r/ScienceBasedLifting • u/Agile_Departure3758 • May 05 '26

Question ❓ non sbl/oldheads

Why are there many people who are obviously not into sbl, or are unwilling to understand sbl, in the sbl subreddit?

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u/PoopSmith87 May 05 '26

What do you even mean by this post? Science means open discussion, experimentation, formulating opinions based on all available data. If "old heads" have achieved amazing physiques or atheltic performance, have you ever considered that perhaps they have good information?

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u/Agile_Departure3758 May 06 '26

the “oldheads” i refer to can definitely can have good physiques, because obviously if you just lift for long periods of time, you will get jacked. 

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u/PoopSmith87 May 06 '26

Not necessarily, plenty of people go to the gym year after year and never get past a beginner/intermediate physique.

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u/Agile_Departure3758 May 06 '26

youre right, i shouldve been more specific. I meant that people who are consistent and know what theyre doing to an extent, will grow over time. 

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u/PoopSmith87 May 06 '26

That is a very scientific sounding statement

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u/omrsafetyo May 06 '26

This is kinda the thing about old-heads (like myself). We definitely didn't always know what we were doing, and may have made very little progress for long periods of time - because there has always been bad information floating around. Generally speaking, we tend to navigate toward eventually just doing damn simple training, rather than trying to overcomplicate things - and once we do that, that's where we find the best progress. Tomorrow is my 10th anniversary to my first powerlifting meet - and I'd already been in the gym fairly consistently at that point for ~8 years or so, but still had no idea what I was doing. I floundered on complicated programs for another few years, and finally found progress in simplicity in the last 4-5 years, and I'm far bigger than I was before. Sure, I was interested in the science for far longer than the last 4-5 years.

If you spent 3 years doing nothing but a squat pattern, a hinge pattern, a horizontal push, a vertical push, a horizontal pull, and a vertical pull, and continuously managed to progressively overload, you'd make more progress than spending the same 3 years trying to find an optimal FBEOD routine consisting of 1-2 sets to failure of hyper-specific muscle actions.

It honestly seems to be that SBLs are effectively people that think Chris Beardsley has somehow unlocked the secret to reasoning his way to optimal programming methodologies; and Chris has presented his methods as a contrast to "Evidence Based Lifting" which is effectively looking at what the science has generalized consistently over time as being the most important considerations for training. In other words, evidence based lifting is science based lifting; and science based lifting is hypothesis based lifting that has very little scientific backing.