You've probably seen a bunch of these iceberg videos circulating on YouTube for the past couple of years, but if you haven't seen any of these before, let me just briefly explain you folks what an iceberg video is. Basically you have an iceberg, and the most common information or myths about a topic are at the top, and the deeper down you go on the iceberg, the more obscure, weird and unknown the topics get. In today's video I'll be covering the fitness iceberg from top to bottom, containing a combination of myths, facts and theories from multiple portions of the fitness industry, and of course I'll do my best to explain everything as we go along.
Now this will took a lot of time and effort to make, I literally spent two weeks just writing the script, so if you enjoy it make sure you leave a like and a comment to help the algorithm, but first let's head right into the complete fitness, myths and theories iceberg. At the very tip of the iceberg we will start off with spot fat reduction. This means training only a specific part of your body will make you lose or remove fat from that area.
The most common example of this is belly fat, and it's been one of the biggest scams in the fitness industry for ages, that you can just do a crap ton of ab exercises and you'll magically get visible abs. This would make sense to most people, considering it'd be logical for your body to break down fat storage from the most local area to provide for energy, but as much as we all like that to be true, no study has ever been able to report it. Most of you have probably heard of Zyzz, or at least seen pictures or videos of the guy online.
Zyzz, or Aziz Shavershin, was an Australian bodybuilder and probably the first viral fitness persona on the internet, who inspired thousands of people back when he was still alive, and after dying very young in 2011, combined with his crazy lifestyle, he sparked a large movement in the fitness industry, revolving around the Zyzz lifestyle, just having fun, looking good and being a chad. There's a theory revolving around how he died, and many claim it was because of performance enhancing and party drugs, which most likely played a larger role in his death, but the leading cause was likely his undiscovered genetic heart defect. You've probably heard from worried moms, coaches and every single facebook comment section on training ever, that lifting heavy weights before you're fully grown will stunt your growth, aka it'll prevent you from growing to your full potential height.
The most common theory regarding this is that you could injure your so called growth plates, which is the area at the end of your bones that determine how long and what shape your bones will have as you grow up. However, a bunch of studies have investigated the relationship between heavy lifting in adolescence and height, and none have ever confirmed this myth. The anabolic window is a supposed time frame of 30-60 minutes after a workout, where your body supposedly can utilize protein more effectively for muscle building purposes.
Supposedly if you don't eat protein until after your anabolic window runs out, you will have wasted that training. As a youngster I felt like I had to get a protein shake in immediately after every workout just for that purpose. But today I know that it's just a disproven myth, and that it's actually the daily or even weekly protein intake that actually matters, as so called muscle protein synthesis is very active up to over 3 days after a workout.
In the fitness community many of us participate in strength sports, the most well known of which are powerlifting, weightlifting, strongman, armwrestling and even crossfit. And all of these sports have their own subcultures which are honestly very interesting and could definitely make for iceberg videos themselves, so leave a comment if you want me to dive into those in the future. More on this later.
Muscle hypertrophy literally just means building muscle, either in the number of active muscle cells or just by getting bigger muscle cells. Muscle hypertrophy is caused by a plethora of factors, but to summarize them all into one primary factor we provide resistance to the muscle during contraction, either dynamic as in eccentric and concentric movements, or isometric, also called static muscle contractions, where the muscle doesn't actually move. In order to continuously experience muscle hypertrophy over time you should utilize a bunch of different training variables and progressively overload the work being performed in some way shape or form, either with increased resistance, a longer time under tension with that resistance, you could also modulate rest time, sets and repetitions total etc.
The possibilities are honestly endless and most of us who go to the gym ultimately either strive for or experience muscle hypertrophy in some way. More on this later. Bulking and cutting are words you'll find quite prevalent in any fitness community.
They refer to your calorie intake compared to your base metabolism. In simple terms, if you eat more than you burn off, you are so called bulking, and if you eat less than you burn off, you are so called cutting. The point in the middle is where your bodyweight will stay consistent and is called maintenance.
