Shadowing Practice: Why Almost Everyone Is Wasting Their Time In The Gym - Learn English Speaking with Video
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What if half the time and effort you're spending in the gym isn't actually doing anything?
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What?
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I know, I know how that sounds, but I just ran an experiment on over 200 people,
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and what we found went against everything I thought I knew about training.
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I'll break down exactly what we did, why most studies never catch this, and how many workouts you actually need to get the best results.
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Ever since I got into lifting, I've always been someone who trains.
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A lot.
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Usually with six hard workouts a week because according to the latest research, the more sets you do with the gym, the faster you grow.
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But most of these studies have only tested high volumes on one or two muscles at a time, not your entire body.
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So was I actually getting more gains training six days per week?
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Or could I have gotten just as good of results training with half of that?
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To find out, I just need to run one of the biggest experiments on my life on 200 real people.
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That's Drew.
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He's one of 200 lifters we recruited as part of our 10 -week experiment, where each lifter was randomly assigned into one of two groups.
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The first group, which
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Drew fell into, is training six days per week using a push -pull leg split.
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Pretty much the exact same routine I followed for years, with around 20 sets per muscle per week.
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Now, Now the second group is also doing a push -pull leg split, but only three workouts per week.
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So same general program, same muscles worked, but half the workouts and half the number of sets.
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Coming off, working out six days a week, this is kind of nothing.
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Like me, and most of the subjects we polled, Matt is predicting that the group training twice as much should build the most muscle.
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He's even worried if he'll be able to build any muscle at all in this plan.
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I don't know.
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I hope I don't get fat.
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Now to control everyone's nutrition, every subject followed a small calorie surplus with a minimum daily protein target.
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And everything was trapped in our Built With Science app.
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And so if we noticed anyone wasn't consistent, we kicked them out of the experiment.
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We also made sure both groups were balanced for gender and had an equal number of beginner and intermediates in each.
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And as for how we're measuring muscle growth, each week participants are submitting circumference measurements of their flexed and unflexed muscles.
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And while you might think this isn't the most accurate way to assess growth, a lot of studies, including some of your videos,
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Jeremy, you'll take a smaller group of people and do these really high -tech body composition measurements.
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But obviously, you can only do that with small groups of people.
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So with this kind of design,
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what we do is we sacrifice the high -tech body comp measurements so that we can expand out and get a more,
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you know, a larger, more representative sample.
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That's Dr. Eric Trexler, a statistician and muscle growth researcher who helped us design this experiment in the first place.
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After the 10 weeks are up, he'll independently crunch the numbers and tell us exactly what happened.
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But so far, after just three weeks of training, the six -day -per -week group are struggling to keep up.
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This week, I missed a few morning workouts.
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Had to do them at night after leaving the office.
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I started to dislike the six -day split a bit.
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This is where we quickly started to notice a big difference between our two groups.
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We actually asked all of our subjects to rate the difficulty of their program at the end of each week.
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Going into the gym only three days a week, I am giving 110 % rather than cutting corners here and there.
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I'm totally digging the program so far.
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I've done a six -day routine in the past, but this program, it gives me energy.
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I wake up wanting to work out instead of dreading it.
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And in the first four weeks, the three -workout group consistently rated their workouts feeling easier and easier.
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Whereas in our sixth workout group, It's a lot.
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It's definitely tough to hit six days of the week.
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My muscles are still sore when I work out.
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Probably tougher than I expected.
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They ranked their workouts as much harder and never really got any easier.
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But we also asked both groups to rank how much they thought their workouts were working.
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I had a massage this week and she said that she could tell that my muscles were a lot stronger,
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a lot of definition and like the V shape.
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I will say that my progress has been explosive.
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If I look at week zero and now there is a huge difference.
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And while both the three and six day groups were confident their plans were working,
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the six day group repeatedly seemed to believe their program was doing more to maximize growth.
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And it seemed like that confidence was helping them push through even the most challenging of their workouts.
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I feel nauseated, which causes vomiting after the leg exercise a couple of days ago.
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Now I can relate to people who like to skip the leg day.
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Meanwhile some members of our three day group weren't sure if they were seeing results at all.
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My belly's what's growing, the rest of me is kind of staying the same.
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I do not feel any stronger nor fitter.
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So at this point
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I would say our sixth workout group not only had over a decade's worth of research predicting they would win,
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but they also seem to have a clear advantage and confidence as well.
