We are having technical difficulties regarding internet availability at the gym. Please do not post a bunch of stupid shit. The issue should be resolved by mid afternoon (Wednesday). In the mean time, here are some videos that should entertain you.
Strong weightlifter:
If you sign up for the Starting Strength Seminar at the Wichita Falls Athletic Club, you may get to experience some of this:
And this is an incredibly important video:
In case you guys missed it, AC and I were on Iron Radio last Friday. You can listen to the show here. Thoughts, questions, and observations are welcome on the interview.
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There are still quite a few spots open for the Starting Strength Seminar at the Wichita Falls Athletic Club in Wichita Falls, TX at the end of February. This is your opportunity to train and learn at one of the best gyms in the country. Here is a tour:
WFAC Virtual Tour from A.C. on Vimeo.
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I commend some of you for not only answering questions in the comments over the weekend but also defending against a few ridiculous statements from certain posters. It is easy to take anything that we say out of context or incorrectly assume it applies to every spectrum of the population. As this website grows, there will continue to be ridiculous comments and/or trolls. As a general rule, these intellectual children can be ignored.
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A new t-shirt order will be in stock shortly. Also, I am working on a couple of other interesting designs. Stay tuned.
I didn’t have time to write tonight, so this is Gary Gibson’s update on his situation. Also, it is PR Friday, so talk about any PR’s you had this week in the comments: weight gained, lifted, or consumed. Giddyup.
Justin and A.C. are on Iron Radio today today at 2 pm eastern time. Listen here
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Did Nature Mean to Make Us So Skinny And Useless?
This week I am officially a big step closer to manhood. I’ve been weighing in consistently between 183 and 188 lbs. That’s about a 25-lb increase in the past 30 days. Squat and Milk. Granted I hit a high of 176 a month prior to the start of this latest cycle, so half of that weight is reclaimed ground, not new territory. Still, the way my weight and my lifts are going, I’m going to get to 200 lbs (and a triple bodyweight squat i hope) a lot sooner than I would have believed just a few months ago.
An adult male of average height should weigh at least 200 lbs…at least he should if he wants to be strong. If all he wants to do is run away from danger or difficult situations at low speeds, then he’s much better off jogging a lot and “watching what he eats” so he stays at 150.
But those 200 lbs of useful man assume both a reasonable bodyfat percentage and strength level. Reasonably fat is under 20%, but not the “about 10%” that gets tossed about so casually. Reasonably strong is a 1.5x bodyweight squat. (Athletes in strength and power sports may want to shoot for over double bodyweight and those in the barbell sports should aim for triple.)
Those guidelines are all well and good. But I got to wondering just why it is that so many adult males of average height are about 150 lbs with the low strength levels to match. And an awful lot of the adult males who are over 200 don’t train properly and are “skinny-fat weak” and wish they were just plain skinny weak 150-pounders. What gives? How did this happen? We didn’t evolve with barbells, and there’s no way in hell I could get to 200 without using a barbell for heavy back squatting. No amount of physical activity I would have been likely to do in the ancestral environment would have gotten me close.
Ultimately I don’t care all that much what nature had in store for my body sans barbell training. I’m happier, healthier and a hell of a lot stronger and less painful to look at thanks to my journey to over 200 lbs. Moreover the speed at which this metamorphosis is taking place tells me that it was meant to be.
Eating more than enough is important to grow, and growing is necessary if one is going to get stronger. The fact that growth is required to get stronger shouldn’t be novel, especially with how much I have written about it.
I am under the impression that nobody here thinks you can continuously gain strength in a linear fashion forever, nor do they think that body weight gains will continuously increase. There is this thing called “diminishing returns” that shows up a lot in life (economics, strength gains, running fast, etc.). In other words, in a given situation where increases have been made, more is required to make the same increase, so improvement is slower. Progress is made, albeit slowly.
In other words, you will not forever be in “mass gaining mode”. Nobody here has ever suggested that you eat tons of food when you don’t need to. If you are Fat Guy, you don’t need to be going ape shit with the milk shakes and large pizzas, even though it may be fun. If you are a girl who needs to gain weight or get stronger, you obviously won’t have the same dietary requirements as Skinny Guy does because you are hormonally different. However, if you are Skinny Guy, then you better throw down if you want to get strong.
Skinny Guy has an interesting task. He needs to drink a gallon of milk a day and eat four hearty meals. He needs to have eggs-a-plenty, bacon, and toast for breakfast. Skinny Guy should be consuming meat throughout the day and inhaling trail mix. There are hundreds of ways to add calories — hop on over to the Food FAQ for help or ideas. After getting more than enough protein, Skinny Guy will purposely be sloppy with his caloric intake if he is going to get as strong as possible in the shortest amount of time. If Skinny Guy is going to spend valuable time in the gym training, then he my as well eat, recover, and thrive so he doesn’t waste his or my time.
Skinny Guy may have been just Average Joe prior to his linear progression, or perhaps he was one of those “clean eaters”. It is understandable that Skinny Guy would fear eating tons of calories. After all, he is scared of losing his abs. Skinny (Weak) Guy shouts, “Hey, isn’t this unhealthy? I don’t want to have health problems!” Really, Skinny Guy?
The problem with this silly assumption is that it assumes you should eat like Homer Simpson for the rest of your life. Once you are done gaining lots of body weight, then you eat to maintain mass and/or increase lean body mass.
Since Skinny Guy is only going to be eating like this until he is no longer Skinny Guy, health issues are completely irrelevant. Do you really think that eating like The Blob for six months is going to pose long-term health risks? Unless you have some kind of pre-existing condition, You’ll Be Fine.
