Greg Nuckols: A Better Way to Approach Strength Research

When I see that there’s a topic that the general discussion around it isn’t in as much in depth as I think would be beneficial, then I have a tendency to get obsessed with something for a few months.

Welcome to the BarBend podcast where we talk to top athletes, coaches, influencers and minds from around the world of strength sports. Presented by BarBend.com

In this episode I’m talking to Greg Nuckols, a founder and the head of content of Stronger by Science. Greg is also a record holding raw and drug-free power lifter, which helped rocket him to notability in the strength world. Greg has written for publications like “Men’s Health,” “Bodybuilding.com,” “Muscle and Fitness,” among others.

We’ve also been lucky enough to work with him on some great content over at barbend.com. I might be a little biased on that last one.

In addition, Greg is one of three minds behind the monthly research review, “Monthly Applications in Strength Sport,” or MASS. He also co-hosts The Stronger by Science Podcast with his friend and business partner, Eric Trexler.

Greg’s passion for research is equaled only by his love of lifting heavy things. In this episode, we talk about Greg’s early interest in strength training and how he built a career and business around deep dives into strength research and studies.

That passion is very much focused on making the information actionable and relatable to almost anyone interested in getting stronger. Just a quick reminder, if you’re enjoying the BarBend podcast, make sure to leave a rating and a review in your podcast app of choice.

This helps us stay on track in bringing you the best content possible week after week. If there’s someone you’d absolutely love to hear on a future BarBend podcast episode, let us know in your podcast review. I personally read each and every review, so your suggestions will be seen.

Today on the BarBend podcast, I am sitting down with someone who I’ve really admired in the strength training and especially power lifting communities for a long time. You may have read some of his stuff online before, and that is Greg Nuckols. Greg, thanks so much for joining us today.

Thanks for having me on.

Greg, I first came across you as a powerlifter and fitness writer. You’ve kind of had those dual roles for a while in the fitness industry. How did you first get involved in strength training? How did your place in the community change and grow to the point where you are today?

How I got involved in strength training? I guess I was obsessed with strength from the get-go. I always thought strong people were really, really cool and there are a lot of really strong people in my family.

I remember growing up, some of my family members had a farm. I didn’t grow up on a farm, but I grew up helping out on a farm and I remember being a little kid. My uncles and cousins could lift way heavier hay bales and shit than I could. I was like, “Man, I wish I was as strong as them.”

We burned a wood fire every winter, grew up in the middle of nowhere in the woods. We’d chop down a big tree, sawed it up. After it dried out, we’d split it and burn it. The bigger chunks of log near the base of the tree could be like 200, 300 pounds. I remember the stronger people in my family being able to lift those and I couldn’t.

I had the progressive overload thing going from day one, kind of doing Atlas stone loads, but with chunks of log onto the back of the trailer. I wanted to gradually be able to lift the biggest logs that I could.

Once my parents would let me start actually working out with weights, I was into that from day one.

Initially, it was primarily to get better at sports, and then when I got knocked out of sports due to repeated concussion issues, powerlifting was a perfectly rational thing to get into. One, I was naturally pretty good at it. Two, powerlifting is very much a sport where if you sustain head trauma, you did something wrong. [laughs]

That’s how I got into it. Early on, I guess I’ve been sharing my thoughts about powerlifting since maybe like 2011, 2012 on what was once gregnuckols.com, then became strengththeory and now, strongerbyscience.

I really started that because I would talk my then-girlfriend now-wife’s ear off about powerlifting all the time. She was and still is my training partner, but I think she didn’t want to talk about it as often as I did. She said, “Hey, start a blog to find some people who are as weird and obsessed about this as you are.”

Back then it was just me sharing hot takes. Gradually over time, as I started getting into the literature and science more, it shifted into being much more like a research-focused thing.

Around 2014, 2015, it shifted from being a passion project to more of a business, because I was planning on going and working at a gym after I graduated from college, but that was back in North Carolina.

My wife got a really prestigious internship for journalism in California. Can’t really swing that commute, so we moved out to California. I couldn’t walk into a Gold’s Gym and be like, “Hey, I want to be a trainer, but I could be gone in 12 weeks, when my wife’s internship is over. Give me a job.”

