Where our advice comes from
It comes from two places: the research, and eight years of coaching gamers.
We’re Daniel, Mike and Sondre, the coaches at Gains For Gamers. Between us there are roughly fifty years of combined experience in fitness and health.
Where the numbers come from
When we tell you how much protein to eat, how many days a week to train, or whether you need a shake after a workout, that number isn’t ours. It comes from the research, and we go to the best of it first. A review that gathers the trials on one question and weighs them together. Then the trials themselves, and the long studies that follow real people, published where other scientists check the work. Then the guidelines from the big health bodies, like the World Health Organization and the American College of Sports Medicine. A textbook only when it’s built on that research, and then we say it’s a textbook.
The sources are at the bottom of every article, each with a link to the paper, so you can read what we read. We read the paper, not the headline about it, and that rules out most of what comes up on the same question: blogs, supplement brands, influencers, and news stories about a study.
A study of twenty young men on a leg extension machine tells you something about twenty young men. When that matters for you, we say so, and when the evidence is thin, we say that too. “Most studies find” means most studies find, not “science proves”.
What the research can’t tell you
Research tells you what works. It doesn’t know what works for you on a Tuesday, when the day didn’t go to plan. The studies say that how you split your training across the week barely changes how much muscle you build, as long as the work gets done. They don’t know that Wednesday is the night you never make it, or that the only free hour you have starts when the raid ends.
A boss guide in World of Warcraft is right about the boss. It doesn’t know you’re on 200 ms ping, the delay between you and the game, or that you have to be up at six. The guide is still right. The timing has to be yours. Fitness is the same, and it’s where most plans fall apart: not because the science was wrong, but because the plan was written for someone with a different life.
That’s the part we do. When we build a plan, it starts from the days you can count on in a normal week, not your best week. It aims at eighty percent, because eighty percent is what lasts. And when a month goes wrong, we look at what happened the way a scientist would, adjust the plan, and carry on. Almost nobody keeps a plan that assumes they cook every night.
We say which is which as we go: “the research shows”, or “what we see with clients”. When all we have is the research, you get the research. What we see with clients is the part no study can give you, and it’s also the part we’re most careful with, because experience, even a lot of it, is not a study.
What we’ll never tell you
That your results are guaranteed
When you’ll reach your goal
What’s wrong with you, or how to treat it
Which medication to take, or how much
A number we made up
A qualification we don’t have
What another coach does, unless we’ve checked it ourselves
We’re coaches, not doctors. This is general information, not medical advice: if you have a medical condition or an injury, or you take medication, talk to your doctor before you change how you train or eat.