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I've been telling myself to stop whining and wake up when the alarm is on.
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I'm enjoying the result of my discipline, which means enjoying the program as well.
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Hearing Atto say this made me feel pretty optimistic that he was using the best plan.
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That is, until the last few weeks of the experiment, where there was one trend I kept noticing from our three workout group.
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I feel way stronger than I did last week, I'm starting to feel like I'm in my 30s again.
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Our three -worker group kept making videos about feeling stronger and lifting heavier than they did the week before.
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I think maybe I did push myself harder because I only had three days and like, we gotta make these count.
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We gotta go hard.
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We only have three days.
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Meanwhile, members of our six -worker group were talking about their training plan as if they were just trying to survive.
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Am I enjoying the program so far?
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No, I'm not.
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I don't know that I would recommend anybody to follow this kind of program or maybe if I were half my age,
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it wouldn't be such a big deal.
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But feelings don't necessarily tell you which program actually builds more muscle.
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So after 10 weeks, we collected all the data, and we sent it to Dr. Eric Trexler and let the numbers decide.
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Whenever I analyze data, the first thing I do is just visualize the data.
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I try to get an understanding of the data characteristics and the distributions.
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Basically trying to make sure that your data collection process yielded data that are high quality and realistic.
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And looking at the data from this experiment, that was definitely the case.
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The analysis revealed that all of the groups in this experiment did on average achieve statistically significant growth.
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Now a million dollar question is, which group grew the most?
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Combined growth in the six -day program was 0 .83 inches on average,
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whereas the three -day -a -week push -pull legs led to a combined growth of 0 .75 inches.
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Now you might say, you know, that looks like a meaningful difference.
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But it's important to understand that that was not nearly a significant difference between the two.
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And any statistician would look at these data and say, those two groups essentially grew the same amount.
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So despite our three -day group doing half the training, statistically, they grew pretty much the same as a six -day group.
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Now, my first assumption is that we accidentally screwed something up.
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The strongest available research out there suggests that if you go from 10 sets per muscle per week to double that,
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you should get about 60 % more gains.
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And when I run that calculation, that means the six day per week group should have seen
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a combined growth of 1 .2 inches instead of just 0 .83.
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In my experience, most people who push to higher frequencies and higher volumes, they end up sacrificing other aspects of their program.
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That's Dr. Eric Helms, a muscle researcher and natural pro bodybuilder.
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When it came to him with our findings, he explained how your muscles don't actually care about how many sets are written in your workout.
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They only respond to the actual muscle building stimulus those sets create.
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So there's absolutely scenarios in my coaching experience where people have
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done something like going from 20 plus sets to say in the teens
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and started to grow better or more or break a plateau.
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And it's because the actual dose was higher when they dropped the volume.
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It's just that they did everything else better and they didn't realize how much they were sandbagging.
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And there's an interesting psychological reason as to why this happens.
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See, back in 2014, researchers had people do 12 sets of maximal isometric bicep contractions, trying to produce as much force as possible on every set.
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But researchers only told half the participants how many sets they'd be doing.
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Whereas for the other half, researchers lied and told them they would only have to do six sets total.
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And so despite both groups being told to push themselves as hard as possible on every set,
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the group that knew they were going to be doing 12 sets paced themselves
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and consistently produced less power than the group who thought they only had to do six.
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And that may be exactly what was happening in our six workout per week group.
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There's an accumulation of fatigue.
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I need to pace myself more.
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It's just a lot of volume to do six days a week.
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Even though our app prompts them to push them close to failure on every set, Just knowing
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that they had twice as much training to get through could have very well caused them to subconsciously hold back
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or Let the form slip as it got tired
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But now you might be wondering if that's the case then why do studies still?
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Consistently show more volume equals more growth push push go go push
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Most people do not train hard enough in their training when we get them in to the lab
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And we I mean they're all supervised training and we push the crap out of them
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Research studies are designed to isolate one variable and control everything else.
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And so when volume is increased, participants are supervised to make sure they're still pushing just as hard.
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and keeping their form consistent.
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In fact, just three days before we were supposed to post this video,
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a brand new study was published by one of our Built With Science researchers.
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They compared a group training under supervision with another group doing the exact same plan, but with no one watching them.
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And after just eight weeks, the supervised group grew more in pretty much every single muscle measured,
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with fat -free mass gains favoring the supervised group by more than a pound.
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So in the real world, unless someone is watching every rep and pushing you, you're left to manage that yourself.
