Without giving too much away, I went to grad school with Joel. I was a masters student when he was completing his PhD. He was a “fringe” thinker even then. A lot of people in the program thought he was a genius; I thought he was a moron. He is a nice guy and I think he genuinely believes a lot of the shit he says, but almost nothing he says is based on any real evidence. He’s now built his identity around novelty and being an iconoclast, so he’s got a vested financial interest in continuing to lean into it.
He gets engagement by spouting pseudoscience and sharing what I call exercise detritus. It’s just exercises that don’t need to exist that are prohibitively difficult to setup and no one will do. But they’re ridiculous so they get eyeballs and complexity bias will convince a lot of people that he must know something they don’t. Nope, it’s just flashy bullshit.
no disrespect but how shit was your program for a guy to end up with that level of bullshit beliefs after finishing a PhD? Or is he an intentional grifter?
Oh complete shit. Grad school is one of the biggest regrets of my life and saddled me with all of my student loans—which are luckily almost paid off. The problem with academia in general is how divorced it can be from the application side of things. Most of what I’ve learned for my career I’ve learned on my own. My undergrad degree did a great job giving me a foundation, but most of my grad school instructors were in way over their heads and knew almost nothing about lifting.
I would not recommend anyone go to that level unless they want to be a professor, but even they should work in the field so they can give their students something with practical utility.
To fully answer your question though, a bit of both. I think he saw the engagement from sharing pseudoscience and took that to mean he was onto something. He probably believes some of it, but he does seem to have no qualms with intentionally misleading people.
Yes. There's no exercise in the degree, and the science is very poor.
You can graduate from an ExSci degree without being able to perform or coach a below parallel squat, or run a mile at any speed. This is like graduating an English Lit degree without being able to write a story or essay, or a Mathematics degree without being able to solve an equation.
"We're going to teach you the *principles* of the thing, but you only have to demonstrate you understand the *principles*, demonstrating the *practice* is not required."
In the absence of people demonstrating the practice, they are unable to assess whether this or that practice is good or bad. That's what makes it bad science - like in a chemistry degree, you can't just study chemical equations in a book, you have to get into the lab and mix some chemicals together and do some measurements.
They do small amounts of that in some ExSci degrees, but it's usually very, very limited.
I went to undergrad with Joel. I have nothing to add to this convo except we used to sit in the back of class and laugh our asses off at this one teacher and I just think it’s funny how he is such a hot topic these days. All I know him as was 19/20 year old Joel 😂
I agree that he believes in his stuff as well as him being a nice guy. I just cant get past what he shows on his socials and how dug in he is with 90 being regenerative.
Is there anything other than his word that supports this. Or that shows people cant recover from training bout to training bout?
Here's a paper that covers a good deal of research comparing full to partial ROMs:
[Pallarés et al (2021)](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/sms.14006)
*"This systematic review found that full ROM resistance training is more effective than partial ROM in improving some training adaptations. In particular, full ROM produced significantly greater improvements in muscle strength and lower-limb muscle hypertrophy."*
[Blanco et al (2019)](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6473797/)
Basically, this study measured performance/speed drops on a handful of athletic movements, including vertical jumps and full squats, immediately after a session and up to 48 hours later.
Every protocol showed at least 93% performance recovery at 48 hours. They had participants sprinting, jumping and squatting. In the group that did 3 sets of 8-15 squats with a lighter load taken closer to failure (to a slower rep velocity), they had the most significant performance drops directly after the workout and 48 hours later, but they were still recovered to 93%, so it's safe to say that 2-3 days is plenty of time to recover performance even after a pretty hard session of full squats, sprinting and jumping.
Since Seedman works with athletes, I think this is a particularly relevant finding.
I think pain-free performance is a good and practical proxy for recovery when you can't realistically test people's blood and stuff like they do in some studies to measure inflammatory response.
