Light versus heavy weight

[HST_Rihad]

Not because I want so, but because if adding weight I would then have to fall short of 1-2 reps in set one. Overall, sensation from performing an exercise done in an alternating fashion makes me feel less confident than when I did it on each w/o. The load doesn't flow so to speak. I often have to exert considerable effort for the last rep or two as early as at workout 3 or 4 of the relevant microcycle (10's). From my personal experience.

 

[Totentanz]

You are the only person in the entire world who has that problem.

 

[Old and Grey]

Rihad, you cannot compare absolute weights between differing exercises and draw any sort of conclusion from it. As for your last statement, I have read it many times and cannot figure out what it is you are trying to say. I think you may be getting confused with the weight comparison thing again but I am not sure.

Anyway, (and take this as unsolicited and off topic advice) at 156 pounds and your height, I think your real problem is that you need to eat more and, perhaps, wiser. "Cutting" should be a word that isn't even in your vocabulary at this point. However, I will say that at that weight, the numbers you provide as PR's are not bad so you must be doing something right.

 

[Lol]

...
I don't want to suddenly start benching 300 lbs while having muscle sizes I currently have, which PL-style lower rep training would allow me to do (they make sure to keep below certain weight limits to stay within a weight category, so muscle/fat gains is a no-no for them), but I do want to gradually build up my muscles to hopefully reach that same 300 lbs x 5 bench. Hope it makes sense.

That is about as likely to happen as me suddenly starting to bench 300lb. ie. it's not happening! "Suddenly" is not a good choice of word to use in this context.

 

[Jester]

No, my goal in increasing loads isn't concerned with wanting to be a power or olympic lifter, but with providing my muscles with sufficient and ever increasing loads while following the HST regimen. It's a fine line. I don't want to suddenly start benching 300 lbs while having muscle sizes I currently have, which PL-style lower rep training would allow me to do (they make sure to keep below certain weight limits to stay within a weight category, so muscle/fat gains is a no-no for them), but I do want to gradually build up my muscles to hopefully reach that same 300 lbs x 5 bench. Hope it makes sense.

Going back to alternating between exercises as suggested by Bryan in the example chart here, this has consistently resulted in me not being able to build up strength even to my previous 10RM or 5RM maxes from when I wasn't alternating, no matter in what exercise (witnessed that in bench/dips and squats/leg press). Lower loads means lower stimulus, that's why I assume it's unwise from the standpoint of relative progression to keep alternating between them, or more generally, doing them at that "3 times per 2 weeks" frequency.

1. Your contentions don't make sense. You are communicating with people other than yourself here. We don't compute 'Rihad-speak' the same way you do.

2. You're ignoring fibre activations when you make the argument that the absolute load used what is necessary here. I can grow doing ~ 65kgs for one-arm assisted chins and 100kg DB rows. I'm using a different activation profile for each exercise, more traps and less lats in the latter, and the inverse in the former.

3. Please argue using science and not anecdotes.

That doesn't even make sense. Why would you have to stop at 185 when alternating with dips?

Put a stamp on the thread saying this.

Rihad, you cannot compare absolute weights between differing exercises and draw any sort of conclusion from it. As for your last statement, I have read it many times and cannot figure out what it is you are trying to say. I think you may be getting confused with the weight comparison thing again but I am not sure.

Anyway, (and take this as unsolicited and off topic advice) at 156 pounds and your height, I think your real problem is that you need to eat more and, perhaps, wiser. "Cutting" should be a word that isn't even in your vocabulary at this point. However, I will say that at that weight, the numbers you provide as PR's are not bad so you must be doing something right.

Rihad doesn't want to gain fat. Which is resulting in minimal gains. Which is a shame, because as you observe, his load #'s are impressive, but the BW and measurements are not due to lack of food.

 

[Old and Grey]

I am not sure but perhaps english is not a first language for HST-Rihad and his literal translation of what we write (or he writes) may be different froom those of us who use english as a primary or only language.

 

[Lol]

I am not sure but perhaps english is not a first language for HST-Rihad and his literal translation of what we write (or he writes) may be different froom those of us who use english as a primary or only language.

Yes, I think this is likely the case. Good point.

 

[HST_Rihad]

Hi, guys. Yes, English is indeed not my first language, I suppose it's this post you had a hard time understanding, sorry for that:

Not because I want so, but because if adding weight I would then have to fall short of 1-2 reps in set one. Overall, sensation from performing an exercise done in an alternating fashion makes me feel less confident than when I did it on each w/o. The load doesn't flow so to speak. I often have to exert considerable effort for the last rep or two as early as at workout 3 or 4 of the relevant microcycle (10's). From my personal experience.

