[quote]Casey Butt wrote:
deat wrote:
I am a nerd, so during my lunch break I measured my wrists and ankles. I am 6’2.5" with 7.5" wrists and 9.75" ankles. Using Mr. Butt’s formula I get a maximum lbm of 204 lbs. This is good news as I am currently about 17% bf at 246, which puts me at my maximum lbm ( at 23 years old!). Now I guess I can quit lifting and pursue numerous professional/graduate degrees.
Actually, the equations in the online article predict an elite competitor of your height and structure would carry 210.6 lbs lbm at 17%, not 204 lbs - that’s assuming your estimate of ‘about 17%’ is accurate. However, the equations are not intended to be accurate as high as 17% body fat. They are most accurate in the 5-14% range (where the majority of the data pool was taken) - at 17% they’re probably off by a few pounds.
With that said, one of the hallmarks of the genetically elite is being able to drop body fat while maintaining a high percentage of their initial lean body mass. In any case, most people will lose several pounds of lean body mass in the first few days of a low-cal or low-carb diet alone (much of that being fluid, but fluid is counted as lean body mass by all body fat estimation methods). Just because you’re carrying 204 pounds of lean body mass at 17% does not mean you would be carrying that at 10% bf. In fact, based on typical people’s weight losses, you’d probably be closer to 195. However, that would put you at 217 at 6’2.5" and fairly lean - a very respectable accomplishment.
Christian Thibaudeau wrote:
When I ear about there limits I always end up thinking of one of my old friends from high school. He was a soccer player and never ever trained with weights in all his life.
In high school he was 5’6" and 177lbs and was in what I would call ‘nearly bodybuilding national level condition’ year round. I don’t know what his wrists measured but he had a small bone structure. So he probably exceeded his natural limit before he even started lifting weights.
A typical trainee of 5’6" would scale to about 181 pounds at the elite level, so your friend at 177 lbs actually would have been at ‘nearly bodybuilding national level condition’ - that’s assuming a sub 7" wrist, proportional ankle, and 10% body fat.
However, it’s very tricky to make accurate bone structure and bf level guesses. I train with a guy who is 5’7" and appears to have wrists like twigs - an illusion created by his long forearm muscle bellies and small hands - yet they taped at 7.0", which is not small for his height. He also has clear vasculariy and fairly sharp abs, yet is above 12% bf (by skin-folds). He looks big and aesthetic enough for high-level competition (he has 20 years training experience), yet at 175 lbs is actually 10-15 pounds shy of what he’d need to be to compete at that level.
My point is that looks can be very deceiving. The 17" arm being mentioned here, although it sounds small depending on what you’re used to hearing, would look huge on a lean person of average height. Actually, at 10% bf and 5’9" height (roughly average) the typically structured person would max out at about 17.2" -17.4" in elite level condition. Most people of that height and structure wouldn’t get that far because that is an elite level achievement, so I have to agree that “the average person does NOT have the genetics to build arms much bigger than 17”. Most people, however, would be better off to, as the last poster put it (from Brooks Kubik) “Lift for 10-12 years, then start reading shit and splitting hairs.”[/quote]
Thanks for the more in depth explanation Mr. Butt. I enjoyed reading your website as well as your posts.
