Genny

I'm not enthusiastic about veganism. Not at all. THAT SAID, neither of these men have the tell-tale signs of PED use. Testosterone receptors exist at different densities on different muscles. The delts and the lats tend to be overdeveloped in people who specifically abuse anabolic steroids--good training can overcome this, but there are often obvious signs, even among champion bodybuilders. Excessively capped delts are usually a complete giveaway. Both of these men have natural-looking physiques. In addition, it hardly needs to be said that neither has the growth hormone gut. The idea that either animal or vegetable proteins have special properties as proteins beyond their amino acid profiles is definitely in the woo territory. Both pro-meat and pro-vegan groups are guilty of that. (I'm pro-small-amounts-of-meat for reasons utterly unrelated to protein--same reasons I think it's a waste of time, at best, to pump lots of supplements and that soylent green is a horrifically terrible idea, nutritionally).

I don't like saunas. I love hot baths, though. My hot bath is at temperatures that would make most people scream and hide. 110F or higher. 🙂 HSP, for sure. (Most commercial hot tubs are put at 105F max, BTW.) I suspect that saunas are similar in that you just get used to it. My baths are very pleasant to me. I can get the same effect by sitting in a car at 150+F, but I don't like the sticky sweatiness. In the bath, it washes away. I've tried both wet and dry saunas--I like the bath better. It's instantly relaxing. The heat exposure should raise your core temp to the 99-100F range to be effective. My normal body temp is always under 97.5 at rest, and yes, my hot bath raises my core temp quite handily. I have chronic pain from a point mutation on the SCN4A gene. The HSP release causes pain relief over a fairly extended period of time, so I was doing this before I heard of the sauna effect because of the pain-control feature. I didn't know why I hurt less, even the next day, but I knew that I did.

My eyelid is twitching at this. It is utterly untrue that biphasic and polyphasic was some great norm. People did NOT go to bed just because it got dark. Ever read Samuel Pepys' diary? He would go to bed for the night at 7 pm...or 7 am...or 11 pm...or 11 am. London shops would commonly stay open into the very early morning hours because the party-hardy rich people were also out living it up. Vikings? It got dark early in winter, and they came inside and started telling stories for endless hours, and when they got tired of that, they fought with each other. They didn't go to bed. THAT SAID, IN THE WINTER, IN NORTHERN CLIMATES, yes, biphasic sleep was pretty common. In the summer and in hot climates, biphasic sleep was uncommon but an afternoon nap was normal. If you were a farmer, you'd get up in the cool of the day at dawn, do morning chores, grab breakfast (breakfast wasn't ready until after the chores were done, BTW), do the main work of the day, eat the biggest meal, grab a nap, and then do evening activities and chores and lighter work before a light meal (optional--if you were poor, you probably didn't get much here) and then bed. You can't take just one pattern and say "hey, some people did it, so everyone must have!" They didn't. There were lots of different patterns. Almost all of them had a main, big sleep at night. The other details were quite variable.

You seem slightly concerned that protein might be having a negative impact on your "gainz," but I really, really wouldn't worry about it--meaning, I don't think you're actually making a trade-off at all. Have you read the research that has used full-body split weightlifting workouts that showed that the effects of training DECREASED BOTH protein synthesis and protein breakdown? And that protein breakdown is decreased MORE? So the protein needs of young men who are initially untrained (meaning the people most genetically able to build muscle at the time in their lives that it's easiest to build muscle) actually DECREASE when they start weightlifting? This makes absolute sense from a free-living human perspective. Throughout pretty much all of history, people haven't been able to go, "Hey! I wanna build muscle! I'm going to eat more meat!" Instead, they had to be able to use the protein typically available in their diets to put on enough muscle in response to the loads to be able to handle their workload. With no special muscle stimulation, the body will quickly cycle protein through muscle and then break it down. But when the body is stimulated, it preferentially hangs onto as much protein as possible, because it knows it has more need for protein than is already existing in the muscles of the body. Take a look at the mosaics of gladiators. Those guys were JACKED on barley and beans and very little meat--sufficient protein but certainly not high by any measure. In short, given what we know about the mTOR pathway upregulation you should expect from protein excess, I wouldn't try to eat more protein than you are now because you want to gain muscle. There's a reason my own levels hang around 10% intake. In high school, I ate no more protein than I do now, and I would have handily broken the state squat powerlifting record for any weight class if my high school had participated in powerlifting competitions.

