How Big Can You Get Naturally?

Training Bodybuilding
341

[quote]Bill Roberts wrote:
Professor X wrote:
SkyNett wrote:
Well, then we actually are all in agreement.

Thing is, as Bill pointed out, it’s not so much Butt’s theory - as he himself has stated that it’s a guideline, not a bible - but the doofuses that read into his concept and apply their own retarded spin to it.

And while I felt the guy who was arguing with you was attacked pretty vehemently right out of the gate, my intention was no so much to defend his position, but point out that some of what he was saying had some merit.

But I do have to apologize to X if it seemed like I was defending him, because I see that once again he trots out the obnoxious fat jokes, which in and of itself is so idiotic, rude and generally dismissive of someone’s hard work that it becomes reprehensible…

While Bill may not personally remember it, when Butt first came onto this site, he very much held to his findings as meaning that there was a limit even though he also stated that blacks may exceed those limits. If you search for them, I am sure you can find the 154 plus threads where we go back and forth about this.

I did not know that.

Mr Butt has since moderated his views then, from some rather specific statements he recently made in response to me on this forum.

My take is he is a sincere individual that is capable of accepting where facts require a change in what he had previously thought, unlike his followers.

On the “Butt’s Ceiling,” at least some of his followers have taken it up, incidentally. They themselves used the expression in a recent thread. I guess they forgot that you invented it, Professor![/quote]

The only reason there was so much debate was because when he first came here, he kept posting as if no one could get past his measurements…basically acting much like the guy in this thread. I am glad if he has changed, but that was not how he was when he first came here. His followers are just acting like he did even though most of them don’t even seem to be bodybuilders.

They strike me as the same types of people who write “steeroidz” after every youtube video of a big bodybuilder.

342

[quote]Airtruth wrote:
An actual weigh in at the Mr. Olympia in 88.

Some of the guys weight?

Rich Gaspari 209 1/2
Lee Haney 243 1/4
Al Beckles 200
Ralf Moeller 288
Shawn Ray 201 1/2
Peter Hensel 240 1/2
Mike Ashley 189 1/2

…

People can talk about “don’t tell people what they can’t accomplish” bit all day, but the fact is, Mike Ashley was about as generically gifted as a natural guy can be and he was 189 pounds. I believe Mike was 5’7" or so. Which again I believe falls right in line with what Casey wrote. [/quote]

Though it’s really not necessary, let’s put a final definitive nail in the coffin so these clowns can’t say no one provided a proven example.

Let’s take the above example Mike Ashley.

I don’t know his wrist and ankle measurements but he did not look unusually thick-wristed or ankled to me. If anything he was a small-joints guy. I will arbitrarily plug in 7.25" for the wrists and 8.5" for the ankles, and use that 5’7" figure for height.

And let’s put in 12% for bodyfat, in case Mike Ashley off season may have bulked up to that.

The renowned calculator declares his maximum weight at 12% bodyfat and those measurements would be…

190.5 lb.

Now, how can it be that his supposed limit would be only 190.5 lb at 12% bodyfat and normal hydration when in fact he was 189.5 at the Olympia, very much leaner and very dry?

That should be the end of any argument that this represents an actual limit with no exceptions.

(Although I’ll bet that these clowns will now cry that all this proves is that Ashley used steroids: their hero has fallen, much to their sadness, as surely they could not be wrong.)

343

No ones ever found out.

You can get 400,500,600,700 lbs of fat “naturally”. Why can’t humans be “naturally” much more muscular than they are with an insane amount of eating and weight training.

I don’t think we have found the limit.

344

Bill, the obvious assumption in your post is that Mike Ashley was natural. IOW, his natural limit might have been within a few pounds of 190, but he exceeded those limits using substances by X pounds.

Whether a guy gets 5 or 25 additional pounds from a substance depends on how good a responder they are and how competent they (or their coach) are in getting the most out of the substances- just like training and diet protocols (as you well know).

I don’t know of anyone who really believes Mike Ashley is natural, and even if he (or Skip Lacour, or some of the other freaks of nature) was/is, it still seems like “Butt’s Ceiling” is a pretty reasonable/accurate predictor of what the vast majority of people could acheive in terms of weight at a certain level of LBM and fat.

And again, just because there are exceptions, doesn’t mean there isn’t a rule.

345

See?

I knew it.

And said it would happen.