At that point I was lucky, in that the site already had a bit of a following. That’s when I started treating it more like a business. I made the shift more towards scientific content at that point. It’s been a process of growing from there.

Along the way, and then I love that background, by the way. Your inspiration as a young man trying to be country strong. then getting into powerlifting. and now Stronger by Science, what that’s become and the media property it’s become. Super, super interesting evolution.

Along the way, you had some success in the sport of powerlifting. I don’t want to gloss over that, the records you set, and the competitions you excelled in. What are some of your top accomplishments in powerlifting, and how’s training been going recently?

Man, it’s funny. I have held three all-time world records in powerlifting across all federations. I had the total record drug-free, no knee wraps at 220. I had the total record drug-free with knee wraps at 242. I also had the squat record with wraps at 242.

It’s a little bit funny to look back at that, because that was right on the upswing of when raw lifting started getting huge. I want to say I set those records in 2012, 2013. The total record in 220 was 1714. Now there’s guys in the 181 class doing that.

I was fortunate to be good at a time when most people in this sport weren’t that good. [laughs] These days, sport’s crazy. There’s so, so, so many more talented lifters in this now, and just so many more lifters in the sport now than there ever has been.

In terms of my best lifts, with knee wraps I squatted 765, and I’ve lifted 735, which these days are good numbers at 242, but five, six years ago it used to be “Uh, crazy!” The sport’s just changed so much.

Currently training is going well. I took two years pretty easy for grad school. Just between being a full-time grad student and trying to run a couple of businesses full time, didn’t have much time to train, but I’m getting back pretty close to where I was before, and having me coming up in January and hopefully going to set some PRs there.

That’s fantastic. What are some of those number or target goals you have in mind, if you’re willing to share? I know some lifters are totally fine sharing, “Here’s what I want to go for before a competition.” Some lifters, that’s the holy grail that they’ll never let anyone see and they would never admit to shooting for a particular number.

I don’t know which kind of lifter you are.

At this competition I’m going to take what is there. I’m mainly doing it because James Deffinbaugh — he’s the guy that runs the gym that I train at, Spider Strength Gym in Raleigh, North Carolina. He is a pro strongman, and he challenged me at the same meet, Raleigh Ruckus, three years ago. I beat him then, and he’s challenged me to a rematch.

At this meet, as long as my total’s higher than his, I’m happy. [laughs] The numbers I’d be pretty happy with — which I think will be enough to win — is squat and pull something over 7, bench somewhere between 450 and 500. Long-term, I’m less interested in competing now than I used to be.

Now I train for the numbers that I personally want to hit. What my long-term goals are across the board, is I want to squat 750 without wraps, 800 with wraps, front squats 600, bench 500.

I’d really like to deadlift 800 but that feels like a long way away, but at least something over 750. Once I hit those numbers, I’m going to be more or less happy with what I’ve done in powerlifting and would really like to give strongman a shot.

That was my next question. Are there any other strength sports that you feel like you want to tackle? It seems like you already have some competition coming from strongman, some training partners egging you on.

What attracts you about competing in that sport?

Oh man, strongman’s just so sick. It’s an objectively cooler sport than powerlifting. I think it’s a better test of strength, and not so much how good are you at three very specific things.

The thing is, I’m really good at squat bench and deadlift. I’m really not that good at pretty much anything else in the weight room.

It’s because I’ve been training for powerlifting for so long. I feel like you have to have a better base of well-rounded strength to do well in strongman.

You can’t be as hyper-specialized because different competitions will have different lifts or things that you’re being tested on. One competition, you might do overhead for reps. One time, you might do max log. It varies so much you can’t be as hyper-specialized on a few things. Aesthetically, it’s so much cooler.

I like how strongman judging works better, which is, did you move this implement through the range that you were supposed to move it through? Powerlifting judging, I think a lot of the rules don’t make sense. For example, why is there a start command on bench press, like who gives a shit?

If you jump the start command that doesn’t help you lift more. It’s just a way that you can get red lights for something dumb. Another thing, which is somewhat subjective judging-wise, is ramping calls in the deadlift.

A pure hitch is pretty obvious. But if there’s a slight ramping, some people who are really obsessed with the rules might be like, “Oh, this person got away with ramping.” Or maybe you just have a little more contact than normal between your thighs and the bar, and you get a red light for ramping when you probably didn’t.