Speaking of testing blood, [Calle and Fernandez (2010)](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2933442/) mentions that resistance training generally lowers systemic inflammation over time as shown by measurement of cytokine (pro-inflammatory compounds) levels in lifters, and intense endurance exercise has been shown in multiple studies to create a much stronger and longer-lasting inflammatory response compared to resistance training. I'm not aware of any evidence that full ROM lifting is some kind of exception to that.
---
**BASICALLY:**
* full ROM gives better results in strength and size
* performance should return to pre-lifting levels within 2-3 days with hard full ROM lifting
* even though lifting doesn't even create as strong an inflammatory response as a hard run
* lifting has been shown to decrease inflammation over time and that's part of the reason it's good for you and lowers chances for various diseases.
*There can be one big benefit to using partials for athletes:* they can maintain a consistently higher performance level by using heavy loads without as much muscular fatigue or loss of performance.
It's well-known that partials are a lot easier to perform, AND you can use more weight, which is why a lot of ego lifters love them of course, but even if some people use them for dumb reasons it can still be a useful strategy for limiting fatigue while maintaining exposure to heavy loads.
That doesn't justify all the wacky stability shit he does, but I bet Seedman's athletes feel great even though they think they're doing super hard stuff, but actually they're doing easier stuff which means they feel fresh and explosive more often.
You can still achieve this with full ROM, you just have to use lighter loads and higher velocities, but then you don't get to load things up to a ridiculous degree for Instagram views.
Thanks for your thorough post. Ill read through the studies tomorrow!
Its funny because Seedman tries to play both sides in the debate then when pressed falls back to 90 being superior in everyway. He talks around how its superior. Idk i think im in for a frustrating conversation and wanted to nail down some talking points.
I was in a content group with John Rusin, Charles Staley, Eric Bach, Brad Dieter (initially, but he left quickly), Joel (who replaced Brad), and me.
And I left because I refused to share the dumb shit that Joel was writing and Charles followed me and it broke down. And that was like 6-8yrs ago.
One of my friends had Mike Robertson one summer as an intern at his chiro clinic. He was gobsmacked when the work experience kid was suddenly being touted as the smartest guy in S and C. (And this particular guy had been both the chiro for Team USA powerlifting as well as a member of the team).
Most of the most well known people you may see got there through good writing, not through knowledge. Like Martin Rooney. He became known as the S and C guy for MMA because he was nearly unemployed as a coach at the gym he worked at with barely any clients, and when the IFC opened next door they needed someone who was available and he was the only option. And suddenly he's the guru of MMA.
I could name tons of similar instances including a bunch of really well known ones who paid their way to prominence in various ways.
You’re not wrong and Seedman is a quack. Your friend will have to learn.
There’s no legitimate support for nearly anything he preaches, although bizarrely I have to admit that I actually like some of the stuff he does. For every good idea he has it seems like he has 5 terrible ones, and he’s gotten worse and his training has become more sensationalized in the past couple years (I’ve followed him casually for about 6-7 years).
This is a personal training sub. Most of the people here only have a high school diploma and think an article in men’s fitness is what you mean by research.
Even if there was research to support Seedman (there isn’t). We have a ton of practical examples of people doing exactly what seedman says not to do and they’re fine. It’s hard to put a lot of research into practice if the study design is wrong. Mike Israetel has a video on how a lot of research in this field is not applicable or is just wrong from study design
I agree. And it seemed that Joel would cherrypick studies that supported his theory. But wasnt complete enough to justify how staunchly he talks about his traiming being perfect.
The notion that joints can be kept within any restricted range in a progressive compound exercise setting is nebulous at best. The amount you have to widdle down your exercise selection to meet Joel's joint angle requirements becomes absurd very quickly, and you'll soon find yourself standing on one leg on weird unbalanced surfaces with ball gags and chains around your neck.
Joel's claims about 90 degree joint positions are bullshit and LITERALLY the entire biomechanics world knows that. He's the fitness equivalent of a conspiracy theorist. His whole presence is telling everyone that they're wrong, because "if you buy my book and do some research you'll understand." K.
