Lurker > pinky0926

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Honestly, I think this is what everyone wants. To be stronger, bigger and leaner. It's not an impossible order, but there's just no one program or one diet that has it all arrive at the same time year round. Part of the wisdom I've learned in lifting is that you have to be comfortable at times with feeling shitty or looking shitty. To grow significant muscle you have to be less lean than you'd like for a while and in turn cutting weight to get "beach ready" makes you feel weak and hate everything. The instagram life of people walking around looking perfect all the time is a farce.

I guess I never really thought about doing both. I've always stuck with one or the other. I wonder how often I should switch this up? Like each workout should be a variation?

You don't want so much variation that you are just confused and relearning things every workout, but it's good to have some variety in set/rep patterns in the same movements. So for example, I follow a program that has follows this sort of pattern:

day 1:

• Main lift: heavy squats for 5 sets of 3
• Secondary lift: light bench press for 3 sets of 10
• Accessory: lat pulldown for 3 sets of 15
• Squat accessory (e.g. leg press) for 3 x 15
• Bench accessory (e.g. dumbbell press) for 3 x 15

Day 2:
Same thing but now the main lift is bench and the secondary is squats.
Day 3:
Main lift deadlift, overhead press is secondary

etc.

So with that, you've got a focus on strength in one lift and then some lighter work on a different muscle group, so you're not too taxed.

You know, I haven't really added more weight each week as a regime. I should try this and I bet the variation here would be enough to get me out of this plateau.

That is key. Progressive overload is really the main thing that matters regardless of what program you do. That's why programs are good, because they push you to go for more weight/reps/sets continuously.

I'm not on an official program as the ones I typically like are made for men and it gets exhausting translating it for me. I should probably just design my own at some point.

Curious about this bit. Designed for men like they focus on muscles that men like, or have jumps in weight that are too large, or something else?

Part 2:

2. I don't know if I should be doing heavy weights to near-failure or failure or lighter weights with more reps (also to near failure).
This is mostly a problem in my upper body. I can gain muscle tone very easily in my legs, so genetics is probably playing a role here. I feel like my upper body gains are just unchanging at this point, yet I still feel stronger than I did 1 year ago.

You should probably be doing both. Set and rep schemes matter less than total volume and overall progress in loading and volume. Variation is useful though.

Again and again research shows that you can grow across a range of sets and reps and that volume is what drives growth. Basically, do more stuff over time to get more big.

If you can do it, linear progression (where you just add more weight each session or week) is the fastest way. If you are sufficiently advanced this doesn't work anymore and you have to follow a "periodised" approach where your volume and intensity undulates over a 4-6 week cycle. Basically, more advanced athletes have to fool around with doing lots of volume with light weights or lots of heavy shit in a sort of wave pattern. They do both, and it's all part of a larger plan that resets in a 4-6 week cycle.

Are you on a program?

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part 1:
Aside from protein (which you're getting enough of, just*) I think fat and carb macros are very individual. You can make academic arguments about what's "optimal" but ultimately what dictates diet success is adherence and what dictates adherence is how much you don't hate your diet. That's why people can a lot of success with a range of diets (vegan, paleo, mediterranean, keto, etc etc). If you try a diet type that people swear by and you hate every second of it, try something else. As long as it adheres to basic principles of nutrition you're good.

Small caveat. "eat whatever if it fits your calorie amount") is easy for bulking. For cutting, you're sort of bound to have to cut fat at some point simply because it's so calorie dense. If you try and eat a small amount of calories while keeping fat high, your meals will be miserably small.

Are you actually trying to bulk and then cut to a reasonable degree in either direction? People tend to plateau early if they aren't actually gaining a reasonable amount of weight for a reasonable amount of time. As far as women are concerned, the principle is still the same, but just scaled down slightly (so instead of 2lbs of gain per week, maybe 1lb per week) and it's harder to track week on week (because your cycle makes water retention kinda fucky).

Basically what I'm saying is, if you set the goal of putting on 20lbs over the course of say 5 months, you'd definitely be stronger and you'd develop a lot of muscle. Even 5lbs of muscle on your frame would be look really significantly different. Then set a goal to cut whatever extra fat you gained in like 6 weeks of dieting (because you can cut much faster than bulk). Caveat here is you sort of have to be ok with being heavier than you'd like, for a time. But if you did it this way you'd absolutely make gains I think.

*This is one area where it seems like women don't actually need less protein per lb than men. They just tend to be a lot lighter in general. 0.6grams to 0.8grams per lb of bodyweight is about right, so your 70grams seems ok there.

