There is a phrase that has become a kind of modern religion: follow the science. Say it and the conversation stops. Debate ends. Whoever invokes it holds the moral high ground, and anyone who questions them risks being labelled a crank, a contrarian, or worse. Trust the experts. Trust the institutions. Trust the consensus.
I have never been able to do that. Not because I am anti-science. Quite the opposite. My problem is that I have read enough history to know what happens when people stop questioning the consensus and simply comply with it. The results are not pretty. Sometimes they are catastrophic.
This article is not an attack on science. Science as a method (observe, hypothesize, test, revise) is the best tool we have for understanding the world. But science as an institution, as a body of current consensus, as a collection of expert opinions backed by official bodies? That is a different thing entirely. That version of science has been spectacularly, sometimes fatally, wrong. Repeatedly. Throughout history.
And it is happening in kettlebell training too. More on that shortly.
TLDR: The scientific consensus has been catastrophically wrong before — lobotomies won a Nobel Prize, bloodletting lasted 3,000 years, thalidomide was marketed in 46 countries untested on pregnant women, opioids killed 400,000 people with FDA approval, and low-fat guidelines made us fatter. The same pattern plays out in kettlebell training: the swing-is-only-a-hip-hinge dogma, dismissing the T-Rex swing, claiming kettlebells can’t build muscle, and rejecting mind-muscle connection — all positions later proven wrong or reversed. The fix isn’t distrust. It’s to never stop questioning — including us.
The Lobotomy Won a Nobel Prize
Let us start with one of the most jarring examples in the history of medicine.
In 1935, Portuguese neurologist António Egas Moniz introduced the prefrontal lobotomy, a procedure that severed connections in the brain’s frontal lobes, as a treatment for severe mental illness including schizophrenia, depression, and anxiety. The medical establishment embraced it. Hospitals adopted it. Psychiatrists championed it.
In 1949, Moniz was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine “for his discovery of the therapeutic value of leucotomy in certain psychoses.” The most prestigious scientific prize in the world, handed to a man for a procedure that would later be understood as one of the most harmful ever performed on human beings.
In the United States alone, lobotomies increased from approximately 500 per year in 1946 to 5,000 in 1949, the same year Moniz received his Nobel. Tens of thousands of procedures were performed worldwide across the 1940s and 1950s. Patients, many institutionalised without any ability to consent, were left emotionally flat, cognitively diminished, and stripped of their personality. The procedure was used not only on those with severe psychiatric illness but on problem children, rebellious adolescents, and political opponents.
Fellow Nobel laureate Torsten Wiesel later described Moniz’s 1949 prize as “a terrible mistake that caused permanent damage to thousands of patients.”
The procedure fell out of favour only when antipsychotic medications arrived in the mid-1950s. Not because the scientific establishment suddenly developed a conscience, but because something more effective came along. The consensus had been wrong for two decades. Nobel Prize and all.
Bloodletting: 3,000 Years of Confident, Lethal Medicine
If the lobotomy makes you uncomfortable, consider that bloodletting, the deliberate removal of blood from a patient to treat illness, was the most common medical practice performed by surgeons from antiquity until the late 19th century, a span of over 2,000 years. It was not fringe medicine. It was not folk remedy. It was mainstream, expert-endorsed, institutionally supported treatment for virtually every ailment imaginable: fever, pneumonia, asthma, cancer, epilepsy, gout, insanity.
William Harvey disproved the theoretical basis of bloodletting in 1628. Pierre Charles Alexandre Louis demonstrated statistically in the 1830s that it did not work. Yet as late as 1942, a major medical textbook still listed bloodletting as a treatment for pneumonia.
Three thousand years of confident, expert-endorsed practice. Killing patients the entire time.
As the British Columbia Medical Journal observed, bloodletting persisted not because of evidence, but because of the dynamic interaction of social, economic, and institutional forces that kept physicians resistant to abandoning therapies validated by tradition and their own anecdotal experience, even when the numbers told a different story.
Sound familiar?
