Comment by dragandj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dragandj | Hacker News Reader

The only thing worse than no knowledge is just a little knowledge.

Although I've always been a "geek" I am into sports since high school - so it is now more than 20 years. Maybe I was just lucky, but I always had good results, even in the era when internet was not there for the information. Never had to take any supplements, and the results were just right. I won't bother you giving advice, because:

1. Everyone's body is different 2. It's simple once you get it, but it might be difficult to explain.

I'll just say that skimming through this guide I've seen a lot of fluff, some good info and also lots of crap.

I think that, for the people here who would like to start working out, the most important things are:

1. You have to build the habit of working out from now on for the rest of your life if you want the results to stay. 2. Find a professional guidance at first. An enterpreneur whose experience sums to (citing from the OP): "I wrote the first draft of this guide months ago. I meant to publish this then. But I unexpectedly lost half the muscle I had gained." is not the best source of knowledge in this area.

I didn't pick up much crap at all. I thought it was well done, and the author clearly mentioned what he preferred vs the science.

I've been weightlifting for about 3 years, no hormones, I'm old (about 50), I'm a doctor and a statistician (ahem, I mean data scientist) and my view is that the vast majority of advice on the net is really bad, so I found this article a refreshing change.

Bloggers select small sized, underpowered studies to support their 'bro science' theories, and it's hard to differentiate what information applies to natural bodybuilding - which is not much since many bodybuilders are on hormone supplements.

My only comments are that creatine in high doses can cause renal stones, and the BMR calculator probably doesn't take into base level activity. E.g. my BMR is around 1600 cal, with general moving around it's around 1800 (before exercise). I measure my exercise calorie burn with a heart rate monitor, and balance my calories intake (using MyFitenssPal). I've been able to control my weight accurately over the last 4.5 years - originally 84kg, down to 64kg, now around 69kg with weightlifting. It's tough being old and trying to put on muscle... and I wasted time not eating enough to start with.

> Bloggers select small sized, underpowered studies to support their 'bro science' theories

There's simply no money for large, high-powered studies. We have to rely on what observations are actually possible.

However the quality of studies, especially in terms of study design, is steadily improving.

> it's hard to differentiate what information applies to natural bodybuilding

Actually, a lot of the worst studies are done with novice trainees. All we've learnt from those is that pretty much any stimulus works on someone who hasn't trained before.

Studies involving subjects using anabolic and androgenic steroids typically control for that.

There's simply no money for large, high-powered studies.

Yes there is, the deepest pockets of all are very, very interested in fitness: the military. You can download the Navy SEAL physical training guide for free!

http://www.sealswcc.com/navy-seal-naval-special-warfare-phys...

http://www.sealswcc.com/navy-seal-what-are-chances-hell-week...

"A three year Naval Special Warfare study comprised of thousands of SEAL candidates has identified the speeds, distances and reps that correspond to success at BUD/S. The graphs in the predictive model show the boundaries of smart training to maximize your odds of success without increasing your risk of injury."

The study appears to show that cardiovascular adaptation dominates the outcomes once you get over a fairly moderate strength level.

You don't need a 500lb deadlift to lift a machine gun -- or swim with a 50lb pack.

I'm talking about hypertrophy, which is the purpose of the post here.

There's not much money for "hi we'd like to research how to make healthy adults as big as possible, thanks".

and I wasted time not eating enough to start with

If you wouldn't mind, I'd be interested in more explanation of this comment, because it's possible that I'm in the same situation you were in when you were "wasting time" and don't realize it. What did you discover about an old guy putting on muscle without putting the lost (non-muscle) weight back on?

Some lessons, based on the fact that as you get older your testosterone levels decrease:

- Based on your testosterone levels and genetics there is a max amount of muscle you can put on per year (without drugs) so exercise and eating over that level doesn't make more muscle, just fat & injury. This varies per person, you have to try and find out.

- You need longer recovery time between heavy weight sessions

- Make sure you eat enough to grow muscle, but no more than necessary

- I've given up the bulk and cut methods i.e. I don't think it's healthy to put on lots of weight and then rapidly cut, it's better to go slow and make smaller adjustments, it will take longer to put on muscle but you will look better for more of the year

Good luck!

Small nitpick: BMR, by definition [0], is the amount of energy burned by a body at rest.

I'm not sure about the medical field, but, at least online, when one wants to calculate total energy use, one calculates Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE), defined as the sum of one's BMR and the calories burned from activity. (Usually one simply estimates activity, and then uses measured caloric intake and rate of weight change to infer the true value of one's TDEE and activity level.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basal_metabolic_rate

Author here. Happy to provide some thoughts on whatever you find to be crap.