The theory that muscle will turn into fat if you stop training is long overdue, but there is actually some weight behind it. The theory states that if you get older or stop training, your lean muscle tissue will be broken down as a source of energy and turned into fat storage. One of the many reasons for this theory is that many athletes, especially strength athletes, tend to gain a lot of body fat after retiring or if they get injured.
The reason for this is because they're probably used to a very high daily caloric consumption, meaning that if they stop exercising, they'll likely also just decrease their average metabolic rate. In other words, they'll end up in a calorie surplus and thereby gain fat while also losing muscle mass since they are not exercising enough anymore. Nucleus overload is a form of training or even a training method which seeks to increase the number of nuclei found within the muscle cells and thereby induce more muscle hypertrophy over time.
However, despite being renowned as a new and revolutionary training method, nucleus overload only seeks to induce a larger amount of so called metabolic stress, which is one of the primary drivers of muscle hypertrophy, and this is normally just done through low rest times and high amounts of repetitions, which do ultimately give similar results as conventional strength training, but is in no way superior. However, utilizing nucleus overload specific training and putting it into your training routine is definitely not a bad idea. A fake natural is a term used within the fitness industry to describe someone who takes performance enhancing drugs of some sort, but claims to not take anything, aka they claim to be natural.
This has spiked a sub-genre of fitness content titled Natty or Not, where influencers speculate and argue regarding which physiques are naturally achievable. However, more recently many claim that fake naturals are deluding what a natural physique can actually look like, and thereby many actually natural lifters are being put down by a community of beginner lifters who have these forced thoughts that nobody can pass a certain threshold as a natural lifter. Muscle soreness is pretty normal following a grueling workout, and it's theorized that it means you'll experience greater results by being sore after a workout.
However, we still don't know exactly the true basics of what causes muscle soreness, as it seems to be very multifactorial. The primary cause of muscle soreness is probably just a bunch of small muscle tears that occur when training, which causes some inflammation and pain and swelling within the muscle. However, there hasn't ever been found a clear link between muscle soreness and actual gains, as it's usually just a matter of doing something you're not used to, and the muscle and surrounding tissues adapting to it.
Westside Barbell is a gym in Columbus, Ohio which was founded by world-renowned powerlifter Louis Simmons, may he rest in peace, back in 1987. Today the gym is legendary for producing and facilitating some of the strongest people in the world, and it has become famous for it's own style of training, mixing old school training methods with modern scientific principles. Their style of training usually includes taking what has worked for elite athletes in the past and passing it down to the next guys in line and utilizing small tweaks to improve over time.
Louis Simmons himself was particularly known for, despite owning one of the most hardcore gyms in the country, to take in outsiders and help fellow strength athletes who were struggling. Fasted training burns more fat This theory is a bit misunderstood in my honest opinion. You see, fasted cardio means your glycogen storages are likely much smaller than if you would consume a meal beforehand, aka your body might be forced to produce more of the ATP for performing that cardio from fat rather than glycogen storages.
However, these storages will fill up rather quickly if you're not in a calorie deficit over time, and the same goes for the glycogen. So yes, you will technically burn more fat temporarily, but it's still up to the calories you consume on that day, week or even month that will ultimately decide if you get leaner or not. You've probably seen a lot of those posts on social media where you have three different body types, which are normally presented as an ectomorph, a mesomorph and an enomorph.
The theory is that these body types are purely based on genetics and that if you have a certain body type, you should eat and train a certain way. For example, if you have the genetics of an ectomorph, you'd supposedly have a hard time building muscle and have a very high base metabolism, but in reality it's actually the other way around. You are an ectomorph because of how you eat and exercise, not because you're just skinny regardless.
Basically, these body types are just meant to describe how a body looks, and nothing more. The Lunk Alarm is an infamous piece of the Planet Fitness gym franchise. The Lunk Alarm became well known on the internet following a series of commercials from Planet Fitness which seemingly displayed gym bros as unintelligent brutes who make the gym a worse place.
