The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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I wrote before on Reddit on the WW threads about negative thoughts and lifting (under a different username). I thought I might continue here.
I have switched to 5/3/1 programming over the past few months. First doing Original, then Forever-style programming last month. I haven't really progressed at all though. It's been very difficult for me to gain weight. Since starting my new job, I have eaten more than ever in my life, but weight gain is still very slow - I have ramped up from eating about 3000 calories a day at the start of June to over 4500 now and only have 2kg to show for it. I still freak out every time my scale gives a lower number, and I am still paranoid about not gaining any muscle. Over the past month I got frustrated with the lack of progress on 5/3/1 and decided to push it a bit further. I am now doing FSL for supplemental work and have cut out rest days nearly entirely so I'm in the gym every day. This is basically the opposite of what Wendler counsels... but I'd rather err on the side of doing too much than doing too little.
I think we generally need a bit more data to tell you anything substantial, like experience (you mention five years downthread), bar weight, and your size. Depending on your experience and the weight you can lift the advice can change pretty drastically. Newer lifters (read: squatting <225lbs) can put on 2lbs of muscle a month, whereas experienced lifters (read: squatting >300lbs) will be able to put on maybe a quarter of that mass if they are lucky. Be patient with yourself and focus on the basics: form, diet, and consistency. What I have to say here you may already know, but might be helpful to anyone reading so I'll say it anyway:
First make sure you are consistently getting enough protein. About 50 grams per meal is the max you can metabolize for muscle gain (or, at least, that's the number I keep hearing Peter Attia throw out, ymmv), so be eating protein throughout the day. For those that don't the bare minimum is 0.8g / 1kg, so for myself at a little more than 100kg I need at least 80 grams per day. I've heard that actually hitting somewhere near 1.2g / 1kg saturates better. Good protein sources are best found in animal products, which have nearly all of the necessary amino acids your body needs. Whey protein is a good supplement, but iirc it lacks some key amino acids that you need so be sure to eat a variety of sources to saturate your body's requirements.
Also, don't do any weird, crazy diets. You can avoid processed foods, but be sure to eat a decent amount of fruits and vegetables. The sugars give your muscles the extra zing they need to really push past plateaus and lift heavier over time. A balanced diet of good, unprocessed foods will probably improve your PR by some reasonable margin (5-10%). Also, Creatine works wonders if you aren't using it. 5g a day will improve your power by 10% across the board with zero drawbacks or downsides. If you are new to Creatine, overload it for the first week (20g/day) to really saturate your muscles, and then drop down to 5g a day for an easy increase in strength. Anything else outside of this is a fad and probably wont work (outside anabolic steroids), so the rest is built in the gym.
I think this is a bad idea. On top of hitting all your macro and micro nutrients, your body needs plenty of good rest to repair, rebuild, and replenish the proteins expended during your workout. The purpose of rest is to allow your body to make the necessary improvements to your musculature, which takes time and sleep. While it is technically locational (doing arms won't improve legs by much if at all) it does take time. This process is also different for stronger lifters, as the more stressful weights take a longer time to recover from. Because powerlifting routines rely on constantly increasing the weight and lifting as close to max as possible as much as possible, you need to give your body the necessary time between sessions. That said, active rest > sedentary rest, so cut back on off days and lift really heavy during your on days.
Out of curiosity, what were you doing before 5/3/1? I do essentially the same thing at the gym but a 5x5 focused around squats. What I read about 5/3/1 is that it does the main powerlifts (DL,SQ,BP) with added mili press. You might want to consider adding a row in to your movements, like a barbell row or something to hit your upper back a little bit.
Also, in regards to volume, if you really feel the need to be moving throughout the week then just do calisthenics during rest days. Heavy weights trigger muscle growth, but training body weight exercise over a wide range of motions can really help improve general fitness and even help with recovery through increased blood flow. Capillarization is also a really useful bonus that volume at lower weights can provide, where capillaries grow and expand within your musculature improving blood flow and giving your muscles better endurance and recovery. If you have specific weight/fitness goals it would be pretty helpful to have them in specifics so that we can help you figure out your path to get there.
Lifting about five years - started with the popular Reddit PPL, tried NSuns, messed around with PPL-style programming, didn't really train over lockdown, did Jeff Nippard's Upper-Lower split when I came back, started 5/3/1 in spring of this year. Started with original 5/3/1 with BBB sets, then did a 5/3/1 Forever mesocycle with BBB sets.
