sounds to me like it could be food poisoning

that sucks man. Does that mean you need to have surgery?

Does anyone know why Lyle's estimates of maximal LBM gains are so far off? Is it b/c he isn't familiar w/the gains of young skinny novice men who drink a lot of milk and do SS? Maybe he's familiar with the gains of young guys, skinny guys, novices, guys who drink a lot of milk, and guys who do SS, but never all of the above.

Lyle does not even understand the distinction between novice/intermediate/advanced that Rippetoe uses, and I think it's very likely the people who authored the studies Lyle relied on don't either. (See this recent thread http://forums.lylemcdonald.com/showthread.php?t=6752 for Lyle's wishy-washy concept of training status.)

The other issues are heavy overfeeding and compound movements with attempted progress every workout.

I am guessing the typical LBM studies take already trained populations, throw them on some random machines, and don't force them to eat large surpluses.



I honestly don't understand the people blaming Rip for the pre-blowup controversy. Calipers with multiple testing sites are considered pretty reliable, and even DEXA scans have a margin of error.

And Miles you're faulting Rip for venturing "outside his area of expertise"? What was he supposed to do when Lyle made claims against him that he knew were wrong? Sit back and say "well Lyle's the expert so I can't offer a rebuttal"?

(And FWIW glycogen is still LBM as far as I know.)

oddly enough, he gave a glowing review of PPST.

I know, and he's said good things about SS.

But if you look at his actual comments about claimed gains on SS it seems that he basically does not believe the books. Maybe it's selective reading or he just overlooked the parts that disagreed with his own training ideas.

I mean the guy who says that a surplus over 500 calories a day is more or less useless cannot actually believe that SS programming works.

he's probably used to the BBers of the world who wouldn't be willing to gain that much fat.

fwiw, i agree with you that it's weird rip is getting any pre-blowup blame. canceling on short notice is somewhat dickish, but given lyle's behavior leading up to it, it's understandable. If Lyle really expected to air out via the interview, he shoulda called Rip and talked to him in person.

average broz gym imo

who cares? again (for the millionth time), lyle being right about the initial argument only needs one thing: for rip to be wrong about 46lb in 6 months. if it's really 35lb, rip is wrong and needs to be called out for claiming results better than anaconda. does anyone not agree with this?

"ability to adapt to training is one way to look at it..." ???

the same way lyle made a claim that zach wasn't squatting to parallel is rip making a claim that he gained 46lb LBM in 6 months imo. each claim is clearly outside the realm of what each guy should be talking about without concrete proof. good for rip proving him wrong on the squats, but that doesn't mean zach gained 46lb lbm. calipers being "considered pretty reliable" is not enough to make that claim.

lyle has shown himself to be an idiot of a very high degree in this situation, but his initial point that rip, despite his godly status, also needs to be held to a high standard of proof, is a good one.

Agreed. If Lyle were anything approaching professional however, his initial response in his own forum should have been "I'm skeptical of these gains, but looking forward to measuring myself"/asking Rip in private to perform a dexa test. He SHOULD be open to the idea that gains larger than he previously thought possible are within the realm of possibility, but is obviously correct to be skeptical.

So miles your whole beef with Rip here is he should have used DEXA instead of calipers?

What if Rip had claimed 40 pounds LBM instead of 46? Is that claim sufficiently modest that calipers are ok? What about 35?

The point we seem to disagree on is that based on my understanding of Lyle's writings, any of those claims blow Lyle's claim out of the water.

You seem to take the position that Lyle was allowing for some gigantic exception to his 2 pounds LBM per month rule. By my reading he basically says 4 pounds LBM per month is the ceiling on even the rare exceptional case.



Obviously you are not a Lyle fanboy so I am sure you have a reasonable argument here, but I am not understanding it.

Definitely agree with this. Lyle could have approached this whole thing scientifically but instead in his arrogance he told himself not only that Rip was wrong, but that Rip *knew* he was wrong and was just being a fraudulent huckster.

Which is an epically bad read.

Rip knows he's wrong, he knew he was wrong when he canceled the interview, idk why he scheduled it in the 1st place before he made claims that made Anaconda look legit.