Strongman doesn’t give a shit. Like if the bar starts on the ground, and you pick it all the way up it counts, which in my mind is what a deadlift should be. That’s a better way to go about it.

In general, I care more about did you lift the weight than did you jump through all of these hoops while lifting the weights? That part of strongman appeals to me more, as well.

That’s certainly something that in the Olympic weightlifting community, we’ve seen the same objections even from seasoned athletes. You have Olympic gold medalists who are advocating for the press out to be removed from the snatch, and clean and jerk, and from the judging credentials there.

There are a lot of hoops in strength sports. The more specialized they become, the more hoops and the more red tape that seems to come up.

Although, in talking to people in the strongman community — Kalle Beck was someone we had on our podcast fairly recently — there are still judging controversies when it comes to strongman. As you get into that sport, and I wish you the best of luck if and when you do, expect some controversies. Which kind of equipment is allowed to be used, which kind of straps, how much tacky on your arms?

In strength sports, if you get a bunch of strong people in the room competing to see who’s best, someone’s going to find some little point to argue about. That’s my theory.

Oh, no, for sure. One of the things that does amuse me about it quite a bit though, is after a meet, it’s usually not the better lifters who are getting upset about that. Some judging calls the difference between someone getting first or second, occasionally they get fired up.

Oftentimes it’s someone who’s placing like seventh or eighth that’s like, “Ah man, I really got screwed on that depth call on squat.” It doesn’t matter. You weren’t going to win anyways.

I’m mostly in it because I like picking up heavy stuff. The competition aspect is a distant secondary for me. If I never competed in anything ever again, I would still be happy just picking up heavy shit the rest of my life.

People do get a little too fired up about competition, in general. Unless it’s something you’re getting paid to do, do it and have fun.

That makes a lot of sense. The cool thing about strongman is you’ll finally get to achieve your boyhood dream of proving you could lift those logs, that you can lift the heaviest logs of anyone in your family.

True. I still don’t think I can.

Part of its just geometry. I’m like 5’10 and some of my cousins are like 6’6, 6’7. I’m partially limited by the size of the log I can physically get my arms around.

Let’s talk a little bit about your career in strength research and writing, which it seems like was something you…I don’t want to say lucked into, because you put a lot of hard work into it. But something that you maybe fell into without thinking, in college, it’s exactly the career you wanted to have.

How has the reception been to Stronger by Science over the last half-decade in its various forms? What are some methods you’ve used to grow that very determined, and, I’d say, very dedicated readership on your site?

Reception has been good, I would say. We’re actually in a pretty interesting niche in the industry, I would say. We straddled the gap between the pure strength sports community and the “evidence-based fitness community.”

Most of the people in the — and I will continue to say, “evidence-based fitness community” — most of them are into either the hypertrophy side of things, or the sports nutrition side of things.

There aren’t that many people in that world who are purely on the strength development side of things. That helped us carve out an interesting little niche.

I’m also fortunate that I was pretty gifted for strength sports. I can write about science and folks who typically may not be that amenable to very science heavy information. Who mostly consume pure strength sports type information and would never wade into PubMed. [inaudible 18:20] our content the time of day because they’re like, “Wow, this guy lifts a lot so maybe there’s something to this whole science thing.”

We were fortunate being able to carve out that little niche, and not be completely alone in it, but have it to ourselves.

In terms of how we’ve gone about growing it, one of the things that has helped us is that we didn’t really go about growing it intentionally, if that makes sense.

As the Internet matures, people start being able to tell more and more the degree to which someone is just genuinely trying to share information and the degree to which someone is being very intentional about playing the online game to eventually separate them from their money.

I’m not an incredibly materialistic person. As long as there’s is a roof over my head, I’m pretty fine with just giving everything away for free. Just like selling as little as I need to. I think that comes across to people.

We don’t have the biggest audience of anyone online, but our audience does trust us a lot and is very loyal. I have an idea of what our readership is, and our viewership is and have a pretty good idea of what that is for several other people who do similar stuff.

When we sell something, and I see how much we make out of that and what our conversions are. I talk to other people about what theirs are. We tend to be able to sell things really well and our audience converts really well.

Largely because we don’t really play that game. It ended up being a good play unintentionally. [laughs]

That’s the best kind of thing to happen for something you’re particularly passionate about.