You are 33 years old and you have an ordinary haircut, black colour.

What do?

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Same as medical science! Nearly all of it is tested on men.

Wanna unpack it? Can't say I'll know what you could do but it might be fun to talk about.

bigblu89 posted...

I think it has a lot to do with the fact that the "average" person can reach peak physical performance in something like weightlifting if they stick to a strict, science base regimen.

Whereas, no matter how much research you do, so matter how many formulas and numbers you crunch, the "average" person either can or can't hit a baseball at an elite level.

I just think of myself. If I had the time and the means, I could turn myself into the physical peak of what someone my age could be. Good enough to rival anyone my age. Simply because the only thing holding me back is actually doing it.

But no level of training and scientific research will make me an MLB caliber baseball player, simply based on my physical limitations at 46 years old. So instead I'm just a pickup/beer league player.

This is an interesting idea. I wonder if it's that there's a lot of barriers to even getting appropriate training in baseball (it's a team sport, you need a coach and a team and doing a lot of stuff thats out of your control), whereas working out is entirely autonomous.

Republicans think immigrants are less human than a clump of cells but also that guns are part of a person's soul, so this should be interesting

No, but that's just personal.

wanderingshade posted...

I just wanna be a mass goblin. I wanna be Grizzly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzQQ1hjuDEY

You know I never realised he was so tall. He always seemed like a squat goblin man. M'lord is huge for real.

emblem-man posted...

I'm guessing there's just no way to smartly train yourself into gaining large muscles with only 30 minutes a day, 3-4x a week right?

30 minutes is really pushing it. I mean that's like just my warmup and squat sets.

45 minutes is doable though for sure. There's a guy on reddit who has been training this way for 10 years and he's swole as fuck (/u/mythicalstrength). There's no secret really, he just trains with an eye watering level of intensity. Imagine doing sets of deadlifts for 10 repetitions and then without any break going into sets of 20 squats, and then sets of overhead press, and then pullups, and then 30 seconds rest and then repeat. That's how he trains. Over time he just built up a ridiculous work capacity, so he squeezes in so much density in his workouts.

Is Rippletoes Starting strength still a thing? I'm still slightly annoyed at the amount of time I wasted doing the whole Starting Strength workout. Should have just done a bro split like everyone else instead of wasting time when I was young.
I mean, it's a fine program. I was just lying to myself when I told myself I cared more about strength than aesthetics.

More people should be honest about their goals for sure. I think a lot of people want to pretend they're into "functional" strength but what they really mean is "I want to look jacked but also do cool stuff like flip tractor tyres".

Starting strength still exists, but it's taken a beating in terms of reputation and it's not the routine people recommend anymore. Eventually people figured out that if you train minimally and only in one way then you only get minimal and specific results. A coach potato with no sports history should do a bunch of stuff other than squats for sets of 5 if they ever plan on becoming halfway athletic.

A great program that does a better job of reaching the goals for novices than SS does is GZCLP. It basically keeps the workouts quite simple but has more volume, addresses deloads better and allows a range of rep ranges, intensity and variation.

emblem-man posted...

What's funny is, the ones who usually care about the details aren't trying to maximize 30 minutes at the gym. They want to maximize their 1-2 hours, 4x a week gym session, lol.

An interesting phenomenon: there are many meathead gymbros who train stupid and are swole. There are no clever academics who train smart instead of hard and are swole.

You can get strong despite bad training if you just do it for long enough and consistently enough. But you can't outsmart a lack of effort.

The ideal would be someone who does both, but fundamentally I see training smart as optional but training hard as fundamental.

Tyranthraxus posted...

When you get millions of dollars involved, pro sports will hire scientists to do the thinking for the athletes. They absolutely do care a lot and invest far more money and time into it then the average person doing fitness for themselves. They also have access to all kinds of shit most people don't for the purposes of efficiency and recovery.

No argument there.

I'm speaking more to how people casually into the hobby of lifting weights vs casually into the hobby of something like soccer - the lifting weights crowd are pretty invested in academic research on the topic. It's like reading the academia is part of the hobby for a significant number of people who otherwise have no business ever being an athlete.

I'm not really sure why this is. Maybe lifting is a nerdier sport. Maybe people need other factors to make it more interesting. Maybe it's just prone to a lot of charlatans who have identified that "science-based" sells.

HorsemnBusiness posted...

TC having trouble figuring out the science of their gains it sounds like.

We all remember that photo you posted lol

No actually, I have no issue there.

emblem-man posted...

You mean at the amateur level of sports? I'd imagine professional coaches do go into that level of detail.

