Iron Culture
Iron Culture was started by Eric Helms and Omar Isuf as a means of exploring the world of physical culture and attempting to distill a unified philosophy of lifting and to help listeners find greater meaning from the iron. The lifting community has become fractured over the last ~70 years and this Podcast will attempt to explore the fundamental threads that unite these different tribes. The Podcast focuses on dispensing practical, useful information to the listener, bouncing from history, to philosophy, to contemporary lifting culture issues, to science. This can range from teaching the audience about lifting, programming, nutrition, supplements/PEDs and the history of lifting culture. The format includes casual conversations between the two hosts on a variety of topics, discussions with a panel of experts and interviews with authoritative figures in the lifting community.
Show episodes
The classic Iron Culture duo hosts this week’s episode to discuss exercise variety. How have the views on this topic changed over the years and why? First, we need to understand how and when bodybuilding separated from strength sport, equipment availability changes over time, and how these factors impacted the percepti
The Erics are back, and this time, they work through a mental model of how training volume, or rather, the training dose changes over time. With a rank novice, a single set to failure done once per week will typically produce continued adaptation, and they won’t plateau for 1-2 years! However, if you take an advanced s
The trio is back to discuss a classic Iron Culture topic: how much does increasing muscle mass contribute to strength? But, before we can answer how much, we must acknowledge that some in the scientific community doubt whether hypertrophy contributes to strength at all! What is the source of this skepticism and how do
PhD candidate Ryan Anthony joins the Erics on Iron Culture to discuss the fishy business of Omega-3 supplementation. Ryan is in the final years of his PhD research at the University of Wollongong in Australia, investigating the role of omega-3 fatty acids in reducing muscle fatigue and soreness following exercise. His
Walter Cariazo joins Omar and Eric Helms on Iron Culture to discuss his decade-long journey in powerlifting. He’s won the 93kg National Championship twice and the 105kg National Championship once in Canada and has had the opportunity to represent Canada twice at the IPF World Championship, most recently in Lithuania in
A long lifting career comes with plenty of ups and downs, so we’re accustomed to hearing stories about setbacks, comebacks, and perseverance from our favorite lifters. These setbacks can take many forms, but Jared Maynard’s extraordinary story exists in a league of its own. Over the course of a few short weeks, a rare
