Sir, I respect your achievements and I understand your point. But your report will IMO not achieve what you intended.
IIUC, it is intended for a group of people who are working hard, are close to their limits but have unreal expectations and are letting their obsession wreck every other aspect of their lives.
But it will really reach only those who are nowhere near their limits and need to fantasize about an “unreal” expectation in order to reach their real limits and be used as an excuse by such people to justify a lack of progress.
I remember how there was an article that looked at most of Bruce Lee’s so-called stunts that his followers and fans had cooked up over the years (and that had snowballed to crazy proportions), and the paper then concluded that the legend of bruce lee was still considered a necessity to inspire people to work harder and so it was not a good idea to publicly debunk the urban legends about the man.
EDIT: I see you addressed these points earlier with “That was not the intended idea and I don;t care if thats how people view this article”. That makes it different. Good day to you.
[quote]Casey Butt wrote:
I did not say anything even implying that it is not possible for anyone to drastically change their lean body mass or body composition. I myself was once 55% bodyfat at over 320 pounds. I then went down to 160 pounds at 15% bodyfat, then back up to 175 at 9% body fat. That was a gain of 23 pounds of lean body mass or a 17% increase. The changes in my appearance were quite noticeable.
If you really do carry 50 pounds more lean body mass than an average person of your height and bone structure then you have almost doubled the accomplishments of the greatest drug-free bodybuilders of all time.
Many people who believe that are comparing themselves to when they were teenagers and just began training. That is not accurate because most people are naturally heavier in their twenties than they were at age 16 or 17 …regardless of weight training.
Realism has nothing to do with defeatism. How people choose to interpret reality is completely up to themselves. Of course, accepting “limitations” requires some maturity that most young bodybuilders don’t have, but that is itself influenced by people’s skewed perceptions.
I agree that people should not mentally defeat themselves because of some information that they interpret in a negative fashion. But I really don’t see how that article is negative in any way. The only way it is negative is if people have unrealistic expectations in the first place.
I think after 10 years of hard, drug-free training and plateauing around where the equations predict, most people will come to “accept” that article much quicker than the younger crowd.
The statistics are accurate, the analysis was accurate. There’s really nothing else to it than that. I did nothing other than analyze and formulate the existing data. Kouri E.M., Pope H.G. Jr., Katz D.L. and Oliva P. independently came to the same conclusions as myself.
Of course people have choices of how they deal with the information. If they’re concerned about it planting self-defeatist attitudes in their heads they can: 1) Simply not read the article. 2) Just ignore it. 3) Adjust their unrealistic expectations. 4) Get mad at the drug-free champions for not setting a more positive example by being bigger. 5) Get mad at drug-users for raising the bar to a level which is unattainable without drugs.[/quote]
