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Why focusing on one muscle at a time changes your physique faster than trying to bring everything up at once. Bodybuilders call this a specialisation phase. A 2026 study by Kataoka and colleagues found that training a lot more muscle didn't slow down biceps growth, so your muscles probably don't compete with each other to grow. I also go through Bickel and colleagues (2011) on how little training it takes to keep muscle.

Bohemian Rhapsody is almost six minutes long, breaks most of the rules of a pop song, and became a huge hit anyway. Would it get made today? A recent article on something called hyperselection says probably not. Once we get good at measuring what works, everyone copies the winning formula and the alternatives disappear. You can see it in music, football, science and cities. You can see it in training too. Instagram

Someone posts a study saying more volume builds more muscle. Meanwhile, the most muscular person at your gym got there doing the opposite. So which one is right? Instagram

You followed the program. You showed up. And you've got less to show for it than you hoped. So you start to wonder whether you're one of those people who just doesn't grow. Researchers recently put that idea to a proper test. They took the same group of people and ran them through the same 10-week program twice. The second round says a lot about what one training block can and can't tell you. In this episode I go through whether "some people just grow more" is actually true, whether you're likely to be one of the people who doesn't, and what a slow phase is really telling you. Instagram

"My workouts take forever." If you've only got 3 or 4 hours a week to train, that's a problem. Every session runs over, or gets cut off wherever the clock runs out. The answer isn't squeezing a longer program into less time. In this episode I go through how to split 3 to 4 hours across your week, the habits that save the most time once you're in the gym, and a full 60-minute session laid out start to finish. Instagram

Nobody can be an expert in everything they care about. So whether you mean to or not, you're choosing who to trust with your training and nutrition. And at the moment that choice is harder than it should be. A lot of fitness content has turned into dunking on other people. The loudest voice sounds the most certain, and certain feels a lot like trustworthy. In this episode I go through five signs that someone is worth listening to, why so much of the loudest content fails them, and what happens when I hold myself to the same test. What's the last fitness post you saw that actually taught you something useful? Instagram

Evidence-based fitness is built on population averages. that means personal progress requires individual experimentation to discover what is truly optimal for you...which means taking risks. But how do we know what risks to take? When is it worth trying something new? What if you don't want to lose progress you've already made?

If you're dealing with a nagging injury that keeps flaring up every time you get back into a groove, the way you're managing it is probably why. In this episode I cover the biggest mistakes experienced lifters make when something hurts, why complete rest makes the problem worse, and how to use the same progressive approach you'd use in your programming to actually build your way out of it.Survey link: https://tally.so/r/OD2YEa

You've made the time, got yourself to the gym, and your knee's hurting again. Or you haven't slept properly in a fortnight. And the thought turns up: not again. Most of us write the week off at that point. We'll start again properly when things settle down. This one's about what to do instead. I go through what actually happens to the muscle you've built when you cut right back, which is usually a lot less than people assume, and the four things I'd focus on while a rough patch runs its course. Instagram

In this episode I explain what I've learned from years of studying the psychology research and applying it to my clients. I introduce a framework that helps explain overthinking, why you feel unsure despite having access to so much training and nutrition info, and how to mitigate stress so you get better gains and a calmer mind. Instagram

Out of more than 18,500 people in the most-cited lifting research, roughly 400 were seriously trained. What does that mean for the 'evidence-based' recommendations you see on social media? Should we throw out studies using untrained lifters? Why don't we use more trained people in research? And what should you do with your own training based on this research? ⁠Instagram

Mental fatigue and brain idling are the one of the most under-looked ways to improve your gym performance, and thus your progress in the gym. But it goes even deeper than that. Sleep, nutrition, emotional affect - could staring at the wall have such broad benefits?Instagram

In this episode: the years I spent reading training research two hours a day, the point I realised knowing the most wasn't making me a better coach or getting me any further, and what changed once I worked out the skill I'd been missing the whole time. Instagram

What happens when you don't have the time or energy to train like you used to or how you really want to? It's easy to slip into maintenance mode. But it doesn't mean your best days are behind you. In this episode I get into that shift through my own story: what changed for me, the wrong conclusion I could have drawn from it, and how I think about progress now that the ceiling has moved.Instagram

The urge to change your program is usually the right instinct… but pointed at the wrong thing.Your program might be fine. Often it’s better than fine. But if you can't tell whether it's actually producing results for your body, with your schedule, at your stage…well, the uncertainty doesn't go away just because you switch to something new.Instagram