Why You Shouldn’t Take Advice From Bodybuilders With Great Genetics

There are an increasing amount of bodybuilders with great genetics who are now coaches.

They are often referred to as gurus, and some were even legendary bodybuilders themselves.

A handful were even Mr. Olympia contenders, or champions themselves.

But should we take bodybuilding advice from them?

These are the reasons why you shouldn't take advice from bodybuilders with great genetics.

Coaches With Phenomenal Genetics

Gurus and coaches who are former (or current) professional bodybuilders with great genetics are hyper-responders to anabolics, and bodybuilding in general.

Believe it or not, these guys actually don't know what they're talking about most of the time.

First of all, I have no biases here.

I have no motivation financially to try and convince you guys to use my services, because I don't do coaching.

I don't have the time, nor do I really want to, to be honest.

I'm just telling you what I would do if I was just starting out seriously in bodybuilding, and what I would avoid.

Based on my experience, I've noticed that a lot of former elite bodybuilders with great genetics have started to throw their hats into the coaching scene to make money after their retirement from the stage.

Once they retire, they have to find means of making money.

For a lot of those guys, their means of making money is coaching.

This is fine for some guys, but the problem with this is when you have guys who are hyper-responders trying to coach average joes.

The elite hyper-responder bodybuilders are so used to having a coach themselves telling them what to do, that they never had to get deep into research to figure out how to maximize their physique because they just responded perfectly to everything.

A relevant example are guys with hair loss prevention advice.

Do you have any guys who know a lot about preventing hair loss that aren't experiencing hair loss?

Typically, no.

Because they have no reason to do research in the first place because it's not a practical use of their time in real life, and they already have that issue resolved.

Gurus Who Don't Know What They're Talking About

If you go listen to elite bodybuilders in the 90s talk about their performance enhancing drug cycles, you'll quickly start to notice how little these guys actually knew about the drugs they were putting in their bodies relative to what you would expect.

Tom Platz did a video where he actually interviewed a bunch of top bodybuilders in the 90s.

It featured bodybuilders with great genetics at the Olympia level, and it was anonymous, even though you can tell who they were based on their voices, and you can see through the pixelations.

These guys were talking openly about what they take, and half of them didn't even seem to know what they were talking about when it comes to anabolics, pharmacology, and bodybuilding, in general.

If you understand bodybuilding pharmacology, it makes you really question, “Can I really take advice from bodybuilders with great genetics?”

Back then, there was no internet that you could just reference for this stuff, so a lot of these guys just relied on their genetics.

It worked for them because they didn't need that top 0.01% of knowledge, and they still did amazing and looked great.

Now, these retired bodybuilders are coaches trying to apply their knowledge in a hyper-response capacity, where they knew only very rudimentary concepts and still looked good, to guys who have average or subpar genetics, and expect the same result, and it just never translates.

For example, I've heard guys who are current coaches, telling guys to use Arimidex and Letrozole in their peak week to dry out.

These are two completely identical drugs in their mechanism of action.

If you have crashed you're E2 to zero, does adding Letro in really contribute to anything?

No, you're just hindering the guys' health for no reason.

You have these guys who are highly-acclaimed IFBB pros giving out protocols that just make absolutely no sense.

To me, the way they go about giving protocols out is the equivalent of them taking whatever they randomly took when they were IFBB pros, which for them still equated to amazing results because they never had to research how stuff really works.

Here's another example.

Kevin Levrone talking about his nationals diet in '91.

Levrone talked about how he'd go to 7-Eleven and get hotdogs with fake cheese on it, or go to McDonald's and eat everything on the menu, but at the end of the day, still got shredded to the bone and won his pro card.

This is a diet model that nobody would succeed with except him.

I'm not saying Kevin Levrone doesn't know what he's talking about.

But would you really want to take advice from a guy who could do that and never had to research into intricate blood-sugar management, how to go about using each drug correctly, why you shouldn't combine certain compounds with others, and all of the other elaborate concepts that come into contest preparation?

Probably not.

Kevin Levrone was such a hyper-responder, he could eat cake every day and still win shows.

How To Choose The Best Bodybuilding Coach

In bodybuilding, the coaches who know the most are actually typically the guys with horrible genetics that still developed good competitive physiques, or have done so with their clients consistently.

Those are the guys you want to listen to.

I know that sounds ridiculous.

I used to think, “Why would somebody listen to a guy who's fat and looks terrible?”

The reason is that these guys are typically the ones who actually have the incentive to learn, and are the individuals who went deep into research, and are more knowledgeable because they are the bodybuilders who couldn't develop insane physiques eating cake every day and popping random Winny tabs every few days.

Go find a coach who took somebody who has crappy genetics and made them a good bodybuilder, not a coach who took a great bodybuilder and made him a great bodybuilder because he hasn't actually done anything.

These coaches who piggyback off the success of bodybuilders with great genetics can literally tell them to do anything and they will still hyper-respond.

There are a handful of those good bodybuilding coaches out there.

I don't want to name names, but just be wary about coaches handing out dangerous protocols.

The funny thing is that a lot of these guys are critical of other guys' dangerous protocols, when they themselves don't even know what they're talking about.

Steer away from the gurus who work only exclusively with genetic phenoms, or are genetic phenoms themselves.

Those are the guys who also had coaches take them under their wing and never needed to do any research for themselves.

They never went out of their way to look at clinical data, or research in general, because literally everything seemed to work for them.

Work With Credible Coaches With A Track Record

Hopefully, that helps you narrow down your search.

I know, it's not extremely helpful that I don't have a list of coaches to refer to.

But honestly, I don't keep up 100% with who's who in the community right now.

I just see random videos popping up on YouTube, and once in a while I'll listen in on the conversations between bodybuilding gurus, and sometimes the stuff is just completely nonsensical.

You should be wary of bodybuilding gurus who on the outside seem to know what they're talking about because their physiques are better than everyone else, and had great records in the IFBB to back them up.

But in practical application, they typically have no idea how to work with guys who have bad genetics, unlike theirs, where they personally have low levels of Myostatin and hyper-respond to eating cheeseburgers all day.

Again, don't take bodybuilding advice from bodybuilders with great genetics.

Work with guys who have a tried-and-true record of bringing very average guys to a fairly high-level, that's my suggestion.