A very weird bit of internet drama blew up over the last few weeks. Most of you have probably never heard of a guy named Dr. Mike Israetel, who runs a YouTube channel called “Renaissance Perioditization”, or something like that. He has a doctorate in… well, something to do with sports science, apparently. And, for most of us, that would be good enough to watch a video or three of his, assume that he knows what he is talking about, and get on with our lives.

That was the case for years. It would have stayed the case for many years more. Until, that is, an Australian bloke named Solomon Nelson bothered to read the actual thesis that “Dr.” Mike submitted.

What he found was not merely shocking, it was a stunning indictment of the appallingly poor state of academic quality control and research in the entire field of exercise science:

He read the entire thesis – nearly 200 pages of it – and, given that immense effort, I figured I needed to watch his entire video. So I did. What Mr. Nelson revealed in that video, called into question the entire basis for awarding Mike Israetel his PhD in the first place.

If that really was his PhD thesis, then it should never have passed a supervisor’s review. The statistical errors alone would have disqualified it completely. The errors around standard deviations might not sound like a big deal to the innumerate, but for those who know how a normal distribution works, and how measures of variance operate – and especially for people with actual degrees in mathematics (like me), who have spent years or decades using such distributions for the purpose of financial modelling (also like me) – such errors are inexcusable.

That video went viral almost immediately, because “Dr.” Mike is a major YouTube fitness personality. His thesis essentially boiled down to, “people with more muscle have more lifting and jumping capacity”, which was kind of a “no shit, Sherlock” moment.

Since the original video dropped, there has been quite a bit of back and forth about whether that was even the actual thesis, or just a draft version. One of “Dr.” Mike’s supporters and friends released a long rebuttal video purportedly taking Solomon’s arguments apart, one by one, and stating that Mr. Nelson had reviewed a draft version of the thesis, whereas the final version submitted was much more polished and did not contain the glaring errors seen in the draft.

That excuse worked – for all of about three days, maybe less.

It now turns out that the “final” version of the thesis, was edited by none other than “Dr.” Mike’s marketing team, and not very cleverly, either:

Everything we see now, coming from “Dr.” Mike, indicates a desperate attempt at damage control to deal with a situation that could easily have been squashed early on simply by being honest:

And all of that is before we get to how insufferable “Dr.” Mike can be, sometimes:

Now, I should say here that I, personally, actually like some of “Dr.” Mike’s content. I particularly like his critiques and breakdowns of the form and exercise strategies used by various elite strongmen, powerlifters, and bodybuilders. His breakdown of the legendary Ronnie Coleman’s exercise programme was superb – and his impersonation of “The King” are hilarious:

And his takedowns of other fake fitness personalities are very good – though, in fairness, dunking on “Vince Sant”, aka “VSHRED”, is a lot like punching a toddler:

But what, if anything, are we supposed to take away from all of this?

After all, most of the people reading this poast have never heard of any of the people mentioned, and do not care. Nor should you. Most of you lot are probably thinking, “Didact, why the hell are you wasting my time talking about a bunch of juiced-up gearheads engaged in a straight-up bitchfight slapfest?”

The reason why, is because this speaks to the same crisis of the ECKSPURTS that we have been seeing for the past decade or so.

It is all too easy nowadays to hang a shingle, start up a channel, and come across as an “authority” on various subjects. Nowhere is this easier to do than in the fitness industry, which is an unmitigated disaster from start to finish. The few outposts of sanity – James Linker’s Shredded Sports Science, Jeff Cavalieri’s ATHLEAN-X, and a handful of others – get drowned out by the tide of roided-out idiots that promote terrible workout programmes with little to no basis in real strength engineering of any kind.

And this speaks to the broader crisis of “science”, in almost every field, that we have seen.

I am hesitant even to use the term, “science”, in connection to fitness. The beauty of going to the gym and working out with good form, is that, pretty much no matter what you do, as long as you obey a few absolute bedrock principles and axioms, you WILL see results, and you WILL achieve your end-goals.

Those axioms are:

• Start out light and easy;
• Use progressive overloading – by adding either weight or reps in every workout;
• When you reach a natural plateau, adapt your workouts to push through them if you wish;
• Always and everywhere obey the principles of good form to preserve your health and your joints;
• Work out safely and carefully, maximising the value of every rep;
• Make sure you pay attention to your rest and nutrition – do not skimp on protein and sleep;
• Above all, BE CONSISTENT and SHOW THE HELL UP every week;

That really is all there is to being strong, fit, and healthy. You probably will not end up looking like a fitness model if you follow this routine – that kind of look really comes down to how much you are willing to sacrifice in terms of your diet, and has a great deal to do with genetics – but if you avoid the good old “Vitamin S” and stick to the basics, you will get lean, strong, and healthy.

And, if you obey those principles, you can keep lifting well into your golden years. That truly is all there is to the subject of fitness. There are no secrets. There is no hidden insight, no magic ingredient, no wizard’s spell, that will turn you into someone with the physique and aesthetics of a marble statue of a Greek god.

You do not need to listen to me to learn these things. You certainly do not need to listen to a man with a PhD, either. And you definitely do not need to listen to someone whose PhD was, to put it very mildly indeed, highly suspect in terms of its quality and insights.

The other clear lesson here is that, when you mess up, OWN IT. Confess that you did something wrong. Admit your mistake. Eat the necessary humble pie.

It will absolutely SUCK for a little while.

But then, the world will move on.

And when, inevitably, some yutz tries to bring up the same thing in the future to shame or humiliate you, all you have to do is to point out that you admitted your mistake, you paid the price, and you learned your lesson. Throw that fact right back in your accuser’s face, and point out there are certainly things that person has done, for which he or she has never shown contrition or repentance.

That is the beauty of confessing your sins, instead of hiding them. Once you have done it, the world generally forgets about them, and moves on.

This is a lesson that “Dr.” Mike should have heeded. He did not. Instead, he and his friends tried to cover up his misdeeds, and in the process, they made the whole situation about ten times worse – and a hundred times funnier.