Was there a moment in the evolution of gregnuckols.com to strengththeory.com to strongerbyscience, was there a particular moment you can look back on and you think to yourself, “Oh this can be a business,” “Oh this can be a livelihood,” or even “This can be more than my personal blog,” anything stick out to you in time?

It’s like that old quote, “Necessity is the mother of invention.” When we moved out to California, I got a job with Juggernaut at the time, as well. I was their content manager.

Chad was absolutely paying me a fair amount for the work that I was doing but it also wasn’t a lot for Southern California. That’s really expensive. My wife wasn’t making too much for her internship either.

It was more of just one of those things where, [laughs] gotta figure out how to turn this into a business so we can feed ourselves regularly and not…We weren’t at risk of lining up living under a bridge, but we were pretty tight financially. It was got to figure out how to make this work.

Make sense. Are there any topics you become especially passionate about over the course of your research-based writing? Are there any topics that you started off with a particular passion for that maybe has changed and you’ve become a little less passionate about as you’ve evolved as a strength research writer?

 I don’t really know that passion is the right word. What I do is I’ll find something that’s interesting to me and obsess about it for about six months and learn about everything about it that I’m interested in knowing.

Like the 80/20 rule where there maybe a little bit more that I could drill down, but I think I’ve pretty much know what I want to know about this thing. Then I say pretty much everything I want to say about it, put it on the site, and then just move on to something else.

For a while, that was biomechanics for the squat bench and deadlift. Going back to the prior topic of giving away as much for free as possible, we have 100 plus-page guides on the site for each of the three main lifts.

That could have been like a 300-page e-book we sold, but we didn’t need to, so fuck it. People can just have it. [laughs]

For a while it was rep range type stuff. I think it’s almost passé at this point, that most people understand that as long as sets are reasonably close to failure, the rep range you train in, as long as you’re doing more than about fiveish reps per set, and as long as you’re not doing 200 reps per set, you get similar hypertrophy.

There’s a ton of research on that now, but when I really got into it, back in 2014, 2015, that was still an unpopular take to have. I’m glad that more research has come out to vindicate that.

Then, for a while, it was the frequency literature. Somewhere in there I got really obsessed for sarcoplasmic hypertrophy. At one point I got really obsessed with muscle memory and myonuclei and myonuclear domain theory.

I wouldn’t say that it was passion about any of those subjects. It wasn’t a deep-seated feeling of, “This is my calling. This is what my life is going to be about,” or anything like that.

For me, the thing that gets me the most interested about something is when it’s a topic that people generally know exists, and when I start looking into it and realize like, “Oh, there’s actually a lot going on here, a lot of research, and a lot of information.”

Maybe it’s the general crowd and the general lifting community is on the right track, but there’s just more information that people seem to be unaware of, or maybe it’s like people seem to be on the wrong track because there is a lot of information they’re unaware of.

Basically, when I see that there’s a topic that the general discussion around it isn’t in as much depth as I think would be beneficial, then I have a tendency to get obsessed with something for a few months.

Take us to your process when you approach a new topic. It could be something like rep ranges for hypertrophy or muscle memory, like you mentioned. How do you start going about sifting through the research, digesting it yourself, and then formatting it in a way to where the readers of Stronger by Science, listeners to your podcast, followers on social media, will begin to digest it?

What is your process like as you intake all the information you can on one of these subjects?

[laughs] I think that we do something that other people don’t. The biggest thing that helps set us apart is that, when I do a literature search, it’s like an actual literature search, and not just punching a term into PubMed and just looking at the first four, five studies that pop up.

Somewhere to what one would do for a systematic review, where you get some keywords together, you search multiple databases, you look at everything that comes up when you punch in those terms, and then filter down to all of the studies that do seem useful and relevant.

It starts with figuring out the correct keywords to run those searches, then pulling up 11,000 results and going through every single one of them, filtering it down to the 50 or 60 studies that really get at the specific topic that I’m interested in. Then actually reading all of those studies, searching the reference lists, getting really, really deep into that subject versus just staying at the surface level for it.