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And if you don't, a lot of the extra time
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and effort you're putting into the gym could very well be going to waste.
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Okay, so what should you actually do with all this information?
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Well, to start, there's three tests you can do to determine if you're actually wasting time in the gym.
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Test number one is rep speed.
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If you're pushing hard enough, your last few reps in a set should move much slower compared to your first few reps.
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If not, it means you're likely stopping too soon.
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Test number two, rep drop off.
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So let's say you're doing three sets of an exercise.
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If with the same weight, your reps stay almost perfectly flat from set to set or somehow go up on your final set,
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that's a good sign you didn't push hard enough in your earlier sets.
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If you're pushing hard, you should see some drop off.
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And so maybe 12 reps in set one becomes 11 in set two, and then that becomes nine or 10 in set three.
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But the final and most important test is actually the simplest.
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If you look back at the last two or three months of your training, are you consistently adding reps or weight on your main lifts?
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If yes, then your program is probably doing its job.
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But if you're training five or six days a week and your lifts haven't moved in months, you might actually want to try cutting it back.
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Well, it might not be a terrible idea to do a little experiment with yourself.
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Try to cut down on your volume for a training block or two, really push your intensity, be very intentional about bringing effort into your sessions
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and it's easy to just kind of watch your progress over time.
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Practically, this could look something like just doing two hard, high quality sets per exercise instead of the usual three or four.
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If you do find that, wow, I'm actually pushing those sets a lot harder,
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I'm more focused in the gym and the lack of volume is not holding me back,
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you may find retrospectively that you were kind of wasting your time doing some low effort sets.
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Okay, but now let's say you're somebody like me.
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You know how to train hard, your form is dialed, and whether you have five sets or 20 to do,
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you're going to push them all properly.
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And so in this case, surely doing way more volume should build more muscle, right?
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Well, this is where things get interesting because shortly after we finished our experiment, a group of researchers conducted a very similar experiment.
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They took over 100 trained lifters and compared roughly 36 weekly sets for their arms and thighs against just nine sets.
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That's about four times the volume.
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But unlike our experiment, every workout they did was supervised to make sure the high volume group didn't start slacking on the extra sets.
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And so, if high volume was ever going to completely blow lower volume out of the water, technically, this should have been it.
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The data do slightly favor the higher volumes in this study, but the difference is probably what most people would consider non -meaningful.
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I think that's just worth acknowledging that every single set you start adding, and especially as you get into the teens and twenties,
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is such a marginal return on investment.
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But that doesn't mean the extra work was useless.
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Especially for someone like
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Eric, who's on a mission to become one of the top five natural bodybuilders in the world.
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I just spent 10 to 11 hours of this week training, and I could have gotten almost the same outcome doing a third of that.
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Like, it's stupid, right?
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And so if you're someone who's willing to make that trade -off to squeeze out every last bit of muscle,
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then I have some really good news
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because we actually tested a third workout group that actually got the best results of the entire experiment.
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For this group, we took all the volume from our six -day split
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and we packed it into just three full -body workouts with supersets to save time.
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The difference is very small and not statistically significant, but technically the program that caused the most growth was the three -day full -body program.
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It led on average to a growth of 0 .87 inches,
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which was slightly greater than what we observed on the six -day push -pull legs program.
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It's probably not the volume because the volume was matched with that push -pull legs six -day -a -week program.
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Maybe it's the frequency, right?
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So that three -day full -body workout, they're training higher frequency per muscle group, meaning because you're taking the same volume per muscle group,
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but splitting it into more workouts, you're not getting into that situation where your performance trails off when you do set after set after set.
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Ironically, this plan is actually quite similar to how
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Eric Helms structures his own training.
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But instead of doing just three full body workouts per week, he does six, with each workout being split into two separate sessions,
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one in the morning and one in the evening to maximize volume
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while keeping the quality of each workout as high as possible.
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And so if you're somebody who wants to do everything you can to maximize your growth, Thank you
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and you're confident you're not going to let the extra volume compromise your effort or form,
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then here's what I recommend in terms of sets per week and some good workout split options.
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But on the other hand, if you just want to make solid gains without spending a ton of time in the gym,
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or you're somebody who's trained a lot right now and just not seeing great results, then here's what I recommend.
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And so while I'm personally not willing to go as far as Eric to maximize growth, I do train hard four to five times a week,
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which gets me about 60 to 70 % of the way there.
