gym, well, they tend to be
the result of tons and tons of factors. And very rarely are those variables isolated. "Hey, bro,
you got to go full range of motion on your bench press if you want a big chest." "But, bro, nearly
every professional bodybuilder you can watch train on the internet does these teeny little baby half
reps. They absolutely do not do full range of motion and they have pecs like shields."
Yeah, but those professional dudes are genetic freaks of nature. They are on an entire pharmacy's
worth of drugs, which I'm not judging on a moral basis. I'm just saying, that's what it
is. They train professionally because it's their job. They train all the time, incredibly hard,
and they eat seven or eight precisely formulated meals every day, and never miss a single one.
And, of course, they think a lot about their form and their tempo, or at least their
coach does. And they might tell you that like, "Wow, doing it this way. This really was the
secret for my arms." But the thing is they don't know that. I mean, they might be incredibly good
at what they do, but that doesn't mean they're good at knowing why they are good at what they do.
Those are two totally different things and they're not testing these variables in isolation, right?
It took years and years and years for them to build the physique that they have. And it's
not like they kept their diet and their drugs and everything completely constant for a whole year,
and only changed the form that they do this one exercise with to see whether or
not that would result in better outcomes than some other kind of form. They're
just not doing that. That's not their job. No, for that kind of thing, you need scientists
in laboratories to do actual studies, but even those studies have some pretty significant limits.
Look at this shoulder training study from before. How many actual human beings did they study in
order to come to these conclusions? It was 10. Ten competitive bodybuilders. That is not a very big
group. And what were they actually measuring? Muscle growth or strength improvement? No,
this is an EMG study. That's when they stick electrodes on your skin to monitor the amount
of bio-electricity going through your muscles as you are doing the lift. It's a useful thing,
but the extent to which EMG readings actually correlate to muscle building, or strength gain
is a subject of ongoing scientific debate. It is a little easier to do experiments in
the kitchen. It's much easier to study things than people. Things you can destroy. You can destroy a
few steaks in order to try to come up with some sort of finding. You can't destroy a few people
and ruin their lives, or their physiques in order to try to learn something about them. Plus, a
physique is built over a period of years, whereas a steak cooks in five or 10 minutes. So you can
actually do the experiment several times, but even then it's surprisingly hard to isolate variables
in the kitchen. Is one of these steaks better than the other because of the way that I cooked it,
or is it just a slightly better cut with more intramuscular fat than the other one? Maybe I
just controlled my heat better this time around. Maybe I was just hungrier when I tasted this one,
and therefore it tasted way better to me. In a highly controlled laboratory environment,
scientists with actual degrees and stuff can isolate these variables. They've got
cool machines that can measure the shear force necessary to cut through a piece of food,
and therefore figure out how tender it is down to a tiny little decimal point. Pretty neat. And
there is food science. Food science happens, but it tends to happen in two areas. One, it happens
in industrial food manufacturing, right? Questions that are relevant to food manufacturers as opposed
to cooks. The other area of research is in things having to do with food safety that are really,
really important to public health. That's where the money is. There isn't a whole lot
of money in answering the basic questions that we have here in the kitchen every day.
Similarly, the scientific establishment isn't that invested in figuring out how to get you
jacked. I mean, there is some research because there is some money in that, right? But it's not
nearly as much money as you have for important things like how to not get cancer, or how to not
die of a heart attack. Those are important things for which there's lots and lots of
public and charitable research dollars available. The pool of money that's available to figure out
how to get you jacked for purely cosmetic reasons — that pool of money is comparatively small. And
when you go looking for studies, they're usually pretty small, and there aren't that many of them.
And even these studies that look at muscle size relative to exercise form,
or whatever — they're generally looking at actual normal humans, not "enhanced" humans. And so
professional bodybuilders are going way beyond the frontiers that science has actually explored
to any great extent, and they have to fill in the blanks with bro science. And I understand that.
Cooking absolutely has its own brand of bro science, and I'm as guilty of dispensing
that bro science as anyone, but in my defense, there's very little actual science to answer
most of the basic questions that I have here in the kitchen. Therefore,
I have to fill in the blanks with my own best guesses, and if you want to call that bro science,
yeah. One reason I have a lot of questions in the kitchen is because most of the time
cooking is a highly repetitive, not that intellectually taxing activity.
So when I'm cutting up a piece of garlic for the millionth time, I've got a lot of brain space
available to consider the minutia of what I'm doing. Is this the optimal knife angle? Should
I snip off the root before or after I peel it? Will crushing actually extract more flavor from
the garlic, or will cooking do all the same cellular damage I could do here on the board?
These variables I'm considering probably make a tiny, tiny difference, but I consider them anyway
because I can, because I have the brain space to obsess over this stuff while I am cooking,
and therefore I do obsess over it, even though it doesn't really matter that much compared to the
stuff that really does matter. Same thing happens in the gym. Lifting is all about doing the same
motion over and over and over and over and over again until you either lose all your gains or die,
at which point you'll lose all your gains. And so after a point, it doesn't actually require a whole
lot of mental energy to pull off the motion that you're really familiar with and used to doing, so
your mind has all this extra space to obsess over the minutia, right?
All of the little angles of alignment and high sets and low reps versus low reps and high sets,
and all that kind of stuff, right? You just have time to obsess over that stuff. And how important
is that kind of stuff? I mean within a reasonable range of doing it right, it's probably not that
important compared to the basic stuff, like do you get in the gym, and do you do it? Are you
consistent? And do you put forth a whole lot of effort? Are you always trying to your max,
or close to your max? Are you progressively overloading your muscles — doing a little bit
more every single time you go into the gym? That's the kind of stuff that really matters, right?
