The DEBUNKING thread.........myths that need to be trashed

This is basic physics.

So, the piece of your #1 point I quoted above-does this mean that if you ARE starting out obese, you can build muscle with a calorie deficit? Because that seems to be exactly what is happening to me, with cardio 6 days a week (on the elliptical to protect my knees, as hard as I can go for 60 minutes), and 2-3 days of lifting heavy weights. My calorie deficit is only about 600 calories a day, and I eat back a lot of my exercise calories. I don't buy your claim that you don't build muscle, when I have moved from lifting 5 lb weights to 15-20 lb weights in less than two weeks and I can SEE the increased muscle in my arms and legs.

On number 4: I don't exercise strenuously ONLY to lose weight, but to strengthen my heart and cardiovascular system. Many, many of the people here were/are obese to begin with, and NEED strenuous exercise to strengthen their hearts, especially if, like me, they have been sedentary for many years and have a family history of heart disease and such. I think it is so irresponsible to come here and tell people they don't need to exercise hard.

Other benefits of strenuous exercise, in my own personal experience: HIGH decrease in anxiety/depression, better sleep, higher sex drive, increased confidence about the abilities of my body to work hard. I DON'T get all that from walking my dog around the neighborhood. Sorry.

A very large component of building strength, and a component that most people completely ignore, is training the central nervous system. You can gain large amounts of strength without adding any muscle mass just by training your central nervous system to control your muscle more efficiently. This is why people on deficits Can see significant strength gains, even without building muscle. I'm a lot stronger than I was 6 months ago, and I can see a lot more definition in my biceps, yet according to my measuring tape, my arms are 1" smaller than they were 6 months ago. My arms aren't stronger due to muscle gain, they're stronger due to my central nervous system utilizing the muscle more efficiently.

^ This. The bolded portion here is all Lyle McDonald, bodyrecomposition.com:


A Quick Tangent into Some Neurophysiology

When you look at strength production, the body has essentially two methods to increase force output which are

Muscle fiber recruitment
Rate coding

Muscle fiber recruitment is exactly what it sounds like, how many of the fibers within a muscle are actually being recruited. Contrary to the exceptional silliness which is endlessly repeated in books and on the internet, most people can actually get pretty close to 100% fiber recruitment (it’s a little bit lower in the lower body but, in the triceps for example, people can get near 100% recruitment).

Rate coding referes to how quickly the body is sending electrical signals to that muscle. As rate coding goes up, the muscle fires harder.

Now, in the muscles we’re interested in from a sports or bodybuilding standpoint, the body will generally use recruitment to increase force production up to about 80-85% of maximum force output (in the lab, this is measured with Maximal Voluntary Isometric Contraction or MVIC, which is effectively 1 rep maximum weight). Beyond 80-85% of maximum, it uses rate coding.

I’d note for completenes that this isn’t true for some muscles in the body, notably stuff like the eye muscles and finger muscles. In those muscles, recruitment is used up to about 50% of MVIC and rate coding handles the rest. Which is a lot of why studies looking at the thumb muscles aren’t really relevant to most training applications. But I digress.

Anyhow, now we have the next part of the picture, the body will recruit more fibers up to about 80-85% of maximum; above that point, there is no further recruitment and force output is improved via rate coding.

I should note that even at lower intensities, as the individual goes to fatigue, eventually all muscle fibers will end up being recruited. But they won’t have been recruited until fairly late in the set (e.g. the last few repetitions).