:facepalm

you're too focused on lyle being wrong and not rip being wrong. i don't care if what lyle wrote is wrong. what he claims in that article can't exactly sell anything. it's like me saying my dick is 2" long and you getting mad that it is probably at least 4" long. rip is saying he has a 10" dick. lyle doesn't believe him and thinks it's bogus for him to put up numbers like this like they are meaningful. it doesn't matter if rip didn't MEAN TO be deceitful. it matters if he is wrong. this is where rip stepped out of his area of expertise (his one qualification being the ability to use calipers i guess).

and it isn't just lyle who believes rip is wrong. most training sites have a thread or two on this topic. saw old school bodybuilder reg park mentioned in one. look up some pictures of park and tell me, if zach is holding over 190lb LBM, then how much was reg holding?

I care b/c I'm interested in how someone can miss something so obvious that seems to fall in their field of expertise.
The difference is that Rip has seen Zach squat and Rip has measured Zach's BF using a caliper. Rip has empirical evidence to back up his claims. Lyle is relying purely on dogma. It failed him wrt Zach's squat form, and we'll see what happens, if anything, wrt LBM.
It seems to me he has done enough to make the claim about LBM. Why would Rip be obligated to prove to Lyle or anyone else by more precise methods that his program added 46 lbs of LBM on Zach?

I'm not sure what argument they're making exactly on other sites, and I really don't know anything about LBM except from reading Lyle's stuff and my own experience.

However a couple of things I would point out:

(1) Zach would lose a *lot* of LBM if he cut down to sub-10% BF.

(2) My impression is that the more advanced you get, the more efficiently additional LBM gains express strength. (I could be mistaken, have never read anything about this). So for example it wouldn't surprise me if you can find someone with the same frame as Zach who is super strong with only like 8 pounds more LBM.

But really the best way of arguing this is to just argue for a higher BF% than 21. The weight + BF% tells you everything you need to know, comparing him to other individuals with (purportedly) known LBM is going to raise all kinds of confounding issues.



But all that speculative stuff aside, I think that even if Rippetoe is substantially wrong, he would have responded well to reasonable arguments that were made to him.

The whole thing should have gone like this:

Lyle: the limit on LBM gain is xyz

Rip: Here is Zach's case, it shows you're wrong.

Lyle: Ok I guess I was wrong, but for the following reasons I think your estimate is high.....x, y, z. We should do a DEXA scan to figure this out.



If that last part had been addressed to Rippetoe himself either in private or on his forum, I am quite confident Rippetoe would have responded well.

But instead Lyle did this random sniping on a different forum and made his inane accusation about squats.



One point I'll concede to you is in Rippetoe's most recent post about this he actually said something like "Zach gained 45 pounds of muscle". Hopefully that was a slip of the tongue but if he actually means muscle rather than LBM he is indeed wrong (because of the glycogen issue, for starters).

Obv Dmitri is a Russian hustler. His Russian insanity-derived power allows him to carry a 2p skittlebell like 50m in the ice like he's carrying the groceries as well. No 24kg sp, but whatev 31 bucks delivered is something I can live with.

wow, no. again, you're thinking the claim to be proven wrong is lyle's.

rip posted these results in early january. 31lb lbm in 11 weeks. lyle laughed, said he was wrong. it's rip's claim to prove. and of course it could've been handled better.

pkrplyrx,

lol? it was not lyle who marched to the SS boards to push his article, which again (and again and again and again) even includes exceptions for young, underfed people (of which zach is both). so the only way you can know for sure if lyle is even wrong on this is if you spoke to him when he wrote the article and he gave you some kind of unattainable maximum rate that takes into account age, starting skinny, and any other genetic attributes. do you have this? and MM, is the 4lb you mentioned earlier just conjecture?

I don't understand why this argument is going on and on and on.

Rip has a history of stating at every opportunity that adding 40+ lbs of 60+ % LBM to novice trainees is "common" in his gym and that they do it all the time; the fat is just transient and can be gotten rid off at any point. He really goes out of his way sometimes to rub this into people's faces. He's basically "lol. eff you" in every interview, in any statement about dieting. He is proposing that you should get heavier all the time, everywhere. This HAS to annoy people who take dieting and being slender seriously, because they are of the opinion that more slender people are healthier in the long run (I'm inclined to believe that). While Rip's advice is geared towards very skinny, underweight high school kids, just look at the forums to see how many actually pretty fat people go ahead and say "eff it. Now I got my excuse to get even fatter."

