first line of your post? "I care b/c I'm interested in how someone can miss something so obvious that seems to fall in their field of expertise."

sounds like you think lyle made a definitive claim and has been proven wrong.

rippetoe posted zach's weight as 237.5 when he posted the videos.

scale says 241 and rip subtracted some weight for his shoes imo. so 237-238 is accurate. i was also curious about the late night light weight. he probably weighs 230 and drank most of that gallon of milk before weighing himself. also watching that video makes it obvious that zach is very skillfully sucking in his rather decent-sized gut in the side-view partial nude, though i'd surely do the same.

obv kidding about the milk.

Actually if you read Lyle carefully he doesn't even say he thinks the 21% looks off. He just says "it's impossible to eyeball" and refuses to pick a number.

He says "lol 18% is low" but that was just a random tangent because nobody had claimed 18%.



Here is Lyle's post:

"When people have that even distribution, it becomes impossible to eyeball

a girl I know got DEXA'ed, lokoing at her you would have sworn maybe 19%. She came in at 26%

bottom line

1. you don't get to assume starting BF%AGe
2. this guy is NOT 18%
3. diet him down and you'll see that he did not gain that much muscle"



So WTF? He doesn't even say "that looks wrong", he basically says "that must be wrong because it contradicts prevailing opinion".

it's easy to see why he thought 18% when the first set of data in that thread has 18.4% as the bodyfat and the first non-lyle person to respond with a bodyfat number made the same mistake.

he has also said "33lb" many times, although the "novice effect" article claimed 31lb in 11 weeks.

Oh no, I won't do that, sorry, it's unbearable

And I think you interpret his post (that you quoted) to match your point of view. I can easily understand that Lyle refuses to pick a specific number because he knows that his guess is pretty inaccurate. So he basically says: do a DEXA. Actually I think that his whole post says "that looks wrong" but at this point he is trying to be polite therefore he mentions points of dogma that make it clear that Rip's statement of 21 % doesn't meet his approval.

This is actually saying "that looks wrong" pretty clearly:

This is getting too nitty but I believe when he made that post he thought that Rip's calculations used the 18% figure, so he would not have been implying anything about 21%.

It would have been very easy for him to just state "21% looks low".

It's really a shame nobody ninja-posted Zach's pic in Lyle's "estimate my BF%" thread before Lyle knew who it was.

As far as I know he has never declined to put a number on someone based on eyeballing it. He has said stuff like "your distribution is deceptive, I think you're ~18% [compared to 15% that other people are saying for example".

But AFAIK he never just throws up his hands and says it's impossible to eyeball. And through this whole controversy he has never suggested a BF% range for Zach.

Yeah, I also said
I'm thinking of "1 lb/week on anaconda" as though the maximum for someone not on anaconda should be lower. And Lyle said (paraphrase) "that's better than ****ing steroids" like Rip's claim is wildly off. Lyle is in Lalaland.
Okay, Rip set out to prove his claims, isn't providing the best proof available, experienced people disagree based on the pictures, but I wouldn't say he insists on his handiness with a caliper
So go ahead and assume that he isn't handy with a caliper and that the #s are off. Big deal. If you or anyone else wants to go to WFAC and settle it then the invitation is open. But why should Rip have to prove his claims using a more precise method?
Rip is a fraud

I think he probably would have said the same thing if "21" had been the number that had been floating around.

But anyway, at this point, I really don't get what your point actually is that you are trying to get across anymore.

This discussion has gone on too long anyway, imo.

The point in this sub-sub-sub-thread was that I'm not sure your claim that "experienced people are saying the BF% figure looks off" is true.

What experienced people* are saying is that the BF% figure *MUST* be off, because if it's not their theories are incorrect.

Those are two very different arguments.



*[By experienced people I don't mean Lyle nuthuggers on his forum, I mean people like Lyle himself, Alan Aragon, any legit diet guru. And if some of these people are saying that the 21% looks significantly low then I will concede the point.]