First Ashley is cited as being natural with an opinion that his development was in line with the system and supports it: I run the calculation, and now he is a steroid user. (Different posters, I know, but still.)

It’s a non-falsifiable system.

346

[quote]Bill Roberts wrote:
See?

I knew it.

And said it would happen.

First Ashley is cited as being natural with an opinion that his development was in line with the system and supports it: I run the calculation, and now he is a steroid user. (Different posters, I know, but still.)

It’s a non-falsifiable system.[/quote]

LOL

And just so it is stated, there is no reason to doubt Mike Ashley at all especially if “but he was really big” is the reason they now throw tomatoes at him.

You can’t win making any argument against it a waste of time. You either fall under their range of numbers or you are lying. Yeah, pretty scientific.

347

And trextacy, do you really want to argue that even if you believe (on what basis?) that Mike Ashley used steroids, that your opinion is that the man could not have, without steroids, reached 200 lb at 12% bodyfat, thus beating the alleged limit?

Do you really want to publicly put yourself on record as having the opinion that, if possible at all, it’s phenomenally rare without drugs for a 5’7" man to reach 200 lb at 12% bodyfat?

348

Mike Ashley is 5’7" and competed at well over 200 lbs, was an IFBB pro that won the arnold and came in second place to Shawn Ray at the Ironman Classic. Do you really think he was natural? Come on. The calcs for his other measurement you used may not be accurate, but even so I think all signs point towards an enhanced physique, therefore not useful in this discussion.

Yes, I think for most 5’7" guys with those measurements, 190 lbs at the stated level of bodyfat would be pretty dang close to maximal, with every pound over that suggesting that the trainee has exception genetics. Why does that POV cause you to insult me? I don’t get it.

And, I’m not a representative of any side of the debate and don’t care about Mike Ashley or people that use substances. I do think that steroids (and other substances) work and have skewed peoples’ perspectives on what a good physique is.

349

I don’t think I’m insulting you by saying that it shows a lack of real world knowledge of that aspect in bodybuilding to think it phenomenally rare without drugs for a 5’7" man to reach 200 lb at 12% bodyfat. (Which I didn’t say literally but it could be said to have been implied.) It is, I think, simply an accurate statement, if that is the case.

And certainly there is also the fact that you could have said no, you don’t think it is phenomenally rare. Actually I was expecting you to stop and think about it and realize hey, actually that’s hardly unknown by any means.

Now in contest condition, absolutely that would be phenomenally rare. Indeed it may not have happened to date.

But at 12%? Nope.

Obviously not every Tom, Dick and Harry achieves it, but it’s hardly super-rare.

350

[quote]Bill Roberts wrote:
I don’t think I’m insulting you by saying that it shows a lack of real world knowledge of that aspect in bodybuilding to think it phenomenally rare without drugs for a 5’7" man to reach 200 lb at 12% bodyfat. (Which I didn’t say literally but it could be said to have been implied.) It is, I think, simply an accurate statement, if that is the case.

And certainly there is also the fact that you could have said no, you don’t think it is phenomenally rare. Actually I was expecting you to stop and think about it and realize hey, actually that’s hardly unknown by any means.

Now in contest condition, absolutely that would be phenomenally rare. Indeed it may not have happened to date.

But at 12%? Nope.

Obviously not every Tom, Dick and Harry achieves it, but it’s hardly super-rare.[/quote]

I don’t think the 8% (if i recall the Butt baseline, maybe 10%???) and 12% don’t relate to LBM on a 1:1 ratio- do you agree? I think that perhaps changing that variable (a significant one) is more significant and a red herring in criticizing Butt’s formula. Not intentional, of course, but it’s my experience (and others, including professor X, have testified) that bodyfat (within reason) is a necessary evil as it were for adding maximal amounts of muscle.

It is also my experience that one would lose more muscle going from 12% to 8% than from, say, 18% to 14%. Not all 4% is equal.

But to answer your question- no, i don’t think 200 lbs at 5-7 at 12% is some unicorn of physique development, but i also stand by the gist of my prior post- that Mike Ashley was not natural, that 200 lb at 5’7" around 12% is an upper level physique (naturally), as supplemented by this post which clarifies that as BF% goes down the amount of LBM lost in the process will also go down such that Butt’s formula will probably bear out. IOW, if Ashley had 8% bodyfat at 5’7" 190-ish, naturally, he would have an elite physique. It seems to me that his genetics are fantastic for bodybuilding, so if he exceeded it by a few pounds of LBM that wouldn’t be a surprise, but it doesn’t mean that the formula is shit.

