Completely anecdotal, but when I was 18, in highschool, I trained in the gym in my hometown, supervised with a trainer, 12 reps per muscle group, very modest gains.
I move to university, start reading a fitness forum where people were saying do max 6 reps if you want big gains.
I also started supplementing with whey protein, and within 3 months the gains were spectacular, everybody noticed, I felt on fire, best time of my life, I miss so much how great I felt in my own body.
I've seen other colleagues and how they trained -- I can say there was 100% correlation that those people who were not training hard also did not have big gains.
People who had enough breath left in them to chat in the gym simply did not gain as much as people I saw as training hard.
Also for me, the 6 reps to exhaustion felt completely different then 12 reps (again, to complete exhaustion) -- immediately after the training it felt amazing to be alive, the world became a comfortable place, my anxiety completely vanished, and in the night and morning after an intense training (especially the legs and back) the erections and libido boost were out of this world, something I never felt with the 12 reps regimen.
What do you consider gains? Consider that this paper looked specifically at hypertrophy (size), not strength. While they correlate, training for one or the other can be very different..
"Traditionally" the rep ranges recommended for hypertrophy has typically been significantly higher than the ranges recommended for strength, but the number of sets recommended is often also significantly higher, often translating to significantly higher total volume.
> I've seen other colleagues and how they trained -- I can say there was 100% correlation that those people who were not training hard also did not have big gains. People who had enough breath left in them to chat in the gym simply did not gain as much as people I saw as training hard.
Well, yes, but training with lower weights and higher rep ranges does not automatically translate to "not training hard".
Having gone through a period of really high rep training, including for a short period doing 1000 squats per day as an experiment, mostly bodyweight, that was far harder exercise than when I 1RM'd 200kg. But the effects are different.
I much prefer Stronglifts and Madcow but because I favour strength over size, and it's far more time efficient, not because you can't also get results with more, lower-weight reps.
> Consider that this paper looked specifically at hypertrophy (size), not strength.
I'm not sure where this idea came from that people do one or the other. Except for the advanced lifter, both will happen from either program. Show me a person who is really big and they are likely pretty strong as well (see Ronnie Coleman). Same with the other direction.
It is unreasonable to talk about newbies. They grow from anything. I mean, you put newbies on the stationary bike and their pullups increase (real study!).
So we should talk about at least intermed. trainees.
And in those, the correlation does not go both ways. Getting more muscles does increase the strength, but getting stronger does not necessarily increase muscle (technique, neurological adaptations, etc).
Simply speaking, guys with big pecs and triceps are going to be strong in bench (even if they don't train it), but strong benchers (especially if they mostly train in 1-3 reps range, outside of hypertrophy 5-30) don't necessarily have big pecs/triceps.
So yeah, the parent was correct in asking what the previous parent mean by having great gains. Because getting stronger does not necessarily mean that your muscles also grew substantionally. Also, if you gained weight also doesn't mean the muscle gain. Due to leverages, the bench and squat results increase even if all you gained was pure fat.
I'm not a fitness nerd by any means, but it's worth mentioning that your bodys ability to get oxygen to you muscle can reportedly easily become your bottleneck if you're training too once-sidedly or use performance enhancing drugs/steroids.
So the bulkier person could theoretically perform better, but doesn't in practice because their body isn't able to actually utilize the muscle effectively.
That's why farmers often outperform lifters outside of the exact niche the lifter trained
I did not at all suggest anything else. Both will happen, but not too the same extent. It doesn't take very much lifting before differences in training regime can be apparent.
It’s definitely different, but somewhat at the margins. There is a reason people call it “farmer strength” where a moderately in shape looking guy can outlift a body builder looking bro.
I know I’ve definitely seen the difference training with a personal trainer telling her I want to train for aesthetics vs strength and vice versa.
There is a strong correlation but it’s definitely not 1.