That’ll be the first thing I do. Then, when it comes to writing, generally, I try to at least have some sort of narrative that runs through what I write. I think that that’s something where a lot of the, again, “evidence-based fitness community” goes wrong. They treat their blog post almost as if it’s a journal article, where it’s just like, “Hey, here is information, and I’m going to spit a lot of information in your face and hope you like it.”

Most people just don’t respond well to that, because if they wanted to read something that read like a journal article, they just read journal articles and bypass your blog. It’s more like trying to find a way to frame something.

It could be as simple as, “Here are the things that people believe,” lay it all out and say, “Here seem to be some of the assumptions underpinning this, so let’s go through this, see if those assumptions check out, see what the research actually says.”

We’re not talking like an Old Man and the Sea-esque narrative but at least some sort of general narrative structure so that as people are working their way through the article, they see like, “OK, why should I care about this in the first place?” and then a logical sequence of information building up from the basic stuff to concrete takeaways.

The biggest thing that’s helped with the writing being clear and coming across well to the reader is…Stronger by Science, people think it’s just me, but it’s actually a partnership. It’s both me and my wife. I manage the content side of things. She manages the business and marketing side of things.

Her training is in copy editing. She is also quite knowledgeable about lifting but not as knowledgeable about science and physiology. One of the problems a lot of people run into is they assume that everyone they’re talking to is as big of a nerd as them and knows as much about science and physiology as they do.

When I’m writing, I have a combination of my wife and my 17-year-old self in mind. People who know a fair amount about lifting are pretty passionate about it but don’t have degrees in this stuff.

It helps me be able to pitch stuff where if someone is actually willing to read attentively, they can get all of the information they need in a way that’s understandable without getting four paragraphs in and being like, “Emptor? What the fuck’s that?” [laughs]

That helps a lot, having a clear reader in mind. Also surveying our audience so I know who these people are and where they’re at. If we surveyed our audience and saw that 80 percent of them work in the health and fitness industry and have a strong academic background, we would probably pitch our articles a little bit differently.

But our median reader is someone who is interested and passionate about powerlifting and strength sports but are mostly like engineers or IT workers that don’t have a physiology education or work professionally in the health and fitness industry.

That’s who I’m writing to, people who are generally intelligent but don’t have a graduate degree in this shit. That makes it more palatable for mass market as well.

 I think one way you’ve taken what Stronger by Science is doing and made it even more digestible and met people where they’re at in a way where they can listen to it on their commute, or at work, or just while they’re training is the Stronger by Science podcast which you do with Eric Trexler.

How did that come about? What has surprised you most about dipping your toes — I say dipping your toes — into the podcasting space? It seems like the podcast has taken off at a pretty good clip. What surprised you most about that?

Oh, man. We wanted to start a podcast for a couple reasons. One was that we wanted to be able to get content out more frequently. My writing process is pretty in depth. Between how long it takes to get an article written and a lot of my writing time being devoted to MASS, the research review we do, I was just putting out maybe an article per three months, which is not ideal. [laughs]

It’s not going to keep the people coming back to your site twice a day, for sure.

Part of it was being able to get content out more frequently than quarterly. That was part of it. Another thing was for years now, I would meet people at conferences, or meets, or events, or something like that. They’d say, “Oh, hey, big fan. I’ve been reading your stuff for a while.”

Then after we hang out for 10 minutes, they’ll be like, “Oh, shit. You are nothing like I expected you to be.” I don’t know. I’m just a pretty chill dude. I’m interested in science. I’m interested in strength sports. I don’t know, I’m fairly chill.

I was the class clown growing up. I like cracking jokes, but people from my writing online assume that…I am a big nerd, but that’s not the only part of my personality. They expect me to be a lot more somber and serious. Anyway, that’s not me at all.

Part of it was to be able to get content out more frequently. Part of it was to be able to get our personalities out there a little bit just so people would have an idea of who are these folks behind the stuff that I’m reading.

In terms of what has surprised me the most about the podcast, I wouldn’t say I’ve necessarily been surprised about anything. We took a couple of gambles on it. I mean the typical fitness podcast is an interview show where you have someone on. You ask them questions.

That’s basically what everyone does. It seems to be a formula with which one can obtain success. It’s also the formula that everyone uses.

 It’s what we’re doing right now, yeah.

 I don’t listen to fitness podcasts. Part of that is I don’t listen to many podcasts at all, but the ones I do listen to are ones where I’m going to learn something, but I’m also going to be entertained in the process. I personally generally don’t find fitness interview podcasts all that entertaining.