Thalidomide: Marketed in 46 Countries Without Being Tested on Pregnant Women
In the late 1950s, the West German pharmaceutical company Chemie Grünenthal introduced thalidomide as a sedative and treatment for morning sickness. It was introduced without having been tested on pregnant women. It was considered safe. It was marketed in 46 countries under at least 37 different trade names.
Between 1957 and 1962, thalidomide caused severe birth defects in more than 10,000 children, described by researchers as “the biggest anthropogenic medical disaster ever.” Limbs missing or truncated. Heart, eye, and urinary defects. Approximately 40 percent of affected infants died at or shortly after birth.
The United States was largely spared only because one FDA pharmacologist, Frances Oldham Kelsey, refused to approve the drug despite intense commercial pressure. She was not satisfied the evidence of safety was adequate. She was a lone voice asking questions the consensus had stopped asking. She was right. Everyone else was wrong.
The thalidomide disaster directly created the modern drug approval framework. Drugs intended for human use could no longer be approved purely on the basis of animal testing, and substances marketed to pregnant people had to provide evidence of safety in pregnancy. These regulations did not exist before the disaster. The consensus had not demanded them.
The Opioid Crisis: Science, Institutions, and Half a Million Deaths
This one is recent enough that many readers will have lived through it, or lost someone to it.
In the 1980s and early 1990s, pain specialists began advocating that opioids were safe for long-term use in non-cancer chronic pain. A widely cited 1986 study involving only 38 patients argued the case. The prevailing view became that opioids were addictive only when used recreationally, not when prescribed to treat pain.
Purdue Pharma launched OxyContin in 1995 after FDA approval, marketing it as a less-addictive opioid. They deployed a 600-person sales force, paid physicians to speak at conferences, and promoted claims to doctors that fewer than one percent of patients became addicted. Those claims were false, and Purdue knew they were false.
The American Pain Society proposed that pain be measured as the “fifth vital sign.” Medical schools taught it. Regulators endorsed it. Doctors who expressed concern about addiction were dismissed as having “opiophobia,” a term coined by Purdue Pharma itself, which later found its way into World Health Organization guidelines.
Dr. Russell Portenoy, one of the most prominent voices promoting opioid safety, later admitted: “I gave innumerable lectures in the late 1980s and ’90s about addiction that weren’t true.”
From 1999 to 2017, almost 400,000 people died from opioid overdoses. In 2007, Purdue paid over $630 million in fines for misrepresenting OxyContin’s addictive properties. The science had been bought. The institutions had followed. The patients had paid with their lives.
Fat Is Bad: The 40-Year Dietary Experiment Nobody Consented To
In January 1977, the US Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs published Dietary Goals for the United States, recommending that Americans reduce fat intake and replace it with carbohydrates. The 1980 Dietary Guidelines for Americans followed. Low-fat became official policy.
There was just one problem. A systematic review published in the journal Open Heart found that the randomised controlled trial evidence available at the time did not support the introduction of those guidelines. The recommendations were not evidence-based. They were made anyway, by people with good intentions, under institutional pressure to act.
When Americans cut fat, they replaced it with refined carbohydrates and sugar. Food manufacturers flooded supermarkets with low-fat products loaded with sugar to compensate for lost flavour. The focus on reducing total fat resulted in increased consumption of refined carbohydrates and added sugars, and avoidance of nutrient-dense foods rich in healthy unsaturated fats.
Philip Handler, president of the National Academy of Sciences in 1980, called the entire undertaking “a vast nutritional experiment.” The experiment ran for four decades. Nobody asked for your consent. You were enrolled automatically by trusting the guidelines.
Other Consensus Failures Worth Knowing
The five cases above are the most thoroughly documented, but they are far from alone. Here is a brief summary of other instances where the scientific or medical consensus was later shown to be wrong, all verified and worth your own further reading:
Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT): From the 1960s onward, HRT was widely prescribed to postmenopausal women and promoted as beneficial for heart health. In 2002, the Women’s Health Initiative trial was halted early after data showed that combination HRT increased risks of cardiovascular disease, stroke, and breast cancer in women over 60. Prescriptions collapsed overnight. The full picture is more nuanced; risk depends heavily on age, type of HRT, and individual health history. But for decades millions of women were prescribed a treatment whose risks were significantly understated. Notably, in November 2025, the FDA reversed its own earlier black box warnings for HRT, acknowledging that the original risks had been overstated for younger, healthy women. The science keeps moving. That is the point.