Ironically, that's what their so-called Lunk Alarm seeks to depress. A Lunk is slang for a dedicated gym-goer and is mostly used as a derogatory term for meatheads. As such, each Planet Fitness has a Lunk Alarm system and staff that are instructed to turn it on whenever they see someone who fits their so-called Lunk persona either lifting heavy or making noise at the gym.
The alarm sounds more like an air raid siren than anything and in recent times, many Planet Fitness gyms have stopped using it. The statement that stretching prevents injury is a double-edged sword. On one end, it would make sense that in order to avoid muscle-based injuries, mobile and stretchy muscles would allow you to hyperextend and stretch a muscle more often and thereby have more degrees of freedom when performing an exercise, running, jumping and so on.
But for one, stretching a cold muscle could itself lead to a minor injury for initiating the workout, and two, a stretched muscle is also a more relaxed muscle, meaning your muscles would likely have less tension on them when performing certain movements, putting you at a higher risk of other types of injuries. This one is pretty simple. It refers to that doing any form of cardio, specifically high-intensity cardio, will result in muscle atrophy, aka you will lose muscle mass.
This is of course very untrue and I personally don't actually think people believe in this anymore. The only reason this could be the case for some people is if you do very extensive cardio, so much so that it will inhibit your strength training. But overall, you'll probably be able to handle more training volume by having a decent cardiovascular capacity and health.
The Iranian Hulk is a 31-year-old strength athlete called Syed Gharibi who went viral on social media a few years back after posting a plethora of pictures of himself next to everyday objects to portray how large of a man he was. Unfortunately for him, his positive fame was short-lived, as he was shortly exposed for manipulating his photos to appear larger than he really was. More recently he agreed to a full-on boxing match with social media personality Martin Ford, and during a physical confrontation between the two, it was clear that the Iranian Hulk was nothing more than an Iranian hoax.
More on this later. In the strength sport community, particularly in powerlifting, the sumo deadlift stance is often used both in and outside of competition, because it can aid certain lifters to lift more than their conventional deadlift counterparts. However, in more recent times, the sumo deadlift has been criticized most often by beginner lifters, calling it cheating, following a joke made by Mr. Olympia, Chris Bumstead, in a Q&A session.
To explain this further, a sumo deadlift isn't exactly cheating, it's simply just another way of performing the same movement, and some people are more mechanically efficient at the sumo deadlift based on their own build. As such, there's a clear distinction between lighter lifters pulling sumo more often, while heavier lifters tend to pull conventional more often because the sumo stance would not be as efficient. The sumo deadlift does however benefit more from softer barbells and bumper plates, while a stiff bar sumo would be just as hard on average for both stances.
Megarexia, commonly referred to under the umbrella term body dysmorphia, is a mental condition where a person has a skewed view of their own appearance. In the case of megarexia, which mostly occurs in men, you will believe yourself to be smaller and scrawnier than in reality. In recent times, many have claimed that the prevalence of megarexia has increased due to unrealistic expectations of oneself because of the fitness content that is produced on social media platforms such as Instagram and TikTok.
Dry scooping is when you take any sort of powder form supplement, most commonly pre-workouts or creatine, and consume it without drinking water. Dry scooping is generally not recommended for two reasons, one it's a choking hazard, especially with bigger scoops, and two, pre-workout and creatine both work better when ingested with water. So dry scooping doesn't actually hold any real benefit unless your goal is to ingest pre-workout as fast as humanly possible.
Gyms don't want you to come. The theory that gyms don't want you to come is rooted in economics and states that commercial gyms such as Planet Fitness, 24 hour fitness and the likes don't want people to actually come train at their facilities. Now at first hand this wouldn't make much sense given that these gyms generally offer training sessions and have personal trainers willing to help, but on the other hand if the gym was completely full all the time that would make it less appealing for most people, in other words it's better for the gym if members pay but don't actually show up. This is also believed to be why the memberships at these gyms are very cheap, since people just perceive paying 10-25 dollars a month as a minor inconvenience and would therefore rather keep paying even if they only show up maybe once or twice a month.