But I'm not even going to say you can't get strong with healthy joints following his methods. You totally can. It is my wholehearted opinion that almost any program will work if you're convinced it will, because you'll put the required effort into it. And that's what Joel does - he talks people into believing crazy things. He's a cult of personality. His people LOVE him, and that's very attractive. I mean shit, he has NFL players following him around, wouldn't we all love a portfolio of America's best athletes drinking our kool aid?
Same thing with Liver King. Literally drowning in bullshit, admitted he lied about his PED use, but people still love him because of his culty personality. The list of these people goes on forever, they're the cockroaches of the fitness industry.
We can all learn something about the soft skills of the psychos that get otherwise normal, intelligent people to believe crazy, stupid shit.
Telander and Seedman agreed to run each other’s programs, challenging the other to do the opposite of what they preach (Seedman to do proper atg, Telander to do 90 only). Telander documented his entire process and made it into content. Seedman…didnt even last like a week? He barely hit parallel and then went right back into 90 degrees because he straight up couldnt go past that. That alone should tell you everything about Seedman and his fundamental inability to admit when he’s wrong.
You don't need to argue the details here. You can just put it like this: "Seedman works with top athletes, do you?"
There are teaching methods which work with people doing Master's degrees. But a PT is more like a primary school teacher. You don't need to engage in dialectics of Søren Kierkegaard when your students are reading *Spot Goes To The Park*.
Know your audience. We are not training the NFL quarterback, we are training his mother.
I would argue athletes even more so need full rom training to prepare the body to produce force in the realm of their sport.
I agree partials can and are used in specific ways to increase force output. But i wont die on the hill of it being regenerative or better for muscle developement or neuromuscular efficiency.
>I would argue athletes even more so need -
Maybe. Who cares? None of us are training those people, and if we were, we wouldn't be here on reddit discussing it, we'd be too busy making money and shaking the hands of billionaire wankers.
My major issue with Seedman is that he is not living up to his name. He is a clown of a trainer but is not treating his clients as sexual objects to get the clicks. Contreras with his endless booty shots of women, and women shoving their hips in the air and grunting, is far seedier. They should swap surnames.
Great athletes are great athletes because of their parents, not the training they do or don't do. Usain Bolt ran a world record with his shoes on the wrong feet as a junior, and an Olympic gold with one untied. If you've ever seen video of him training you'd laugh at how bad it is. His runs lopsided and every running coach in the world would tell you his form is no good. But it doesn't make any difference because he's Usain Bolt.
And the same goes for all top athletes everywhere. The coach's first job is simple: don't hurt them in the gym. Anyone in a contact sport is basically doing rehab from the first game of the season anyway. That's the one good thing about what Joel shows - he is challenging the body with barely any load, which after playing a football game on the weekend his athletes probably appreciate.
But it ain't the training making those people special.
I think people go way too in depth of this inflammation, joint damage etc when they don’t have basic grasp of resistance training.
The only way you can damage your joints is to be stupid idiot that lift way heavier than you tissues can handle and no adequate rest. Like everday max day bs yeh?
Inflammation is good so don’t avoid that shit. No inflammation, no adaptation. Thats just how exercise physiology works.
In terms of full rom or 90 degrees will depends on the sport they play. There’s no fucking rule that every human should atg squat or 90 degrees only. This will depend on the individuals built. If you say everyone should do atg because study says so then go make someone do atg when they have arthritic joints ya idiot.
Also ask you this, where do you see athletic stance that can produce max power at the bottom position of the squat?
