As you don’t have the data, why do you persist with the belief?
What do you hope to gain from this? It is such an inconsequential thing, lyou see a 50 year old do it and then what? You probably won’t accept it or say it’s not typically or there are steroids involved. But if you do accept it, does it make even a tiny difference to any part of your life?
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Why do strong men have goals, Strongmangoal? Why does anyone talk about lifting weights? What benefit is derived from such talk? You’ll pardon me, but I’m not apt to discuss my motivations for this thread when this thread hasn’t even yielded any data yet. When I’ve gotten some numbers out of it, I’ll be happy to yap about the why.
I WILL say that if he seems genuine - I’ll ask what his training program was, natty or not.
As a counter, you’ll find many people are more willing to provide data if they know WHY they are doing it. If there is no benefit/purpose, there’s minimal incentive to participate.
Rebuilding after a 5yr layoff. I don’t think 5’11" is short, but you may.
As a counter to your counter, I can’t sue you when I give the motivation and it shows your theory was incorrect. And YOU are participating, just not positively.
If I set the age to 18, this thread would be replete with numbers.
A man with 11 inch arms, even if he never lifted before, has issues that go beyond not lifting.
You’re right.
That’s usually the case 
Your results reflect that
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True, but I’d still like to be proven wrong. Someone let me know when it happens.
Wait… a Youtuber said something that may be an exaggeration of the truth!!! This is unheard-of, and if you alert Youtube they will immediately demand this person rescind their proclamation and tone down their rhetoric. Good catch, and thank you for bringing this to our attention. Next thing you know a commercial will exaggerate the positive attributes of the product they’re selling.
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Blockquote What you’re asking, and have asked several times over the last 10 years… I’m pretty positive there’ve been more than a few examples in training logs and the T-ransformation challenge over the years.
It would have been nice if you had invested all the time you took to
- write that post;
- investigate MY post history,
into rather giving us some links to those transformations you claim. To giving us some hard numbers, instead of just the words, “newbie gains”.
Fairly lean 17” arms look big on most frames. Outside of Instagram models and pros it would certainly be big at avg joes gym. I’m short and have 17” arms so people do think they are bigger.
So you can throw out blanket statements, personal theories pulled out of thin air, and hypothetical scenarios, but we need to counter it with concrete evidence? No, that’s not how it works.
But…
Here’s a forum member in his 40s who went 10 years without training and then made ridiculous progress. This pic is a 28-month transformation. I have now provided more evidence against your claim than you’ve provided to support it. So, does my team win or something?
Unless you want to point out (fairly) that he’s not in his 50s and then try making the case that test levels are the single biggest influencing factor - which they’re not - and that they’re drastically worse at 50 compared to 40 - which they’re not.
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I get that but my point is more about what constitutes big. If a trainer tells some average guy who never trained that he’ll get big arms, how big does he mean? To some, 15 inches might be big enough to be considered big. And the OP is not lean.
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I still don’t get why it’s so bad if someone has unrealistic expectations. When we played soccer as kids we all thought we’d be in Premier League. Evidently not the case but we still exercised and had fun.
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And a shredded 17" arm is huge on most people (greater than 80% of men are between 5’5" and 6’1"). Frank Zane had 17" arms, at 5’8" - 5’9", and I don’t think many would consider his arms small.
Arm measurements kinda make guys have unrealistic expectations. Many of the 18" arms claims would be 16" if the individual was lean.
Within an individual, it is a big factor, but among individuals, genetics is much larger. Guys with good genetics naturally are often looking better than guys with poor genetics on the sauce.
I know a guy who is in the latter half of the 50s, with 19" arms. He isn’t super lean, but it isn’t all fat either as he is benching low 400s, and pulls low 700s. His arms dwarf mine (especially his gorilla forearms). He has better arm genetics than I do. If we were both to try to add as much arm mass as possible, he would probably beat me.
I have reread your OP and still disagree. I am a 52 yo post menopausal woman with Graves who doesn’t even do direct arm training and have put 3/4 inch on my arms in the last two years, despite a pandemic. Pretty damn sure if I can accomplish this, a 50 yo healthy male should far exceed this.
Now then, if you want to call it quits, that’s on you, but the rest of us may not be ready to throw in the towel.
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And Arnold and Sergio had arms that were 4 or 5 inches bigger. Then you have Franco who was significantly shorter than Zane but had arms the same size as Zane. Big arms is a pretty meaningless term as it’s all relative to not only the individual’s arms but the perspective of the person making that judgment. If a trainer says he can help someone get, regardless of age, big arms like Arnold then yeah, I would question him. But if he just says he can help someone get big arms then I would need to hear something more specific from him before I questioned him.
The OP seems to think that a 50+ year old going from 11 inch arms to 13 inch arms is getting big arms. I think it’s more like emaciated arms becoming normal (by normal person standards) arms.
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