Throughout the ages there's always been tales of men performing incredible feats of strength, everything ranging from Milo of Crolton who supposedly ran a whole mile while carrying a bull, to more modern feats like Paul Anderson squatting 1200 pounds. However there are few stories similar to the one of Louis Cyr, who is often referred to as the strongest man who ever lived. Cyr was a canadian strongman in the late 19th and early 20th century and some of his supposed feats of strength include pressing a 313 pound dumbbell overhead, restraining horses with just one arm, back lifting over 4000 pounds and lifting 550 pounds with one finger off the floor.
And to this day a statue of Louis Cyr still stands in Montreal to memorize his feats and in 2013 a movie was made in his honor. Safe to say a lot of people believe that Louis Cyr of that time could actually compete with today's strongman in the world's strongest man competition. With all the technology available in the modern world and ability to manipulate photos before being published, a lot of us are now on the edge whether or not to trust the legitimacy of the online transformation pictures and videos we find on YouTube, and other social platforms.
Back in 2012 fellow YouTuber Furious Pete made a video showcasing how drastically the body could actually change in just a few hours with the goal of potentially making a lot of money from transformation videos just like the one he made. And now there's been a stigma for these transformation videos online, there's since been several other YouTubers who have replicated this just to show how easy it is to manipulate the photos you post on social media. And there are plenty of examples of influencers editing their pictures quite drastically still going on today.
The so-called mind-muscle connection is a Jimbro term used to describe the feeling of internally focusing on a working muscle. For a while the mind-muscle connection was believed to not be of any use, as it would not necessarily impact the myofibrillar contractions occurring within the muscles when training, but recent articles have actually showcased that, to a degree, using an internal focus on the working muscle you could actually make small alterations to the factors that affect muscle hypertrophy. Synthol is an oily substance consisting of MCT and alcohol which is used to cosmetically enhance the look of muscles.
It is normally marketed as posing oil and therefore it's not technically illegal, but if injected can be very dangerous. In recent times, synthol has primarily been used by bodybuilders or otherwise by those suffering from crippling body dysmorphic conditions, mostly men. It's normally injected into the arms, traps or shoulders, although it can technically be injected anywhere.
Several synthol users have over the years gone viral on social media, although most of them are actually already dead, partially because of the oily injections. More on this later. Every man with access to the internet has probably heard of the term nofap before, and I don't believe I need to explain it, but nofap can be a lifestyle in which you avoid blowing the meat flute for weeks, months or even years with the primary goal of increasing testosterone.
While nofap could improve certain mental aspects of one's character, semen retention in any way has never been proven to actually increase testosterone. Kyriakos Grizzly, also known as Kyriakos Kapakulak, is a retired greek weightlifter who in recent years became well known in the fitness industry for his incredible, yet very unconventional training style and lifts. He's gathered a solid fanbase, myself included, who seemingly follow his channel just to see what weird lift he will perform next.
Despite being more of a meme than anything, his lifts actually challenge some of the strongest men on the planet, such as his incredible surger shrugs and cheat curls. And on top of being insanely strong, he has the voice of an angel. Both myself and JackPGM have made multiple videos showcasing this behemoth of a man and his character, so if you wanna see more, we'll keep you entertained.
More on this later. If you've participated in any sport which requires some sort of agility and nimbleness, you probably heard that you should avoid excessive weight training, as it would make you slow and uncoordinated. While the origin of this theory is unknown, it's believed to derive from the fact that larger mass requires more force to accelerate, and thus a larger man would reach top speeds much slower than a lighter man, and thereby get outrun in most aspects of sport.
