Unless you a professional athlete, somehow making money off your physique, or are being prescribed roids by a doctor, why the fuck would someone subject themselves to all of these side effects? Just crazy to me. At least this dude can say it helped him sell his book I guess.

Work out hard, eat well, sleep well and the results will eventually come. Maybe you won't bench 400 lbs, but you can at least not look like a fat ass. The guy in that article made it out like he worked out a lot before going on roids, but looking at the before picture, it is clear that he did not or he ate a bunch of shit all the time.

9/4/2013 3:02:10 PM

Hard work or genetic potential? Anyone pick up the Sports Gene yet, by David Epstein?

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2013/09/09/130909crat_atlarge_gladwell

9/4/2013 3:28:28 PM

When done properly the sides from steroids are are pretty limited and if they were made legal they could be even safer due to more research and help from doctors. Got to save people from themselves though.

[Edited on September 4, 2013 at 4:45 PM. Reason : B]

9/4/2013 4:45:28 PM

most people claiming to hit plateaus and be stuck in the gym in certain lifts are generally just lacking intensity

[Edited on September 4, 2013 at 4:47 PM. Reason : do work]

9/4/2013 4:46:51 PM

Quote :

"Unless you a professional athlete, somehow making money off your physique, or are being prescribed roids by a doctor, why the fuck would someone subject themselves to all of these side effects? Just crazy to me. At least this dude can say it helped him sell his book I guess. Work out hard, eat well, sleep well and the results will eventually come. Maybe you won't bench 400 lbs, but you can at least not look like a fat ass. The guy in that article made it out like he worked out a lot before going on roids, but looking at the before picture, it is clear that he did not or he ate a bunch of shit all the time."

The side effects aren't nearly as exaggerated when anabolic steroids are used intelligently. The guy in the article apparently had no idea what he was doing, spent about 5 minutes doing internet research, ordered some drugs online, and started using them. He's lucky he didn't get himself killed or permanently fucked up.

9/4/2013 6:32:12 PM

^ Yeah I am sure this guy did not do it correctly, but anabolic roids are not something people should be using unless it somehow improves their life in a measurable way IMO. And I am not talking about putting on 30 lbs of muscle or adding 100 lbs to their front squat.

Maybe if there was more research, roids could be put to better use, but I still don't understand the average meat head at the local Gold's Gym wanting to inject this stuff. Just seems like a good way to hurt yourself and waste money at the same time. Kind of like smoking in a sense.

9/5/2013 2:00:04 PM

the idiot shows himself shooting in the side of the glute where the sciatic nerve is located. It's hard to take anything he says after that seriously.

[Edited on September 5, 2013 at 2:13 PM. Reason : ^same could be said for almost all supplements.]

9/5/2013 2:12:26 PM

^ Agreed on the supplements. But the side effects of protein don't give you bitch tits.

9/5/2013 3:46:07 PM

soy protein can give you bitch tits. so can marijuana, alcohol, and excessive body fat.

I'd argue that soy protein will do so faster than steroid use.

9/5/2013 6:40:43 PM

doing squats today and my hamstrings instantly got tight after about 2 sets.

What could that be from? stretched, warmed up with a light jog...

9/5/2013 6:50:14 PM

Post a video next time you squat if you want to get any worthwhile advice.

9/5/2013 8:13:25 PM

I dont know but you dont want to do amy conventional stretching or jogging before squatting. Stick to doing the bike and then mimicking the ROM a few times. Ill stretch my groin by holding at the bottom and pushing the outside of my elbows against my inner knees.

Then do a few really light sets like of just the bar, 95 lbs etc before ramping up to your working sets.

9/6/2013 7:43:09 AM

Foam roll and dynamic warm-up before squatting. Glute activation isn't a bad idea either.

9/6/2013 10:54:04 AM

^^ did you ever post pics of yourself at 10% body fat? i never saw any.

9/6/2013 2:26:11 PM

Had a brief conversation about fitness and weightloss with an MD/PhD student at work today, who still adamantly believes in the "calories in, calories out".

