"bro science" vs The Science™.

There's this term "bro science" that is clearly not meant to be complimentary. And it certainly has its issues, but it has a somewhat surprising history of often being ahead of The Science™.

It happens when some community (of men, when this term is used) has some experience-derived body of knowledge or beliefs that has yet to be validated, or may even have been explicitly contradicted, by The Science™. It happens quite a lot in fitness, especially among powerlifters, bodybuilders etc.

One good recent example is that The Science™ has always told us that optimal hypertrophy (growing muscle) requires fewer reps with more weight, like in the 5-12 rep range with a sweet spot probably around 8. Bodybuilders have ignored this since time immemorial because they simply knew better from experience. Lo and behold, The Science™ has now caught up and can find no detectable difference in results with rep ranges from 5 to 30.

My point here being science - when done right, which is rarer than you might think - is a really good way to discover truth, but not the only legitimate way. Learning from individual or shared experiences is also fraught with difficulty, but not to be written off as readily as is implied by terms like "bro science".