SideSteel Member

Those home scales that measure body composition are horribly inaccurate. As long as someone is training reasonably, eating enough protein, and not losing at a rapid pace, they are basically doing the things that need to be done to maintain as much muscle as possible while dieting.

This is fantastic. Nicely done =)

Except there aren't 200-300 studies on this.

I'd be curious if there is any evidence of this one way or another. You could make a case for satellite cell changes that could be quite meaningful.

You can't speak from experience if you have not taken steroids however you can point to controlled research that demonstrates that people did indeed gain lean mass and get stronger by taking steroids and not training. By the way, there was a dietary protocol in that study but you have to read the study to know that.

Almost all the food we eat has caffeine in it?

So to clarify, your issue with caffeine is specifically with people who take massive amounts of it daily? And you also use caffeine yourself in small doses?

So you think caffeine is bad because it's addictive and you have no evidence that it's harmful. Gotcha. You can carry on with your opinion of course, and feel free to ignore me. If you DO have evidence of caffeine being harmful I'm all ears.

Regarding dosing your best bet would be to reference pre-workout ingredients in supplements that don't use prop blends and compare dosing to the available evidence at examine.com. Examine will likely have everything well-referenced so you can compare. A simple and completely made up example might be something like Beta…

Is it harmful and do you have evidence of this?

You're free to disregard any opinion of mine you'd like, but I haven't stated an opinion in the post you're quoting. I shared a controlled study. This study is not my opinion, it is a study. Note: Strength measures in the non exercise group went up. Meaning, steroids increased their strength without them doing any lifting…

Then please state which ingredient you take issue with. Saying "chemicals" is equivalent to saying "toxins" when it comes to buzzword nonsense. If you don't like pre-workouts, cool. But if you're going to paint this picture of them being somehow detrimental then state why. Saying "garbage" doesn't really tell us anything.

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199607043350101#t=articleResults Note that the non exercise group given steroids showed a significant increase to lean mass

I could care less about you using or have used or anything like that. Having said that, it's incredibly ironic that you have an issue with caffeine and "chemicals" but you don't have an issue with steroids given we have a lot more data on the safety of the former.

There's an overwhelming amount of evidence in support of caffeine having ergogenic effects. I DO think pre-workouts are over-used and many people think they need them. I just drink coffee. But I think saying "chemical" without saying which specific ingredient you take issue with, is rather silly. If you're going to take…

I think some form of counseling or coaching is a good idea.

No, I don't think people can typically reverse diet to a significantly higher TDEE unless they gain weight along with it. However, as intake increases so does diet induced thermogenesis and NEAT, and so I DO think energy expenditure goes up, and I DO think there are individual differences in how someone responds to calorie…

If this were a client I'd have a good amount of history/data to work with which may dictate which direction I would go. Generally speaking though if I see a situation where someone is at a low calorie intake and not losing for an extended period of time it tends to boil down to the following things: 1) Inaccurate logging.…

Also worth noting that someone on that high of a protein intake (2g/lb LBM) is likely getting in a ton of glutamine already.

Thanks. Just for what it's worth, I TEND to find that low intensity exercise decreases appetite for me and high intensity exercise increases it.

I write my own programs or I hire my coach, lately it's been the former. Having said that, the linked thread above is great if you're looking for pre-written stuff.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23835594 CONCLUSIONS: High-intensity intermittent exercise suppresses subsequent ad-libitum energy intake in overweight inactive men. This format of exercise was found to be well tolerated in an overweight population.…

Effects of exercise on appetite are individually variant and tend to be intensity/modality dependent too. I don't think it's at all accurate to state that it should increase appetite.

I would v I would suggest finding a trainer or coach who has experience programming and prepping for the sport of powerlifting. You don't need to know your 1RM however it's very likely that your program will have you hitting heavy sets of 1-3 reps when you are about 2-3 weeks out. Using this combined with RPE and/or video…

Just as an FYI, Error rates with body fat analysis are quite high. In fact, both DEXA and hydrostatic weighing have upwards of 3-5% margin of error rate in individuals with bioelectrical impedance having massive error rates.…

I don't know that we can attribute the leanness to reverse dieting necessarily.

Because in reality many people tend to react less than favorably to increases in body-weight, this tends to cause less abrupt changes on the scale with less chance of over-shooting maintenance. It's also a bit challenging to accurately nail down maintenance calories due to those changes in NEAT. I don't think it's…

Food has several different properties to it. A calorie is one of those properties. And so if you compare 900 calories of 1 food to 900 calories of an entirely different food, the calories are identical. In your example, there are many OTHER food properties that are drastically different, but the calories are the same.

Yes but not in the way some people do. For example I'm not a fan of slowly adding in calories over the course of several months to try and get to maintenance. However I do think there's some merit in doing it in chunks. For example if I'm going to get someone out of a deficit I'll make a big jump, maybe around 60-80% of…

I train 4 days per week. I squat 3 days per week, I bench 4 days per week, I deadlift 1 to 2 days per week. All of the above is done in a variety of rep ranges AND intensity each week. So for example I will have high volume and low/moderate load, moderate volume/moderate load, low volume/heavy load. As I progress from week…