Margarine over butter: For decades, health authorities told us to replace butter with margarine because saturated fat was the enemy. The problem: making liquid vegetable oil solid required hydrogenation, which produced trans fats. Harvard Health later concluded there was never any good evidence that switching from butter to margarine reduced heart attack risk. The trans fats in margarine turned out to raise bad cholesterol and lower good cholesterol simultaneously, a double hit worse than the saturated fat in butter. The FDA banned partially hydrogenated oils from the food supply in 2015. The recommended “healthy” swap had been causing harm for decades.
Routine tonsillectomies: Tonsillectomy was the most frequently performed surgical procedure in the United States between 1915 and the 1960s, routinely recommended for children with recurrent sore throats based on the theory that tonsils were “portals of infection.” In a striking 1934 New York study, when 1,000 schoolchildren were examined in successive rounds by different physicians, 94% had either already had or been recommended for the operation. There was no meaningful evidence base driving this. In 1978, the National Institutes of Health convened a panel of experts who concluded there was insufficient evidence that the benefits of a preventive tonsillectomy outweighed its surgical risks. Guidelines tightened significantly after that. The operation is still performed when genuinely warranted, but the era of routine removal is recognised as a consensus built on theory rather than evidence.
Recovered memory therapy: During the 1980s and early 1990s, a therapeutic practice emerged in which therapists helped patients “recover” suppressed memories of childhood trauma, often abuse. The approach was widely adopted and institutionally endorsed. A peer-reviewed study published in PMC by Otgaar et al. confirmed that the belief in recovered memories was endemic in therapeutic circles in the 1990s, and that techniques including hypnosis, guided imagery, and repeated suggestive questioning were being used by large numbers of practitioners. Research through the mid-1990s demonstrated these techniques were capable of implanting false memories rather than recovering real ones — with one foundational study finding that 25% of participants developed detailed “memories” of childhood events that had never occurred. Thousands of families were torn apart by accusations based on memories manufactured in therapy. The practice is now scientifically discredited and the American Psychological Association advises therapists to avoid preconceptions about abuse and to seek corroborating evidence.
Smoking endorsed by doctors: From the 1930s through the early 1950s, cigarette advertisements ran regularly in the Journal of the American Medical Association and the New England Journal of Medicine, with tobacco companies using the image of physicians to reassure the public their products were safe. The ads used actors in white coats rather than real doctors, but the medical journals accepted the revenue and the profession’s credibility was used to sell the product regardless. RJ Reynolds famously ran a campaign claiming “More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette” — a claim generated by handing free cartons to doctors at medical conferences and then asking what brand they smoked. A peer-reviewed analysis confirmed tobacco companies targeted physicians as a sales force to suppress public fears, using advertising revenue to the journals themselves as leverage against institutional opposition. JAMA did not ban tobacco advertising until 1953. The science linking smoking to lung cancer existed long before the public was told — and was actively suppressed for decades through manufactured “controversy.”
Now Let’s Talk About Kettlebells
You might be thinking: those are extreme cases. Medical disasters. Institutional failures on a massive scale. Surely the fitness world is different. Surely the kettlebell community, with its experienced coaches, its certifications, its decades of practice, has things figured out.
Let me tell you two stories.
The Swing Is a Hip Hinge. End of Discussion. Except…
For years, and still today if you ask most AI tools or search engines, the kettlebell swing has been classified as a hip hinge, not a squat. The Hardstyle community enforced this position aggressively. If your swing had significant knee flexion, more upright torso, and forward knee travel, you were doing it wrong. This was doctrine, not debate.