351

[quote]trextacy wrote:

I don’t think the 8% (if i recall the Butt baseline, maybe 10%???) and 12% don’t relate to LBM on a 1:1 ratio- do you agree? I think that perhaps changing that variable (a significant one) is more significant and a red herring in criticizing Butt’s formula. [/quote]

There is nothing fixed about 10% with regard to the weight calculations. I just happened to pick it previously and happened to pick 12% this time.

It is Butt’s own calculator, which uses the equation in question, that generates the 190 lb figure as the supposed limit at 12%, when asked to provide a figure for that bodyfat percentage.

The fault is not mine that it does this.

For fun I’ll give you what it says as the claimed maximum for 5’7" and those quite reasonable wrist and ankle measurements for bodyfat levels varying from 5% to 20%:

5%: 171
7.5%: 178
10%: 185
12.5%: 192
15%: 200
20%: 217

Sorry, el wrongo. Not a ceiling, not a limit, not a maximum and folk that come on boards and insist that no one has ever met a non-drug-user exceeding the formula and anyone who says they have met such is lying, and anyone who has exceeded the formula therefore must have used drugs, is just sadly off base.

That is what I have criticized.

I have never said the formula has no merit of any kind. It is the misapplication and the absurd insistences that exceptions don’t exist or are bizarrely rare that I object to.

So far as merit goes, aside from it showing interesting correlation between height, wrist, and ankle sizes with other measurements for the data set it included, the figures it gives for biceps, forearm, chest, and calf sizes – which are given only for 8-10% bodyfat, unlike weight figures – are reasonable calculations for natural trainers having very fine genetics and thoroughly respectable results in the gym. I would not say they cannot be surpassed, but someone who achieves them is indeed doing well. Most will not reach these values.

The thigh figures I think fall short, though.

As for the weight, I really think it’s f’ed up although with just a tweak it could be quite reasonable for giving a usual-but-not-invariable maximum weight in contest condition, if the arbitrary value of 7.5% (ignoring that we want the weight for a leaner condition than this) is plugged in for the bodyfat.

E.g., the 178 lb calculated with that number plugged in for a 5’7" natural bb’er if interpreted to be for very dry, shredded contest condition seems to me to be, for the great majority of individuals, fairly described as a “ceiling” or greatest value obtained in practice among the great majority, though I expect there will be outliers.

I am not saying that 7.5% is necessarily the perfect number to plug in. But just for illustration, using the formula that way to find an ordinary maximum for dry, shredded contest condition seems to give much more reasonable values than what it gives for, for example, predicting alleged maximum weight at 12% bodyfat.

(Which happens to end my participation in this thread: sometimes a thing has been beaten into the ground enough.) EDIT: I failed in that, as trextacy had a really good follow-up post.

352

Well, I will admit you know more about this than me. I think we can get to the crux of the matter though. So, to that end, I will ask you- do you believe (a) that there are upper limits to LBM that can be carried at a relatively lean BF % (say, 9-10%) based on physiological indicators (height, joint size, or whatever you can think of) or (b) that there is no predictable limit (or small range of limits) based on a defined set of physiological characteristics?

If I offered you $1M to “do better”, would you be able to do it and come up with a reliable system for achieving what Butt attempted to do with his formula (a predictive formula), or would you say “I’m sorry, in my best conscience I can’t say that there are any measurable traits (height, joint size, etc.) that can predict a max muscular bodyweight at a given bodyfat”? IOW, would you propose a different formula/approach than Butt, or do you think he is trying to predict the unpredictable (for 90% of the male population) and the mere notion of a formula is bullshit?

353

Well, it is fair to say that an individual at for example 6’3" using known methods of training and nutrition and having genetics that have in this century been seen cannot be, for example, 1000 lb at say 12% bodyfat.

So that value would be too high.

We could say the same for 900 lb.

We could work our way down quite a bit.

However, can we work our way down to anything really precise? No.

For example, can we really know what Mark Henry, who is 6’3", would weigh at 12% bodyfat if he had never used drugs and had trained as a bodybuilder?

We just don’t know. The man would be huge, though, I am sure. But we cannot nail it down.

Or take the previously-mentioned Brian Orakpo, also 6’3", and measured at 263 at 8% bf. Do we know how big he might be as a natural bb’er at his peak? There is no way to say. Undoubtedly he’d be a truly massive dude at say the 12% bf figure though. Or 8% for that matter.