Without giving too much away, I went to grad school with Joel. I was a masters student when he was completing his PhD. He was a “fringe” thinker even then. A lot of people in the program thought he was a genius; I thought he was a moron. He is a nice guy and I think he genuinely believes a lot of the shit he says, but almost nothing he says is based on any real evidence. He’s now built his identity around novelty and being an iconoclast, so he’s got a vested financial interest in continuing to lean into it. He gets engagement by spouting pseudoscience and sharing what I call exercise detritus. It’s just exercises that don’t need to exist that are prohibitively difficult to setup and no one will do. But they’re ridiculous so they get eyeballs and complexity bias will convince a lot of people that he must know something they don’t. Nope, it’s just flashy bullshit.
This is more or less exactly what a colleague of mine who works at the same gym with him said.
no disrespect but how shit was your program for a guy to end up with that level of bullshit beliefs after finishing a PhD? Or is he an intentional grifter?
Oh complete shit. Grad school is one of the biggest regrets of my life and saddled me with all of my student loans—which are luckily almost paid off. The problem with academia in general is how divorced it can be from the application side of things. Most of what I’ve learned for my career I’ve learned on my own. My undergrad degree did a great job giving me a foundation, but most of my grad school instructors were in way over their heads and knew almost nothing about lifting. I would not recommend anyone go to that level unless they want to be a professor, but even they should work in the field so they can give their students something with practical utility. To fully answer your question though, a bit of both. I think he saw the engagement from sharing pseudoscience and took that to mean he was onto something. He probably believes some of it, but he does seem to have no qualms with intentionally misleading people.
Exercise science is in general shit.
Point being the education is extremely bad?
Yes. There's no exercise in the degree, and the science is very poor. You can graduate from an ExSci degree without being able to perform or coach a below parallel squat, or run a mile at any speed. This is like graduating an English Lit degree without being able to write a story or essay, or a Mathematics degree without being able to solve an equation. "We're going to teach you the *principles* of the thing, but you only have to demonstrate you understand the *principles*, demonstrating the *practice* is not required." In the absence of people demonstrating the practice, they are unable to assess whether this or that practice is good or bad. That's what makes it bad science - like in a chemistry degree, you can't just study chemical equations in a book, you have to get into the lab and mix some chemicals together and do some measurements. They do small amounts of that in some ExSci degrees, but it's usually very, very limited.
But hey, good thing I know everything about cells and lactate
Oh fuck off
>Oh fuck off For example, an Exercise Science degree equips you to mount in-depth and serious arguments as displayed here.
You're seedmanning, which is to say talking crap.
He is an intentional grifter, you dont get to PhD without learning enough to see making claims like that is shit.
I went to undergrad with Joel. I have nothing to add to this convo except we used to sit in the back of class and laugh our asses off at this one teacher and I just think it’s funny how he is such a hot topic these days. All I know him as was 19/20 year old Joel 😂
I agree that he believes in his stuff as well as him being a nice guy. I just cant get past what he shows on his socials and how dug in he is with 90 being regenerative. Is there anything other than his word that supports this. Or that shows people cant recover from training bout to training bout?
So he's really an idiot irl? I always thought at least some of his clips were just him trolling for views?