Anecdotally as someone who strength trained on a recreational basis the last 20 years (and run a marathon just to see if I could), nothing beats heavy lifting.
A Strong lifts 5x5 program build around squat, deadlifts, bench and shoulder press can always make me feel pumped for the day!
> People who had enough breath left in them to chat in the gym simply did not gain as much as people I saw as training hard.
IDK. When I powerlifted the goal was to move the weight. I've almost passed out from heavy deadlifts, but was rarely out of breath. I also almost never chat in the gym because it's my meditative place, not because I couldn't chat :)
I think what OP is specifically refering to is the intensity level that varies among individuals. I suspect that oft times when people train with a low weight/high rep scheme, they accidenrly let their intensity levels slip. I suspect that for most people, especially newer lifters, doing a high weight/low rep scheme makes keeping the workout for intense because it is easier to focus on being intense for a short time. Just a thought....
There really isn't much of a difference between doing 6 reps vs 12 reps, what matters is going to failure which I think may end up being harder when doing 12 reps because people maybe don't realize how much they have left in the tank.
Going to failure can also be a question of which ‘link in the chain’ is hitting failure at any given rep range.
Bent over rows being and easy example: at a 5RM upper back is giving out as desired, but past 10RM my lower back is the issue. If my goals are bent over endurance in my core then higher reps will force adaptations where I’m weak, if I’m trying to get my shoulder blades sexy and humpy I gotta keep the stimulus where I want results. In addition to manipulating reps something like a snatch grip can provide a leverage based answer to the same targeting needs.
Proximity to failure is key, targeting and maximizing that proximity is individual and highly goal dependant.
[As a bit of a physio case I’ve found General Gainz (/r/gzcl on Reddit), to be a highly productive RPE based system with very happy adaptive approach to hitting personal limitations mid workout; no “failures” or broken spreadsheets = motivation = consistency = progress; strong recommend to check out]
Why did you stop? It seems you did, but since it made you feel excellent, it seems strange to “choose to stop”.
It’s not an innocent question: Gains and feeling extremely well and confident and serotonin-boosted are only useful if it can be sustained in life. The two alternatives are: 1. It pumps you but tires you very fast and you get fat down the line, and your overall life is ~obese (seems to happen to way more people than one could assume), 2. Only the change produces this feeling, and change cannot be sustained forever.
Not just one reason, but I stopped because I more or less maintained my physique for 7-8 years afterwards (probably being in your 20s helps) and my life circumstances were in a goldilocks zone; my dad (a doctor) was adamant I'd destroy my heart with all the muscle mass I added.
The thing that motivated me to start was the fact I was not very successful with girls and gaining 30 pounds of muscles in early 2000's Romania was intoxicating, if anybody told me before that girls would send kisses in the subway, grab my arms in the bus and start conversations with me or ask for my number in clubs, colleagues ask me to dump my girlfriend I would have said it's impossible.
I'm ashamed to say, but all that validation was even better than the way lifting made me feel and the primary drive to weight lifting.
It's only now that I remember how good weight lifting in itself made me feel, I never did give it much thought back then.
But now it's very hard to find the time or motivation to start it again.
I'm not really scared of getting fat down the line, I'm in my early 40s now and I've never been fat.
You could be right, that it's only the change that makes you feel amazing, and I only ever went to the gym for some 6 months total, but I have my doubt that it would ever go away, I've been on many, many drugs, NOT ONE ever made me feel good for 6 months straight, they all downregulate very fast.
Now thinking about it, I get a renewed motivation to re-start weight lifting
And this is incredible motivation for me. I’m in my 40ies, and have been unsuccessful with girls. Of course being in your 20ies helped because that’s when good stories start, and at 40 women are already taken, but I find it a decent explanation of the times I was successful or not and it’s worth trying again. I was very fit at 30 but never muscular, just a guy with 8 hours or random sports per week, so like you before 18. I still do 3-5 hours of sports per week, I should redirect that towards gains.
