What are some of your unpopular fitness related opinions?

I agree in general that matters are "over complicated" unnecessarily in respect of the advice people need to hear, for what stage they are at and what their goals are. However, it's understandable, since people within the industry are making a living selling content, and there's always going to be pressure to be new (Or, controversial, whatever works).

And yes, as Cilian says there are people who spend their time looking for that content because they're either avoiding doing the work or are getting supbar results because they're putting in a subpar effort, and no one likes to recognise that in themselves, it's not just an industry issue.

However...

Although "Lift 3 days a week and you're grand" is advice that will get a green light from a lot of people, because immediately their minds go to well-known and successful whole-body linear progress novice strength progressions... If someone is not a novice then it may not be as simple as "lift 3 days a week".

At the end of the day, programming is about frequency but also intensity and volume and manipulating the whole 3 requires going beyond a 3 day training schedule, especially after novice. Programmes acrue more days in order to address the need for added volume, and body part splits come in to manage recovery. As much intensity as can be managed always has to be there, the creation of mechanical tension in the muscles increasingly being understood to be just indispensable for progress.

So yeah, post-novice 3 days a week might kind of limit someone, you might want them to be able to go to a 4 day upper / lower split or something like that.

Really it's as long as a piece of string, someone could be told they should lift 2, 3, 4, 5 times a week and depending on their goal and their training history that might be the right advice for them. It's not always over complicating it, unfortunately the truth is that really good programming after novice gets ... Not complicated ... But it definitely requires greater knowledge / experience to be optimal Actually, I guess it does get complicated, because more complexity is required over time. The cover of Practical Programming by Rippetoe and Baker has a graph illustrating this, funnily enough.

In fact, isn't that why so many people who become involved in strength training seem to struggle to actually progress past novice. They run an LP and then years later they're stuck with broadly similar numbers , and they're repeating LPs endlessly and fruitlessly. Intermediate programming is nowhere near as well understood by the general training population.

That is true about effort.

I think part of why many people stall early or abandon linear progressions is that they are inadequately prepared for the fact that the difficulty is backloaded to the last 1/4 or so of the programme. Everyone feels great about their 3x5 or 5x5 squats until they actually enter the end game when it requires a bit of focus if you want to make the lifts on a given workout.

And then, if entering intermediate programming, there is the depressing realisation that except for a deload week squats might never be as easy as they were during that novice stage ever again. Texas method is a classic follow on from SS and it is pretty gruelling. It’s not all doom and gloom but certainly as you say, the question of how hard someone wants to work for their numbers becomes less abstract and a question for now not the future.

Not sure if you’re being serious or not here!

Right, you were being serious - OK! I thought you were being ironic.

Well, what you said was "I'd set different goals when diminishing returns are too high, why "waste" a year trying to get an extra 10Kg on squat or deadlift for instance when you could focus on doing something new like a nordic curl."

Without knowing what our trainee's lifts are, and whether he has in any way tapped them out, it's not really possible to say he is into diminishing returns, first of all. If he's an advanced lifter then potentially yes, he might be into diminishing returns to spend a year adding 10 kilos if his goal is something broadly unrelated (Performance in another sport, for example, or perhaps hypertrophy).

But most people don't get demoralised by ongoing hard training because they're at the stage of diminishing returns, they never get that far.

Complete anecdote, but in men who are doing the big lifts they often seem to start to question it when they hit somewhere between them squatting one and a half times bodyweight and two times bodyweight, that seems to be the point where they suddenly discover that they are interesting in "trying something different for while". Later, they might come back and the cycle repeats itself, which is why in a commercial gym you'll often see blokes squatting the same weight ranges year in, year out.

In your second post you suggested that if people get demoralised when gains are hard to come by, they should effectively change goals.

Well yes, that's exactly what people do. It gets too hard, they do something else. That's grand, but it's kind of funny because don't they realise that's inherently how things like beginner linear progress programs work? They get harder as you go on, and that's also how adaptation is driven. If you go off and do something else all that it means is you immediately start to detrain and that top end strength you worked to gain likely goes back down towards baseline, depending on what you're doing after that.

Worth mentioning that the close cousin of this is when people are actually still progressing but they program hop to something else out of sheer inability to stick with something.

The search for "something new" is constant and I understand the pull myself.

Not sure what's so fascinating about nordic curls btw... They're an assistance movement you can put towards the middle or end of any lower body workout, not particularly sexy I would have thought.

After novice I do like either a rotating lifts or conjugate approach, provided there is a bit of cop on involved. Either approach can be compatible with holding and improving strength on the big three, if that is a concern.

On accessories I believe you can switch it up but again you have to know what you’re doing but we can assume that if it’s post novice. At that stage hopefully movements have been identified that work best for the individual anyway.

Must admit it is only relatively lately that I zeroed in on which accessory movements have the best resistance profiles and were also pain free for me. If I’m doing biceps, triceps, shoulders or upper back and I have access to a cable stack, better believe I am using it. With free weights I have some good options too but I had to sort through and ID what worked for me.