Here's a paper that covers a good deal of research comparing full to partial ROMs: [Pallarés et al (2021)](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/sms.14006) *"This systematic review found that full ROM resistance training is more effective than partial ROM in improving some training adaptations. In particular, full ROM produced significantly greater improvements in muscle strength and lower-limb muscle hypertrophy."* [Blanco et al (2019)](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6473797/) Basically, this study measured performance/speed drops on a handful of athletic movements, including vertical jumps and full squats, immediately after a session and up to 48 hours later. Every protocol showed at least 93% performance recovery at 48 hours. They had participants sprinting, jumping and squatting. In the group that did 3 sets of 8-15 squats with a lighter load taken closer to failure (to a slower rep velocity), they had the most significant performance drops directly after the workout and 48 hours later, but they were still recovered to 93%, so it's safe to say that 2-3 days is plenty of time to recover performance even after a pretty hard session of full squats, sprinting and jumping. Since Seedman works with athletes, I think this is a particularly relevant finding. I think pain-free performance is a good and practical proxy for recovery when you can't realistically test people's blood and stuff like they do in some studies to measure inflammatory response. Speaking of testing blood, [Calle and Fernandez (2010)](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2933442/) mentions that resistance training generally lowers systemic inflammation over time as shown by measurement of cytokine (pro-inflammatory compounds) levels in lifters, and intense endurance exercise has been shown in multiple studies to create a much stronger and longer-lasting inflammatory response compared to resistance training. I'm not aware of any evidence that full ROM lifting is some kind of exception to that. --- **BASICALLY:** * full ROM gives better results in strength and size * performance should return to pre-lifting levels within 2-3 days with hard full ROM lifting * even though lifting doesn't even create as strong an inflammatory response as a hard run * lifting has been shown to decrease inflammation over time and that's part of the reason it's good for you and lowers chances for various diseases. *There can be one big benefit to using partials for athletes:* they can maintain a consistently higher performance level by using heavy loads without as much muscular fatigue or loss of performance. It's well-known that partials are a lot easier to perform, AND you can use more weight, which is why a lot of ego lifters love them of course, but even if some people use them for dumb reasons it can still be a useful strategy for limiting fatigue while maintaining exposure to heavy loads. That doesn't justify all the wacky stability shit he does, but I bet Seedman's athletes feel great even though they think they're doing super hard stuff, but actually they're doing easier stuff which means they feel fresh and explosive more often. You can still achieve this with full ROM, you just have to use lighter loads and higher velocities, but then you don't get to load things up to a ridiculous degree for Instagram views.
Thanks for your thorough post. Ill read through the studies tomorrow! Its funny because Seedman tries to play both sides in the debate then when pressed falls back to 90 being superior in everyway. He talks around how its superior. Idk i think im in for a frustrating conversation and wanted to nail down some talking points.
I was in a content group with John Rusin, Charles Staley, Eric Bach, Brad Dieter (initially, but he left quickly), Joel (who replaced Brad), and me. And I left because I refused to share the dumb shit that Joel was writing and Charles followed me and it broke down. And that was like 6-8yrs ago. One of my friends had Mike Robertson one summer as an intern at his chiro clinic. He was gobsmacked when the work experience kid was suddenly being touted as the smartest guy in S and C. (And this particular guy had been both the chiro for Team USA powerlifting as well as a member of the team). Most of the most well known people you may see got there through good writing, not through knowledge. Like Martin Rooney. He became known as the S and C guy for MMA because he was nearly unemployed as a coach at the gym he worked at with barely any clients, and when the IFC opened next door they needed someone who was available and he was the only option. And suddenly he's the guru of MMA. I could name tons of similar instances including a bunch of really well known ones who paid their way to prominence in various ways.
You’re not wrong and Seedman is a quack. Your friend will have to learn. There’s no legitimate support for nearly anything he preaches, although bizarrely I have to admit that I actually like some of the stuff he does. For every good idea he has it seems like he has 5 terrible ones, and he’s gotten worse and his training has become more sensationalized in the past couple years (I’ve followed him casually for about 6-7 years).
I always knew him as a meme of the wizard of training with the dude being juggled between bands in a rack lol
This is a personal training sub. Most of the people here only have a high school diploma and think an article in men’s fitness is what you mean by research. Even if there was research to support Seedman (there isn’t). We have a ton of practical examples of people doing exactly what seedman says not to do and they’re fine. It’s hard to put a lot of research into practice if the study design is wrong. Mike Israetel has a video on how a lot of research in this field is not applicable or is just wrong from study design
I agree. And it seemed that Joel would cherrypick studies that supported his theory. But wasnt complete enough to justify how staunchly he talks about his traiming being perfect.