Medical scientists, in training...of course they think they know everything.

9/7/2013 1:21:09 AM

that's extremely scary that a person with years of schooling in hormonal responses to stimuli and feedback mechanisms in the body could think so simply.

9/7/2013 8:54:53 AM

Quote :

"did you ever post pics of yourself at 10% body fat?"

face is a ghost. Dude talks about all this progress he made, but never posts pictures. Probably afraid that if he does, someone from sports talk will see him and beat him up.

9/9/2013 10:07:11 AM

yeah i was wondering how he could get to 10% BF while drinking so much beer

9/9/2013 1:36:01 PM

i said i probably didnt quite get there. I was pretty close though. I never paid for a test or anything so its hard to know exactly but ~12% is pretty accurate. I don't have a picture of me at my very lowest at 157 because i didnt really intend to stop there and thus didnt get a picture, but here's me (in gallery) floating around ~165 and before i made my final push to shed the fat but gave up. Losing the fat first is the right way to do it, but by the end of it i was too small and i want to gain 20 pounds of muscle before i expend so much energy and endure the pain/torture of shedding all the fat.


Anyway, now I'm doing starting strength (minus the power cleans they freak me out).

Day 1 and 2 you're supposed to stop increasing the weight when the reps slow down at all so they're quite a bit below my 5RM, but you're supposed to start below so you don't plateau early and you can complete all three sets.

It seems like a waste of a few workouts to start off so light and not really push yourself, but im just going to do what it says and hope it works.

166 lbs.

3x5x95 squats (im going pretty far below parallel obviously). I might limit my squats to parallel after the weight gets heavier but for now i like increasing my ROM. It's giving me a lot more confidence that i can go low when i raise the weights and im less worried about a hamstring injury.

1x5x185 deadlift.

3x5x135 bench press

3x5x85 overhead press

8,8,6 chinups (didnt rest long enough set #3 i guess)
6,6,5 pullups


Setting my goal by new years for 180 lbs

3x5x185 squat

1x5x275 deadlift

3x5x185 bench press

3x5x135 overhead press

3x15 chinups, 3x12 pullups.







[Edited on September 9, 2013 at 6:56 PM. Reason : a]

9/9/2013 6:50:56 PM

i never saw any point in keeping track of reps, weights and what not. i just go to gym work out all body muscles all the time and leave when i feel tired. i rest when i dont feel like going to the gym.

doubt any of the neanderthals and early homo sapiens had a choice to do "shoulders and back" and "biceps and chest" or legs only days. it was little bit (or a lot) of everything every day. same with running. humans aren't meant to run 26 miles at once or do double ironmans. if we were, we would be born with slow twitch fibers only. it is retarded.
things like athletes heart and irreversible enlargement of left ventricule are very much real things.

same thing with eating. they didnt stuff themselves with random protein powders, carb loading, carb free, paleo shit....and not. just eating everything and anything in moderation and youll be good. might not be the most cut person, but certainly the most healthy one.

as old saying goes, moderation with everything, including moderation itself.

9/10/2013 2:55:48 AM

If your goal is just to get a workout and not get stronger or bigger then you have a point. There weren't any Neanderthals walking around like Arnie in his prime either, not sure if they are your best representation of what you should do.

9/10/2013 8:14:44 AM

Its pretty simple really. You track reps and weights so you know to do more next time. Thats how you grow bigger and stronger.

And youre right 90% of gym goers dont need a bodybuilding split. Do full body until your totals are tracking at least 900lbs or so and then switch to a split routine.

You arent hitting the muscle groups often enough in splits if youre a beginner

9/10/2013 12:16:44 PM

You don't need to total 900 to gain benefit from a bodybuilding split. Your muscles don't know how much weight you are lifting and if your goal is size (which is what I am assuming when you refer to it as a bodybuilding split) then the key is not how much weight you are lifting, things like tension and the strength curve are more important. If you are new to lifting then yeah you should focus on the core lifts first but there isn't some magical number you should hit before transitioning, it all depends on your size, body type, and goals.

