The Controversial Debate Over the “Right” Way to Exercise Is Missing One Critical Thing

A “wide grip,” in the jargon of powerlifting, is to lie flat on a cushioned workout bench, equipped with a rack of weights and ideally a spotter, while placing both of your hands on the outer ends of the barbell. This is the classic bench-press form—you lower that weight to about an inch above your abdomen before raising it back up toward the ceiling. A “close grip” entails almost the exact same thing, except instead of gripping the weight at its edges, you keep your hands closer to the center of the bar—this puts more torque on your elbows, which supposedly adds extra compression to your triceps.

Regardless of which contour you choose, the fundamentals of bench-pressing are identical. Lift the weight 30 times, over the course of three sets, and you will have completed one of the foundational circuits of bodybuilding.

This may not seem like fertile ground for controversy, and yet, for as long as people have been talking about weightlifting on the internet, they’ve also been arguing about the contrasting physical virtues of hand placement—or more specifically, how a close grip, or perhaps a wide grip, will “totally kill your gains, bro.” There are literally hundreds of YouTube videos about this, all published by oily fitness gurus advocating for their preferred regimens. Coach Nick Benerakis, a powerlifter and owner of the Big Benchas training program, believes that a wide grip can activate more pectoral strength than the alternatives, while Jeff Cavaliere, who runs the 13-million-subscriber-strong ATHLEAN-X, opines that a narrower grip increases an athlete’s total range of muscle contraction. (If you want to go back further in time, let it be known that Arnold Schwarzenegger has always been a wide-grip guy.) The lack of consensus has spilled out into countless Quora queries and Reddit threads as aspiring gym rats beg for any definitive advice from their betters. (“Close vs. wide grip bench press. Does it really matter?” reads one particularly exasperated topic, posted to r/Fitness, five years ago.)

Even if that poster did find a definitive answer to their question, they’d still need to wade through a wealth of other exercise ambiguities in order to construct their ideal fitness program. The nuances of bench-pressing is one of many rabbit holes to fall down—you can just as easily obsess over, say, the width of your squat grip, or the subtle permutations between the dozens of different butterflied metal bars hanging off the lat pulldown machine. Think your pushups are safe? Nope, there’s a close-versus-wide debate there, too. And what about the contrasting advantages of the deadlift and the squat? Pull up a chair, you’re going to be here for a while.

Zoom out further, and the puzzle grows even more inscrutable. Last year, the New York Times interviewed four different fitness scientists about whether stretching—as in, the basic workout ritual prescribed by PE coaches for centuries—was physiologically useful in any capacity whatsoever. The piece’s core treatise? Maddeningly, “It depends.” Over the summer, Men’s Health asked several elite bodybuilders the age-old question of whether more weight or more reps will lead to superior muscle mass. Again, the upshot was inconclusive. “There’s benefits to both approaches. … Do what’s right for your body.”

Human beings are blessed with multiple interlocking biological systems, including a fleshy musculature that can miraculously animate our skeleton. We have developed certain baseline postures and strategies to ensure that we can work out without injuring ourselves (lift with your legs, never overload the bar, and so on), and we generally understand that if we work our anatomy over and over again, it becomes stronger. We also know that exercise is the single best thing anyone can do for their well-being—it boosts longevity, mental health, mobility, general quality of life, and more. But outside of that instinctual understanding, you are forgiven if the rest of the modern fitness strata—with all of the arcane supplements, esoteric training plans, and arguments over where to put your hands on a barbell—leaves you discouraged and confused. The fitness industry eclipsed $30 billion in revenue last year, a boom that can be tangibly felt with all the jacked people proselytizing the nature of their gains on Instagram, thirsting for your business. And yet, the advice is often so muddled and contradictory that, from a consumer’s perspective, we’re left with uncertainty about what we’re actually supposed to be doing in the gym. Seriously, how do we still not know if it’s important to stretch before a run?

Well, according to Christie Aschwanden, an athlete, science journalist, and author of Good to Go: What the Athlete in All of Us Can Learn from the Strange Science of Recovery, we’re anxious because we’ve all been taught to ask the wrong questions about fitness. As it turns out, the process of getting in shape doesn’t need to be complicated at all.

