The Bro Science Approach to Fitness

When I take my short walk to the gym at 5 am each morning, I find the city fairly deserted. I always return the wave from my building’s receptionist while he’s across the street enjoying a cigarette. I’ll weave around one or two garbage trucks backing into a building’s dumpster, and pass a few stragglers from the night club who are ending their day as mine begins.

I recently rode the elevator in my building with this graveyard shift receptionist. He sees me leave for the gym every morning, and he urged me to consider taking a few rest days to let my body heal. My exercise routine is a little more sophisticated than he’s implying—I do a three-day body part split interspersed with different kinds of cardio. Over the course of a week, every muscle gets ample chance to recover.

There’s a Dunning-Kruger problem that surrounds fitness generally. I get the most advice from those who value their health the least. I do have to give credit to one guy who approached me a while ago and at least asked how I built up my physique: “You eat all plant-based right?” Uh no.

Two years later, that conversation still troubles me. The propaganda from the medical-industrial complex is just so strong.

Which brings me to this week’s sensation on social media, an excerpt from a longer article about how to appraise the truth in our age of information overload. The trending passage offers an explanation for why bro science has proven itself to be consistently right versus the conventional wisdom.

Bros, in their path to becoming Bros in the first place, had no choice but to come to terms with reality. Consistently. Ineluctably. If one wishes to gain physical strength and an ability to fight well, there is no way to cheat or bribe the ability. It cannot be faked or imitated. As such, Bros have understood already, at some fundamental level, that we cannot change reality to suit our ideology; it must always be the other way around.

Bro science is the original biohacking: you listen to others who have achieved what you want, and then experiment to narrow down what works for your particular physiology. So it’s settled then. I’ll stick with my fitness routine, whether the majority of people like it, or not.