I’ve been trying to research sauna usage and cancer rates because there is some suggestion that temperature triggers immune system activation and not just the reverse. Would be very interesting if true—and a lot more pleasant, too. Of course, I actually love baths that raise my body temperature by a few degrees. So I’d be thrilled that something I enjoy already has more than HSPs going for it!

The flu shot and the Tdap both knock me on my butt for 24 hours. I sleep most of the day and I run a fever. You know how babies sleep all day and get feverish after a vaccination? That’s me. Out cold. How do you even stay awake after? I wouldn’t want a stronger immune response! I’d be absolutely miserable.

FFMI of 25 at a low BF%. Not BMI. http://scoobysworkshop.com/the-natty-limit/ You can’t conflate the two—also, fat-associated FFM inflates the FFMI numbers with people with BFP above 6-8%. Given your current BMI and age, you’re going to be facing real biological limitations getting much larger. Easy gains get a lean guy between a BMI of 23 and 25 depending on age. (Not a FFMI of 25–and I just about nailed yours, btw. 😛 ) You’re facing the slower gains and also lower levels of testosterone and growth hormone. There is no magic formula. You’ll make incremental gains to a point and then you’d have to significantly your total time to get more. There is no health-based reason to do this. There is also no health-based reason for me to work on my shape, either. I just want to. Take a look at Jack LaLanne when he was 40 vs 60. That guy worked out 2 hours a day his whole life without interruption, but he was at a BMI of 23 by 80.

I am a 5'6" woman. I weigh 120lbs-ish, so a BMI of around 19.5. I average more than 2000 cal a day, so not a CRONie. I work out more than 99% of Americans, which, sadly, means that I do slightly more than the minimum recommendations for strength and cardio--probably 2-3 hours of "vigorous" (according to the CDC, but "light/gentle" according to exercise researchers) jogging and 1-2.5 hours of weightlifting per week, on top of walking 10-20 miles per day and sometimes more than 30 mi/day on a treadmill desk. (I do not do this because that much walking is recommended but because I have a sodium channelopathy with a warm up effect, and it keeps my pain levels low. That is an "extreme" level of walking. 8-12 mi per day is probably more ideal for health.) My oral temperature is 96.8 to 97.2 F, unless I've been asleep (drops to 96.5ish, though I've seen even lower) or I'm walking briskly and have had caffeine (up to 97.6). Working out, it's higher. Of course, it stays slightly elevated for me after exercise for a bit. If I hit 99F not because of exercise, it's because I am miserably, miserably sick--though it can go even higher. So what's that again about lean exercisers not having lowered body temperatures? 😉

Never having kids raises the risk of most types of "female" cancer independently of other factors. So does not breastfeeding. Married men live longer than never-married and divorced men, too. Obesity is linked to having less sex and less satisfaction with sex, so any study that doesn't separate the two will be badly flawed, BTW. But the idea that sex-restriction is good for longevity is a very goofy idea that belongs in the realms of mysticism and fraudsters. It is also based on some INCREDIBLY, HIDEOUSLY sexist belief systems about the evils of women stealing vital male strength. The two cannot be separated. It actually angers me the amount of attention that some very ugly guru traditions have been given, with the link of this guruism to manipulation, scamming, exploitation of every sort, fake magical cures for people with REAL diseases, and all sorts of other awful things in India. It gets dressed up it pretty crystal woo for Western audiences and credulously swallowed.