“People have been convinced that we need to optimize everything. That there’s this absolutely optimal way to train that’s going to get you the best results, and if you don’t do that exactly right, your results are going to be subpar. It turns out that thinking is almost entirely backwards,” she said. “Basically, any kind of exercise is better than none. So much of the benefit comes from just getting off the couch. If you’re interested in strength training, you can find all sorts of advice that is extremely specific in how many reps you need to do, how much weight you should put on, and how much rest you need to take in between. But really, most of the benefit is simply in the act itself.”

Aschwanden is illustrating the essential paradox in fitness science. Exercise, in almost all capacities, works, so any of the optimizations she speaks of—the wave of ink spilled about barbell grip or squat posture—is only going to augment your gains around the margins. “We’re bombarded with the idea that there are certain secret tricks that will get you a better workout,” she explained. “It really doesn’t matter that much if you’re doing five sets or two sets, or if you’re going to the gym five times a week or three times a week.”

Case in point: Aschwanden cited a study published in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise that divided participants in a strength training program into three groups. One group did only a single cycle of the exercises each session—deadlift, leg press, and so on—while the others did three cycles and five cycles, respectively. Those who worked out more reported larger visible bulking to their thighs and elbow flexors, but everyone studied had made equivalent gains to their overall strength despite the difference in reps. That’s because—to Aschwanden’s point—all of them took the most important step: leaving the house and hitting the gym.

Dr. David Behm, a professor who studies fitness at the Memorial University of Newfoundland, is even more dismissive of the idea that it’s possible to establish definitive workout advice, even if that advice is ostensibly backed by the scientific method. “You won’t find anything conclusive by reading single or even multiple research articles. If you give me an opinion, I guarantee you that I can find some piece of research that says the exact opposite,” he said. The reason for this, asserts Behm, is the innate diversity of the human body, which even the most comprehensive deductive study can never fully account for. For instance, the mentioned Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise article—while useful and worth considering—focused on 34 men, and all of them had some background in strength training. Its ascertainment, therefore, cannot be extrapolated to account for women, or children, or people who have never picked up a weight in their life, or someone who usually sticks to cardio. Few things in life are more variable than the boundless gradient of the human body, said Behm, and that makes exercise science extraordinarily difficult.

“The fitness advice you’re reading isn’t from people who are trying to lie to you. They probably did read a scientific study that reached a certain conclusion. The problem is the research is most likely conducted by a grad student who’s going to be lucky to test 16 or 24 people over the course of 12 weeks, not 10,000 people across the world,” he explained. “There is never going to be an exercise that does the same thing for everyone on the face of the earth.”

Behm says that there are some ways around those problems. As a researcher, he puts his scholastic emphasis on what statisticians call meta-analysis, an aggregation of multiple different studies asking the same underlying question about fitness, which increases the number of participants in an overarching study exponentially, from dozens to thousands. But even with that extra material, Behm doesn’t believe a meta-analysis can reveal the unvarnished, caveat-free truths of exercise. At best, he believes science can get “about 95 percent” of the way there, which, again, is suitable for most people hitting the gym.

Alex Hutchinson, a science writer and author of Endure, agrees with Behm. In fact, he argues that it’s a blessing that we don’t know more about the physiology of fitness. The differences in exercise are minute, marginal, and reserved for a sliver of the human genome—LeBron James, Michael Phelps, Simone Biles—somatic outliers who are dead-set on world records and gold medals, where the precise arc of a dumbbell fly really might be all that separates defeat from victory. If that sort of elite athleticism isn’t the goal—and it’s not for most of us—we can tune out the noise, savoring the knowledge that we’ll never raise a banner to the rafters.

“The reason we don’t have better answers about fitness is because all of these techniques are pretty similar. It’s not like one guy is trying to put on muscle by lifting weights, and the other guy is trying to put on muscle by petting cats,” Hutchinson said. “If there was a huge difference between Method A and Method B, then science would bear that out. The fact that there isn’t a clear answer is all the proof you need that you don’t need to care that much.”

