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.
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:
What do?
No equipment. Wanna be jacked.
Get a box, fill it with stuff. Lift it. No fucking joke, this builds core strength. Refresh yourself on lifting technique before starting, so you don’t fuck up your back. Do this several times, then take a 40 second break, then do it some more. Get tired, sore.
My job requires me to lift 50 lb boxes for hours at a time. Started last month and I’m in better shape than ever.
Any particular muscles you wanna work on?
I don’t mean to be a dick but there’s way better and safer ways of doing this.
I always appreciate advice. I agree it can be easy to injure yourself lifting something like a box, particularly with the risk of the box breaking. I kinda wrote that assuming the poster has 0 access or funds to equipment. But the second worst thing a person can do is delay exercise for years because they keep planning to get equipment, or the act of acquiring equipment becomes the psychological fulfillment.
Get tired, sore.
Not so sure about this advice. Goes against the advice my doctor friend and the nutrition / sports teachers at my local university tell beginners.
Tie shopping bags full of books to a broom handle, fill gallon milk jugs with dirt or sand.
are those supplement powder things all just hype?
It depends. First, you certainly don’t NEED one, but they CAN help. Protein is a complex thing, anyone saying otherwise is lying or ignorant. You certainly need a “complete” protein source, meaning it has all the Amino Acids your body requires. You could just add chicken/eggs/soybeans to your diet and get mostly the same effect. Whey protein is technically more “bio-available” meaning your body can use it more efficiently. Its not a huge difference. You can also by pure Whey as a baking ingredient for a lot cheaper.
If you mean prework-outs, that gets even iffier. Some are just sugar, which you likely don’t want. Some have vasodialators like Arginine or its superior brother Citrulline. These convert into Nitric Oxide in your body, which causes blood vessels to expand and get more blood to muscles. Some have Beta-Alanine which works but may make you unbearably itchy. The best prework-outs are coffee or beet juice. Beets for their vasodilation. Coffee not just for the caffeine, but coffee specifically reduces muscle soreness. Seriously, drink it before/after exercise, it helps a ton. While we’re on the subject, Magnesium Glycinate can help with recovery a lot. (Magnesium Oxide does nothing but it is a laxative, lmao)
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.
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.
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.
Why do I feel high after heavy squats?
Why do dumbell ohps give me a headache?