When I go on podcasts, I try to be kind of high energy and maybe more entertaining than I would otherwise be for that reason. I’m generally not entertained by fitness podcasts.

We wanted to make it slightly different where we have running jokes. We have sarcastic little bits that we do. We also wanted it to be long form, because I feel like a lot of podcasts don’t go into as much depth as they probably could.

We just wanted to make sure we had a format where if we want to talk about something, we can spend two hours drilling down into it, same general thing we do with the articles. The format we use is a lot different.

I thought it was going to do well, because I wanted to make something that I personally would listen to. I was hoping that I wasn’t a super weird outlier. It’s turned out pretty well.

Most of the feedback that we get in terms of like people sharing stuff on Instagram and tagging us in it is like. “Hey, I found your podcast. I didn’t think it would be this funny.”

I accidentally almost killed myself because you cracked a joke while I was in the middle of a set of squats. So, one, fuck you, but two, I’m really enjoying the podcast.”

I’m not surprised that that gamble paid off, but it was a bit of a gamble. I’m glad that it has paid off.

Like many of your listeners, I came for the science and I stayed for the personalities and the inside jokes, 100 percent. I think you all strike a really nice balance there. It’s definitely a podcast too that it builds on itself. It gets better as you listen because you and Eric have this great rapport, and you have this inside jokes.

It gets better as you listen to more episodes. The first one you’re like, “All right, these guys are pretty funny. There is some science here.” Then the next, you’re like, “OK, I get that reference. OK, I get this. This is a running bit.”

By the third one, you’re almost expecting some of these quirks, some of these inside jokes. You’re like, “When are they going to get to that bit? What are they going to do with that?” It does loop you in a little bit. I really enjoy that.

We’re braced for when we get about 40 episodes in and we can never acquire another new listener, because they’re like hobbling in so far in midstream. The podcast is 70 percent inside jokes. They’re like, “What the fuck is going on here?” But for the time being, things are good.

By that point, it’s just a soap opera. You’re going to have characters and plot lines.

Pretty much. I’m not going to spill the beans, but we have a couple bits planned within the next couple of months that for people who have been with us for episode one, we think they’re going to like them. But for people who that’s the first time they listen to us, they’re going to be so incredibly lost. I’m excited for both of those responses. [laughs]

 I’ve done some work on fitness…Sorry, not fitness podcast, which I’m doing right now, but fiction podcast. I always been casted as the villain or narrator. If you need a narrator to do the “On previous episodes of the Stronger by Science Podcast,” or something like that, I’m just saying I’m available. I’m just going to put it out there.

That would be cool. Like one of the Golden Age of radio, like serial shows?

Right or even in Dragonball Z style where the recap from the previous episode, and then the next time on Dragonball Z is longer than the actual episode in the middle, because you’re just giving background and then foreshadowing.

Well, by the time you get to the end of the Cell Saga, you have no idea how you got to that point without a 10-minute recap.

Exactly. I’m just saying. It’s out there. If you want to workshop it, if you need a narrator, if you need someone to give feedback, I’m available, Greg.

All right. We’ll hit you up.

Greg, it’s been a pleasure chatting with you. This is not a super long form podcast, not quite as long form as the Stronger by Science podcast. I do want to take a sec to ask where can folks follow along with what you do, what you produce for Stronger by Science?

Then also where they can follow you personally on social media and just keep up to date with both the competition side of Greg Nuckols but also the writer, nerds/hilarious podcast host side?

Free content strongerbyscience.com. If you want to check out the research review that I put out every month along with Eric Drexler, Eric Helms and Mike Soros you can find that it’s called MASS for Monthly Applications and Strength Support. You can find that at strongerbyscience.comm/mass. You can find the Stronger by Science podcast wherever fine podcasts are found.

Seen as an election is coming up not too long from now, I’m not as active on Facebook as I once was because, god, it turns into a goddamn cesspool. I’m fairly active on Instagram.

That’s where I post lifting videos and pictures of food and my dog. That’s just @gregnuckols.

Awesome. Well, Greg, thanks so much for joining us and we look forward to hearing what comes next from the podcast you’re writing and competitions. Thanks so much.

Thank you