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Comment by cjf4 | Hacker News Reader

Unless your rail thin and a teenager, I'd avoid Rip's diet advice. It will undoubtedly get you fat.

Lyle McDonald's bodyrecomposition.com is, as far as I'm concerned, the best nutrition resource on the internet. Lyle does a great job of taking clinical research and boiling it down to practical applications for people who train.

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Agreed. Mark Rippetoe's diet will make you gain body fat. In his defense, he mentions this several times in the book, writing things approximately like, "People are in love with their visible abs. This diet will break your affair off."

Diet != losing weight. The GOMAD (gallon of milk a day) diet is not designed for you to lose weight. It's designed to maximize daily caloric intake, which in turn maximizes speed of recovery.

Once you're done with starting strength, you switch to something like IF (intermittent fasting) to cut the excess fat. Then you end up with lots of muscle and no fat.

You can either lose fat or gain muscle. It's incredibly difficult to do both at the same time.

GOMAD is also specifically designed for teenagers with no fat or muscle that don't know how to consume 3000 + calories/day (and I believe Rip usually wants them in the 4-5000 range). What I'm saying is that this is an inefficient approach for almost everyone outside that demographic that has any sort of interest in improved appearance (i.e. almost everyone).

Your body can only build muscle at a certain rate, and the rest of the caloric surplus is going to be converted to body fat. So what I'm saying is if you are willing to pay a little bit of attention to macro nutrient intake, you can gain muscle with much less of the associated body fat that comes with bulking.

This way, you have to much less to cut. More importantly, you learn how to eat properly which is essential for long term success.

The point is to have a caloric surplus. Because then you can guarantee maximum recovery.

"difficult to do both at the same time"

With right combination you can do it. Targeted Keto/IF combination seems to be quite effective. Sheds fat while maintaining (or gaining) muscle mass and minimizing the impact of the diet to your strength levels. I've dropped +25kg BW while gaining +5kg of muscle mass and gaining/maintaining my big-lifts. I noticed that going from Stronglift 5x5 to Madcow really helped my recovery. Mostly as my body couldn't keep up with the heavy squatting and deadlifting too many times during the week.

Yup. But if you're doing both at the same time, you are not maximizing your gains. You could be increasing strength much faster, then cut much faster afterwards.

But I would assume that heavy cut will end up eating your gains too?

That's true. I really needed to bulk so it worked for me (gained 30 pounds in about half a year). That being said, for those looking to control weight and do something more manageable I would definitely recommend McDonald's guide.

I also think the focus on squatting and dead lifting does not produce very aesthetic results for a lot of guys. Some people have twiggy legs and benefit from putting on some lower body mass. But a lot more guys who progress to intermediate squat and deadlift numbers wind up with over sized thighs and glutes and frankly it doesn't look good. Nor is it very "functional" outside of the lifts. That kind of bulk definitely slows you down on the court/track/field.

People get caught up in stuff like the deadlift because you build up to what seem like big numbers. But the fact is, it's not very impressive. Most guys can get there. And it's not very useful, athletically speaking.

I think Rippetoe's original schtick was built around bulking kids up for certain positions on high school football teams. Having an extra 20# to throw around at age 17 is going to really help a lineman. I'm a bit skeptical about the wider reverence the Rippetoe approach gets these days.

"the deadlift [...] is not very impressive, [...] and it's not very useful, athletically speaking."

That is probably the most false statement I've ever read on the internet. Which is saying something. Athletically speaking, there is no single exercise better than the deadlift. With the squat coming in at #2.

If you play tennis, box, run 400m, or play basketball, then pursuing a heavy weight deadlift routine is going to compromise your performance. Sometimes it might help build some strength, but beyond a limited amount sinking a lot of training capacity into it is going to slow you down and compromise endurance. This is not remotely controversial.

All of those exercises demand explosive strength from the legs. Which is what the deadlift is very, very efficient at producing.

Proof: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrLVlbgwcW8#t=80

This guy is doing a 47 inch box jump... out of a pool. This is what deadlifting does.

I know people who were able to dunk in high school as teenagers and were very explosive. Than they started weight lifing regime, lifted hard for a decade (solid weights on compund movements), still can't really dunk no more, while they should be even more explosive.

Thing is, pylometrics is still nr. 1 for most explosivnes and also olimpic lifting, but not classis weight lifting, strength is not power.

+EDIT: This guy on the video does far more than just DL to achive what he does, he is also very competent at calisthenics, he does one leg hill jums and other extremely difficult exercises ... Claiming this is a product of solely DL is misinforming.

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