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Posted on 26th Apr, 2017 in Fitness

There's one thing I encounter pretty frequently when browsing /r/fitness (and pretty much any online lifting/fitness community) that bugs me from the scientific perspective.

Most people assume that everyone is more-or-less average: sure, there's a range, but the range is reasonably small except for maybe some incredibly rare outliers.

This assumption plays out in a variety of ways.

1) Is someone still pretty weak after two years of training? Well, they're just lazy.

2) Did someone make exceptional gains in a progress post? Well, they must be on steroids.

3) Countless threads where the poster is asking a question along the lines of, "I heard that when I did 'x,' 'y' was supposed to happen. When I tried 'x,' 'y' didn't happen. What's wrong with me?"

Here's the deal, though: you can be a long way from average while still being perfectly normal. The assumption that people cluster really close to the average (for pretty much anything related to lifting, at least) is wrong.

Let me give you an example.

I recently snagged a huge dataset with all of the USAPL's competition results since 2008. I was curious to see whether someone's level of strength is predictive of how quickly they'll continue gaining strength (we assume that weaker people predictably have a pretty easy time getting stronger, whereas stronger people take a lot longer to see meaningful progress). So, I narrowed it down to the people who showed up in the database multiple times, and calculated their average rate of strength gains per day. When I plotted every individual result, there was actually almost no relationship between how strong someone was and the rate their strength increased between meets. However, when I grouped people together by strength level, group averages were almost perfectly predictive of how quickly someone could gain strength.

You can read about all of that in more depth here to see that dichotomy graphically. The difference is pretty striking, really: Group Data Don't Tell You Much About Individuals

Here are a couple other examples from published research:

1

HUGE sample size (585 people). On the same training program, average increase in muscle cross-sectional area was 19%, but there were people with increases of 50%+. Over 1/3 of the people gained muscle at less than half the average rate, while quite a few people gained muscle at over twice the normal rate. Ditto with strength. Average increase in 1RM was 54%, but quite a few people had increases of 100%+ and a lot had increases of less than 25%.

2

Also a pretty big sample (66 people). In this study, they grouped people based on how well they responded, with low responders being roughly the bottom 1/4, high responders being roughly the top 1/4, and modest responders being the middle ~half of the group. The low responders didn't have a meaningful increase in muscle fiber size, and the high responders made double the gains of the typical modest responder.

In both of these examples, you can see a lot of people who were a long way from average but who were still perfectly normal. The second study is a particularly good example – the high responder and low responder groups weren't anomalies – they combined to make up almost half of the subjects!

If I'm trying to get one thing across in this post, this is it: average and normal are two entirely different things. "Average" is a single point and "normal" is a range. Crucially, it's a MUCH bigger range than most people expect. The range of perfectly normal responses to training is enormous.

I'm not sure how much this post will change the day-to-day conversation in this sub, but hopefully it'll help at least a little bit. If you're making slower gains than average but you're training your ass off, don't worry about it too much – you're below average, but you're still normal. If you are a lot stronger than most other people, you may be better than average, but don't get too big-headed about it – you're still normal (unless you're winning world championships, but that's not going to apply to many people here).

Focus on what you can control, advise other people to focus on what they can control, and let the results take care of themselves. Those results may differ substantially from average results, but that's...normal.

-Greg Nuckols, https://www.reddit.com/r/Fitness/comments/67iu4u/youre_not_average_but_youre_still_normal/