But in recent times, several articles have been published on the matter showcasing that maximal strength training has the opposite effect across every single sport, and that the athletes with the most rapid acceleration are sprinters, of course, and weightlifters. Below the surface sports of bodybuilding, powerlifting and strongman, there exists a subcategory of strength-based sports, one of which is the strict curl. Similarly to powerlifting, the goal is to curl up as much weight as possible with a standardized bar and rule set.
You stand up against the wall with your head, butt and shoulders in contact with the wall, and you curl the bar up until your forearms are perpendicular to the floor. The strict curl has become very popularized in the last 4-5 years via promotion from other fitness influencers such as Nick Strength and Power and Larry Wheels. The current strict curl world record is held by both American Leroy Walker and Russian Nizami Tagiev at 114 kilos.
Six-pack shortcuts used to be one of the biggest channels in the fitness community, led by this very handsome manly man called Mike Chang. The channel focused on making workout videos and nutrition advice alongside selling training programs. The channel used to be everywhere on YouTube by spamming advertisements using clickbaity titles such as Scientists in China have discovered a revolutionary new shortcut to six-pack abs, and at some point they were actually banned from YouTube because they didn't follow the regulations for advertisements, scams and practices.
Six-pack shortcuts tried selling the idea that you can lose fat just by using their methods, which included specific workouts and supersets which could be performed at home. Their practices ended up being exposed and Mike Chang himself actually quit working with the channel sometime in 2015. How much the channel ended up making because of these scams is currently unknown, and six-pack shortcuts has later been rebranded to sixpackabs.com, although they are no longer as active on social media.
In 2021, a series of pictures went viral over the internet showcasing this insanely masculine figure from the Sleek and Tears photography project. This man was later called GigaChad, and he became a cultural online sensation overnight. But following the rise of this memeable figure, it came to light that these photos from Sleek and Tears, although somewhat edited, were actually of a real person and Russian bodybuilder and fitness model Ernest Kalimov.
Now it's very hard to actually find unedited pictures of him online, but it goes to show that GigaChad is in fact a real person, or at least based off of one. Jack 3D, or Jacked, was one of the most well-known supplements in the fitness industry back in the early 2010s, primarily because it contained a very potent stimulant, namely 1.3-dimethylamine, also known as DMAA. The pre-workout was so strong, it was deemed to basically be legal meth.
Following the ban of DMAA by the US Food and Drug Administration, Jack 3D was banned from all supplement stores in 2013 following a series of actual deaths related to the pre-workout itself, one of which was British marathon runner Claire Squires during the 2012 London Olympics. Despite going out of production over a decade ago, there are still traces of the original Jack 3D spread across the internet, and it has become perhaps the most infamous supplement in the fitness industry. Most of you know Arnold Schwarzenegger, the most famous bodybuilder perhaps of all time, and some of you may know that he said in Pumping Iron, which was filmed in 1975, that he wanted to retire to focus more on things like acting.
Well after retiring in 1975, he did other stuff for about 5 years before setting a goal that in 1980, he would once again participate in the Mr. Olympia competition and go for his 7th title. There he would compete against the likes of the reigning Mr. Olympia, Frank Zane, alongside Mike Menser, Tom Platz and Chris Dickerson. However, Arnold didn't actually have long to prep leading up to the competition, which was held in Sydney, and as such, he lacked a lot of his trademark size and he was nowhere near his best in terms of conditioning.
But Arnold still managed to pull off the win, just in front of Chris Dickerson. This resulted in the other bodybuilders, as well as the audience, booing the results and boycotting the Olympia the following year. Many of the competitors were very outspoken that they had been victimized through politics, given that Arnold was actually a promoter of the Olympia competition 4 years prior.
It didn't exactly help that the following year, his best friend Franco Colombo went on to win his second title, arguably in worse shape than Arnold.
The V-Shred controversy is very similar to a modern day version of the aforementioned Six-Pack Shortcut scandal.
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