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Trade off that makes sense for me.
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But just as we saw with our experiment members,
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any plan can get you results as long as you're willing to stick with it and support it with good nutrition.
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And if you want all of this guesswork taken care of for you with a personalized workout
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and nutrition plan that adjusts weekly based on how your body is actually responding, I highly, highly recommend trying out our Built With Science Plus app.
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You can try it completely free for two weeks by scanning this QR code right here or heading to builtwithscience .com.
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Thanks so much for watching and see you next episode.
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Hello.
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Oh, hi.
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What's up, man?
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Good to see you.
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How did you like training six times a week?
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It seemed like you had quite a hard time.
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Am I enjoying the program so far?
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No, I'm not.
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I feel nauseated.
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Quite frankly, I would say that I hate it at that time.
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Well, I do have some good news for you.
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I have another experiment.
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Oh, wow.
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Wow.
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Yeah, sure, I'm in.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This speaking lesson is built on the video “Why Almost Everyone Is Wasting Their Time In The Gym”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: workout, muscle, volume, training, push. This video has 225 sentences and 3156 words to shadow. The speech runs for 16:18. The speaker talks fast, about 194 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. 85% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start.
Key vocabulary in this video
15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| workout noun | /ˈwɝk.aʊ̯t/ | An exercise session; a period of physical exercise. |
| muscle noun | /ˈmʌs.əl/ | A contractile form of tissue which animals use to effect movement. |
| experiment noun | /ɪkˈspɛɹ.ə.mənt/ | A test under controlled conditions made to either demonstrate a known truth, examine the validity of a hypothesis, or determine the efficacy or likelihood of… |
| researcher noun | /ˈɹiˌsɝ.t͡ʃɚ/ | One who researches. |
| rep noun | /ɹɛp/ | A fabric made of silk or wool, or of silk and wool, and having a transversely corded or ribbed surface. |
| consistently adverb | /kənˈsɪstəntli/ | In a consistent manner. |
| maximize verb | /ˈmæksəmaɪz/ | To make as large as possible. |
| whereas | /(h)wɛɹˈæz/ | In contrast; whilst on the contrary; although. |
| frequency noun | /ˈfɹiːkwənsi/ | The rate of occurrence of anything; the relationship between incidence and time period. |
| combine verb | /kəmˈbaɪn/ | To bring (two or more things or activities) together; to unite. |
| nutrition noun | /njuːˈtɹɪʃ.ən/ | The organic process by which an organism assimilates food and uses it for growth and maintenance. |
| measurement noun | /ˈmɛʒ.ə.mənt/ | The act of measuring. |
| participant noun | /pɑːɹˈtɪsəpənt/ | One who participates. |
| statistically adverb | /stəˈtɪs.tɪ.kə.li/ | In a statistical way. |
| consistent adjective | /kənˈsɪs.tənt/ | Of a regularly occurring, dependable nature. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| work out verb | /ˌwɝk ˈaʊt/ | To calculate. |
| drop off verb | To fall asleep. | |
| wake up verb | /ˌweɪk ˈʌp/ | To stop sleeping; to awake. |
| break down verb | To stop functioning. | |
| come off verb | To become detached. | |
| end up verb | To bring to a conclusion. | |
| find out verb | To discover, as by asking or investigating. | |
| get through verb | /ɡɛt ˈθɹu/ | To overcome; to endure. |
Sentences worth repeating
Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:
- I hope I don't get fat.
- I'm totally digging the program so far.
- Am I enjoying the program so far?
- If not, it means you're likely stopping too soon.
- How did you like training six times a week?
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | was trapped · were balanced · are written |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | I've always been · have only tested · have gotten |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | someone who trains · people who like · discipline, which means |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 59 contractions and reduced forms, such as you're, I'm, don't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: sixth /sɪksθ/, thigh /θaɪ/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: nutrition /njuːˈtɹɪʃ.ən/, measurement /ˈmɛʒ.ə.mənt/, shortly /ˈʃɔɹtli/, essentially /ɪˈsɛnʃəli/, composition /ˌkɑm.pəˈzɪʃ.ən/
- Long words — get the stress right: experiment /ɪkˈspɛɹ.ə.mənt/, consistently /kənˈsɪstəntli/, participant /pɑːɹˈtɪsəpənt/, statistically /stəˈtɪs.tɪ.kə.li/, technically /ˈtɛk.nɪˌkəl.i/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like workout, muscle, experiment.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.