Reddit reviews The Muscle and Strength Pyramid: Training

The Muscle and Strength Pyramid books are great. If they're interested in health, they'll probably want both the nutrition and training volumes.

> So is there any science as to what you should do to get big?

Yes there is, and there are loads of books on it.

In large part lifting weights is the process of discovering your potential. The guys who are "wow would you look at that guy!"-big, are big because of their DNA, and they probably lifted a long time.

Benefits of optimizing your diet and nutrition are significant, but small (probably).

As you become more advanced, the "optimality" of your training and diet might be required to get any gains at all.

If you want to learn about the science of getting big, there's a couple of guys to pay attention to. They're all a bunch of nerds who lift, have some science background related to exercise/nutrition/statistics, and are effectively part time science communicators in the fitness field. They tend to appear on long form podcasts every now and then, and it's usually a good listen.

Eric Helms: Well known physique coach and PHD in strength and conditioning, and has written the books: muscle and strength pyramid: training, and nutrition. He also has a podcast together with Omar Isuf.

Greg Nuckols: Writes long form detailed articles (strongerbyscience.com), that are scientifically rigorous, while still having the goal of being comsumable by people without much of an educational background, assuming you're somewhat intelligent.

Menno Henselmans: Physique coach who writes plenty of articles, and I believe he also has a research group.

Mike Isratel: PHD in sports physiology, and co-author of Scientific Principles of Strength Training and some other books on training/nutrition. Probably the most entertaining person to listen to of the bunch, and popularized the concepts of MEV (minimum effective volume), MAV (Maximum adaptive volume) and MRV (Max recoverable volume), which are useful concepts to think about when designing programs.

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edit: some stuff