> "the myth that women have a harder time gaining beginner muscle"

Do you have a study to prove that women can grow "beginner" muscles at the same speed as men? I mean common, testosterone levels are drastically different, it will surely affect the muscle growth.

Studies:

1: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11890579?dopt=Abstract

2: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7558529

3: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2991130/

Article: http://bayesianbodybuilding.com/natural-muscular-potential-w...

Yes, men have more testosterone, but testosterone is less important to the female muscle development process. In fact, women benefit from higher levels of IGF1 growth hormone, which is critical to muscle growth, as compared to men [1, 2].

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/49661582_Circulatin...

[2] http://press.endocrine.org/doi/abs/10.1210/jcem.81.7.8675561

Don't get me started on p values now, but just think about this:

"Eight young men (age 20-30 years), six young women (age 20-30 years), nine older men (age 65-75 years), and ten older women (age 65-75 years).

The results indicate that neither age nor gender affects muscle volume response to whole-body ST."

"Six women and 6 men trained the elbow flexors 3 days per week for 20 wks, one arm performing in each session 3-5 sets of 10 maximal concentric actions on an accommodating resistance device, the other arm 3-5 sets of 8-12 coupled eccentric/concentric actions on a weight training device."

"One hundred eighty-one previously inactive healthy Caucasian (N = 117) and African American (N = 54) men (N = 82) and women (N = 99), aged 50–85 yr,<...>

Training-induced increases in absolute MV were significantly greater (P < 0.001) in men than in women, though both sex groups increased MV significantly with ST (P < 0.001), and the relative (%) increases were similar. "

So, if we are to believe the first two, that were, BTW conducted on miniscule samples, and concentrated on only one exercise of a small muscle, we should expect the same muscle gain in 20 year old men as in 70 year old ladies!

I wonder why those old ladies do not feature that much at bodybuilding competitions or Olympic games...

The third, which has larger sample, actually says that there is the difference between males and females, which is in accordance with what we can see at every sports event.

Note also that the elbow flexion muscles (biceps, brachialis) have relatively low androgen sensitivity

You want to get the benefits of hard work without the hard work or time. You can't lift for 3 months, read a bunch of shit and try and sell a fitness product. You need to look the part. That means you have to put in the work and the time. Great start, but you don't even look like you lift weights at all. In 5 years you could have something. Your guide isn't bad, but until you look the part and have actually seen what it takes to develop a real physique, you can talk about the theoretical, but not the practical.

If you had bothered to actually read the guide, you would have learned that it was not written for the tiny fraction of the population that wants to get super-muscular, but the far larger number of people who would like to gain a moderate amount of muscle.

I don't find your advice to be "crap", but I do think it could be a lot simpler. Run stronglifts, 5x5, or starting strength. All of these involve 3 trips to the gym per week, are very easy to follow, and have well defined progressions.

These are not easy to follow. When you are already strong and have access to a personal trainer, maybe the are. When your starting point is difficulty lifting the lowest possible weight and you don't know how to configure your deadlift form properly because you actually /can't/ lift the lowest recommended weight, so your bar has a really low starting point, it gets a lot more complicated, not to mention dangerous.

At least Starting Strength and possibly others cover this case in detail, mentioning something like "You might need to lift a PVC pipe from riser blocks at first."

I think you seriously over estimate the portion of the population who cannot squat or deadlift an empty barbell on day one.

You seriously overestimate the portion of population who can do anything, really, with proper form

Form can be learned. The parent was talking about people being too weak to do the lifts at minimum weight.

You can squat an empty barbell, but the starting height of the barbell will be incorrect. So you don't squat an empty barbell, you squat a barbell + weights that are tall enough to make the barbell be some height off the ground. If the barbell is really low on the floor, it's not the normal deadlift anymore, and for someone who has never done deadlifts before and is having issues figuring out the right form as it is, that's terrifying.

Also, none of the weight programs actually have a starting weight low enough to support that, anyway. No program I've seen starts deadlifts at empty barbell. So good luck aligning your deadlift weight with your other weight, like you're supposed to do to not get unbalanced. SL certainly didn't, maybe SS does but I don't recall that. So what are you talking about, anyway?

There's a similar and more significant problem with barbell rows, to the point that I ended up not doing them at all. But deadlift is considered more core.

