I think the Lyle forum post is interesting. On one hand he is saying he gained mostly fat, on the other he says newbies way under average weight can be exceptions to usual standards. I think truth here is somewhere in between like always.

i am curious if there is a way to gain lbm without the fat.

The stronglifts 5x5 program includes pushups and pullups. Although I generally follow SS (modified of course because I do not do GOMAD or sleep 10 hours a night and dont recover fast enough to do 3 max 3x5 worksets a weekf or sustained linear gains) I include these exercises, which seem to give a good arm workout, along with working core muscle groups.

SS can include pull ups

pushups are so easy they get included under "warm up"

im gonna quote some of the stuff from that thread that i am confused about

again, whats with the fat cell thing?

i cant imagine this is remotely the case. i would imagine if he shirked even 5lb of pure fat he would "look" better.

same. should i be assuming that they are including a loss of lbm along with the 24lb fat loss?

really?

wondering how much truth is here?

my arms have gotten significantly bigger but it took a while. like in the 3rd or 4th month or so is when i noticed them getting bigger. most of the gains have been in the triceps, not that i care whether it's biceps or triceps - as long as they're getting bigger, then i'm happy.

Well, one could eat at a small surplus, weightlift including cardio, etc. and slowly gain weight/strength. If you follow this approach you may not be able to do SS for very long because you will not be able to recover well enough from 3x5 max workouts and you may never gain as much LBM/strength overall.

However, from a health perspective you might benefit from such an approach by never putting on a bunch of bodyfat that could cause health issues (even in the short term) and that you may never have the discipline to get rid of later in life. Also, such an approach might be more aesthetically pleasing.

Or one could take anabolic steroids I suppose, although these have their own side effects and cause health effects similar to a GOMAD diet (ie raise blood pressure, raise cholesterol)

Ty thats exactly what I was looking for, will include those as well.

addressing bolded, why cardio? cant we just eat less? secondly, it was my understanding that lbm gains end quickly if one eats at a deficit or maintenance, how do we resolve this if we want to get stronger? of is that idea false?

the rest of your post is kinda strange to me, would you advocate anabolic steroids over bulking up?

anyway, from my perspective, discipline is not a problem.

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Damn right, club night. Gucci mane wasted. Wasted.

But now he's added a bunch fat cells he's stuck with the rest of his life.

what does this mean? what are the implications?


Well, at the cellular level there are two ways to get bigger. Either your cells become larger or they divide and grow in number so you have more cells.

This poster is implying that Zach's body responded to his caloric excess by growing new adipocytes (fat cells). The poster is further implying that now that Zach has millions more adipocytes than he did before, his body will more efficiently store fat, which will make it much harder for him to lose weight or keep of weight if he does lose it.

As far as whether this is true or not I do not know enough about adipocyte biology to comment. If you were really interested you could go on pubmed (www.pubmed.com) and look up some articles in peer-reviewed academic journals to see what the concensus of the scientific community is on this subject.

However, keep in mind the human body (or any biological system) is extremely complex and despite the advanced state of science we have today, there is still a lot that is unknown, and there is a lot that is believed to be true today that will probably be proven false in the years to come.

This is relative. They are obviously easier for some people than they are for others. Besides, there are ways to vary pushups to make them harder. For example, you can clap your hands in between, clap your chest, clap your hands behind your back, have a buddy to put weight on your back and spot you, etc.

I personally clap my hands and IMO doing 3 sets till failure on my "A" workout day gives a good total body/arm exercise.

so the guys on lyles forum think that is a bad thing?

but kyleb and others on this forum dont think it really matters?

they train basically the exact same muscles as the bench. i guess they use a bit more support musculature too, but its hardly like they give you much needed arm and pec work you dont get from the other exercises in SS

Regarding the Lyle thread:

Most of the comments from randos are just whatever.

What the argument really boils down to is that Lyle implies that Zach has a BF% significantly higher than 21%.

If Zach is in fact at 21%, then he did in fact make the LBM gains Rip thinks he did and I'm not sure what remaining controversy there is.


Also note that Lyle doesn't give a BF estimate but just says "it's impossible to eye-ball".

I can't be sure but to me it sounds like Lyle is the biased one here, because rather than modifying his previous statement about the ceiling of LBM gains he's just attacking the premise that Zach is 21% without any real evidence.

I'm guessing if someone had posted Zach's picture without cluing Lyle in to he was and asked for an estimate Lyle would have said "20-22, hard to tell" or something similar.

But now that this is a potential piece of evidence against Lyle's beliefs it's "impossible to eyeball".

Fat cells definitely divide once they get to a certain size. That size is genetically set. To say that Zach has gained a bunch of fat cells and that it makes him predisposed to being fat for the rest of his life is one hell of a stretch.

And for the last time, the only people I advise to GOMAD are the 5'11" 140 lbs house cat sized humans, since they're on the verge of being malnourished anyway. I hardly advise anyone to get to even my levels of bodyfat, but I was already here, so whatever.

ETA: I also agree with everything MM just said.

lol

At this point in my training cycle, I want to diet down to like ~215 and show epic pics from the height of my "bulk" (maintenance around 250-260) and show what a hulking lean mass of awesomeness I am. Not to attract women or clients to my business or increase my self-esteem (though all of those factors are nice), but to hopefully shut up all the idiots who advocate doing things like P90x or not getting stronger in fear of getting bigger.

Plus I'll still have a sweet squat and deadlift. As long as I ignore Jaysick's log, I can feel pretty good about myself.

ETA: derosnec, I hope you realize that's not my saying. Don't want to take credit for it.

I think this is substantially wrong actually. Most people who become obese do so because they consume at a small surplus over a very long period of time (like age 20 to 30 say), while their metabolism is simultaneously slowing down.

There is a big difference between this and people who deliberately gain weight with the intention of subsequently dieting. I don't know if the difference is set point or some lack of disposition to obesity or what, but everyone I know who has deliberately gained a bunch of weight has had no problem losing it.

Probably has to do with psychology. If you're willing to control your diet to gain weight, it's functionally the same as controlling it to lose weight. The main thing is that you have the ability to control your diet in either direction.

Few people actually get obese over a short period of time, like you pointed out. It's the usual scenario of eating the same amount of food when you were in HS/College (and likely more active) while your metabolism slows down.

Compared to eating tons of food and lifting heavier on SS, dieting will be lolz easy.

ya i was def having problems shoving food down my throat and i only gained 15lbs over 3 months.

imo making a push up into a plyo exercise and then shoving in multiple sets of failure on bench press day is probably the worst way to go about incorporating push ups.

and lol at taking steroids over dieting.

lol @ rip lying. much of my "estimate" was not influenced only by the pictures, but from being the same height as him, ~15lb heavier, and unless i'm a ******, "looking" more muscular, and thinking that the numbers themselves don't make sense. basically if i have ~10lb lbm more than him, i'm a cut (an efficient one) away from 25+ FFMI at 10% bodyfat.

the LBM gain chart thing was only brought into the conversation by others. in the article itself, there are exceptions, including starting underweight. he clearly started underweight, so the 20-25lb lbm/year could be low. but it just does not look like he added 46lb of muscle to his body.

i don't know how many other possible factors there could be, but one i do know of is creatine. if he takes creatine and is holding an extra 6-10lb of water, that alone makes a pretty big difference in the amount of lbm he gained. 80% of that water weight would be attributed to lbm, which is substantial.