Two caveats: I'm talking about early 2000's Romania where it was quite rare to see really muscular men AND I was in my early 20s, I have no clue if men in their 30s or 40s get the same kind of attention, it was the shallow kind of attention.
By the time my 30s hit I was already married, however we did have a very rough patch where we were very close to divorce, I traveled alone, was part of an NGO and I think a lot of the young women there got a strong clue about how rough things were between me and my wife because I also got a lot of attention from women back then but then it wasn't because of physique - it was because I was their photographer and high status in the NGO and much higher net worth.
Going the traveling groups, I also did get quite a bit of attention, because there were a lot of single women in their late 20's and I'm sure a lot of them got this fantasy they would find their soul mate on such a trip and I was 100% not interested in anything romantic but I was very open to socialize. All sorts of un-intended "adversarial" techniques I noticed worked -- again my portrait photography hobby seemed attractive to the ladies, when I noticed one was too interested, I pulled away so she won't get the wrong idea, which made her even more interested, I also chatted up foreign women in the hostels because I was geniuinely curious about their background -- I had a long conversation with a hot, early 30s phd in fish farming and a young woman in our group started interrupting us by saying "You know, we've been together in this group for 3 days and you haven't spoken to me as much as you did to this foreigner, why?".
I clearly remember I talked to a psychology major woman in the bus because I'm very interested in psychology and I did quite a few years of psychotherapy and I'm very interested in Schema Therapy. At some point we discovered we run in the same park and she invited me to run together. It was then that it hit me she probably had the wrong idea, but I felt it would be weird to say "that's great but I'm married" and I was in a headspace where if I wanted to I would have gone with her for a run regardless of what my wife thought about it, but I also got the feeling this young woman will not take it well if I said I was married, so I just started avoiding her. I noticed she tried even harder to approach me.
Later that evening one of of the women in the group asked me "Oh wow, so I checked your facebook and you're married?". And I said, "Yes." . That young woman just blurted it out "But I asked you to go running together, why aren't you wearing your wedding band????".
The point I'm trying to make is I'm sure having a great physique is sure to be helpful even in your 30s and 40s and it will certainly set you aside, but there are other, more powerful tools to build attraction, alas, some quite manipulative (like social proofing, oblique approach, status, feigned low interest, push pull, triangulation).
I think it's very important to understand where you stand, where your target demographic stands, and where your competition stands.
If you're in an area where all the guys are super fit millionaires, you're not going to have much luck with the ladies there.
I was never in the pickup scene, and I've seen some terribly messed in the head men because of it (bitter redpill types), but I think there are quite a bit of spoken or not so spoken psychoevolutionary tricks out there great to know and take with a huge grain of salt.
Probably the biggest trick is no trick, but to actually be ok with yourself, empathetic, reasonable, have fun by yourself, explore, have healthy boundaries, but still generous, not have/display emotional baggage, basically present yourself as being what the kind of woman you want also wants.
Completely anecdotal, but when I was 18, in highschool, I trained in the gym in my hometown, supervised with a trainer, 12 reps per muscle group, very modest gains.
I move to university, start reading a fitness forum where people were saying do max 6 reps if you want big gains.
I also started supplementing with whey protein, and within 3 months the gains were spectacular, everybody noticed, I felt on fire, best time of my life, I miss so much how great I felt in my own body.
I've seen other colleagues and how they trained -- I can say there was 100% correlation that those people who were not training hard also did not have big gains. People who had enough breath left in them to chat in the gym simply did not gain as much as people I saw as training hard.
Also for me, the 6 reps to exhaustion felt completely different then 12 reps (again, to complete exhaustion) -- immediately after the training it felt amazing to be alive, the world became a comfortable place, my anxiety completely vanished, and in the night and morning after an intense training (especially the legs and back) the erections and libido boost were out of this world, something I never felt with the 12 reps regimen.