And this obsession with relatively inconsequential minutia is exacerbated by the content marketplace
that you and I are engaging in right now. There are people whose whole job, their thing that they
do for money every single day, is to make videos about lifting, and they need things to talk about.
So my favorite lifting content creator at the moment is this guy, Sean Nalewanyj. Seems like
a really smart, responsible guy. And he generally emphasizes the basics, like progressive overload
and maintaining a calorie deficit to lose weight, but you can only make so many videos covering
those basic simple undisputed things that probably account for 90% of your success or failure in the
gym, so he does have to find other things to talk about. It's like he almost depends upon
other not-so-smart or responsible content creators to make really stupid videos for him to refute.
So this guy's doing this absolutely ridiculous curl thing. And then Sean can come in and say,
"No, that's dumb. Just do normal curls. Normal curls are good."
I am 100% guilty of the same weirdly parasitic behavior in my own career. How many times have
I made a video where I test a whole bunch of slightly different ways to make something, ways
that people argue about all the time saying, "No, this is the best way." "No, this is the best way."
I test them all, and then I report back to you and say, "Wow, they all basically taste the same. So
just do whichever one is easier for you." I do that all the time. But let me end on a positive
note. There's one thing that's really good about both lifting discourse and cooking discourse.
Both of these activities and the conversations around them they both force us to ask some really,
really basic and important fundamental questions about why we do what we do. What is the purpose
of being in here and doing this thing? Consider the deadlift. There is no reason
to be alive if you can't do deadlift. Deadlift is fun because it's usually the lift at which you can
lift the most weight. It uses some of the biggest, strongest muscles in your body, like your glutes,
but it all depends on the tiny little muscles that support your grip. If you can't hold the bar
in your hands, you can't do the lift. So people generally use straps to help them hold the bar,
but this prompts us to ask a really fundamental question about why we're doing what we're doing.
What is my goal here? Is my goal to move the most weight? Is my goal to grow an absolute dump truck,
as the kids say? Or is my goal to be able to pick up really heavy things in the real world,
move them somewhere else where I need to move them, and put them down again?
In a real world situation, I'm probably not going to have straps, or any other grip
assists. So it probably doesn't make much sense to use them in the gym. My chain is only as
strong as its weakest link, and my weakest link is my grip, so I need to strengthen it.
There's a similar case that comes up in sauce making. Not so much now, but back when I was
younger, there was a scandal in the West when it was revealed, or discovered by White people,
that Chinese food, or at least Chinese-American food, is generally made with sauces thickened with
starch. There's this idea in European cooking that the real way to thicken a sauce is by reduction,
right? You make a meat stock and then you reduce it until you've got a lot of gelatin concentrated
in there, and that's what thickens the sauce. Thickening a sauce with starch is cheating because
it happens instantaneously. Well, what sense does that make? What is my goal here? Is my goal to
have a thick sauce that clings to food and tastes delicious? I'm pretty sure that's it. So whatever
I can do that will do that is good, right? Here's an even more fundamental question that
came up here in the gym. Let me tell you a little story. So when my first kid was born, weirdly,
that was really, really good for my lifting schedule. I found that sort of the regimentation
and the discipline that came from having an infant in the house — that really helped me to
focus on doing all the things that I needed to do regularly in my life, including getting down to do
the weights in my gym, which was in my basement at the time. And the thing is is that having
one kid actually leaves you with a surprising amount of time. Having two young kids — that
completely destroyed my workout schedule, and I put on a ton of weight and lost all my gains,
and it was terrible. But when I had one kid, it was manageable and I was lifting a whole lot.
And the thing about that kind of stuff is that it makes you sore, right? When you are lifting heavy,
you then get what's called DOMS — delayed-onset muscle soreness. And you're going to be sore for
several days after. And that's definitely true with lower body stuff, and squats in particular.
Dorian Yates, the Mr. Olympia in the '90s, he said in an interview once that for the 20 years that he
was competing, it was agony for him to sit down on the toilet every single day because he was so sore
from doing all of his squats and his leg presses. This act was just agony, because everything was so
sore, and I definitely know what that feels like. So, anyway, my first baby is born,
right? And I'm spending lots of time down on my living room floor playing with my baby,
right? I have to get down and get up again a whole lot, and it was absolute agony. It
made me dread going down on the floor to play with my infant. And I was like, "Wait a minute.
What is the point of all of this? What am I trying to be fit for? What am I going to do in
my life that's more important than what I'm doing right now? Getting down on the floor
to play with my baby son and take care of him." This is one of those moments where they say, "Hey,
this is what life is all about." This is what life is all about. What am I prepping for in the gym if
not that? What am I training for? If I'm not training for this, maybe I'm training for the
wrong thing, so I backed off. I started doing much lighter weights on my lower body days, and maybe
I don't have as much of an absolute dump truck as I could have as a result of heavier training,
but I wasn't sore, and I was able to actually function in my life. And I think that's important.
Similarly, the kitchen presents us with a really fundamental value question. Am I trying to have
something good to eat, or am I trying to make something good to eat? Those are not the same
thing, right? I think that the main goal is to have something good to eat. In which case,
why do I stress about making things from scratch as opposed to using prepared ingredients? How
is that cheating? The end goal is to eat, not to cook. Unless, of course, the end goal is to cook.
I mean, I get pleasure from cooking. The journey is often more important than the destination. So
I don't know, but it's good that I have to think about these things, don't you think?
Assuming you're working from a basic level of minimal fundamental competency,
it probably makes a lot more sense to obsess over why we do what we do
rather than how we do what we do. That's an important lesson that I learned over in the
kitchen, and that's a real important lesson I've learned here in this room, too.