I definitely agree that you should avoid injury! I have a SLAP tear from bad pushup form as a teenager, so I can't train over-the-head anywhere close to 1 rep max. Most studies, though, show no big difference in either hypertophy or strength gains for more than 5 sets and more than 5 reps (if we are talking natural lifters--juiceheads get lots of benefits from more reps). As long as you're at 5-8 sets and 5-10 reps and are really getting a good workout in that range--not to failure but to "stutter"--we're talking teeny differences. At that point, it works out to sets times reps times load, AT ANY GIVEN PACE. If you slow down your reps, then really that's exactly the same as doing more reps, in terms of total muscle loading. But once you get below a certain threshold in terms of weight, stimulation dives pretty steeply. That's why there's the sweet-spot range. I'm not sure what your BMI is, but from a look at you, you're probably just not putting in the time and loading required to go beyond what you have. That is NOT an insult but rather a compliment. You have a certain amount of potential for building, and your cheap and easy gains are clearly far behind you. A FFMI of 22 is quite good for a man (that's all the easy gains for a young man there), 23 is quite impressive, and a FFMI of 25 is at the limits of the possible for the most elite and dedicated natural bodybuilders with quite lengthy and dedicated programming. Most professional bodybuilder coaches have very, very few clients that ever hit this number. From your general shape, I'm guessing you're a fair bit north of 40 years old, and the people who have lifted their whole lives seem to dip after 50 in terms of how much muscle they can keep on, so there's that, too. I've done cross training sometimes for fun (think Crossfit without the stupid and dangerous), and it does reps and sacrifices weight. I can tell you that the 5-8, 5-10 formula is INCREDIBLY true with hypertrophy. You start pushing into sets of 30 or TUL equal to that amount (60 seconds, or even 1:30), and sure, all the flabby boys and girls are getting both muscle and strength. Meanwhile, my muscles are shrinking, and forget my 1RM, my 5RM is in the tank, even as I'm doing quite heavy kettlebells, etc. And I'm a girl! My muscles weren't that big to start with!

Seems like a brilliant way to get intractable insulin resistance and multitudinous nutrient deficiencies. If someone is encouraging an eating pattern that no free-living human society has ever even been able to come close to...it's a tip-off that it might be bad for you. Even Eskimos/Inuit never lived in nutritional ketosis, and they ate a lot of berries, roots, and some greens. Inuits still take off work during berry-picking season because it's that culturally important. They used to dry the berries and mix them with fat for winter. (I guess that's what gave them such terrible heart disease. The berries. lol.) I am not vegan, and I include veganism among these diets, BTW. Don't do extreme things. It rarely ends well.

I’ve done FMD and water fasts...I don’t even know how many time now, actually. The FMD macros tend to make me sick to my stomach. I prefer to just eat only the amount of cashews that fit into the max allowed calories and not try to make the rest up with veg. I also prefer to do a water fast the first day instead of the gentle induction. I’m a lot less hungry. It seems the happiest of both worlds to me. Ymmv If you might possibly be sick and just to know you’re infected...don’t do it. It really does clear out your immune system pretty aggressively, as I’ve discovered to my chagrin. Fasting softened an ice pick chickenpox scar I’ve had since I was a little kid. It sounds crackpot like but it’s true. I didn’t realize that people claimed it helped scars until after I looked it up following what I noticed. It improves my allergies for weeks and even my sporadic adult acne. It seems to reduce visceral fat more than subcutaneous, too. I swear it also reduces fine lines. It took several cycles to see some of these changes but it’s pretty startling. Acne and allergies are quite immediate though.

Pfffth. This is data using untrained men. Time under load isn’t magic. It’s just another way of manipulating total loading while pretending you’re not. With decent form, you’re not going to injure yourself lifting weights. It’s just not that dangerous. I’d rather use something that’s proven to increase hypertrophy or strength in trained men than the fad du jour, if that’s what I wanted. This is as goofy as the fascination with HIIT, which is useful for some markers of cardiovascular fitness/adaptation and useless for others. Does it work? Sure. Do other things work better? You betcha.