This changes everything.

Will be OCDing it up from now on.

I can already tell you that most gym plates will vary up to 2lbs in both directions.

K. No data collecting.

Muscle confusion!

Haha, older brother wisdom right there.

lol.

Also I'm pretty sure the bar at my gym weighs like 90 pounds.

As long as the error is evenly distributed, nano loading will still be effective over time.

I'm shocked that there could be as big as +-2pounds on a 45 pound plate... Never noticed anything like that. I remember hearing that they had to be within .2 pound but maybe that was a specific brand, not sure.

Here's a general gym observation. I'm a walking experiment for showing the contrast between ineffective weightlifing/diet and proper weightlifting and diet.

When I was in high school and college, I worked out a decent amount but I was never able to gain muscle. Worked out for about a year in high school and tried to go regularly my junior/senior year in college. I was more or less the loser on the machines, I didn't push myself very hard, etc. And I didn't tailor my diet for muscle gain as much as I should have.

Fast forward about 10 years. I almost decided against taking up weightlifting again because if I couldn't create muscle when I was younger, no way I'll gain weight when I'm 30. I'd been hovering between 145-150 lbs of scrawny *******. But I had a lot of free time, and my work has a gym. (I also play a lot of sports, and I wanted to work on strength and explosiveness.)

It's been a year and I've gain about 18 lbs. Not all muscle obv but I'd say 2/3 muscle. (I'd be heavier but I periodically do a week of intense dieting to cut 5 or so pounds.) I'm actually pushing myself to exhaustion, and I'm eating correctly. (Gomad ftw, other high-protein and high-saturated fat foods.) Not bragging or anything, but I've gone my entire life thinking I just can't build muscle, and I look back at all the wasted gym time I wish I could have back to do correctly.

Nice tale! I have recently been in contact with an old HS buddy who is also a recent convert to the iron sport. We've both expressed regret about not getting involved sooner in much the same way you did - wouldnt it have been great to be 28 and have ten years of quality gym time, instead of only one? Still, im pretty glad Ive found it now, and hope to make the most of it.

What are your current goals?

Just bring in your own scale. If you read this thread from start to finish you'll see that this would still keep you in the most normal 10% of all gym members.
The only reason I want my fantasy home gym to have Eleiko bumpers is because they're calibrated so this wouldn't be an issue. =\

Seems totally unacceptable to have this kind of discrepancy.

There's a short bar in my gym that I use sometimes for rows, I was never sure if it weighed 25 or 30 so I stood on the scale yesterday with and without it. Sure enough, it came out to 27.

I weighed all my 45 lb plates recently. Maybe half were 45 lbs, one was 47 and the rest were 44 or 46.

30 seconds is more than what is necessary to increase muscle endurance according to Dr McGill. He says several short sets are better than one long set for muscle endurance.

Longer than that is fine for testing purposes, but its kind of a waste of time for actually getting something accomplished.

So cha, what would you say about weighted normal planks mostly for strength work (improvement for squats/DLs)? Same thing? I usually do regular planks weighted for 1:00-1:15.


Also,
you guys need to find better gyms if the plates are +/- 2 lbs imo.

Add weight or do something harder imo.

Hm alright, thanks.

Performed my first spot of a squat today. Guy was doing set of 3 with 365 pounds and set of 2 with 385 pounds. He was only going down about halfway, but still pretty strong dude.
He hit the 365x3 on his own, but I had to help him on the 385x2.

Wasn't so bad, although it did feel a little weird grabbing a dude below the armpits form behind and helping pull him up. I have actually done this same thing a lot with babies, small children, and females, but never with a man.

Cool story bro.

Since I already volunteered myself to nit up this plate weighing debacle, make sure you report how you measured the plates (eg 1 scale measurement, averaged 3 of them, etc.), since the variance of the measurement process would certainly be a factor in many different optimal estimations of the plate weight variance.

I started off wanting more strength and explosiveness for sports, with a long term goal of gaining 20 lbs of muscle. (By long term, I mean like 5+ years if I could even gain that much at all. Wasn't sure it was possible at my age and with my record of futility.)

