> With the body it is almost always use it or lose it.
It is wild how intense this effect is. Last year, I broke my ankle. I couldn't use that leg at all. Within two months, almost all of the muscle in that calf was gone. Just eight weeks and while one leg still looked normal and the other was a stick. Even the flesh that was still there was soft and spongy.
When I got an X-ray later, the surgeon said I had the bones of an 80-year-old in that leg. All the bone density, just gone.
It's crazy how rapidly a human body will cannibalize itself if you don't use something. From what I've heard, this is an evolutionary adaptation unique to humans. Most other animals just have the muscles they have regardless of use. But, perhaps because we went through a narrow population window during the Ice Age, we've evolved this ability to harvest our own resources to survive.
Probably great for not starving to death, but a real bummer if you're trying to be fit.
Not to necessarily contradict your experience, but to balance it with a bit of optimism... Weight lifters who stop training often find they do lose muscle faster than they'd like.
BUT, once it's packed on, muscle seems to require a lower minimum volume of training to maintain.
AND, when they start training again, it comes back much faster than it did the first time around.
I'm an avid lifter and last year had to get 2 surgeries on both elbows. This kept me from doing any upper body training for about 8 months, and I just did basic things for my legs that I could do. I.e. no squats, no leg press since I couldn't even carry the weight plates myself. Basically just leg extensions, leg curls and biking on a stationary bike.
I kept most of the leg strength and muscle mass with even just this but my whole upper body basically went back to not looking like I lift at all.
The upside though and what proves your point around muscle memory is as I'm writing this it has been 12 weeks since my second surgery finished. I started going back to the gym after about 6 weeks with the lightest dumbells on the rack, literally starting from 5lb on every exercise.
In just this 6 weeks I basically look like I never stopped lifting and have approximately 85-90% strength back on all of my upper body lifts (for example 6 weeks ago I couldn't even bench press the bar and struggled to do 10 reps with a 5lb db, yesterday I'm back to hitting 225 for 6-8 reps) and I'm sure if it wasn't just due to surgeries and was just a long break I'd probably be back at 100%, that's how powerful muscle memory is.
I've had the same experience with my legs and cycling. I usually cycle pretty regularly from spring to mid autumn. But I rarely do during winter. It's just not enjoyable for me when it's -10°C.
Every year during the winter, my legs basically turn into sticks. This year especially since I broke a bone a few months ago. For the first few weeks of spring my stamina and leg strength is at most a third of what it was the previous year. But once I've regularly cycled again for a handful of weeks, the strength returns incredibly quickly.
I was diagnosed with bilateral cubital tunnel syndrome. It may have been slightly related to lifting in that while lifting didn't cause it, it may have made it more apparent. My surgeon told me that based on what she saw it may just have been to me being unfortunate in how my elbows were constructed.
At first I had to stop lifting altogether and rest hoping it would go away because it was getting really bad to the point I could not work (type) for more than 5 minutes at a time without my hands/forearms going numb and holding anything in my hands. It got so bad that even just lifting up a cup to drink from or using utensils for more than a minute or so caused a lot of pain.
After 3 months of physical therapy and limiting usage of my arms altogether it hadn't gotten any better so I was told the only remedy was surgery. It started with one of my hands/forearms suddenly starting to go numb one day while working, and about a week later started in the other hand. I was told its fairly rare to occur in both sides except in cases of it being a genetic issue so I think I was just unlucky.
So I had surgery on one side and then waited until that side mostly recovered in terms of pain and had the other side done.
Technically my hands do still sometimes get a bit of numbness/tingling but I was told by my surgeon and from research that its fairly common for people who get surgery for this to still have occasional mild numbness for even years, or basically forever after surgery since nerves heal super slow. But it is so much more bearable than it was to prior.
My understanding is that *strength* comes back quicker. This enables mass to come back quicker, but the causation is reversed. A lot of strength is neuromuscular control over muscle, not muscle mass itself. So it doesn't take as long for the relevant brain neurons to remember how to more efficiently recruit the muscle mass that's there.
This is a similar effect to how one sees all the time a leaner, wiry person be stronger than a more muscular, pumped person.
Strength isn't just the muscles themselves though; it's also tendons, ligaments, bone density. These take time to gain and lose, and generally (as I understand it) respond slower than the muscles themselves.
Yes, all of those have slower responses. It's part of why people who rely on things like anabolic steroids tend to have a lot of connective tissue injuries: they're getting stronger at an artificial rate and exceeds the ability for the connective tissue to keep up.
