Neil takes a look at Bro Science, watch the below video:
Hi there guys, this is Neil Deighton back with a new video. This one's gonna focus on is it always best to educate people about everything? That's not to say I know everything, far from it but if you know something, is it always best to let another person know so they can learn how things work? I'd say 99.9% of the time yes it is, knowledge is power as they say and you can progress better if you know what you're doing. I think under some circumstances, maybe no it's not the best idea. If someone's speaking crap, sometime for their productivity for their results it's maybe best not to explain what's happening. Let me give you an example, this is where I got it from. Now it happens a lot with creatine supplements I've heard this a few times now.
So I saw a guy train in the gym, I know this guy, he's a decent shape really considering that he's a lazy trainer. You'll find him talking a lot, he'll spend a lot of time between sets. His training plan isn't too bad it's the fact that the work ethic isn't there. I went to the gym and saw him training as I was training, saw him out of the corner of my eye, he looked to be working hard, he wasn't talking to anyone he was just getting on with it. Anyway, at the end of my session he came across and say “wow I've started taking creatine”, I said “oh right, brilliant”, he said “yeah I'm taking it 20 minutes before I workout and it's kicked in when I work out I've got loads of energy, it feels like I've taken 4 to 5 cups of espresso before I train. I'm buzzing, I can't stop”. Well what do you say to that, because he said “what do you think to it, do you get the same effect?”.
Now for people who don't know how creatine works, it's not a stimulant. What it is, is your first source of energy really. You've got your ATP stored in muscles and the amount stored is only gonna be available for a couple of seconds effort. So if you're starting out in a sprint, that first couple of seconds, you've got ATP there and that's providing your energy. Now what happens is your ATP is made up of adenosine and 3 phosphate groups. Now one of the phosphates will come off and that's where you get your energy. So what you're left with is an adenosine molecule and 2 phosphate groups so adenosine phi-phosphate, ADP. Now you've got the other phosphate group floating around and what we need is that phosphate group attached back to the ADP to form 3 phosphate groups again. So you've got that one phosphate that's breaking off and you want it back on. Now this is where creatine comes in, you get creatine phosphate stores in your muscle. Everyone's got these without supplementing without creatine, you find them in meats and your body will produce some of its own. What that does is your creatine and phosphate bind and your creatine basically drops off your phosphate at your ATP. It's more complicated, you've you creatine kinase that kind of thing. But what creatine is doing is it's replenishing your ATP stores, so it's giving you that energy, fast energy these stores will maybe last around 10 seconds. Now if you're taking creatine you're gonna have more pools of creatine in your muscles so you'll have more creatine phosphate, more creatine binding with phosphate so you're getting a faster replenishment. And that's where you're getting your gains from creatine.
Now what do you do, do you tell the guy that's actually what's happening it's not a stimulant at all? Well in my opinion I aren't at the gym to try look intelligent, I want to see him do well I want to see him improve and the fact that he's thinking it's doing such good work why burst that bubble basically. If I'm gonna tell him that and then he thinks “well yeah, maybe it's just a good day, maybe I'm having a good week, maybe it isn't doing as good as I thought it was doing”. So then he starts questioning it, he might look up a bit of data that might back it up, well no it's not a stimulant. Then he's back to training his usual way “oh I had a good week, I thought it was this but maybe it was that”. Whereas if you don't say anything as I said to him basically he said “how do you find creatine?” I said “I get pretty much the same effect”. Now obviously that's a total lie but hopefully it's gonna keep him training as he's training, and again this isn't a guy who's looking to learn anything, he isn't bothered about why something works, what happens chemically or physiologically. All he wants to do is train hard, he isn't interested in that side of things so to me it would be totally pointless and the only reason you'd do it is to try look intelligent, not really what I'm there for or what I try to do, except on these videos, I try to sound semi-intelligent.
So what that is basically is a placebo effect and I’m quite interested in looking into the placebo effects of things, I’ve not studied psychology or sports psychology or anything like that but it's something I'm interested in, something I try and apply to my own training and have done for a long time. I was reading an article a few months back that Josh Bryant wrote on elitefts.com and in that article he had a study and it was about osteoarthritis and what they had is some groups that get surgery on their knee and the other groups were placebo, they didn't actually have the surgery they just had an incision. And what they found is the pain ratings went down for both the surgical group and the placebo. There's more too it but I aren't going to bore you with all the figures, I will post the study below, it's a full article if you want to read it. If you're gonna look at it, look after 2 weeks, after 2 weeks the perceived pain rating for the placebo group was more than 11 points down on average. Now obviously they don't have post surgical pain because they didn't have the surgery buy just convincing themselves that their knee was gonna be better, they had the operation, things are looking up it's drastically improved their physiological response, they aren't feeling the pain so much. So it's a very powerful tool if you harness your psychology when you're training, believing in yourself basically you're kinda using the imagery, imagining yourself doing the lifts that kind of thing and always completing numbers you want to complete and making it as realistic as possible and really having that belief in your programming, the belief that what you're doing is gonna work. Chances are they're gonna work better just for that reason because of that positive thinking. It's not hocus pocus kind of bullshit, it actually does work, it's been proven to work so harness that in your training.
Basically that's my thoughts on the placebo effects and a bit about bro-sceince. That's my video for this week, thanks for watching.
