Science vs. vibes: Viral beef between Canadian bodybuilding coaches incites battle of age-old rival archetype

By now you've likely seen footage of Mike Van Wyck, the Canadian bodybuilding coach, whacking Jeff Nippard, a fellow trainer and certified internet celebrity, in the throat, and flinging him to the ground during a recent dust-up at a Burlington, Ont., gym.

If you don't know these guys, and haven't seen the video, maybe your date of birth puts you outside their target demographic. But if you know a young person that's into fitness, they can fill you in about how a disagreement over training philosophies resulted in an assault charge for Van Wyck, who put his massive right hand on Nippard's neck while cameras rolled.

Van Wyck, who once worked as Drake's bodyguard, has 287,000 Instagram followers and a straightforward philosophy. He doesn't need advanced degrees or a hard drive full of research papers; he has a PhD in pumping iron, and the rippling physique to prove his methods work. At six feet tall, he claims to weigh just over 300 pounds — almost all of it muscle.

Nippard, meanwhile, has built an expansive online following (2.1 million Instagram followers and 5.8 million YouTube subscribers) as a steroid-free expert on the science of building muscle. Training hard is good, but Nippard, who stands five-foot-five and weighs 180 pounds, believes training smarter is better. He reads all studies so his trainees don't have to. They just benefit from his expertise.

So if you're wondering how a beef between two Canadian bodybuilding coaches made mainstream headlines, the answer is in those details. Both men have audiences; Nippard in particular. News follows the numbers, so a dogfight between popular online figures is guaranteed traffic to your website.

More fundamentally, it's a showdown between age-old rival archetypes — jocks