9/10/2013 1:34:32 PM

^agreed

9/10/2013 1:59:25 PM

It also depends on training frequency. If you can workout 6 days a week, a bodybuilding split makes a lot of sense. If you can only do 3-4 days a week, full body workouts are probably a better idea. Hitting arms or shoulders once a week simply isn't going to be enough to grow for most people.

9/10/2013 3:08:39 PM

Quote :

"CrossFit mirrors American militarism"

Quote :

"AMERICA is its sports. That’s a strong claim, but try coming up with a more pervasive, more intrinsic lens through which we see ourselves. Politics? Religion? Check the stats and you’ll find that about 122 million of us voted in the last presidential election and about 129 million of us regularly attend church, but in 2009 the US Census Bureau reported that nearly 270 of the 313.9 million Americans participated in “sports activities.” That number includes everything from the little leaguers on the ball field to the huffers on the treadmills, with walking, unsurprisingly, as our number one sport. America is a sporting land. And that includes the land itself. Sure, we may officially reside in states and counties, cities and towns, but we live in athletic divisions, regions, and rivalries: home team and visitors, us vs. them. I’m in Ohio and on any given day I can probably tell you how our baseball and football teams are doing, even though I find both sports snoozers. Like pop hits or smog, sports is in the air. We breathe it in at the checkout counter, the water cooler, the bar. All the more so in an age with an Internet and interstates. There isn’t a great geographical or cultural difference between Cincinnati and Cleveland, but it sure as shit matters if you’re in Bengals or Browns Country. Map America, and the Mason-Dixon line looks quaint compared to the scrimmage line. That includes the very language in which I’m writing this, our workaday American English. I hear my wife, whose sports know-how consists of having watched every season of Make It or Break It, saying to her boss, “We don’t want to bench our best players,” and I’m reminded that, as Americans, we speak in sports. Will you score? Will you win? Will you take a hit for the team? Sports—whether we’re talking about our love life or our daily grind—gives us one of the “metaphors we live by,” to quote the title of George Lakoff’s and Mark Johnson’s study about how we shape our experience through language. Cognitive linguists have shown that we make sense of our lives through metaphors: life is a journey; love is war; Syria’s use of chemical weapons is, in Obama’s words, “a game-changer.” In sports, Americans have a set of analogies, images, tropes, and conceits, through which we understand ourselves, even when those metaphors, like Obama’s, woefully distort the reality we’re trying to describe. So, when a new sport emerges on the American scene, it may signal more than just our love of exercise fads, crazes, and novelties. (Thighmaster, anyone?) A new sport may show us how we, as a culture of sports, currently envision ourselves, especially because sports serves as a surrogate for so many aspects of our culture that I’ve just mentioned. Like religion, politics, region, and language, sports bring us into community and give us a sense of belonging. It’s an academic commonplace that sports, with its rituals, fetishes, seasons, and deep devotion, has increasingly fulfilled the role of religion, but it’s an eye-opener when you find a figure such as Nelson Mandela upholding sports as a means through which humanity can achieve its highest aspirations. At the Laureus World Sports Awards in 2000, Mandela saw the path to a brighter future, and it comes with a marching band: Sport has the power to change the world. It has the power to inspire, it has the power to unite people in a way that little else does. It speaks to youth in a language they understand. Sport can create hope, where once there was only despair. It is more powerful than governments in breaking down racial barriers. It laughs in the face of all types of discrimination. And sure enough, sports can uphold a standard of justice that we often find lacking in our government and social institutions. The stopwatch doesn’t care about your race, class, or gender. The barbell isn’t impressed or daunted that you went to Yale or prison. “I think all of us are looking for that which does not admit of bullshit,” the novelist Harry Crews once said in an interview, and he found that in sports: If you tell me you can bench press 450, hell, we’ll load up the bar and put you under it. Either you can do it or you can’t do it—you can’t bullshit. Ultimately, sports are just about as