Currently my highest lifts are four reps with 100kg on bench press (which I did a few months ago), 155kg on back squat (again, done a few months ago before I started getting back pain) and 190kg on deadlift (done about three years ago). I currently weigh about 84kg, up from about 77kg this time last year.
Yes, I eat lots of protein. Not hard when you eat over 4500 calories. I don't track it but when I do it is normally about 250 grams or more which should be more than enough since most recommendations go up to 2.2g/kg. Admittedly I do eat a fair amount of processed foods, I'm not much of a cook and I don't really know how to make or grow things from scratch and I often have to eat out when I'm working. Honestly I don't understand what people are getting at when they criticize processed foods. Lots of people have gained weight and muscle drinking milk, eating pizza, and using processed supplements like whey protein and creatine (which you yourself recommend). I don't believe it's somehow necessary to cut all those things out of a diet. You're also wrong about whey protein - it has a complete amino acid profile.
5/3/1 isn't a powerlifting program and I'm not really interested in powerlifting.
5/3/1 has assistance work, and I do some sort of row or pulldown variation every day, including barbell rows on press day.
Sometimes in the evenings I go for a run and do some pullups/burpees/dips in an outdoor gym. I'm not that consistent about it, I need to fit it around my schedule, but I usually aim for going twice or three times a week.
Well, in the past when I've trained with rest days, I didn't get any stronger. I've read the best thing to do in that case is to train harder or with more volume or great frequency, so I chose greater frequency.
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I've been lifting for 8 years now and one of the biggest mistakes I see people make is having the wrong mindset. They think they signed up for a sprint when in actuality its a marathon. My suggestion without even reading further simply going by my priors is, "lift for a bit longer and then come back".
So you are not gaining any "weight".
Looking at your weight over a short timeframe is a bad idea because;
It varies based on waterweight.
You can't delineate muscle gain/loss with fat gain/loss.
It's a low resolution way to check if you are making progress.
Check your calorie intake. And fix this. Looks like you have this covered.
Are you lifting more weight (or more reps, or shorter rest) ? If you are not getting stronger, your muscles will not get bigger, regardless of calorie intake.
Are the other variables in check? Adequate sleep? Adequate PROTEIN?, etc? Control for all the variables otherwise your conclusion will be useless.
Wildcard: Are your hormones in check? Failing to put on muscle despite tremendous effort might be a symptom of low testosterone.
Well, I've been lifting for about five years and I'm still pretty weak. And I think I am gaining weight again now that I am eating more calories. I don't know if I'm necessarily stronger. Obviously switching from lifting four or five days a week to seven days a week is going to reduce how hard I can push when I am in the gym. My current 5/3/1 template doesn't program AMRAPs for the leader cycles, I'm using 5's Progression instead.
I eat plenty of protein, and though my sleep isn't perfect, I think very few people have perfect sleep. I also have had my testosterone tested and though it was below-average it was still above what people describe as the low range.
How has your progression been through these years with PRs for the main lifts? That is a very long time. Much longer than I have been lifting (with bad discipline and a lot of lockdown induced breaks) in fact and I have seen some pretty decent gains in this period. But the visible gains came much later and were smaller than how much I was progressing with the number on the bar.
I describe my lifts and progression here. Admittedly I didn't really train at all over lockdown, which adds up to maybe a year out of the gym with two months in October 2020 where I was in the gym (which was actually a pretty good two months of training).
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If you have been lifting for 5 years its likely that you might have hit your genetic limit, or physical (current level of sleep,nutrition, hormone) limit.
Do you have a time delineated data of your lifts? If the plots look logarithmic, then you probably hit some limit. What makes you believe that you can possibly get stronger?
I think it's highly unlikely that I am anywhere near a genetic ceiling, and if I was that would be extremely depressing. In any case lots of people continue to gain muscle and strength after five years.
You are not giving us much to work with.
What are you numbers and what does the progression look like? What are the variables you tried changing, etc.
I described my numbers and lack of progress here
These numbers are totally plausible for genetic limits to be of concern (That's not an insult, these are good numbers). I would say the median male would achieve these numbers after 4-5 years of lifting. So there is a 50% chance that these are the highest numbers you will achieve.
These numbers are in the 40-50th percentile., of serious lifters. I'm quoting the 83kg weight class.
My question is what makes you think you can lift more than this? Compare yourself to the average lifter not people on youtube and instagram.