A few things:

1) Did you mean deadlift instead of squat in your first few sentences? Squat has the bar on your back, so distance off the ground is not an issue...

2) Speaking honestly, if this is the kind of thing that is going to keep somebody from getting stronger, then they're not gonna accomplish much in life. Working from first principles, there are two ways to get a less-than-135lb loaded bar at the right height for deadlifting:

a. Plates which are less dense than steel. You can buy or fabricate wooden starter plates which are the same diameter as a 45lb plate.

b. Rely on something other than the plates to get the bar in the correct starting position. Blocks, books, Tupperware bins, or (if you have one) the safety bars on a power rack all would work.

3) In Starting Strength, the starting weight for each lift is whatever you can lift on day one. If that is below the weight of an empty 45lb barbell, then you get a woman's (35lb), junior (25lb), or PVC (perhaps less than 2 lbs?) barbell. Your starting weight is not the important part, it's adding weight to the bar each workout.

The SS community believes pretty strongly that strength is for everyone. They train lots of people (women and older people) who don't fall into the traditional strength training target audience (men 16-40).

All in all I found your guide pretty straightforward and agreeable. I think that you overstate its applicability, since it's tailored for very thin people like yourself rather than for overweight people (the majority of people that start training). I do think it's good that you focus on motivational factors, as that is ultimately by far the most important thing to success in fitness.

One point is that muscle memory is probably a real effect. There is a very approachable article on it on Strengtheory although the site is currently down. There is a cached version at [0]. Basically, as your muscle grows it creates new myonuclei, which is energetically expensive, but those myonuclei are not lost when you detrain. You need a certain density of mynuclei to support a given volume of muscular tissue. There is also a brief description on Wikipedia with references [1].

Another thing to note is that the main benefit of compound exercises for bodybuilders is that compound exercises are much more time efficient than isolation exercises. With regard to the specific exercises you've selected, a few criticisms come to mind. 1. I don't think oblique work is necessary in a minimal program focused on aesthetics. Most people do not need a specific focus on larger obliques. 2. On your leg day you are progamming 4 sets of squats, 3 sets of hamstring curls, and 4 sets of deadlifts. The hamstring curls are at best unnecessary. The hamstring is the primary mover of the deadlift, and squats also work the hamstrings. It would be better to program barbell hip thrusts to develop the glutes. In general you should add specific glute exercises for an aesthetic-focused routine targeted at both men and women. 3. The seated pulley row and lat pulldown work substantially the same muscles.[2] They should be separated in the workout at least. In general I'm pretty skeptical of bodybuilding split type workouts for beginners. I think it makes more sense for beginners to do full-body workouts, as the hallmark of being a novice is that you can make strength gains every workout. Body part split routines are necessary in part because intermediate lifters require more time for their body parts to recover from a given exercise, so working a body part once a week makes more sense.[5]

It is probably not the case that 4 sets is "ideal" for hypertrophy. There are diminishing returns, but not negative returns, and 4 sets is certainly not enough to get "maximum hypertrophy" as you claim in your addendum.[3] Part of the reasoning failure here is that you claim that it's impossible to lift with middle amounts of reps for more than 4 sets, but that is probably not relevant, because what matters for hypertrophy is the number of sets you do to near failure. Being within the magic rep range is not very important.[4]

I think that's all the criticism I have time for now. Seems like a good start, and hopefully you can use some of this information to improve the guide.

0: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:pl8tNHF...

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muscle_memory_(strength_traini...

2: https://www.t-nation.com/training/inside-the-muscles-best-ba...

3: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:X6nFkck...

4: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:L6EENZs...

5: I believe this is discussed in detail in Practical Programming for Strength Training by Rippetoe.

Welcome to HN, where everybody is an armchair expert and good at only criticizing.

It's obvious you put a lot of work into this, and you know what, it may not be the world's best information on building muscle, but what I do know is that you researched this way more than I have, and actually inspired me to start a workout routine. So there's that.

thanks for putting this together.

> You have to build the habit of working out from now on for the rest of your life if you want the results to stay.

This. It's a lifestyle. There are no shortcuts or miracle plans. Just do it for fun and for the overall health benefits. The muscle will come as a nice side benefit.

> Although I've always been a "geek" I am into sports since high school

I've been also working out for 18 years now. It's odd that society still has this stereotype that the geek types don't do sports.

Funny anecdote: one of my best friends and training partner is an ex-professional olympic weightlifter (national team of my country). He's also very geeky and now that his elite sports life has ended is trying to launch web and mobile projects. Recently I have convinced him to start learning programming...

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