close to what one would call the truth as it is possible to get in this world. The counterview to sports as a beacon of meritocratic equality and unbeclouded truth is that it’s a spillway for our worst public and private selves. Orwell, as you’d expect, saw sports as “bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting.” And Chomsky sees sports as an opiate for the shirtless, face-painted, giant-foam-finger masses: “It’s a way of building up irrational attitudes of submission to authority and group cohesion behind leadership elements. In fact it’s training in irrational jingoism.” I don’t think you have to choose between sports as Big Brother and sports as American Eagle to agree with a less epistemologically grand version of Crew’s claim: sports can tell us the no-bullshit truth about ourselves, and a new sport might just have some new truth to reveal. In this case, the sport is CrossFit, “the sport of fitness™.” You’ve probably heard of it, either from some guy yakking about it at the office or through one of those lifestyle segments on the news where it sporadically pops up. The typical take is that CrossFit is a cult or that it makes you vomit. (The yacker will demonstrate his cultish investment in CrossFit by detailing his retch-inducing workout.) CrossFit invites these views. Like yoga or golf, it tends to spread from a form of exercise into a way of life. It’s loosely linked to a particular diet (paleo); it has signature clothes (high socks, a liberal use of athletic tape, a preponderance of booty shorts for women and tattoos for the men) as well as its own terms, often for things that English is already equipped to handle: a gym is a “box,” a workout is a “wod” or “workout of the day,” a recommended standard for a given exercise is the physician’s “Rx.” And people who do it flood Twitter, Facebook, and other social media sites with videos, comments, recipes, advice, and general chitchat. All of these aspects, along with the fact that CrossFitters tend to love, not just do or like, but love CrossFit, give outsiders the impression that CrossFit is a cult. That and the vomit. Every CrossFitter has their favorite story of workout obliteration, often involving a bucket. And just about every CrossFit workout ends with a group of people writhing on the floor in a slather of their collective sweat. Witnessing this scene from the outside, you’d be perfectly right in asking why anyone would do it. My wife and I certainly did. We were introduced to CrossFit one summer evening about a year ago. We’d invited colleagues over for dinner. Robert is an historian of 17th century English theology and a displaced Southerner. Jill is a Renaissance scholar, who shares Robert’s sense of Southern decorum, but fuses it with the sincerity and openness of her Midwestern upbringing. They’re both around my age, forty-something, and self-described conservatives, though Robert is quick to make wickedly wry observations that’d make you think he wasn’t the father of two well-raised daughters, and Jill obviously loves it. In short, they’re our very adult and very admirable friends. So when we saw the giant scabs running along Robert’s shins, we were concerned. “Ah,” said Robert, glancing at wounds obviously delivered by a runaway jigsaw or the jaws of a Rottweiler, “that’s from the rope.” The rope? “Have you guys ever heard of CrossFit?” asked Jill with a beamy smile. “It’s this crazy exercise we’re doing!” That’s when we noticed Jill, in a sleeveless blouse, had shoulders and biceps that appeared freshly chiseled. I blurted some remark about her “guns,” Jill insisted I not call her arms “guns,” and my wife and I proceeded to drill them for details. They were reticent, but we eventually pried from them stories about skin-frying rope climbs and punishing push-ups, about Jill’s inability to lift her arms after a workout and write lecture notes on the chalkboard, about a gym behind barbwire in an industrial warehouse and its stentorian coach and residing genius, a tiny ex-gymnast with a blonde pony tail and the stamina of a Navy SEAL. We also heard about vomit. Robert vomits in workouts at least once a month. (Down, he informs me, from an initial bi-monthly basis.) He pushes himself like a man possessed, even when guys half his age are bent over and wheezing, until his only option is a sprint through the rear exit and a secluded spot in the gravel by the fence. After our conversation that night, my wife and I worried that our very adult and very admirable friends had gone slightly insane. ... "

http://www.salon.com/2013/09/08/crossfit_nation_partner/

9/10/2013 3:19:23 PM

i found that article shallow and pedantic.