Are you sure it's my language you have trouble with, and not the peculiar way I'm finding problems where they don't really exist for others?

 

[Old and Grey]

Yes, English is indeed not my first language,

That is a tip-off right there. A born english speaker would say:

"No, english is not my first language."

However, your written english is better than 90% of native english speaking college grads so you do a good job. Where the problems come in, and this applies to any language, is if you are not inherently familiar with the customs and nuances of how certain cultures mean things. You have to live in that environment for a long time to catch on. I can speak technically very good spanish but I find it very different in, for example, Agentina vs Mexico vs Spain. Sometimes the differences can prove embarrassing. Whay can be taken as a compliment in Argentina can be fighting words in Venezuela. Same words but slightly different intonation.

However, I do think that your rationalization process is a bit goofy too!

Enoughn of this BS. It's time for my PM split.

O&G

 

[Jester]

Hi, guys. Yes, English is indeed not my first language, I suppose it's this post you had a hard time understanding, sorry for that:



Are you sure it's my language you have trouble with, and not the peculiar way I'm finding problems where they don't really exist for others?

Your written command of the English vocabulary and grammar is superior to many of the first-language/native English speakers I know. This is not in the least what I am referring to. The issue is that essentially, you're not connecting your thoughts and your sentences. It's difficult to understand what you are attempting to convey when there is no natural flow of information.



And again, eat more!

 

[HST_Rihad]

Yes, English is indeed not my first language,

That is a tip-off right there. A born english speaker would say:

"No, english is not my first language."

Ha-ha, got me on that one, that was a negative yes on my part

AlexAustralia, you're 100% positive it's not the information itself you are uncomfortable with, but the missing link between what I'm trying to say and what I actually say?

 

[Jester]

There's two things here Rihad

1. I clearly disagree with several of your beliefs that you've expressed here; fasting invalidating the laws of thermodynamics, mythical lean gaining, losing fat and building muscle simultaneously without steroids etc.

2. IMO, and at least for the post in qn O&G's, is that you need to connect your thoughts better via sentence structure. Your vocabulary and command of grammar is more than adequate - you should feel quite proud of your mastery of English, not being your first language, I certainly would if I was in your position. The problem here is that you leave out gaps in your narrative. It's the equivalent of telling me you know how to count and then saying "1,2,3,5,7,8,9,12,14" - clearly you know what you want to say, you just aren't connecting the dots enough.


I have no dramas with you having different beliefs. You shouldn't espouse them as fact when you have science standing in the way, but this is a discussion forum. You disagree with me that you can gain on 2 sets and no more. That's fine. I disagree with you about the things above. That's also fine. Just try and connect the dots between your major points more coherently.

 

[HST_Rihad]

The problem here is that you leave out gaps in your narrative. It's the equivalent of telling me you know how to count and then saying "1,2,3,5,7,8,9,12,14" - clearly you know what you want to say, you just aren't connecting the dots enough.

Thanks, I was just trying to save everyone's time when I wasn't verbose enough, thinking the main idea still got conveyed in its entirety.

You disagree with me that you can gain on 2 sets and no more. That's fine. I disagree with you about the things above. That's also fine. Just try and connect the dots between your major points more coherently.

I totally agree with you that 2 sets during 5's is enough to gain strength, that's exactly how I increased my leg press & incline bench loads. The distinction between strength & muscle CSA gains is obviously a bit blurry from your standpoint. Then you bring up the idea of eating a lot, supposedly even overeating, in order to bulk up. Apart from the obvious fat gains, what's also happening there can be mistaken for the positive role of eating above maintenance (or maybe just eating at maintenance is enough - still have to figure this one out) for the purposes of muscle growth, namely the accumulation of so called "inessential LBM" (water+glycogen+connective tissue+minerals, explained in a bit more detail by Lyle here) that contributes to muscle girth. The take home message is that the inessential LBM isn't contributing to myofibrillar contraction activity, it isn't "muscle" so to speak. I can't say much more than this at this point, I'll first need to lean down to get some abs visible (still need to chop off an inch or two off of my waist), only then will I start eating at maintenance (whereas maintenance can be defined as eating as much as possible taken over a course of a week to cover my workout expenditure and all the non-exercise activity level, that will allow me to keep equal fat in/out balance, i.e. not be gaining fat), and see if I can get the inessential LBM back to where it was, and if I can keep adding muscle.