In that sense, maybe society is in need of a structural reframing of the way we think about fitness. Maybe a workout ought to feel like an element of our own personal rhythm—more peaceful, more slow-paced—rather than a code that must be broken. It’s a notion that’s complicated by the constant barrage of viral workouts that billow up in every conceivable algorithmic channel, often hawked by profiteering influencers who claim to have solved the enduring mystery of exercise. Perhaps you remember Lauren Giraldo, the hugely popular Instagram influencer who pioneered the “12-3-30” method, a 30-minute treadmill walk at 3 miles per hour at a 12 percent incline, which became popular enough to support its very own fitness brand. (See also: the wealth of content published about Bella Hadid’s alleged “slim-thigh workout,” or the advent of the “weighted hula hoop.”) Of course you won’t be shocked to learn that out of 488 self-proclaimed fitness influencers studied in the Academy of Management journal, fewer than 20 percent had any training credentials whatsoever.

Cedric Bryant is the president of the American Council on Exercise, or ACE, which has been investigating the spurious fitness trends that have passed through global discourse for decades. (In 2011, the organization sponsored a study of the Shake Weight, and concluded, predictably, that it essentially functioned like an ordinary two-and-a-half pound dumbbell. They also examined those repellent, glove-like running shoes. You know, with the little toe-pockets.) Recently, Bryant hired a university to study the efficacy of Giraldo’s 12-3-30 drill, because he believes that ACE has a unique responsibility to dampen the various zeitgeists that seize the fitness world through unaccountable, and often uninformed, social channels. (The results are still pending, but other experts tend to agree that it functions as a decent, low-impact workout.) Bryant contends that misinformation is a problem—especially in the context of faulty nutrition advice—but he also doesn’t consider the tide of uncertified, vibes-based Instagram fitness gurus to be an enemy. If they are motivating more people to exercise, even under the auspices of a questionable workout plan, then they’re on the same side as Bryant.

“Overall, they are going to prove to be a net positive. When you look at the data, and the risks of having a major coronary event or some other health catastrophe, being physically active is much safer than sitting on the couch,” he said. “So generally speaking, they aren’t as big of a boogeyman in the way they’re perceived to be.”

What Bryant is less fond of is the way the internet eventizes fitness, rather than treating it like a native fixture in anyone’s daily routine. “Our muscles are motor fibers, not neural fibers. They aren’t little brains telling us that we’re going to get a better response if we purchase a $3,000 piece of equipment,” he said. It makes me think of the frequent anxieties we’ve all encountered in our conditioning journeys—the circuits started and abandoned, the lapsed gym memberships, the Peloton currently collecting dust in the corner of my bedroom—evidence of a social environment where fitness must be accompanied by something new and cutting-edge to be worthy of our attention. It’s all a matter of hubris. How could we ever hope to dream up superior ways to move our arms and legs? To pick up something heavy before putting it back down?

Hutchinson, the science journalist, finds himself wondering if someday in the future humanity will finally solve all the questions of fitness. He imagines an athlete arriving at a clinic where doctors will scan their body and prod their muscles with impossible equipment, harvesting payloads of molecular data, which will then be fed into some sort of monolithic supercomputer. The machine would spit out a projected marathon time, accurate down to the millisecond, before the athlete even ran the race. Hutchinson describes this scenario as his worst nightmare.

“It’d be like the sport has no meaning. What makes fitness interesting to me is that we don’t know the answers, and we’ll probably never know the answers. So the best thing we can do is try to understand the human body, and use that knowledge to find the best path forward for ourselves,” he said. “When people try to give definitive exercise advice, they’re missing the nuances and complexities that make fitness fascinating.”

I’ll keep that in mind the next time I head downstairs to my building’s gym, prepared to load up the barbell slotted above the weight bench. It is there, below the buzzing fluorescents, that I will contemplate the infinite conundrum of human anatomy—the dark matter residing in each and every one of us—all miraculously articulated in one simple binary: Wide grip or close?