9/10/2013 4:34:00 PM

900 isn't a hard and fast number or anything but it represents a rough approximation of when a lifter is becoming advanced enough to really consider transitioning to a bodybuilding split. I'm not saying its the only way to eventually get there, but it certainly is a lot more efficient and will get you there faster.

When you're a beginner weight lifter you have a couple of advantages.

1) Pretty much anything you do will cause you to grow. So there's no need to get a tricky/complicated routine going. Just lift weights and take the simplest approach possible and save the complicated things for later when it gets harder to grow.

2) You have quick recovery time because the workouts aren't tough on your central nervous system. You can squat/deadlift every other day because you're weak as fuck. When you start deadlifting 400-500 lbs then doing it 3x per week becomes a pipe dream without steroids at least.

3) Low weight high reps is a crappy way to get stronger. What's the point of subjecting yourself to all this volume, repetition, etc if you are bench pressing 135 lbs? You aren't going to get a lot stronger that way and you'll start plateauing while you're still weak. Why not get stronger before you start this stuff? Obviously you'll grow a lot more doing 12 reps of 185 than 12 reps of 135. Have you really ever seen a huge muscular person who couldn't bench press 200 lbs?



[Edited on September 10, 2013 at 10:44 PM. Reason : a]

9/10/2013 10:44:23 PM

low weight high reps is the perfect recipe for bigger muscles and more muscular endurance. not everyone cares about strength.

9/11/2013 9:29:54 AM

Low weight high reps = bigger muscles?

I thought

Low weight high reps = muscular endurance and fat loss
Med weight med reps = hypertrophy
High weight low reps = strength increase

9/11/2013 9:53:45 AM

High weight low reps is much better for fat loss actually. High reps on a calorie deficit is good for muscle loss.

And you need to build strength first so you can lift enough weight to do high reps with more weight

9/11/2013 10:11:56 AM

Your muscles don't know how much weight you are lifting

9/11/2013 10:27:25 AM

.

[Edited on September 11, 2013 at 11:20 AM. Reason : wtf]

9/11/2013 11:18:44 AM

poundages mean nothing. If you can't check your ego when you walk into the gym, then you're never going to realize your potential. Your one-rep max have more to do with leverage and neural adaptation than it does with actual increases in muscle mass. There's a good reason why serious powerlifters in lower weight classes don't look like bodybuilders.

everyone knows that small guy at the gym who can bench 400lbs because he's good good leverage and technique. But you show me a guy who's added 100lbs to his 10 rep max on the bench, and I'll show you a guy that's added a 1" slab of hardened muscle to his chest.

all this advice goes out the window if you're training to be a powerlifter, but very few people in here are training to be a powerlifter. Serious powerlifters want to get as strong as possible without gaining weight, because they have to compete in weight classes and ties go to the lighter lifter. My current gym is full of them, and it's impressive to watch them train.

9/11/2013 11:19:51 AM

^ this

9/11/2013 11:22:07 AM

Leaving my ego at the door was by far the hardest step when I switched to wanting to build mass as my main goal. It is a humbling experience to lift for hypertrophy compared to trying to load the bar up as heavy as you can but once I realized that I have been making more mass gains faster than I have ever done before. Still have a log way to go before I will be happy but definitely on the right path now.

9/11/2013 11:32:25 AM

you can also use changes in your lifting techniques to get more development with less weight. I can make my quads grow better by narrowing my stance and squatting deep with no lockout at the top using 315x10 than I can with normal form 405x10, and my joints feel better too.

Not locking out at the top on the bench and using chains allows me to get a better workout with less weight also. It took me a while to get used to working with chains though, because it was easy to go past failure and not be able to rerack the bar on the top pins.

9/11/2013 11:41:09 AM

Have you heard anything that Ben Pakulski talks about (I am sure plenty of other BBs say similar stuff)? He talks a lot about altering your form to create more tension on the muscles and hitting all parts of the strength curve. Like for bench he talks about trying to squeeze the bar inward to activate your chest more. I have been doing some of that type of stuff lately and noticed a huge difference, had to drop the weight down a lot.

