[quote]Professor X wrote:
He couldn’t teach someone who is 180lbs anything at all? Nothing? He looks like a bodybuilder, trains like a bodybuilder and knows absolutely NOTHING? That in itself is impressive.[/quote]
He is not as lean as a bodybuilder. You didn’t say “looks like a bodybuilder” earlier; you said 250 pounds and talked about “big”. He is big, and he’s right around 250 pounds. And nobody knows ABSOLUTELY nothing. But I bet if he just made up his own diet without reading any good information, he wouldn’t be too successful at keeping muscle and dropping fat.
Big friend could take skinny friend (150 lbs at 6’4") to the gym and mentor him, and I’m sure skinny friend will not get big. Skinny friend will probably get injured.
Skinny friend eats next to nothing, by the way.
Big friend did nothing special to get big. I mean he did not make a great effort. He lifts weights; but a lot of small guys lift weights too. He eats what he feels like and has no special weight-gaining diet whatsoever.
Are you being serious?
Yes, big guys exist who are naturally big and had no strategy for getting big. How would they advise? Big and super lean, now that’s another story.
I am always interested in achievement and I always ask people what they do. But sometimes, they really don’t know. So I don’t assume they always will.
I would not say that my big (I wouldn’t say massive; he’s about 250) friend has gained more muscle than me. He’s never been skinny. Relatively speaking, I increased my bodyweight by 30% in 16 weeks when I started training. That sounds maybe almost unbelievable, except that before I started, I was a very skinny ectomorph who had lost weight due to a long illness. Compared to my typical weight before the illness, I increased my bodyweight by 15% in those first 16 weeks.
However, I am by no means an expert on gaining muscle, which is why I never give advice about it. My own gains really didn’t come from any special knowledge I could pass on. I had never lifted a weight in my life before that time, so they were “newbie gains” in my opinion. I wasn’t even eating much protein.
My goal is not to get huge, which you can disdain if you choose (though why people disdain other people’s goals in this area is beyond me); it has been to rehab a severe back injury and now my priority in training is not to mess it up any further.
Because unfortunately when I started training there was no INFORMATION about this.
Where would I go to learn? I don’t know where to go, but I know the KIND of information I’d want to see. I’d want to see someone who discovered what different strategies are currently advocated; assuming there are several strategies, and maybe conflicting opinions, take a population of trainees and try out the strategies and measure which one works the best. If there is a lot of variability between different trainees, then identify what individual differences are responsible. (That last step is unfortunately rarely done, which is why so much of the “research” isn’t useful to individuals.) Now if someone did all this observation carefully and systematically, it could be called a “scientific study.” I don’t care if it is done by a “coach” or a bodybuilder or a PhD. And I don’t care if a 150-pound guy did the observing and measuring, or a 100-pound woman. That would be quality information. And if the study identified a strategy as most successful, that would be the one to try first.
In theory you could get less systematic but still potentially useful information from a forum like this where people post their detailed experiences.
Well, you’ll never know if you don’t consider the information from the smaller guy. You will just never know. Why shut out sources of information without considering the information itself?
If they’re big AND lean, then probably the chances are good for getting some helpful advice. The combination probably rarely happens by accident, especially when even just lean is pretty rare.
Good information involves observation and measurement, as I said before. That means measurement of whether something “works,” as in the scenario I described above. I’m not talking about “theories.”
People will take some little fact of human physiology and use it to justify a whole diet or workout strategy. These strategies rarely work well, and then “science” gets a bad rap. But building a workout on a fact or two about physiology is not logically valid scientifically, because you are assuming that there are NO OTHER aspects of physiology that will affect the outcome. That’s usually ridiculous, because the body is very complex. So if you want to know how well a workout strategy works, you have to observe and measure the workout strategy itself. That is the only valid way.
I am a cognitive neuroscientist. The entire field has developed to know what people know. The subjects with photographic memories who have been closely studied have NOT learned how to have a photographic memory, and they have no idea how their brain does this. It does not appear to be possible to “learn” to have a photographic memory; at least, no one has succeeded in trying.
Or by “photographic” did you just mean “really good”?
Researchers currently think that the capacity of working memory is the closest thing to innate and unlearnable there is.
I certainly hope that I never try to insult people to make myself feel better about anything. But I don’t feel bad about anything, except screwing up my back. And what I learned from that was that what you don’t know CAN hurt you.
Absolutely. Observing and measuring how you respond to different stimulus in a systematic way IS the scientific method, and it’s the best way we have for learning the truth, including about our own bodies.
And basically, no official scientist in a lab is going to study YOU (meaning, any given weight lifter). You have got to do it for yourself. That’s why training logs exist.