It is funny for weightlifting hobbyists to be so precise in some of these things though. I could see a case of wanting to be more efficient being positive for those who just don't want to spin their wheels trying to gain a certain physique. Get in, do the work well, get out fast, get swoll.

Exactly, at the amateur level. And quite often this causes decision paralysis/fuckarounditis, or the culture of biohackers who are trying to replace hard work with gimmicky sciency-sounding quick fixes.

Glob posted...

No.

As a former professional athlete, people at the top level always care about the research.

I have no doubt that at the top of every sport there are sports scientists who go into extraordinary granular detail on everything. No argument there.

The phenomenon I'm talking about is how even at the casual l layperson hobbyist level, people who are into lifting weights are far more interested in the scientific research than people into say, Jiu Jitsu, to a point where there's an entire meme culture of nerd fitness.

It's just a bit unusual, but I don't think it's entirely a bad thing.

Relative to other sports, that is.

Like you don't get a bunch of football bros or climbing bros getting into intense debate about the optimal training methodology to throw a better pitch or send a route. People aren't over on the soccer subreddit asking what the scientific research says about how much kicking volume is optimal for a beginner.

But you do get people who are into growing their muscles doing exactly this. The science based fitness community is its own beast now.

I know that people do study this stuff somewhere, but fitness is sort of unique in the sense that even the general layperson is out there trying to keep up with the research on sets and rep schemes and following "science based" training.

Letting one of the most racist government institutions dictate human rights based on nothing more tangible than what a person looks and sounds like, let's see how this plays out

Ever notice this?

There will be a video of a pilot crashing a plane and the comment will be like "I was in the air force for 20 years, this was a lot of mistakes by the pilot. Greetings from Germany."

Maybe it's a boomer thing

"There's so much pain that I have in regards to the loss of my baby, Jailyn.

"I'm extremely hurt about everything that happened. I am not trying to justify my actions, but nobody knew how much I was suffering and what I was going through ... God and my daughter have forgiven me."

The narcissism is palpable

Sufferedphoenix posted...

I will agree the story is presented well but I'd say it's also mostly forgettable. Like I remember the overall summarized version if the story but struggle to remember specific story beats.

I actually preferred some of the main side quest stories. Lady Masako and Ishikawa were good characters.

This is what sets it apart from something like Horizon Zero Dawn IMO. Ostensibly a similar setup, but I literally can't remember a single character from that game.

The worst part about these videos is they rarely offer any actual analysis. They just quite literally describe the game as it is played.

I guess the good news is that technology has become sufficiently sophisticated that tiny studios can pump out incredible games without this garbage.

Hollow Knight, Stardew Valley, Outer Wilds - the games industry is in safe hands if this stuff is possible.

Instant must watch. The Jordan Schlanski bit is perfect.

Also how does Werner Herzog have the most instantly recognisable voice ever

CobraGT posted...

I own the game but I have yet to play it. How good is the story?

Despite my earlier criticism of the premise the story is actually told very well in a very cinematic way and the characters are compelling, and is probably the most "authentic" samurai game of all time, in the sense that it literally feels like an Akira Kurosawa movie at times.

I actually found it a pretty annoying fake drama because the samurai were literally never like that. They had no problem at all using assassination and covert tactics.

So basically, lord sakura was going to let thr Mongols gain control over Japan because of a bullshit version of bushido

I think if you create a villain that manages to eclipse the protagonists in popularity then yeah, you've fundamentally written a good character.

JRPGs have such weird and convoluted stories though so I try not to squint at it too much

It's amazing how much I hate LoK compared to the first show. it's like in the process of trying to add more nuance and depth they stripped out the heart of it.

1337toothbrush posted...

Not surprised to see praise for bush here. You know, the guy who dismissed multiple warnings which led to 9/11. The guy who took advantage of that tragedy to launch two forever wars. The guy who attacked women's reproductive rights, who completely botched the response to hurricane katrina, and who pushed hard for a border fence. The guy who was mad about France not joining his stupid war and the "freedom fries" that came out from that. The guy who made our country into a laughing stock. The guy who was basically "elected" by the supreme court.

You don't have to elevate prototype trump to stick it to trump. They're both absolute dogshit.

I'm looking through the topic and not seeing the praise, can you help me out

Garioshi posted...

Please stop rehabilitating a war criminal with the blood of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis on his hands

Please read things better

What I'll never get over is how there's less than 4 years between trump and biden but fox would have you believe they're 30 years apart

Don't get me wrong he's an awful man who did much worse things than just make speaking gaffes on TV

But I distinctly remember him being the posterchild for political buffoonery in the 2000s.