9/11/2013 11:59:45 AM

I've heard of others advocating that, such as ripping the bar apart for triceps focus or pushing the bar inward for chest dominance. About the only exercise I switch up regularly is squats, because there are so many good variations of foot stance and squatting style.

9/11/2013 2:42:08 PM

you guys are really doing a disservice to beginning weight lifters by spreading nonsense.

get stronger. way stronger. then build mass.

Anything you do as a beginner will make you bigger than you are. But you'll never get big bench pressing 135 lbs for 25 reps, period.

6-8 reps is really your wheelhouse to "GROW". 12 reps is a crappy growth stimulus and its for advanced weightlifters.

Lifting light is fine for advanced lifters, but by pretending it will get you ripped everyone is just perpetuating the steroids myths.


If you don't take steroids you'll never be "huge". Who cares. Focus on making money, looking good, and getting girls off. You don't need to bench press 400 to get girls hotter than most guys jerk off to online.

"Everyone wants to be a bodybuilder but nobody wanna lift no heavy ass weights"

[Edited on September 13, 2013 at 1:45 AM. Reason : a]

9/13/2013 1:39:11 AM

RIP credibility

9/13/2013 6:18:03 AM

^^ All coming from a guy who's like 150 lbs and never been big in his life.

I am not arguing the points that medium reps build muscle or anything like that, but when a big guy/power lifter like eleusis is posting, he's got more credibility than a skinny guy who just started lifting.

And yes I agree that looking good/staying healthy should be the motivation for most people when working out (much moreso than strength or getting huge).

9/13/2013 7:40:51 AM

^^ lolz

9/13/2013 8:23:02 AM

Have ya'll even read the sticky?

also, shots fired

9/13/2013 9:32:08 AM

Quote :

"All coming from a guy who's like 150 lbs and never been big in his life. "

RIP

9/13/2013 10:15:59 AM

Im 170 now, ill be 190 in a few months and yes I was relatively muscular when I was 22 before I sustained nerve damage. It took years to regenerate now it has and ill be big from lifting heavy not light.

9/13/2013 10:25:58 AM

I eagerly await these great results from a few months of starting strength.

9/13/2013 11:40:39 AM

Sweet. Me too.

My only issues so far are my lack of sleep and drinking. Definitely limits results some

9/13/2013 1:01:05 PM

I remember there was a how many pull ups can you do debate on here recently with some posters putting up numbers that many did not believe. Here is what the P90 founder can do.

Quote :

"How many pull-ups can you do without stopping? I can do 40. Here's a challenge to anyone out there: We do a fun routine called 30-30. How quickly can you do 30 pull-ups and 30 push-ups? My best is one minute flat."

And here is his breakfast.

Quote :

"You're serving as Honorary Race Marshall at the National Press Club's 5K on Sept. 7. What will you eat for breakfast beforehand? I'll have my usual steel-cut oatmeal with water, blackberries and blueberries -– no salt, no sugar. And then I'll probably have four or five egg whites scrambled with sautéed onions, peppers and basil -– double the basil -– and I'll throw some slices of avocado on top of that. I'll probably skip the toast. That's pretty much what I have most days, except just the oatmeal, or maybe a shake."

how he got started for those who are interested.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/12/tony-horton-p90x-yoga-breakfast_n_3902266.html

[Edited on September 13, 2013 at 1:16 PM. Reason : ]

9/13/2013 1:15:40 PM

Interesting. I'd like to try the 30-30 cold just to see, even though I don't normally do arbitrary challenges like that. This one just happens to be suited to my build . The push-ups side of that is a breeze, but unless you are cutting corners, you're probably still going to utilize nearly half the minute busting out push-ups in decent (good but rushed) form. Doing 30 proper pull-ups in the remaining 30 seconds would be the beast time-wise.

[Edited on September 13, 2013 at 1:26 PM. Reason : ]

9/13/2013 1:21:46 PM