 

[Jester]

You cannot gain muscle, that is, build mass and decrease your entropy without consuming excess calories above maintenance (whatever it takes to fuel your body doing whatever you do, and yes, maintenance is higher when you're exercising compared to when you are not).

This is a fundamental principle in physics, extrapolated to the context at hand.

I'm saying you need to eat above maintenance if you wish to gain muscle. You can't cheat this Rihad. If you use hormones (ala steroids), then your body will preferentially consume your bodyfat as an energy source, in order to accomplish the energy surplus required. You will still need sufficient protein intake to overcome the entropy barrier (if you like, think of it as a funnel/bottleneck; you have to put in a lot of protein to get a little muscle to dribble out).

Your 'take home' message is irrelevant to the simple premise of muscle requiring the body to be in caloric surplus (either via its food or fat surplus or both) in order for it to be constructed. Lyle has explained this at length, now that you're willing to listen to him (it seems).

Further more, water+glycogen+connective tissue+minerals are essential for muscle to be built, just not directly. Let me know if this isn't obvious (as to why this is). I believe you're misinterpreting the impact of Lyle's explanation here. When he describes it as 'inessential' he is talking about weight-loss for an obese beginner. Please do not try and manipulate what is written there. He says that you can afford to lose some as it was supporting weight that you're losing (burning fat etc), but even then you cannot afford to lose much and probably won't.

 

[HST_Rihad]

You cannot gain muscle, that is, build mass and decrease your entropy without consuming excess Lyle has explained this at length, now that you're willing to listen to him (it seems).

I listen to information, not a person. Lyle, for one thing, calls HST's SD nonsensical, that doesn't prevent me from reading his opinion on other stuff. This goes for Brad Pilon, Martin Berkhan, Borge Fagerli or whoever else.

From physiological standpoint, something can't happen out of nothing, muscle growth always needs energy as the bricks themselves, as well as for the work to build something from the bricks. However, the time frame and energy requirements are seemingly exaggerated. What happens first when we start overeating? First of all, fat gains. Then some water is retained by incoming carbohydrates in abundance. Connective tissue starts growing in our muscles in an attempt to block future damage to cells. All this contributes to the seemingly a bit larger muscle size, along with the fat. But is all tag-along stuff required for the myofibrills to actually grow? How can the science explain the fact that many kids all around the world grow in height while staying lean (provided they don't overeat), adding size to muscles, bones, organs, skin, etc.? My cousin turned 17 a couple of months ago, he's always been skinny as hell & is now taller than me (he's about 176-178cm / 5'9"-5'10"). How did his muscles grow in length under caloric restriction or maintenance? It seems body can do fine with even smallest amounts of food enough to cover its expenses. There's no obvious need for a natural to overeat in advance, gaining fat and such. Eat just enough to cover your workouts, exercise will do the rest.

 

[Jester]

Hormones.

-You absorb more of ingested food
-You use fat for energy instead of energy storage

You're also ignoring the well chronicled stunted-growth that caloric-restriction causes. Added to this the sub-average bone density of those on caloric restriction. The thinner arterial walls. The thinner heart muscles ... the list goes on and on

You can't "eat enough just to cover your workouts" ... it's simple science. Your cousin was eating enough to grow, when combined with whatever his body needed from his fat storage. You need energy to construct muscle tissue. You understand the cellular differences between muscle cells and fat cells right? I assume you're a Science major or have studied the physiology texts of those courses ... ?

You cannot build muscle using the same amount of energy that it takes to move mass. When you move, energy is required to move you. Similarly, when you move additional mass (clothes on your back, carrying the frypan from the stovetop to the sink, lifting weights, playing hoops etc) you need more energy still. The food you consume provides that energy. You cannot use that energy to ALSO build muscle. The universe doesn't work like that, regardless of what Rihad thinks about his cousin or his thoughts.

IF you follow information rather than your own opinions (you being, "a person", then follow it.

You need to eat above your energy expenditure needs to build muscle. 'Working out' falls into the category of energy expenditure. If you'd like an example of someone who eats ridiculous amounts of food to fuel expenditure, Google the diet of Michael Phelps.