I can say so far as the general problem goes, one cannot take a small number of samples and generate a formula that can be relied on for closely establishing maxima for, so to speak, the world at large.

Using some of my own research as an example, I had a dataset of prodrugs with varying solubilities in water and isopropyl myristate, and varying molecular weights, along with their transdermal flux values. From this I generated the Roberts-Sloan equation, which fits the data it was derived from quite well (yawn: that ought to happen if an equation is any good at all), and with more significance, when it is rederived from subsets of the data, closely predicts the omitted elements.

And with considerably more significance, in years since has pretty closely predicted entirely new compounds developed since then.

I had 43 compounds.

But even so, if I were to claim that the equation is highly likely to predict maximal transdermal flux for ANY compound, no exceptions, out of the very very many sorts that there are, I’d be making quite the fundamental mistake.

I expect (don’t know) that the Butt dataset was a lot smaller than that 43, and by no means do I think – nor at this point does Mr Butt – that it can cover everyone.

As to what it would take to do the job more closely?

Measuring a TON more individuals, in a hypothetical world where physically gifted persons were far more prone to going into bb’ing and where physique-enhancing drugs did not exist so as to avoid having to second guess whether an exceptional specimen was a drug user or not, and doing essentially the same sort of work Mr Butt did. I think he did very well for the dataset he had to work with. I don’t think that that dataset makes it possible to give figures that are a maximum for everyone yet also close to figures already observed.

And I think that even with a very large dataset, you still couldn’t simultaneously give a figure that was a true maximum for all cases and yet also close to figures already observed.

354

I see your point. I guess Butt thought that by sampling a couple dozen (?) top level bodybuilders from their day (pre-steroids) he was, per se, looking at solid pool reflective of the upper limits (or a reasonable sample thereof) of natural physique development- OR, at least what was available to assess, since we pretty much have to look back that far “to know” we are looking at a natural bodybuilder in peak condition. Unfortunately, the kind of (more) conclusive study you are talking about probably couldn’t be pulled off.

But like I said I see your point(s) and you know more about this than me. The criticisms of many others on here, to me, seemed like your garden variety “it’s cool to act like limits don’t exist and I can look like Ronnie if I try/eat hard enough” posturing. The images out there of what is “big” have been skewed, well, big time, and many would be doing well to reach Butt’s Ceiling naturally. If you are a NFL running back, a Mike Ashley, etc. then more power to ya. A look at the competitors (and their size) at most any natural show I think would be shocking for many who are use to a different standard.

355

But with of course the caveat that there is quite considerable shrinkage at the show compared to their reasonably-lean walking-around condition.

356

[quote]Bill Roberts wrote:
But with of course the caveat that there is quite considerable shrinkage at the show compared to their reasonably-lean walking-around condition.[/quote]

That isn’t even the main issue though. Are we now assuming that guys at natural contests have the best genetics for bodybuilding? That assumption makes no sense. Why do people assume the people with the best genetics for gaining muscle care about remaining natural?

I mean, Ronnie Coleman was clearly a freak since high school. People like Vic Richards was bigger than 90% OF THE PEOPLE ON THIS FORUM when he was fucking 17 years old. Do these people really think that Vic Richards would fall under Butt’s limits?

No, EVERYONE may not be able to get extremely large, but let’s get real…this activity isn’t even for everyone. We have known for decades that if 1,000 people are into bodybuilding, maybe 10 of those have what it takes to be a pro bodybuilder in terms of genetics.

Why do we care at all what average people can do and why are we basing limits on the average?

This mentality can only have one conclusion…the prevention of someone with above average genetics from reaching their full potential simply because they BELIEVE they can’t do better.

357

[quote]trextacy wrote:
The criticisms of many others on here, to me, seemed like your garden variety “it’s cool to act like limits don’t exist and I can look like Ronnie if I try/eat hard enough” posturing. [/quote]

Who is saying this? Be very specific. However, the people who do focus on their POSSIBLE limits as beginners will be least likely to exceed them whether they have the genetics for it or not.

358

Just checked my numbers on the Butt calculator.

So, what does it mean that my legs surpassed “the limit” at a much lower body weight?

And, my neck is too big. How does that happen?

Alas, according to the numbers I will never be a man using PX’s definition. (16 inch arms - if one is wondering I am referencing comments in one of the threads that influenced the creation of the T-cell Alpha)