Besides, when you are training hard competitively, you must recover if you are going to succeed or improve. This requires lots of calories, and you must get them any way you can. When you instantly use the fuel you consume to repair your body, problems don’t exist. In other words, you can’t compare the effects of a sedentary person eating like shit and someone who trains very, very hard. I laughed when all of those assholes said that if they only “cleaned up” Michael Phelps diet, he would be an even better performer. The food he eats is the only way he can physically consume the calories that his body needs in order to recover. If training hard is a normal part of your life, you will eventually learn this.
A) If you are under weight, you must eat lots and lots to not be under weight.
B) If you eat lots, you are doing this for the sole reason to get stronger by increasing your mass.
C) Unless you have pre-existing conditions, six months of eating sloppy is not going to adversely affect your health. It takes years of unhealthy habits to start causing problems. Just ask your parents.
D) Inefficient people are annoying, so just eat the fucking food.
Tomorrow I will finish up by detailing food intake for the lifting population that doesn’t start with “Skinny” or end with “Guy”.
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Steve sent this video in. He squats 350 for a single and says, “Not too pretty, but got the job done.” More importantly, watch the end of the vid.
I realize a lot of you are new to all of this. You are possibly new to strength training and eating in order to recover from that training as well as increasing muscular body weight. Even if you have been involved in some kind of training, you may still be new to what we recommend on this website. It’s okay.
Let’s pretend you work in an office building and you have to make managerial decisions. Construction needs to occur in half of the building so that the plumbing can be fixed along with the installation of a network infrastructure to make things more efficient. Everybody that works for you gets moved to the other half of the building, and both guys and girls have to use the same toilet. Do you think it would be logical if I came up to you and said, “Uh…Mr. Lumbergh? I have to poop a lot, and now the women will always smell it for the rest of my life because they will forever share a bathroom with me. Please ignore the fact that my overuse of toilet paper is why we are fixing the plumbing in the first place.” This may require an expert plumbing contractors seattle; make sure you hire a reliable one. Get a licensed plumber involved to fix everything and do it properly. If you need water softener installation services, make sure to contact the experts. If you notice that the water pressure in house is low, an expert needs to address it immediately. Also, ask the plumber to check the toilet and resolve the causes of toilet gurgling.
Assuming Lumbergh doesn’t can your ass on the spot, he is going to have to remind you that A) you brought this on yourself since you ruined the plumbing, B) this is obviously not a permanent thing since the other half of the building will open up after construction is over, and C) the entire office will run more smoothly after the new infrastructure installation, so just fucking deal with it. Yeah…
Look, when I tell you to eat lots of food so that you can not only satisfy the necessary protein and caloric requirements for training, but also an excess of both to stimulate new tissue growth, I’m not telling you to do this for the rest of your life. Why do you suddenly think I am recommending that everyone should ALWAYS eat triple bacon cheeseburgers and a bowl of ice cream with magic shell and brownies?
The terms don’t change. If you are fat or skinny, you have done something to make yourself fat or skinny. You have to do something different if you want a different result. Since the majority of both guys and girls are underweight and weak, they will have to train and eat more to get stronger and bigger. Since stronger is better, they need to do this ASAFP.
It is implied that you will no longer look like a skinny, useless human after getting stronger. This is the point. Emaciation is in vogue and stylish, and we aim to put an end to this societal quirk. The skinnier and more weightless you are, the more extreme your eating can and will be to make the most efficient gains. If you are a competitor and train very hard, you will need to eat even more to recover from your training.
Recovery: 1 lb. burger, fries, and shake (From The Scott)
Thing #1: You brought this on yourself by being weak and probably skinny in the same way that the guy in the story ruined the plumbing with his belligerent bowel movements.
If you aim to get as strong as possible in the most efficient amount of time — which would be the sensible use of your training time and resources — then you will inconvenience yourself with eating lots of food so that you recover and GROW.
Thing #2: You must make the sacrifice to change your habits to achieve results that are different than where you started. The guy in the story was unhappy with the women in his building inhaling his acrid aroma, but he is going to have to deal with it during this period of change — ESPECIALLY because it is his fault in the first place.
There is no reason you have to continue eating sloppy in the event you reach an appropriate body weight for your frame. This would be irresponsible and ill-advised in the long-term. Even though you are gaining muscle and fat, the majority of it will be muscle if you are training and eating correctly. Correctly means following a program (the novice linear progression from Starting Strength always produces results if properly followed), and proper eating means eating a quantity of protein that corresponds with your desired weight (1 gram of protein per pound of bodyweight) as well as enough calories to recover and increase body weight.
Keep in mind that by doing this, you are gaining both strength and muscular body weight. The strength increase is the whole point and is universally useful (Note: especially in zombie survival scenarios). So what if you lose your abs? Abs were not meant to be concave. Besides, when you hit that appropriate body weight, you can adjust your diet so that body fat can be reduced. However, care must be taken that body weight is not lost — it’s obvious that a 230 pound man must eat differently than a 150 pound boy.
Thing #3: The goal is to gain strength, and this is ultimately useful. In the story above, the guy overlooks the fact that his office building will be much more efficient with the new infrastructure. This is analogous to your body functioning better with whatever it is you are trying to do. All athletic qualities are increased and augmented (automatically or through practice and conditioning), you will live longer, and you can wow your friends by tossing small children over houses.
In Part 2 tomorrow I will talk about why the majority of you are wasting your time when you worry about the health considerations for eating to grow.