We throw around the words smart and intelligent and genius casually, and I’m not sure that really applies to someone who writes articles about pumping biceps or how to eat Paleo. I don’t think there’s any such thing as genius in strength & conditioning.

When I think genius, I’m thinking names like Isaac Newton, Bernhard Riemann, Srinivasa Ramanujan, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Albert Einstein, Claude Shannon, Kurt Gödel, Alan Turing, Richard Feynman, Douglas Hofstadter.

(If none of these names ring a bell, then you may not understand why my bar for genius is set so high.)

Reading anything written by those names (and plenty of others I’ve left out for brevity) leaves me feeling roughly the intellectual size of an ant scaled against Mt. Everest. At least one valid definition of genius must be that its sheer capability leaves you profoundly aware of your own limitations.

I can’t say I’ve had that sensation from anything or anyone in the world of strength & conditioning. There are no intellects that have left me gasping in awe of their prowess. This may be because of the material we deal with, rather than the personalities.

To be blunt, neither strength & conditioning or nutrition are that challenging to master. Even popping the hood and digging around in the guts, you just don’t find much that’s complicated in the abstract way of math and philosophy.

Exercise science and nutrition are the book report sub-fields of biological science. They’re almost entirely observational—you look at what’s happening and write up a lab report—which means there’s not a whole lot of abstract conceptualization necessary.

A good memory is useful for that kind of thing. Since exercise science is mostly hard facts, the more you can pack in and recall on demand, the “smarter” you are. But that isn’t genius. It’s not even a matter of high intelligence. Storage and recollection of facts is a function of a good memory, nothing more.

Even if we are dealing with super-intellects who have a lock on cellular biology, does that mean anything? Knowing biochemistry in and out right down to the finest resolution is not any indication that you know how a body responds to training.

In discussing living organisms, we have to be careful to avoid reductionist thinking. Bodies are complex systems not easily analyzed by breaking them down into their smallest pieces.

Julian Baggini uses a clever phrasing: “no more than, but not just”. Baggini says that we use the words just and only when we want to trivialize a thing. Creationists say that biologists consider humans to be just animals. Believers in a soul criticize neuroscientists who say that our minds are only a process of our physical brains. We can treat things as what they are without degrading them.

Our bodies are no more than chemical reactions. Take a human body apart and you’ll find nothing but organic molecules made largely from carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. There’s no magic, no animating life-force.

Yet here we are. Simply by the fact that I’m writing this and you’re reading it, it’s clear we aren’t just a soup of organic molecules.

Living organisms are an emergent phenomenon, a higher level of meaning that has importance above and beyond the individual parts, that can’t be expressed by simply knowing how mTOR interacts with p70s6k and FOXO. The pattern of the system-as-a-whole is what matters.

No more than, but not just.

Relative to exercise science, this higher level is what we mean when we talk “in the trenches” knowledge. Prep coaches that dial bodybuilders into contest condition. Powerlifting coaches who know how to get you strong. Strength & conditioning coaches who develop MMA cage-fighters or offensive linemen.

These are examples of get-your-hands-dirty know-how and they don’t require a lick of knowledge about protein synthesis or gene expression. These are mechanics who understand how the car runs, and would be entirely stumped by the mechanical engineering that went into designing it.

Is this genius? It’s certainly a specialized form of knowledge, a trained eye that knows what to look for and how to fix it. But I don’t think it’s genius. There are no deep hard-to-grasp insights, nothing that demands deep abstract thought, no incomprehensible secrets. Most of what’s presented as complicated, inaccessible or difficult in strength or nutrition falls under the umbrella of needless obfuscation, not too different from sham New Age pseudoscience.

At the bottom, we’re just molecules and complex beyond understanding. At the top, the level where everything of interest happens, we’re surprisingly simple.

Where does that leave genius? And more importantly for the purpose of this article, where does it leave the arrogant and the know-it-all?

Once upon a time I’d have phrased this as a conflict between science and practical knowledge. I no longer think that’s the case. There’s a more subtle conflict at work which has to do with an approach to knowledge and learning, rather than the sources you draw upon.

Whether knowledge comes from science or practice, the defining quality is the willingness to learn and the ability to challenge your own sense of certainty. Some people have this—it may be called “open mindedness”, although I think that’s deceptive—and some don’t.

Besides my aforementioned sense of inadequacy next to my list of geniuses, there’s another quality common to all those names: humility. Not so much in the sense of genteel politeness, but in intellectual terms.

A willingness to be wrong. A curiosity that transcends ego or the need to be right. A respect for knowledge, an awareness that our understanding will always be inadequate. The greatest geniuses, the “smartest people who ever lived” if you still think of people that way, were rarely ever smug in their knowledge or arrogant in their certainty.

What gives a strength coach or a nutritionist the right to that self-assuredness? Are your beliefs infallible because you write diet books and hang out on internet forums? Is your favorite way of working out or eating beyond reproach because you are just that smart?

I don’t mean to insult the whole community or say that we’re all idiots, as I’m sometimes prone to do. There are well-educated and even some intelligent people working in “the fitness industry”. This is about perspective.

I realize that having useful insights into biology and perhaps a wider survey knowledge of science and logical thinking can be invaluable. But we aren’t dealing with quantum physics or meta-mathematics. We lift weights. We eat food. We run and jump and pick things up.

Realizing that you will never know it all, that your brain is very likely incapable of truly understanding the hard problems^[1], is both humbling and a relief. There is no point to ego and arrogance when you define knowledge in those terms.

Knowledge is a process, a kind of striving, rather than a state of attainment. You don’t know nearly what you think, and being certain is concrete proof that you are no longer learning.

^[1]Our logical-thinking and reasoning abilities are surprisingly limited, being dependent as they are on the emotional and body-control regions of our brain. Compared to really good logical reasoning devices (aka computers), we’re just plain horrible at even conceptualizing things like complexity or emergence.

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