Science vs Experience

For decades, lifters have been running the longest, most brutally honest experiment in strength training: if it works, keep it; if it doesn’t, throw it out. Long before exercise science had peer-reviewed studies on specificity, progressive overload, RFD, or accommodating resistance, lifters were already putting these ideas to work under the bar.

Every serious strength athlete, powerlifter, or coach knows this truth:
practice evolves faster than science can study it.
We don’t wait for a study to tell us whether something might work—we test it on ourselves, on our training partners, and on our clients. Strength training is one of the few fields where the practitioners consistently blaze the trail and the science follows years later.

Intuition: The Most Overlooked Training Tool

One of the most underrated tools a lifter has is intuition—real, earned intuition. Not the “wing it” attitude, but the kind of deep physical awareness that only comes from years of reps, failures, plateaus, injuries, and breakthroughs.

Lifters learn to read subtle cues:

• When the bar feels heavier than it should.
  
• When recovery is off.
  
• When your body signals an adjustment is needed.
  
• When a variation just instinctively feels like the right fix.
  

But modern training culture often tries to box people into one of two extremes:

1. The “All Science” Crowd

These lifters want every decision justified by a study—even if the study was on 17 untrained college kids doing cable curls.

2. The “Gym Bro” Crowd

These lifters reject science entirely and rely only on feel—even when better information could save them time, injuries, or wasted effort.

The truth? The best training lives in the middle.

Science gives us explanations, frameworks, and confirmation. Experience gives us direction, intuition, and solutions years before science even asks the right questions. Both matter—but one can’t replace the other.

My Own Lesson in Intuitive Problem Solving

When I first started lifting, my bench lockout was terrible. It was always my weak point. I wasn’t reading research, I wasn’t following Westside, and I definitely had never heard the term accommodating resistance.

I just thought:

“If the weight is hardest at the top, why not make the bar heavier at the top so I can train it more?”

So I strapped chains to the bar. It was easier at the bottom, harder at the top, and immediately made sense to me. I didn’t know who Louie Simmons was, let alone that he had been using chains. I didn’t know anyone else in the world was doing it. I didn’t even know the term “variable resistance.” I just knew, intuitively, that this was the solution to my weak lockout.

Only years later did I learn that this method had a formal name, decades of real-world use, and research eventually backing it up. But that research came long after lifters had already proven it in gyms around the world.

This is the perfect example of how lifters often arrive at the right answer simply by listening to their bodies and solving problems through intuition and experimentation.

Lifters Lead — Science Explains

This pattern repeats everywhere in strength sports:

• Frequency
  
• RPE and autoregulation
  
• Compensatory acceleration
  
• Reverse bands
  
• Accessory specificity
  
• Tempo work
  
• Periodization variations
  
• Velocity-based training
  
  

Lifters were using these tools for decades before they were defined, studied, or validated.

Science didn’t “discover” these methods—it confirmed what lifters already knew.

And this is how the field should work.

The Middle Path: The Future of Smart Training

You don’t have to choose between being a gym bro or a lab coat. The strongest, most successful lifters and coaches understand this balance:

• Use your intuition to discover what works.
  
• Use your experience to guide your training decisions.
  
• Use science to refine your methods and understand the mechanisms behind them.
  

Your body is the most honest piece of lab equipment you’ll ever have.

Science is the manual that helps you understand why the equipment works the way it does.

Both matter. But the mistake many make is trying to replace one with the other.

Final Thoughts

Strength training has always been driven forward by lifters—athletes, coaches, and experimenters who learn through sweat, pain, trial-and-error, and intuition. Science plays an essential role, but it’s often years behind the methods being used successfully in real gyms around the world.

The real magic happens when you combine both:
intuition + experience + science.That’s where great coaching lives.
That’s where lasting progress is made.
That’s where lifters truly evolve.

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If you’re tired of waiting for science to validate what your body already knows, it’s time to train with someone who’s lived it, coached it, and proven it for decades.

I help lifters bridge the gap between intuition, experience, and evidence-backed methods so you get stronger, faster, and with fewer wasted years.

Ready to train smarter and finally break through your sticking points?
→ Click here to work with me 1-on-1.