Summary: If you work out enough, you will gain muscle, according to your body's potential. You can't beat the potential. You can only make it more efficient. Superslow is the god-king of efficient exercise: 20 minutes of superslow lifting a week, and you max out your body's muscle growth capabilities. 15 hours of lifting a week won't get you any more muscle growth.
And, given that it's all tradeoffs, all the way down, I finally have a response (3-4 years later) to one of my hyper-smart Crossfit friends:
There are 3.5 known health benefits to exercise.
- More muscle is good for you.
- Some aerobic exercise is good for your cardiovascular system.
- Exercise messes with your hormones in various ways, some of which are good.
- If you're in the correct 3% of the popuation, physical fitness can enhance survival (military folks, firefighters, etc.)
For #2, there are no known cardiovascular benefits to aerobic exercise beyond ~45 minutes of brisk walking 4x a week.
UPDATE: the following refers to intentional exercise, not work that happens to be physical, or playing basketball with your teen son.
Once you're past 45 minutes of walking 4x a week, and 20 minutes of superslow... you're either
- paramilitary,
- playing with hormones,
- playing with status
- just playing
- all 4
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9 comments:
...or a farmer.
[Interesting, the captcha word for this comment is 'somme'. Are you running some special war geek version?]
Exercise and nutrition science are two related fields where we don't know nearly as much as we pretend to know.
We have a vast body of non-scientific gym lore describing what has and has not worked for various people with various fitness and athletic goals.
We also have a lot of surprisingly narrow scientific studies, which are applied surprisingly broadly in explaining how things work.
All this is complicated by the amount of money to be made through misinformation. There's more money in suggesting that consumable nutritional supplements work than durable fitness equipment, more in suggesting light, easy-to-ship equipment than heavy iron weights, etc.
If your goal is to put on muscle mass, you want to stress (or challenge) as much of your muscle mass as possible to elicit growth.
Does doing this slowly make a tremendous difference? Not really. Can you speed up the process by doing more sets or lifting often? A bit, not zero, but not much. Can you speed up the process dramatically and go well beyond your natural limits with small doses of synthetic testosterone or its analogs? Definitely. There are trade-offs, even if the "right" answer is indeed right for most people.
Are there are no cardiovascular benefits to aerobic exercise beyond ~45 minutes of brisk walking 4x a week? Studies may show no statistically significant difference in mortality or morbidity beyond those cut-offs, but athletic performance — VO2max, for instance — definitely improves beyond 45 minutes of brisk walking per week. Again, if you simply want to stay in shape with the least time and effort formally exercising, yes, some brisk walking gets you surprisingly far, but that's not the whole story.
Isegoria,
That matches, in your typically clear fashion, what I said in my typically over-certain fashion.
Your final section seems to me to say precisely what I did: You can get better at exercise by doing more exercise...but it's not clear that it helps for health.
While I use HIT concepts myself, I acknowledge there are a few problems with it. I'm not sure why one of the answers to "optimal" muscle gene expression can't involve a greater volume of work than prescribed in Body By Science. While I think BBS presents a very efficient method for a busy person to get a resistance workout, I'm not sure that it's the best or only way. HIT enthusiasts tend to be insular and somewhat cultish as well. It doesn't make them wrong, but they are a closed system. No feedback from exercise science. And you know how that goes...
I find the idea that 20 minutes per week is all you need awfully suspicious. Isn't that exactly what we would all like to be true?
As such I demand a bit more supporting evidence than I do for someone who tells me that it will take a lot of work to achieve my potential.
Unfortunately, neither group can actually point to anything like a randomized trial involving large numbers of people that have actually done anything like "approach their genetic potential".
The only thing that comes close is Hettinger's work in the 1950s (http://www.transformetrics.com/classics/physiology-of-strength), but even there the actual results aren't that impressive.
Status is a pretty important thing, especially in your early 20s. I personally found that I got the best response from women when I was capable of lifting about 2 sigma more than the average Joe (this isn't really hard to do if you're a man who is tall with a fairly large frame, in my case a for-credit weight training class from the university was sufficient to get there and about an hour or so twice a week in the gym to maintain it. More than 2 sigma seems to have diminishing or negative returns in terms of how women view you, but they definitely appreciate when you have the raw power to lift to a low ceiling any woman you're likely to be attracted to. That's a primal thing I believe. Since then I've not really had time to maintain this level, but thankfully, the wife is pretty light.
slowfit,
Thanks for dropping in.
I'm not sure why one of the answers CAN'T involve greater work...but I haven't seen any decent evidence that says it DOES involve greater work. I agree on the cultishness...but I've been reading Doug McGuff for 10 years off and on now...and he doesn't seem to fit the profile.
Dr. Pat...
All we get is Bayesian updating...
We've got examples from the genetically gifted (Casey Viator, Mike Mentzer) who have demonstrated that the gifted can put on mass at insane rates using HIT training. And we haven't seen anyone who can do notably better using any methods.
Further, we've seen that both HIT training and normal methods seem to (without many controls) give the same basic results over time for normal folks as well...
I'd say that this leads us to the moderately strong belief that genetic potential is the big deal, and roughly, any decent training does the same amount of benefit. This would fit strongly with evolutionary priors.
On the other hand...reports about HIT training suggest that a lot of folks would prefer 6-12 hours of other training to 20 minutes of HIT training, for the psychological difficulty.
Jehu,
Status rocks. I wasn't dissing it. I was suggesting that an awful lot of weight training appears to be inter-male status competition outside of a pure strength issue like the one you reference.
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