I was one of the coaches who argued otherwise, and the response was dismissal and hostility. The big names had spoken. The certifications had codified it. That was enough for most people. Years later, I am told it still comes up in certain circles — my name, my position, the argument I made. I find that telling. The people who were right rarely spend time relitigating old debates. The people who were wrong, or who defended something that turned out to be wrong, often do.
But let us actually examine what a hip hinge is, because the word itself tells you something important.
A true hip hinge is a stiff-legged hip hinge. The knees do not move. That is why it is called stiff-legged. The hips flex and extend. One joint. That is the definition.
The moment we introduce meaningful knee flexion, as in a conventional deadlift, we have already departed from a strict hip hinge. We are now loading two joints: hip and knee. The fitness world has continued calling this a hip hinge by convention, but anatomically, the definition has already been stretched.
Now step further and introduce a third joint: the ankle. When the knees track forward, the calves load, the torso stays more upright, and dorsiflexion occurs at the ankle, we have three joints working in a coordinated pattern. At that point, the movement is not a hip hinge in any meaningful anatomical sense. It is a squat pattern — specifically, a shallow or quarter squat.
A squat is not defined by how far down you go. Depth determines what kind of squat it is:
- Shallow squat
- Quarter squat
- Parallel squat
- Deep squat
The argument “it’s not a squat because it doesn’t go all the way down” is like saying a half-press is not a pressing movement because the arm did not fully extend. The pattern is defined by joint involvement and direction of load, not by range of motion. Once the ankle is loading, the knees are coming forward, and the torso is staying more upright, that is a squat pattern at a shallow depth. Calling it a hip hinge at that point is a naming convenience, not an anatomical description.
StrongFirst’s own website now features an article titled “Is That a Squat or a Hinge?”, published in 2021, which acknowledges that what they now call the “athletic hinge” maps directly onto what published research calls the “squat style” swing: defined as involving increased range of motion at the ankles and knees, resembling a quarter squat. The same article recommends this pattern as the preferred choice for general athletic training purposes.
The movement I advocated for years now has a new name: the athletic hip hinge. The biomechanics did not change. The label did. And because the established voices now endorse it, the community has accepted it without pause, without acknowledging that coaches who argued for this pattern years earlier were correct. The community that laughed is now nodding along because the big boys said so.
This is the same pattern we saw with bloodletting, with dietary fat, with opioids. The consensus hardened. Questioning it was socially costly. Then reality caught up, and instead of acknowledging the shift, the establishment simply rebranded.
The T-Rex Swing Is Wrong. Just Swing.
The squat swing is not the only example. Consider the T-Rex swing — a variation where the elbows are pulled back during the movement, increasing engagement of the lats and rear deltoids. A Hardstyle instructor once dismissed it publicly with the words: “The kettlebell is an instrument meant to be SWUNG.” The implication being that pulling the elbows back is simply wrong, and anyone doing it needs to be corrected.
But the T-Rex swing is not wrong. It is different. It has a different muscular target. It serves a different training goal. Whether it is right for you depends entirely on what you are trying to achieve and whether you are performing it safely. That is the only question that matters.
This is the problem with Hardstyle as a system — not the methodology itself, which is genuinely excellent and has real value, but the dogma that accompanies it. Hardstyle is a legitimate and powerful approach to kettlebell training. The problem is that it has a tendency to present one way as the only way, and to dismiss variations not as different tools for different purposes, but as mistakes made by people who have not yet learned enough. That is not coaching. That is gatekeeping. And it does a disservice to practitioners who might benefit from a broader toolkit.
You Cannot Build Muscle with Kettlebells
The second piece of received wisdom I have pushed back against for years: kettlebells cannot build muscle. They are for conditioning, fat loss, and endurance. Not hypertrophy. If you want size, pick up a barbell. Kettlebells are the wrong tool.
This argument has always frustrated me because it ignores something fundamental: a kettlebell is a weight. The science on what drives muscle growth is well established. A peer-reviewed analysis in PMC confirms that mechanical tension through progressive overload is the primary driver of skeletal muscle hypertrophy, and that this principle applies across a wide range of loading paradigms. The biology does not care whether the implement is a kettlebell, a barbell, a dumbbell, or a rock. Muscle tissue responds to load, tension, volume, and progressive challenge. The tool is irrelevant. What matters is how you apply it: the right exercises, the right rep ranges, the right volume, the right load.
