In Metis and Bodybuilders, Scott argues that bodybuilding metis—the practical, experience-based knowledge of gym-goers—failed to optimize rest periods correctly before academic studies did. He presents this as evidence that metis is inferior to academic science, at least in the field of bodybuilding.
But this criticism assumes that metis and academic science are trying to solve the same problem. They aren’t.
Academic research in bodybuilding aims to optimize hypertrophy per unit of time or effort. It tries to isolate variables—rest periods, rep ranges, training frequency—and find the most efficient path to muscle growth. Bodybuilding metis, by contrast, isn’t optimized for hypertrophy efficiency. It’s optimized for adherence—for getting people to train consistently and keep pushing themselves harder over months and years.
Most people don’t fail to gain muscle because they rested 90 seconds instead of 180. They fail because they stop going to the gym or stop increasing the weight. Once someone trains regularly and progressively overloads, almost any routine will work. This is why full-body programs, bro splits, German Volume Training, PPL, and Starting Strength all have loyal followings: people stick with them, and sticking with a program usually works.
This is what metis in bodybuilding optimizes for. It encourages habits and rituals that keep people in the gym, and keep them pushing harder. It doesn’t need to determine the most efficient path to hypertrophy. It needs to make sure you’re still lifting six months from now. From that perspective, it doesn’t matter if shorter rest periods are slightly less optimal. What matters is whether a given routine keeps you engaged, consistent, and striving to improve. A slightly less optimal routine that someone follows for two years will produce more muscle than a perfect routine they abandon in one month.
In fact, several commenters in Scott’s post point out that shorter rest periods help them finish workouts faster. If doubling rest times causes someone to skip sessions due to time constraints, then hypertrophy per workout becomes irrelevant. They’re not doing the workouts at all.
A useful analogy comes from Joseph Henrich’s The Secret of Our Success. Manioc is a calorie-dense plant that grows easily, and some indigenous Amazonian groups have developed a multistep, multiday technique to process it. The roots are scraped, grated, and washed to separate the fiber, starch, and liquid. The liquid is boiled, but the fiber and starch must sit for two days before they can be baked and eaten. The process is time-consuming; women spend about a quarter of their day on it. A well-meaning reformer might try to simplify the process to save time—perhaps by just boiling the manioc, which removes the bitter taste. Unfortunately, manioc contains cyanide, and eating too much over time can make you sick. It turns out the entire process is necessary to leach out the cyanide. The reformer assumes the goal is to remove bitterness and concludes that metis has failed, since they’ve found a faster method that achieves the same result. But metis was working toward a goal the reformer didn’t see: removing poison. In this case, metis was wiser than the reformer.
The mistake Scott made was to assume that metis aims at the same target as academic science—and then to fault it when it misses. More often, metis is aiming somewhere else entirely.