Also another wild fact I didn't realise until now: he's younger than Biden AND Trump

Getting some counselling this week I think. Need to clear out my head and get out of this loop.

This is an embarrassing level of dick sucking.

Southernfatman posted...

I think I'll trust Peppy Hare over you, thank you very much! Who are you to doubt El Peppy?

I'm currently a commercial pilot, used to fly F35s for the RAF, over 20,000 flight hours

That's what I would like to say but actually I'm just a guy who learned a new word 9 minutes ago on a youtube video

Southernfatman posted...

He pressed Z or R twice didn't he? So Barrel roll.

The airplane makes a complete rotation on both its longitudinal and lateral axes, causing it to follow a helical path

It's hard to say if Fox was just fragrantly ignoring the advice of his wingman or if he simply lacked the flight experience to execute the more difficult manoeuvre

They didn't tell me that they literally meant that in the same sense that like, a flea market in Thailand is the free market place of useless shit you'll be hustled into paying too much for that will fall apart in 3 days

LonelyStoner posted...

Hes about to hit the core of the earth with that hole hes digging.

Don't count on it. MAGAs brains are so melted by this point that they literally think emulating NK if trump says so is a good thing.

I think both games are indicative of the time they were made. You couldn't make a game like GoW2 nowadays without it being considered extremely silly (and all the QTEs would be fucking annoying).

I feel very fondly about the original games but don't think I would enjoy them much again.

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A goal of these AI voice-bots for as long as they've been around has been to make them convincingly realistic. It's only in the past few years that that has been achieved, with the turing test being officially passed in 2014 (the test to trick people into thinking an AI chatbot is real).

In this case the "uh" might just be giving the AI time to compute something, or it's a deliberate vocal tick to make it seem more real.

Heineken14 posted...

I wonder if that Seymour fight up on the mountain is still a huge cock block after all these years knowing it's coming and being able to level and what not before it.

I honestly think what made it hard back then was lack of information. You can't just play the fight like other fights, you have to have some strategy to it.

A combination of poison and knowing the right nul[element] order was all it takes, IIRC.

I've seen too much sci-fi to be excited about this.

Guns_of_Verdun posted...

You speak to the girl, agree to look for her child, then it shows Dark Ifrit chilling on a cliff edge

Then you're given control back and can walk away or walk towards the cliff:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-KnhxEpKPo

Skip to 3:55

wtf, this didnt happen at all.

You know what - what I think happened is that I triggered this cutscene months ago and left it alone, but this time I came back to that area and had forgotten about it. That meant I didn't see ifrit at all, and just spoke to the girl and it triggered the fight. She was standing behind the two guys when I went there.

You're going to a foreign country or even just foreign state or area and everyone will tell you the same things:

• stay out of the centre, it's too touristy and expensive
• Here's this super niche not-touristy activity that we did and you should do it too, trust me bro. Basing this off the one time I went there as a tourist for 3 days
• You don't want to go to X famous place, it's too crowded and full of tourists
• Here are some bars/restaurants that only the locals know about

I've travelled a lot and to be honest that's just bollocks advice isn't it? I mean the stuff you saw in the postcards is why you saved up money and went there in the first place right? Why are you listening to your pal who is barely less ignorant about it than you are?

I'll take Edinburgh as an example. I live in Edinburgh, but for most people in the world this is a dream tourism destination. A magical hogwarts-like city with castles and oldness and winding dungeons and passages and stuff like that.

Now if I were to give you the "local" experience, here's what you'd do: 1) avoid all the areas that make's edinburgh so picturesque so that you can commute more easily, 2) go to a local's bar/restaurant that is pretty much like any bar in the world (except maybe smaller), 3) stay in a suburban area outside of the main strip that looks pretty much like any other place in the world because it's more affordable, 4) here's a bunch of restaurants that I enjoy that are foods from around the world that give you nothing new in terms of experience, because I'm guessing you've had a good burrito or pizza or wherever you came from.

All the stuff that I avoid is stuff that tourists want to experience in edinburgh. The castle, the royal mile, the scott monument, some horrific haggis dish somewhere. At best I can recommend some famous tourists spots that are not obvious on trip advisor, and that would be the one gem of advice that would be worth your time. But for the most part, you should do exactly what the tourists do. Go to the centre where the other tourists are.

Bonus pro tip: have a weekend in your own city or town and go and do all the touristy type stuff that you normally scoff at. You'll probably have a surprisingly good time.

Guns_of_Verdun posted...

