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
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.
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.
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
> Reputation management is what it will take to bring trust back to all forms of media.
Does that really work, though? I think it doesn't -- think all the anti-vaccine type influencers -- their identities are known and they're ok with it.
> It means creating a trusted identity that can be verified, and that the identity is known to be a real human with a reputation to lose if exposed as being a bot or otherwise untrustworthy.
Surely this won't be used for nefarious reasons or to silence individuals like it's done in the UK or in the cancel culture actions. /s
That's completely beyond the point, though?
Kodak invented the digital camera, did not think anything about it and others then ate their lunch.
Those others are also not crushing it in 2025.
The point is IBM is not the go-to to listen about AI.
Also not saying they are not right, even a broken clock is right 2 times a day.
> The point is IBM is not the go-to to listen about AI.
Why not, though? For better or worse, they're a consulting services company these days, and they work with an eye-wateringly large number of companies. I would expect them to have a very good view as to what companies use AI for, and plan/want to use AI for in the future. They may not be experts in the tech itself, but I think they're decently well-positioned to read the tea leaves.
> expedited the fall of Soviet Union by forcing them into expensive competition?
Nobody forced the Soviet Union into anything.
I think the soviet leaders knew that the system in the West AT THAT TIME was simply better in all ways imaginable and the comunism utterly failed at its mission -- the workers in the West were enjoying a much much better life that those in communism, and having lost that ideological space, they thought they could override common sense on the battle field -- surely, if you win the space race, more olympic gold medals or on the battlefield, then communism actually won?
Cold War involved a lot of imperfect knowledge - until Gorbachev, soviet leaders were utterly convinced that USA plans to attack first. On one hand, it was paranoia, on the other hand, US intelligence actions including gleeful setup of mass scale murder in Indonesia reinvigorated that belief.
First, China is nothing like the USSR economically and the West is NOTING like the old capitalist West in any regard.
Second, the ideological capitalism of the West during the Cold War is not what actually brought prosperity to the masses, I think it was just the fear of comunism that kept the elites at bay and willing to give some scraps to the unwashed masses.
China is full of Potemkin villages. They strategically invest huge resources into areas the West finds politically advantageous, but somehow only grow exactly the 5% they say is required. It’s had to square the circle when so much is obviously nonsense
> in a pre-civilization pre-agrarian world, but ADHD would make pretty much no difference.
I have ADHD and I also have hyperfocus, I think hyperfocus is an advantage in a pre-industrialized world.
As a child I was fascinated with blowguns. After a summer of shooting unripe grapes out of plastic pipe, I could shoot anybody in the forehead from 20 meters away, easily. I shot the blowgun thousands of times a day, it was relentless.
The same when I went fishing, a whole day could vanish and it would feel like a blink of an eye.
I taught myself how to ride a bike and I woke up that night to ride the bike, even though it had a flat tire.
I like to go mushroom hunting, but when I do, I usually like to go alone, I walk for extraordinary distances, rough terrain, I don't get bored, I can literally keep at it for the whole day that people think I'm crazy.
It's a bit like a stimulant induced obsession, but my inner voice recedes far back in my skull, it's an incredible flow state-like feeling.
I'm sure this kind of obsession builds skills and it has to have some benefits in pre-industrial societies.
> This would come at a cost to social/copying skills. This idea doesn't explain "systems thinking".
The concept of envy/malice/insecurity and people lying to your face and stabbing you in the back was completely foreign to me up to the age of 36.
Only in the face of overwhelming evidence and harm to myself did it all click.
Lately I'm seeing myself in this junior dev I'm mentoring, I'm strongly suspecting he's on the spectrum (that's why he was rejected initially from an internship, despite my input that he'd make a great dev, which proved 100% accurate) -- the guy is totally happy in his technical world, jabs and callous remarks from others completely go over his head.
A lot of people on the spectrum simply have a deep interest in things and systems. I could be wrong, but I think some of those spindle neurons and circuitry made to model others just get used in some people to get systems.
I often get frustrated because people seem to want to learn HOW a technical insight and it's impossible for me to tell them HOW I got to that conclusion, other than I deeply immersed myself in it and it just clicks.
I get the same awe when my wife makes jokes about a behavior of mine or someone else and I can see just how deep, funny and plausible her whole internal model of others is; and sometimes how wrong it is, just like my internal model of a system sometimes is. Alas I can change my internal models of systems on a whim.
I am on the autism spectrum. I have a deep interest in systems as well, and I like systems and so forth. Things and so forth. Social skills is not what I am good at and I still struggle with but improving with time.
There is an art in which I basically don't do that kind of thinking, that's improvisational comedy.
Improvisational comedy is an art in which I do by honed instinct. There's a system to it, and I can sometime recognize patterns, but most of the work I do is subconscious processing and rather autonomous.
To this day, I think I would have something to teach to the community if I could articulate the unique skills I possess.
I can relate. It's an advantage for sure not being in tune to human social conflicts. I am to a degree, of course, but I don't consider the same things offensive and that has only helped me in learning a lot quickly. In this regard I wish autism was seen as less of a disability and more of a "you are different from most people but sometimes that is good."
I want to share my counter example -- no amount of therapy could help me not almost loose it every time I drove my daughter in heavy traffic or deal with her just being a toddler.
But after 2 weeks being on concerta made lasting changes even months off the drug.
It was the best type o therapy -- you just do the thing that triggers you minus the bad part and learn it's not so bad and you can do it, it has profound implications.
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.
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