If you want to look like Chris Hemsworth in Thor, Ryan Reynolds in Blade Trinity or Hugh Jackman in every movie ever, go and find out how much they ate to get there. A quote from Ryan Reynolds, "I pretty much expended America's supply of chicken breasts" - from the commentary on Blade Trinity. You have to eat more than you burn to build muscle. It isn't like fat where there's a simple chemical breakdown and the fat is shuttled to storage. It's an incredibly complex, energy inefficient process.

Read more, learn more, eat more.

 

[Lol]

HST_Rihad,

Do you really think that your now 17-year-old cousin is consuming the same number of calories/day as he was when he was 10? 12? 14? Chance of that being the case is exceedingly unlikely. As growth hormones do their job of turning children into young adults, the tendency is for them to want to eat more to cover the energy requirements necessary for growth.

If you make a loose analogy with a building site, look how much energy goes into building a small house (not including the energy cost of the materials themselves): hundreds of man-hours of labour are required to transport materials and then to put them all together. There's usually quite a bit of wastage too. Construction of anything requires a surplus of materials and is very labour intensive. It is, therefore, energy expensive.

The construction processes in your body work in a loosely similar way, although the level of complexity is obviously far higher. Just because you can't see what's going on, and just because no-one fully understands all the processes and mechanisms at work, doesn't mean you can assume/hope that some sort of miraculous energy creation process might be occurring in some special cases. I don't think you're that special. I know I'm not!

 

[HST_Rihad]

Even before we came into this sport, there have always been tens of processes going on in our bodies simultaneously involving substituting "worn out" skin, organ, muscle cells that we've never attempted to predict and overeat in advance. They just happen regardless. Of course they take up energy. This is what eventually piles up to constitute our metabolic rate: the total amount of work being done within a time frame (24 hours, anyone?). There are several natural signals trying to tell us when more food is desirable: hunger, fatigue etc. Trying to "outsmart" our bodies and pre-feed it with copious amounts of food to store some of it as fat is one way to do that. I still don't see how tricking our bodies into building more muscle to withstand future loads (i.e. what we do in the gym) would necessitate any food intake above and beyond our daily needs? Is the environment for such growth to occur supposed to be any different or more complicated or "sciency" than when we didn't even know what protein, carbs, fats, vitamins & minerals stood for, and still grew in size?

 

[Lol]

Maintenance calories take care of housekeeping. What we're trying to do is make our house bigger. Whilst your hormones will tell you when you should eat and when you should stop eating (if things are working reasonably well), there is no lightbulb that goes on (or off) when the right number of calories has been consumed to allow a particular set of processes to occur. It's not possible to be that exact.

I don't understand why you think you're tricking your body? You've created the required growth stimulus (hopefully) through your training and then you are supplying (again, hopefully) enough calories in the form of useable nutrients for your body's processes to get to work on the construction. If you don't give it what it needs, it will carry out maintenance and then guess what? It can't do any further building because you didn't supply it with the requisite materials!

I realise that this is simplifying things a lot but surely it is fairly apparent that 'maintenance', by its very definition, implies no new building processes of any kind?

I'm sure we've been over this before. As I see it, the only way around the problem of growth under maintenance cals is to have an excess of stored calories and building materials, in the form of fat and/or muscle mass, that can be broken down and then reused in another part of the body. So if you had very well developed legs and skinny arms (I'm thinking cyclists), you might be able to grow your arms a bit whilst eating at maintenance if you stopped training your legs (eg. by living in a wheelchair for a while) and trained your arms with a novel stimulus instead. So, in effect you would be removing a growth stimulus from one part of the body while applying it to another. This might work for a time (while there's plenty of excess cals and materials available) but it's a lot of work for your body to tear down muscle in one area and then to transport what's needed to the new area and go about the process of synthesising newly stimulated arm muscle. Much easier to give it a constant supply of fresh materials and to let it get on with the building process that way.

 

[Joe.Muscle]

Rihad,

It really as simple as.

Get adequate protein and calories (surplus)

Train each muscle group (Frequently) meaning hit each muscle group 2 to 3 times a week.

Gradually increase your weights (progressive overload)

And do this above with enough training volume to elict a growth response (30 to 60 reps) sometimes less with newbie lifters.

And that's it basically.

You can get into more details "if you really" wanted to get all science about it...but truthfully if you do the above and EAT and gradually get stronger you will be surprised at how much you will gain.

I wish I would of known this BASIC stuff when I started out.

What the guys are telling you is no matter what you can not out train bad nutrition.