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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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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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'd guess that you did a pretty good job of it if you noticeably lost weight and became more toned after 6 months of consistent working out. Unless you're starting from a baseline of already being very fit and toned, becoming actually noticeably muscular by the standards of what counts as muscular for men with 6 months of consistent working out would require doing an outstanding job of it, not merely a good job.
I get that, and I was prioritizing losing weight over gaining muscle via my diet.
I still dislike hitting the gym, and after that 6 months of intense adherence, I've fallen off and spent who knows how much on lapsed gym membership cards.
I seek to actively tradeoff time spent in the gym for potential health hazards, but that depends on how severe and unmitigable said hazards are.
There's a probably a lot more meat on the bone to trade off workout efficiency vs optimization than there is for drugs.
I think that's highly unlikely. Given that you're in the gym, lifting hard, recovering adequately and hitting every muscle group reasonably often, I think there's very little to be gained in trying to 'optimize' your workout (even leaving aside that no two people can agree on what 'optimal' training looks like). People train and develop great physiques and strong lifts even under suboptimal conditions all the time.
Whereas taking steroids does seem to make a pretty big difference, especially coupled with that other 95% of training hard and frequently, eating and recovering well. Certainly, much more and much more easily than trying to live some kind of 100% optimal lifestyle that would probably require you to quit your job and never have kids.
My point was more that if the limiting factor is time/motivation, it's quite likely you'll get more out of using a workout plan based around efficient short "fun" workouts. For example if one just does front squat and bench press, three times a week, that is a small time commitment. The tradeoff being optimally targeting every muscle group for maximum growth, and some injury risk. But not, eg, shrinking your testicles.
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Maybe. I've yet to see anyone testify on behalf of the drugs, which I suppose is weak Bayesian evidence on its own.
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