In 2008, YouTuber Joe Delaney was a teenager just starting his lifting journey. But, by his own admission, he was doing ‘a lot wrong with my training and diet – somehow, it worked’. While he’s since relied much more on science-backed research to shape his fitness approach, at the time Delaney was following more traditional ‘bro science‘ advice.

‘To find out why, let’s do it again,’ Delaney says in his latest video. ‘I went back through my archives and put together a historically accurate reconstruction of my training and diet from 2008.’

He explores why he made so many mistakes, despite approaching his training in good faith. And, ultimately, it still produced results – just not for the reasons he believed at the time.

No Structured Programme

Rather than following a plan with the same exercises week to week, Delaney would often go into the gym not knowing what he was doing until just a few seconds before each exercise. This made tracking progress difficult – he didn’t know how many weekly sets he was doing for each muscle group, or even what weights he was lifting.

‘Only a few of our mistakes really left gains on the table,’ Delaney says. ‘I think the main two for me being the absence of a programme and the inefficiencies of a bro split.’

Excessive Volume and Intensity

While he didn’t follow a structured programme, Delaney did follow a bro split. This often meant performing excessive training volume that he struggled to recover from, though he also mistook that soreness for growth.

Giving the example of a chest workout in which he completed 21 sets targeting his pecs, Delaney highlights how research suggests more sets won’t always make you stronger or bigger, with anything beyond around 12 sets for a single muscle group offering diminishing returns.

And it didn’t stop there. Delaney also took many of those sets to failure, while keeping rest periods between 30 and 60 seconds because he believed more pain would produce more gains. Both approaches proved highly inefficient, making it much harder for him to recover.

Following ‘Bro Science’ Nutrition Rules

Delaney believed in a long list of nutrition rules, including:

• Eating six meals per day
• Consuming 30g of protein with every meal
• Eating carbs before training
• Having protein immediately after training
• Eating one cheat meal every week to ‘shock’ the metabolism
• Avoiding carbs at night because they were more likely to be stored as fat
• Eating only ‘clean’ foods
• Eating cottage cheese before bed because casein is slow digesting

Despite that, some of those rules are actually helpful – it’s just the reasoning behind them that doesn’t quite add up.

‘What becomes apparent when looking at these is that it’s actually quite a good guide for building muscle and staying lean. The logic might be pure insanity, but at worst, many of these are just unnecessary and some actively helpful,’ he says.

Even though much of Delaney’s logic was flawed, he still made progress. Lifting heavy, training hard and eating well all improved his strength and physique, and the experience has continued to shape his training as he’s gained more knowledge over the past 18 years.

‘A lot of the stuff we did fell into the category of right thing, wrong reason, so it was harmless enough,’ he adds. ‘Part of the answer as to why we still made gains was the diet. It may have been extremely heavy on the bro science and a lot of unnecessary effort, but even if I was doing a lot of things for the wrong reasons, they still turned out to be beneficial.’

For example, aiming for six meals a day under the assumption that it would boost his metabolism is incorrect, but it ensured his daily protein intake reached around 180g. Similarly, eating clean because he believed junk food would be stored as body fat more easily – rather than excess calories being the real issue – was the wrong reasoning. But the practical outcome was still better health, improved recovery, higher-quality training and easier body composition management.

And his main takeaway?

‘You can get away with a lot if you actually just eat well and train hard consistently.’

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