Wise Lifting with Luke Tulloch

How to feel steadier when you're not sure your training is working, by training your mind the same way you train your body.

I came to compassionate mind training when I was moving countries and having a kid at the same time, and it changed how I approach pretty much everything, training included.

Why focusing on one muscle at a time changes your physique faster than trying to bring everything up at once.

Bodybuilders call this a specialisation phase. A 2026 study by Kataoka and colleagues found that training a lot more muscle didn't slow down biceps growth, so your muscles probably don't compete with each other to grow. I also go through Bickel and colleagues (2011) on how little training it takes to keep muscle.

Bohemian Rhapsody is almost six minutes long, breaks most of the rules of a pop song, and became a huge hit anyway.

Would it get made today?

A recent article on something called hyperselection says probably not. Once we get good at measuring what works, everyone copies the winning formula and the alternatives disappear. You can see it in music, football, science and cities.

You can see it in training too.

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Someone posts a study saying more volume builds more muscle.

Meanwhile, the most muscular person at your gym got there doing the opposite.

So which one is right?

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You followed the program. You showed up. And you've got less to show for it than you hoped.

So you start to wonder whether you're one of those people who just doesn't grow.

Researchers recently put that idea to a proper test. They took the same group of people and ran them through the same 10-week program twice.

The second round says a lot about what one training block can and can't tell you.

In this episode I go through whether "some people just grow more" is actually true, whether you're likely to be one of the people who doesn't, and what a slow phase is really telling you.

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"My workouts take forever."

If you've only got 3 or 4 hours a week to train, that's a problem. Every session runs over, or gets cut off wherever the clock runs out.

The answer isn't squeezing a longer program into less time.

In this episode I go through how to split 3 to 4 hours across your week, the habits that save the most time once you're in the gym, and a full 60-minute session laid out start to finish.

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Nobody can be an expert in everything they care about.

So whether you mean to or not, you're choosing who to trust with your training and nutrition. And at the moment that choice is harder than it should be.

A lot of fitness content has turned into dunking on other people. The loudest voice sounds the most certain, and certain feels a lot like trustworthy.

In this episode I go through five signs that someone is worth listening to, why so much of the loudest content fails them, and what happens when I hold myself to the same test.

What's the last fitness post you saw that actually taught you something useful?

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Evidence-based fitness is built on population averages. that means personal progress requires individual experimentation to discover what is truly optimal for you...which means taking risks.

But how do we know what risks to take? When is it worth trying something new? What if you don't want to lose progress you've already made?

If you're dealing with a nagging injury that keeps flaring up every time you get back into a groove, the way you're managing it is probably why. In this episode I cover the biggest mistakes experienced lifters make when something hurts, why complete rest makes the problem worse, and how to use the same progressive approach you'd use in your programming to actually build your way out of it.Survey link:

https://tally.so/r/OD2YEa

You've made the time, got yourself to the gym, and your knee's hurting again. Or you haven't slept properly in a fortnight.

And the thought turns up: not again.

Most of us write the week off at that point. We'll start again properly when things settle down.

This one's about what to do instead.

I go through what actually happens to the muscle you've built when you cut right back, which is usually a lot less than people assume, and the four things I'd focus on while a rough patch runs its course.

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