I want to give my comrades advice and help the swoletariat grow. This isn’t just about muscle gain, but cardiovascular health, diet, nutrition, and whatever weird shit your body may be doing.
If I don’t know it maybe I can help you figure it out.
If you’re morbidly obese (130 kgs) and want to loose weight, what is the best way of doing it realistically?
The human body evolved to store energy to survive periods of scarcity and it will fight you if you try to loose that storage deliberately. Is there a way to trick your body into letting go of all the fat?
Yes and no. I’m sure you’ve heard the calories-in-calories-out thing, and its a little more complex than that. Before I continue, any large weight-loss is best done with a doctor’s guidance.
I want to start by saying most people have tried dieting/exercising and found they lost a few pounds, stopped losing weight, then regained it and got discouraged. This happens a lot. Let’s look over a few details: When one starts dieting, they’ll quickly see a lower number on the scale simply because less mass is in their digestive tract. Exercise (depending on the activity) can see a gain in muscle mass or blood volume. People usually underestimate their caloric intake and over estimate their expenditure.
This cycle is really common. In some cases the regimen was working and they got discouraged by a scale. In other cases, the regimen simply put them and their normal maintenance calories because they were over-budget before starting.
The solution to this conundrum is simple: stick with it. If your progress halts, cut some more calories from your diet and proceed. Don’t worry too much about the scale, focus more on how you feel. Monitor that your activity level doesn’t decrease and calorie intake doesn’t increase.
Something really very helpful is to write down each caloric value before you eat. Every single thing, even the 5 calories of oil in a cup of black coffee. Add it up and keep track each day.
As an example of how knowledgeable I am: I’ve been cutting fat and gaining muscle through diet and exercise, and recently found my weight loss slowed and I started getting runny noses and sneezing. I know this was due to low glutathione resulting from too much exertion. Basically the oxidization from exercise was outpacing my liver’s ability to make glutathione. So I started taking N-Acetyl-Cysteine, the protein precursor to glutathione. I feel much better and the weightloss has resumed.
Yes this means I’m not eating enough calories, no I won’t change that, no you should not undereat. Undereating causes your body to scavenge proteins from both your skeletal muscles and organ muscles, including your heart.
Yes this means I’m not eating enough calories, no I won’t change that, no you should not undereat.
Uhh, what? What do you mean by undereat then? Also how are people supposed to lose weight if you don’t do that?
I mean in excess. A caloric deficit is necessary for weightloss, but to this degree may be unhealthy. If I’m at the point where I need exogenous N-Acetyl-Cysteine I’m likely pushing myself a bit farther than one should.
what’s a minimum caloric intake that won’t cause my body to scavenge proteins from my heart :ohnoes:
Weird shit my body may be doing: why does my hand hurt right where my thumb joins my palm and index finger?
I meant to start doing some pushups and pull ups this week but this injury appeared and I can’t really support my weight on this hand/wrist right now (I’ll probably just do situps instead). Its not like a broken bone pain where it’s constant, its only when I apply pressure with it (holding something tightly or lifting something), stretch it, or put weight on it. I’m a bit confused because it might just be from doing some work last week (after being a neet for the whole pandemic) but my other hand isnt hurting like that despite being my dominant hand and the one I was more likely to be lifting and sanding and carrying things with.
I have this almost exact issue with my left hand. Happens when I grip something like a bar with my thumb around it. It I don’t wrap my thumb around and only grip with my fingers it doesn’t hurt. It’s always been like this. I never had it checked out but I think the muscles and nerves formed a little weird so pressure on that spot compresses the nerve more and thus causes the pain. If it’s a sharp pain when you have it then it is very likely nerve compression. If I go a week or so without working it too much it kind of “resets” and I can use it again. Biggest thing I did to help it was get a pair of workout gloves that have thicker padding in the area. They help a lot. Still can get bad if I overdo it. I have noticed, as I have gone up in weight, that the pain does not trigger on the lower weight I used to do. So there seems to be a link to muscle growth.
Reps vs added weight as progressive overload?
Got to the point where my weights aren’t heavy enough and I don’t have enough money to buy more. Should I just add more reps to each set? Is that gonna keep building size?
Its real hard to find reliable information on that subject, much of it boils down to bro-science. Like, on one hand I have a friend who is a power-lifter and isn’t close to looking jacked, he looks average. However, the results I’ve seen for muscle size usually comes from added weight. I suspect there’s some goldilocks range between the two, but I would love to see some research on that.
If its between adding more reps and nothing, definitely add more reps. But if you can add more weight, that would be better. Sorry I don’t have anything more conclusive on this.
As someone that does powerlifting myself, the biggest driver of muscle/strength growth is volume. The rep range during training makes one perform better relatively in that range so for example doing doubles and triples makes one better at doing doubles and triples and doing high rep sets makes one better at those sets and not as good at singles, doubles triples etc.
Uh some actual research on this instead of just “trust me bro” Schönfeld meta-study that basically says "higher training vol. = higher muscle growth (to a point) might add others later during the day.
Yh the goldilocks range seems to be 3-4 sets of 8-10 reps. I’ve heard that once you can easily do 8 reps of something it’s time to make the exercise harder. Been following that rule and it’s worked well.
Surely it builds size with added reps too though cos at the end of the day you’re still causing the whole damage/repair cycle to take place?
Yes, but definitely not at the same pace. The body can be stingy about adding muscle, because it knows simply having muscle is calorically expensive. Ultra-high endurance athletes are typically quite skinny. You’ll definitely benefit from increased reps, but not necessarily as muscle size.