Because from what you are saying all the other variables minus hormones seem to be controlled for. Only hormones and genetics are left.
With these numbers, assuming all else is in order. If your progression has been logarithmic over time, you probably hit your genetic limits. If its been linear, there is more room to grow.
Which is the reason I am saying that its hard to answer without knowing what the trend of your progress looks like.
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Really impossible to overstate the value here in general across a ridiculous number of dimensions. Strength, cardiovascular fitness, mental health, mental sharpness, digestive health. Just everything works better with good sleep. People have different patterns, so there's no one formula, but I am absolutely only operating at my best if I'm going to bed early enough that I wake up at dawn without an alarm. If you're not waking at sunbreak, it may well be time to check on what's going on.
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You talk about the numbers on the scale, what about the number on the bar? Are they going up?
Also, anecdotally, if weight gain is the goal, I've been running super squats the last few weeks. In six weeks I've put on 12-15lbs, without trying at all. No really serious changes in diet, just lifting different. My weight has held steady between 185 add 195 for years, six weeks of 20 rep squats and heavy pullovers and I'm much bigger.
I'm not sure. My current 5/3/1 template uses 5's Progression, not AMRAP sets. I will start doing AMRAPs again soon when I start the anchor cycle. I have considered Super Squats. Right now I'm avoiding back squats due to lower back pain and doing front squats instead. But I don't know how different it would be. My current program already has me doing FSL Widowmakers, where I use rest-pause to always hit 20 reps, so if this fails I don't really know what to do.
If the numbers on the bar aren't going up, there's something wrong with how you're doing it. Either some form of "overtraining" and lacking adequate recovery or too low intensity/fuckarounditis; or some deeper hormonal/stress/diet.
Well, like I said, I don't know if this current training cycle is working until I finish it. I agree there is something wrong if I do not progress, and that makes me anxious because I don't know what that is. I would assume it's not overtraining but undertraining, and that I just need to add more volume and intensity. I don't know if the problem is fuckarounditis. What would that mean? That I should just continue to do something that doesn't work?
The opposite. I would define fuckarounditis in themotte-ish terms as getting stuck in a training cul-de-sac where you're working out fairly hard, but the stimuli aren't sufficiently novel and your recovery isn't good enough to progress, so you're just doing the same thing over and over, and it's hard and it feels subjectively like a good workout, but your body isn't replying by building new adaptations to it, so you keep doing the same things a little harder, but never break out of the stimulus-recovery equilibrium you're in. So for me that was the year I was 23, when I'd been lifting a little bit, and I got really into a bastardized version of Bulgarian daily max training advocated by Chris Thibadeau (Sp?). I cringe at myself writing this. I'd go into the gym most days and hit a daily 3rm ramp in the push press or the snatch grip high pull or the power snatch or the front squat, followed by some more rep work, and the smallest amount of assistance. It was SO FUN, because every day I was trying to put a big weight up doing lifts I really loved, but my maxes barely moved for like a year, because the equation of novel stimulus and adequate nutrition and recovery was in a stasis (grad school played a role in the bad nutrition/recovery). I needed something new to break out of it, getting into rock climbing actually increased my deadlift and squat and helped me hit my first bodyweight snatch within a month when I returned to lifting.
I'm about to drop some serious bro-evolutionary-science here, but the way I think about it, if you do a big workout and then you eat a big meal and sit around, your body "interprets" that as killing a big animal in a successful hunt and then hanging around eating it. And your hormonal system says, great lets build muscle so we can do that again but even easier and better, then we'll get to sit around and eat for a bit. So high intensity followed by adequate rest. From a novel stimulus, if you can already do that your body isn't going to respond by building expensive adaptations. Westside does novel stimulus by constantly varying minute styles of three basic lifts, Crossfit does it by constantly varying exercises performed. Rest and recovery you already know what you need.
I have tried different things, and my current training where I train every day is different from what I've done before - before I was training four or five days a week, and now I am doing seven days a week. But I'm also unconvinced. Lots of people go into the gym and progress just by adding weight to the same lifts every week, and progress far beyond where I am now.
Well hope you find a solution, gave my guess
I'm sorry you feel like your advice is wasted. You're probably right. From what I read getting big and strong isn't about finding One Neat Trick, it's about working hard... So if I'm failing it's just because I'm lazy and need to work harder. I do want to do super squats, but I don't know if it will make any difference. What matters is hard work and effort, not programming.
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