Because he is the one who started the "Zach experiment"?!?

Rip is the one who makes claims that seem to be ridiculous to most people in the industry and science. So now everybody has to settle for unclear testing environment (cf. the body weight discrepancies with regards to daytime etc.) and sub-optimal testing tools, because "they don't know the procedure"? Saying that people like Lyle don't know anything about the use of a caliper is pretty much an insult in itself.

My earlier statement of me having no sympathy whatsoever for Lyle and his behavior still stands, btw. He handled the situation awfully and he was way out of line, professionally and personally.

Rip stated specifically somewhere that he didn't care to be more exact than this and that scientists should do experiments in controlled environments, he didn't care enough to do so. If someone like say Aragon approached him and asked to use <measurement x and y>, I do think he would be open to this (at least if he didn't have to do the work himself, heh). Would be marginally interesting.

lol. The Rip/Lyle rage has made it over to 2p2. At least your not calling each other slack jawed ******s i suppose.

Genz,

Everybody doesn't have to settle for an unclear testing environment. They can reproduce these results w/skinny young guys, barbells, food, and milk. They can also go to WFAC and measure Zach using a caliper themselves or ask if he is willing to try another method.

And so what if Rip started the Zach experiment!!! How does that lead you to conclude that he should use a more precise method? He could have taken pictures and said just eyeball them. If that's not good enough for you, fine. Why is it Rip's job to prove to the world what his program can do?

AFAIK Rip doesn't make any of these claims in his books. Ergo, he's not using them to push his sales, since that would be the obvious place to put them if he wanted to use the gains as a marketing tool.

Now everyone is arguing in this thread based on what they thing rip or lyle meant when they said x.

How big a pussy am I if I start using the PPAN template when my squats reach 270 (about a week)?

Yeah. The whole discussion is pointless. My point was mentioning that Rip has a habit of making claims ("we do it here all the time") and then saying "I'm just a gym owner, not a scientist/doctor/coach, I don't care to be exact". That is bad style and dishonest imo, esp. when you use radio shows etc. to mock people who say otherwise.

Question...

Someone recently posted this from Mark Twight. I mostly only skimmed it, but it was do do with specifity in endurance training, right? i.e. to get good at running long distances, you have to run long distances.

Is it my imagination, or have I read the same style article somewhere before about speed training? If so, anyone got a link, or at least who wrote the article I am thinking about..?

My last response in this matter. Tl;dr

From my point of view Rip put himself out there recently by going on and on about the awesome gains of Justin, AC, Zach and about how common all this is and about how everyone else is ridic. I think IIRC he is pretty clear and direct in that web radio interview a while back. If you act like that and bash other people's businesses etc. you are required to provide the best available proof imo and can't just say "I don't really care that much."
and he certainly makes profit by the 70sbig guys, who make huge claims all the time too. So he can't really hide behind just being the gym owner. Because where do you think their opinions are coming from?
Moreover he is expanding his business to certification courses so he claims to be an authority. Afterall, SS is all about the novice gains. And saying this only includes the strength but not the weight gain potential is insincere. He keeps going on about the connection of growth and gain.

Good posts Genz, totally agree.

Wow that sucks - any idea how this happened and what you might have been able to do to prevent it?

All this talk of DEXA scans made me google that and see that UT offers them to the public for $90. Might actually get one done since I don't know anyone who is particularly accurate with calipers and I'd like to get a reasonable estimate of my body fat % to see how my training goals are progressing. I think the Accu-Measure one spot caliper test is terribly off for me anyway as I'm not sure I'm even doing the right spot and I'm skinny fat so my body fat is all concentrated in my torso.

I'm actually thinking of doing one myself just to see how accurate my calipers are.

The thing that turns me off is it seems like a doctor's appointment kind of deal, where you wind up waiting like an hour and filling out a bunch of pointless forms.

One spot caliper measurements are obviously pure lolz.