It's actually been closer to 10 months than a year. Very surprised and pleased with my progress, both with the muscle gain and with my performance on the field. I know there's going to be a drop-off at some point. Rather than stop at my goal of 20 lbs, I'll probably keep weight lifting a part of my life routine. I got my first kid on the way though. Dunno how much free time I'll have in a few months.

I don't like taking my hands off the keyboard.

+1 to this, I have a similar story of improper training/dieting + moment of clarity and change. In highschool, I was one of the first guys to start training before the grade 11/12 weightlifting "boom" hit most of the kids. Part of this was due to the fact that I developed early (had chest hair in grade 6 lulz embarrassing moments were plentiful), and I never played any organized sports besides a year of football which most people were preoccupied with up until the end of highschool.

I was 240 pounds, 5'9/5'10 in grade 9 (14 years old). Definitely obese, but to put this into perspective, I worked out at the gym (weight training) or jogging about 4 x a week, and later on in the year joined a boxing gym. Throughout highschool I got A's in P.E. and was good at sports and my cardio, if you could believe it, wasn't even in the bottom 25% of the class (I think a lot of this was due to genetics since I had 2L more lung capacity than the second biggest in the class when we checked, and my resting heart-rate was 50-55 at this point).

When I joined boxing, I mostly stopped jogging because we did more than enough cardio there, and kept up weight training but at a lower frequency. But basically what happened was from age 14-17, I went from 240 pounds obese and athletic (sounds like an oxymoron) to 260 pounds obese bear mode. So why did someone who worked out vigorously 8+hours/week for 3 years obese? One reason was smoking too much weed and getting off track periodically/eating too much, but the main reason was that I had an absolute neurosis about dieting. I was under some romantic impression that you could lose lots of weight while gaining lots of muscle if you simply upped the protein and lowered the fat/carbs, but I wouldn't even follow my own ****ty diet broscience correctly and I probably consumed 3000 calories a day thinking I was cutting, and then by the time I started realizing I had to focus on losing weight first, I got scared of losing all my muscle so I basically followed my ****ty routine for another year for who knows why.

Then bam, 18 years old, I finally snap, realize how ******ed I am, and started dieting and doing mostly cardio (typical workout was 20 minutes jogging, 20 minutes rowing, 20 minutes on heavy bag, some body weight exercises like pushups and squats and a few weights, and then a 45 minute swim), I did this for about a year and lost 50 pounds. Unfortunately, I suffered a pretty severe head injury the following year which kept me basically bed-bound and depressed for a year and a half, and I gained most of it back and lost most of my muscles. Not that this is an entire excuse, but when you can't walk up a flight of stairs without making your migraine 5 x worse, it's understandable. But now I'm back on to cardio/dieting and I've dropped about 20 pounds back. I felt like I had taken a billion steps backwards and it was almost impossible to get in shape now, but simply knowing what I'm doing now and not following my highschool neurosis makes me know I'll get there. It's crazy how long someone can follow something that isn't working simply because of one neurotic idea or because it's easier...

Pic related: me at 16. I almost can't even look at this **** now because I just know by this pose, I was thinking "Herp derp look at my muscles I iz so buffz i cannot lose weight i will lose my musclezzz nd my eyebrow piercing looks so rad".. ****ing fat piece of **** lol.

no "now" pic leaves this terrible image in our minds.

canoodles now pic

'bout right.

lol, like i said, i'm worse off now than i was in that pic even 4 years ago (20 now), i weigh about he same as i did then (250 now down from 270, prob about 255-260 in that pic), but have a lot less muscle and bigger man titties. i'll get there though, then you'll see a vicious transformation

Women also like a nice butt way more than a lot of guys realize. Time to start doing them squats brah.

http://www.fitbuff.com/womens-favorite-male-body-parts/

Re: plate weighing discussion

I have a spreadsheet with the weight (down to the gram) of each of my five sets of clips, so that if I want to micro load I can hit quite a few intervals between 0 and five pounds by adding different combinations of clips.

That article makes the dangerous assumption that women know what they actually want.