If you want to take the quiz, it can be found at jeffnippard.com/muscleiq. I recommend giving it a go before watching the video. (Bonus, you get a code for 30% off programs for completing the quiz.)
Am I smarter than average about fitness? I guess so. I scored a 77%, and apparently the average was 62%.
What did I get wrong? I didn’t know what a Meadow’s row was. I would have called it a landmine row, which wasn’t one of the options. I kinda have a beef with the naming of exercises to be honest. I would love for a more standardized approach to naming–a taxonomy of sorts that breaks down a lift, starting with the main muscle group or movement being targeted and getting more specific as you tweak the details. So, I question if this counts as a meaningful thing to know for a typical lifter.
I got abduction and adduction backwards. I always do. I need some kind of pneumonic to help me keep them straight. Jeff suggests that “aliens are abducting” our arms or legs. Not sure that one’s gonna stick with me.
Onto the “hard” questions, I didn’t know the strength level for an intermediate to advanced man at the bench press. Honestly, I don’t care about men’s strength levels, so it’s not a detail I would hold onto. If the question had been about a woman, I’d like to think I’d have gotten it right.
I didn’t know what kind of muscle dominates the soleus, and honestly, this is another one where I just don’t care. Is knowing this going to change my training? Nope. Although, since I don’t train calves, maybe that’s not a fair measure of it’s validity. Between genetics and an early life with obesity, my calves are fairly huge without any intentional effort on my part. But maybe it matters to folks without those “advantages?”
I didn’t get the 80% of max effort question right, and I think it’s because I don’t use percentages of max effort to define my lifts for the day. I like to autoregulate how much weight I’m moving each training day. I set my rep range and sets and then use whatever weight I can perform that volume of work at for that day. Sometimes it’s up, sometimes it’s down, and each time, it feels like the “right” load for where I was at that day, not based on a percentage of my best day with that particular lift.
And finally, I missed the second to last question on refeeds. I feel like I should have gotten this one correctly, as I’ve heard about this research several times. Maybe that made me overly confident that I fully understanded the science on that one. So, I learned something! Lean mass retention was the main benefit of a refeed.
I thought this was a fun way to check my understanding on these topics! Did you give it a go? I’d love to hear how it went for you and what you learned! Leave a comment below or find and follow Progressive Strength on Facebook to join the conversation over there!
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