A kettlebell pressed overhead, squatted with, or deadlifted under sufficient load produces the same mechanical stimulus as any other implement. The reason people say kettlebells cannot build muscle is usually because they are picturing light swings for high reps — which is a conditioning stimulus, not a hypertrophy stimulus. That is a programming problem, not a kettlebell problem. Apply hypertrophy principles to kettlebell training and you get hypertrophy. The claim that you cannot is not science. It is dogma dressed up as expertise.
Mind-Muscle Connection Does Not Exist. Just Do It.
Over a decade ago I argued for the importance of mind-muscle connection in training — the deliberate, conscious focus on the target muscle during an exercise. The response from prominent voices in the fitness community was dismissal. The position being that you just perform the movement and that is enough. Thinking about a muscle while training it was considered unnecessary, overcomplicated, or simply nonsense.
The research disagrees. A peer-reviewed study published in PubMed found that resistance-trained individuals could measurably increase activation of a specific muscle — verified by EMG — simply by consciously focusing on it during exercise, at loads up to 60% of one-rep maximum. A separate analysis published in the Strength and Conditioning Journal by Schoenfeld and Contreras confirmed that an internal attentional focus — deliberately thinking about the target muscle — produced greater activation of that muscle across multiple exercises and muscle groups. This is not speculation. It is measurable, repeatable, and documented in EMG data.
The people who said “just do it” were not drawing on evidence. They were drawing on habit and the authority that comes with a high position in a community. That is a different thing entirely. And it is exactly the same mechanism that kept bloodletting in textbooks three hundred years after it was disproved.
The Pattern Is Always the Same
Look across every example in this article and you will see the same shape repeat itself.
A practice or belief becomes established. Institutions endorse it. Experts defend it. Questioning it becomes socially costly; you are labelled ignorant, dangerous, or simply wrong. The consensus hardens. Evidence that contradicts it is ignored, explained away, or suppressed. And then, eventually, the consensus collapses. Often not because the institution changed its mind voluntarily, but because reality became impossible to ignore any longer.
The common thread is not malice. It is certainty. Certainty that stops asking questions. Certainty that mistakes institutional authority for truth. Certainty that confuses “this is what we currently believe” with “this is how things are.”
It happens in medicine. It happens in nutrition. It happens in psychiatry. It happens in the kettlebell world. It is happening right now, in fields and practices we have not yet identified, because that is how it always works.
This Is Not About Being Right
I want to be precise about what this article is and is not.
It is not a victory lap. It is not a catalogue of people who were wrong so that anyone can feel superior. It is not an argument that you should distrust medicine, science, or expertise. Those things have also saved countless lives and reduced immeasurable suffering.
What it is, is a call to a different way of engaging with information, any information, from any source, including this one.
The philosophy I have applied throughout my career, in kettlebell coaching, in building IKU, in everything I have published and taught, is straightforward: question everything. Not cynically. Not reflexively. Genuinely. Ask why. Look for the evidence behind the claim. Understand the incentives of whoever is making it. Experiment. Test it against your own experience and your own body. And remain willing to revise your view when better information arrives.
That means not blindly following mainstream fitness media. Not blindly following the big-name kettlebell certifications. Not blindly following whatever AI tells you about movement patterns. And not blindly following me.
The lobotomy had a Nobel Prize. Bloodletting had two thousand years of expert consensus. OxyContin had FDA approval and a 600-person sales force backed by medical school partnerships. The low-fat diet had government guidelines and four decades of institutional momentum. The Hardstyle swing doctrine had the most respected names in kettlebell training enforcing it, and now AI systems repeat it by default, because they learned from the same consensus.
None of that settled the question of what was true.
Only evidence, time, and the willingness to keep asking — even when it is uncomfortable, even when the room turns against you — can do that.
Always do your own research. Verify. Experiment. Do not take anyone’s word for it without checking. And that includes ours.