Lyle didn't believe this because he spends all his time on diet and stuff. Instead he says: people probably mostly get fat.

Rip takes Zach, makes him gain a lot, claims that he gained x lbs of LBM and squats y kg.

Lyle blows up and says "lol. never that gain of LBM" plus "lol squats".

Lyle gets pwned by rip wrt to the squats.

Unresolved issues:
- was the measurement of LBM using a caliper accurate enough? Considering this, were the starting and ending measurements accurate?

And most importantly imo:
- is the fat that Zach gained actually "transient in nature" like Rip insists or has the program the long term effect that Zach will walk around with an increased amount of body fat? I actually think this is the most important aspect about the whole thing that isn't addressed at all. Why would an ordinary guy accept immense fat gains just to get a bit stronger in a shorter time? I think that most people get stuck on this fat, esp. when they are older and have jobs. Zach is probably going to compete in the future and he is under the influence of the people at WFAC. But for "normal" people, I'm not sure if this is a great trade-off. People usually don't get skinnier when they grow older. So why put such a mass of fat on when you're young to reach some artificial goal, because someone said "stronger people are more useful in general"?

ETA: yeah, I understand that Rip has to be "called out" when Zach actually has gained less than he claimed and that Lyle wasn't "wrong" then. Somehow, I don't believe that this is the core of the fight, tbh. When I look at Lyle's posts (read just a few of them), I get the impression that the additional fat gain on top of the (alleged) LBM gain is more what makes him furious. He repeats "you are making ******s get fat" over and over in his posts.

I am confused miles. If I understand correctly, the part of your previous post that is addressed to me is reemphasizing that Lyle has not made a definitive claim wrt an unattainable maximum rate of LBM gains. I don't see how my previous post implies that I didn't know that. Lyle thinks Rip's claim is ridiculous and fabricated, so if Rip is in the ballpark then it's neither ridiculous nor fabricated (though perhaps unintentionally inaccurate) and Lyle is wrong.
lolol, c'mon. "He might have gained more than six lbs" like there's any chance he only gained 6 lbs of LBM

And miles I still don't understand why you think Rip is obligated to prove Zach's LBM gains by a more precise method. Rip has stated his method thoroughly and provided all of the raw data along with the way results were calculated. He has left nothing in the dark. Lyle and others can form a judgment based on that information about the accuracy of the results. Why should Rip have to do anything else?

couple more things worth noting.

zach "weighed" 242 on 3/1 when he had gained 46lb LBM. on 3/9 when he squatted for the videos he weighed under 238. that 4lb drop in weight (which imo is weird for someone who says he wants to weigh 275 and never misses workouts and drinks gomad all day every day) is "worth" 3lb LBM. every single percent rip is low on his bodyfat measurement accounts for another ~2.5lb LBM he doesn't have.

weigh him when he's full and have a little unthinking bias going on when taking caliper measurements and it is super easy to get wildly different numbers for his LBM gains.

pkrplyrx:

because he set out to provide proof that his claims are accurate. But now he doesn't provide the best proof available, instead insists on his professional experience and his handiness with a caliper. He does this even though some experienced people think that his measurements are off by looking at the pictures. That should be enough motivation to use a better method (and split the bill if that's the reason not to do it).

OTOH, a more precise measurement method doesn't really help, imo, because it's about the relative gains and the starting measurements were taken with a caliper too.

I give up, you seem to see this situation a lot differently than I do.


Here are the two articles I know of by Lyle that address the issue:

http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/mus...mass-gain.html

http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/mus...potential.html


Note this line in particular: "And, occasionally, when the stars are right, and everything clicks, a true one pound per week of muscle mass gain may be seen for short periods. But again, that tends to be the exception."


That was the basis of my 4 pound LBM/mo interpretation.

This is esp. weird because Rip said that Zach came to the gym at an unusual hour (10:30 pm) to make the videos and end the debate.

I weigh myself almost every morning before breakfast and very often before going to bed, because I'm always fascinated about how I can lose 1.5 kg (3.3 lbs) over night. I.e. I pretty much always weigh a lot more in the evening than in the morning. So it's pretty weird that Zach was so relatively light that night when he was on his usual diet. To me this looks like he loaded up on water etc. before the photos were taken to weigh as much as possible.

The scale says over 240, unless you have a read on when Zach touched the slider