You have to talk to an NPC who leads you to Ifrit, then you still get the chance to walk away <_<

How did you start that fight by accident?

Guy was speaking in Al bhed and it was vague anyway. Once you're in the cutscene you can't escape. I couldn't see ifrit, just a random NPC.

What you described isn't what happened for me - did it change in the remaster? There was nothing giving away that it was a dark aeon.
Alteres posted...

You cheated not only the game, but yourself.

You didn't grow.

You didn't improve.

You took a shortcut and gained nothing.

You experienced a hollow victory.

Nothing was risked and nothing was gained.

It's sad that you don't know the difference.

I shall commit sodoku

In this playthrough I used Zanmoto once against Dark Ifrit, because I had just been grinding out the monster arena capture quest in Bikanel. Spent nearly an hour without saving trying to get 10 sandworms, 10 cactuars and 10 Zu birds. And then without realising it I had wandered into Dark ifrit's area, while being supremely underlevelled to even think about facing him.

So basically it was a choice between losing that fight and doing all that grinding again, or just using Zanmoto to whoop him. So I did that. i reason that if I beat the other dark aeons legitimately it doesn't matter, he's hardly the hardest of them.

Guns_of_Verdun posted...

FFX is a great game but there's a whole lot of bloated game design. Things that make no sense, things that overpowered.

You can get Wakka's Attack Reels straight after Luca and it's the most OP attack in the game (Other than Zanmato) and then his Auroch Reels overdrive you can only get after like 300 fights or something is shit

Kimarhi has like 18 overdrives and they are all worthless.
Lulu's overdrive is absolutely shit and worse than attacking normally.

Every boss/difficult enemy being immune to status effects making them near useless. Seriously, aside from Sand Worm is there any point in ever poisoning anything?

There's the unexplained friendship mechanic that barely comes up.

Yeah. And all of these systems also means there's usually a shortcut strategy to most bosses, which is kind of neat but hard to discover.

Seymour for example - IIRC, every version of him is vulnerable to poison. And since the damage is calculated based on his total HP, it's the easiest strategy to win even if you are under levelled. You cast bio once or hit him with a poion weapon once, and watch his health melt away at 4x the rate of your best attack.

I just did all the celestial weapons quests and I was amazed at how annoying Wakka's was. The other celestial weapon quests were hard but relatively short. This one was like "ok, play 100 games of blitzball, each game is 15 minutes long btw lololol"

I'll try and explain this in a way that doesn't require you to play the game.

You have a standard JRPG party, and one of those characters can summon "aeons" to help fight. These are basically giant monsters that totally decimate and make the game easy-mode for people that don't want to grind too much. This is true for everything except the very end game optional bosses, and FFX has a lot of those, and they are very hard. Most of the aeons you get are picked up normally through a standard playthrough. They have fairly ordinary attacks - hit physically, do magic, here's an ultimate attack, etc.

And then there's Yojimbo. Yojimbo is found buried in an optional dungeon. To get him you have to pay a pretty ridiculously high amount of money (for a standard playthrough). Even if you get him, he'll seem really odd to actually use. He doesn't have normal attacks. Instead you pay him money and he seems to decide what attack to use based on what you pay, but for the most part it seems random.

So it's completely reasonable to think that most people who've played this game either never found Yojimbo or never used him once they did.

But there are two interesting things about the guy. The first is that he has this one attack that has the ability to one-hit kill literally any enemy in the game, including the God-like post-game optional end boss that takes a fully maxed out party about 40 minutes to kill ordinarily. The second is that the in-game formula that decides whether he can use this ultimate attack is so fucking complicated that someone wrote a gamefaqs guide that reads a bit like a mathematics research paper.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/ps2/197344-final-fantasy-x/faqs/24392

In a nutshell, there's a ludicrously complicated interplay between how much Yojimbo likes you, what actions you've asked him to do previously, what level the enemy is that you're fighting, what resistance they have to his insta-kill attack and finally a huge amount of RNG. This stuff is so complicated that even only as recent as a couple of years ago people have been breaking open the game's source code to better understand how it's calculated.

An entire guide to just explain how to use ONE attack for one entirely optional assistance character.

It's just bonkers to think that back in 1999 Square decided to put this much work into something so totally unimportant to the game and then hid it completely.

This is so many levels of "wow, people actually care about this" that I feel dizzy

Can't watch trailer right now, but I want this to be good so bad

I want to clarify: while there were many toxic elements to our relationship, she didn't threaten to kill herself if I left her. She just went and did it somewhat quietly (sending messages to friends), and it was easy enough to miss her that it seemed like a real attempt.