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).
Jump in the discussion.
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I'll second @FiveHourMarathon here: if you're asking people on the internet this question, you aren't anywhere near needing to worry about the limits. Lifting weights to get stronger is basically pure upside until you get so deep into it that it becomes a part-time job, and even then it's basically all upside.
I also agree that 1/2/3 plate bench/squat/dead is a good bare minimum for a male lifter; under that your only goal should be getting stronger regardless of any other athletic goal.
My hope is this was an intellectual exercise instead of a serious inquiry.
Otherwise it's much like women worrying about being too "ripped". Honey, it'll never happen - and if it does, a week on the couch will swing you back just fine.
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Lifting weights to build muscle is probably detrimental to long term longevity, particularly coupled with a high BW. If you care about that sort of thing.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37285331/
I agree with @ArmedTooHeavily
Person goes to hospital with cancer. Is stuck in a bed having their bum wiped for them. Loses muscle mass. Dies. Clearly they just needed some whey and squats. Or hospitals cause cancer.
Actual weightlifters have bad life expectancy outcomes, on par with athletes that get punched in the face regularly.
https://www.sebjenseb.net/p/what-is-the-optimal-body-type
This guy is talking about "Olympic bodybuilders" so I am immediately skeptical that he has any idea about what is going on in the data. Looking at data that involves all Olympic weightlifters is going to be confounded by the super heavyweights with enormous fat mass.
Not just that, but if you look at the methodology they do not control for any confounders. Particularity the fact that countries that focus on Olympic weightlifting typically do so because it's relatively inexpensive to have a program compared to other sports. Look at any of the medals tables and you see a bunch of North Korea, Kazakhstan, Georgia, Belarus, etc. None of which are famed for longevity of the population. That lifespan chart is absolutely useless without controlling for confounders, unless you think equestrian and sailing has some magical protective powers other than being a sign of affluence.
They also fail to quantify the likely effect of steroid use, which is absolutely rampant in top level weightlifting. "...in the past decade, more than 600 lifters have tested positive." This is particularity relevant because the steroids used are chosen for their ability to avoid doping control and make the athletes stronger not for safety
Also agree, you should probably not take training advise from someone who does not understand the difference between general strength training for health, weightlifting the sport, and bodybuilding.
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I'm sure you could find any number of reasons to ignore anyone you feel like - why not a typo or minor terminological error?
It's really more of a major error because the body composition of a bodybuilder is totally different from the body composition of a weightlifter. Olympic weightlifters are also (at least nominally) drug tested while top bodybuilders are not.
Again, if you choose not to be interested in this, you could find any number of rationalisations. That he wrote Olympic bodybuilder instead of Olympia bodybuilder does not really seem important to me. It's not even the only typo in his post.
Olympia wouldn't make sense in the context. He's not even talking about bodybuilders.
It's ironic that you are doing what you are accusing me of doing (nitpicking and ignoring the message) when I actually made substantive criticisms.
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That doesn't even come close to passing the sniff test. "Exercise will make you die sooner"? Give me a break, the entire first world is dying from being too fat and too sedentary.
And even if there is some correlation between muscles and morbidity, you'd be a fool to only consider the number of years lived. Physical strength is massively, massively important to quality of life in the elderly. One of the most important reasons to maintain physical vigor is so that when your aging really sets in you have a sufficient physical baseline to not be reduced to invalidity.
To quote Tolkien:
The old which is strong does not whither
Deep roots are not reached by the frost
Exercise in general is good for your life expectancy. Any yet, weightlifters have some of the worst life expectancy outcomes among all athletes, alongside boxers and ice hockey players who are literally getting brain damage from their sports. I think virtually all of this is caused quite simply - people who lift weights are too large. The sport valorises size and strength, and even hobbyist natural lifters are expected to have BMIs at 25 or over.
Lifting weights is probably not the culprit. The skinny old guy doing squats with 60kg in between running marathons is probably not endangering himself. But he will likely outlive the meatheads benching 140kg. If you can call such an existence living.
I agree that it's better to live fifty years as a meathead than seventy as a cardiohead. And you're right that people are dying due to being fat and sedentary. But lifting doesn't fix that. It's one of the few athletic activities that actively encourages weight gain and does not inherently involve any cardiovascular exercise.
Whats your squat PR?
I ask because in my experience 100% of the people who say any variation of "you'll get too big" (in this case "even hobbyist natural lifters are expected to have BMIs at 25 or over") have never picked up a barbell in their lives. It just doesn't happen, it's not a concern, its media-created fantasy. It's like people who say "why didn't he shoot the gun out of his hands?"
170kg. I don't really PR that often on squats - in theory I could probably do 180 based on my reps.
I'm no soothsayer either but what others have told me is that if I wanted to squat more I'd probably have to put on more weight, at least temporarily. And since I don't really consider my squat numbers to be respectable...
Anyway, you clearly are not paying attention to what I'm saying. I don't consider there to be such a thing as too big. There are however, clearly tradeoffs to getting big and strong that people don't want to hear about.
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