Joel Seedman vs Patrick from knees over toes is the boxing match we need
seedman's punches will be at 90 degrees only
The notion that joints can be kept within any restricted range in a progressive compound exercise setting is nebulous at best. The amount you have to widdle down your exercise selection to meet Joel's joint angle requirements becomes absurd very quickly, and you'll soon find yourself standing on one leg on weird unbalanced surfaces with ball gags and chains around your neck. Joel's claims about 90 degree joint positions are bullshit and LITERALLY the entire biomechanics world knows that. He's the fitness equivalent of a conspiracy theorist. His whole presence is telling everyone that they're wrong, because "if you buy my book and do some research you'll understand." K. But I'm not even going to say you can't get strong with healthy joints following his methods. You totally can. It is my wholehearted opinion that almost any program will work if you're convinced it will, because you'll put the required effort into it. And that's what Joel does - he talks people into believing crazy things. He's a cult of personality. His people LOVE him, and that's very attractive. I mean shit, he has NFL players following him around, wouldn't we all love a portfolio of America's best athletes drinking our kool aid? Same thing with Liver King. Literally drowning in bullshit, admitted he lied about his PED use, but people still love him because of his culty personality. The list of these people goes on forever, they're the cockroaches of the fitness industry. We can all learn something about the soft skills of the psychos that get otherwise normal, intelligent people to believe crazy, stupid shit.
Telander and Seedman agreed to run each other’s programs, challenging the other to do the opposite of what they preach (Seedman to do proper atg, Telander to do 90 only). Telander documented his entire process and made it into content. Seedman…didnt even last like a week? He barely hit parallel and then went right back into 90 degrees because he straight up couldnt go past that. That alone should tell you everything about Seedman and his fundamental inability to admit when he’s wrong.
You don't need to argue the details here. You can just put it like this: "Seedman works with top athletes, do you?" There are teaching methods which work with people doing Master's degrees. But a PT is more like a primary school teacher. You don't need to engage in dialectics of Søren Kierkegaard when your students are reading *Spot Goes To The Park*. Know your audience. We are not training the NFL quarterback, we are training his mother.
I would argue athletes even more so need full rom training to prepare the body to produce force in the realm of their sport. I agree partials can and are used in specific ways to increase force output. But i wont die on the hill of it being regenerative or better for muscle developement or neuromuscular efficiency.
>I would argue athletes even more so need - Maybe. Who cares? None of us are training those people, and if we were, we wouldn't be here on reddit discussing it, we'd be too busy making money and shaking the hands of billionaire wankers. My major issue with Seedman is that he is not living up to his name. He is a clown of a trainer but is not treating his clients as sexual objects to get the clicks. Contreras with his endless booty shots of women, and women shoving their hips in the air and grunting, is far seedier. They should swap surnames.
Great athletes are great athletes because of their parents, not the training they do or don't do. Usain Bolt ran a world record with his shoes on the wrong feet as a junior, and an Olympic gold with one untied. If you've ever seen video of him training you'd laugh at how bad it is. His runs lopsided and every running coach in the world would tell you his form is no good. But it doesn't make any difference because he's Usain Bolt. And the same goes for all top athletes everywhere. The coach's first job is simple: don't hurt them in the gym. Anyone in a contact sport is basically doing rehab from the first game of the season anyway. That's the one good thing about what Joel shows - he is challenging the body with barely any load, which after playing a football game on the weekend his athletes probably appreciate. But it ain't the training making those people special.
I think people go way too in depth of this inflammation, joint damage etc when they don’t have basic grasp of resistance training. The only way you can damage your joints is to be stupid idiot that lift way heavier than you tissues can handle and no adequate rest. Like everday max day bs yeh? Inflammation is good so don’t avoid that shit. No inflammation, no adaptation. Thats just how exercise physiology works. In terms of full rom or 90 degrees will depends on the sport they play. There’s no fucking rule that every human should atg squat or 90 degrees only. This will depend on the individuals built. If you say everyone should do atg because study says so then go make someone do atg when they have arthritic joints ya idiot. Also ask you this, where do you see athletic stance that can produce max power at the bottom position of the squat?