Especially with something like Trenblone. The muscles blow up, yes, but the psychological feeling of energy and power is (literally) insane and leads to cocaine-addict-like overconfidence. It's common on the forums for novice tren users to damage their tendons because they feel like they can throw up 50 more pounds than their weakest parts can really handle.
Oh, that sounds right. I have quite lean arms and I had a few experiences when people (including me) were surprised that I was stronger than someone more muscular.
The downside is that it's much easier for me to overstrain my muscles. My muscles can really hurt without much effort if I lift weights and I'm not focused on preventing that.
I used to go to the gym regularly. I definitely remember how hard it was to do pull ups and dips when completely untrained. I had to start with negatives. It seemed impossible at first. Now I haven't been to the gym for almost a year but still occasionally do some bodyweight exercises. I can still knock out 10 pull ups, 40 press ups, dips etc. all from a dead stop. It's amazing really. I have less muscle than a lot of people now, but I seem so much stronger still.
I'm 43. I started this last year. My life has changed so positively too, in similar ways. People treat me better (I was previously 5'9" and 200lb, now I'm 180 - it doesn't take a lot!), my back also feels better, I sleep better, I'm more able to focus, and like you say, mood too.
Just as a counterpoint (which you generally don't hear when people talk about any kind of exercise):
I'm 43 too. I started getting back into it about a year ago and ended up feeling a lot worse physically (and correspondingly psychologically) because of it. I have pain in my arm/shoulder now that isn't getting any better and which "physiotherapy" did almost nothing to improve, and hip pain/discomfort that's gotten worse in the process, plus there's the obvious wasted time, effort, and money.
I'm glad you're having positive effects from it, but it's far from a universal truth that weight training leads to positive outcomes. Not that I think that's what you're claiming, but that seems to be the narrative online.
I do think it's basically universal that weight training when done correctly leads to positive outcomes. What I'm seeing you talk about is trying to teach yourself. I don't think that's safe or effective.
I find machines hyperfocus the training on specific muscles, but take away most need for stabilization. They can also cause RSI-like effects by constraining you to one and only one movement path.
With barbells (or dumbells, or kettlebells, etc.) you have to not only lift the weight but also balance/stabilize it, that recruits and strenthens a lot more small muscles along with the major muscle area you're training.
Machines and dumbbells initially when I injured my arm (it was a repetitive use thing and not a trauma), and then after a long break and trying to let it heal, I switched to barbell for most things, along with a pressing machine (because I don't have somebody to spot me for bench press) and a pulldown machine.
I don't know. That's the problem: all the stuff I watch and read is so vague and even contradictory ("push yourself, but don't push yourself too much!"), and so one-size-fits-all that I have no idea where to even begin at this point. It's like learning some skill that takes years, except if you get it wrong you ruin your body and are left in pain.
IME, when I take long breaks from lifting, keeping my protein intake high means I lose muscle much more slowly. One gram of protein per pound of body weight daily has been a major game changer in losing weight and gaining muscle. Gray beard BTW.
You could consider increasing protein consumption a bit. Other research indicates something like 1.1 g/kg is better. Of course quality matters too: people who are getting most of their protein from lower quality plant sources may need more in order to get enough of certain essential amino acids.
Agreed, I'm consistently inconsistent. I'll lift for a while, then mess around and not lift for a while.
Each and every time I've gone back to consistent barbell lifting it would only take me a few months to get back to higher numbers I've run into in the past. This is part of the reason why I love weightlifting so much.
I used to be an avid runner, and not running after a long while has made it much more difficult. Lifting is always easy to get back into (at least for me).
I've been weightlifting quite a bit, nothing extreme but all the usual full body stuff plus targeted ones. I've broken my legs several times in past few years, always something unique.
Last one was nasty - bad paragliding fall right on tarmac with my heels taking brunt of the hit (better them than spine). Both legs broken, 1 month wheelchair (before wheelchair came I was literally crawling between spots at home, interesting experience for sure), 2 months crutches since one leg took most of the hit and calcaneus was to pieces (yet somehow magically they stayed together so no surgery & metals required).
Needless to say, after those 3 months, leg was concrete level of stiff with 0 stability working and yes all muscles gone, quads most visibly. especially jarring when next to it was a leg which still was 1 month fully out of order, and just used in 2 months, they look like from different people next to each other. That leg was the stronger and slightly but visibly bigger one before.
What I want to say - losing muscles is a trivial issue, an afterthought compared to losing all flexibility and strength in tendons and ligaments, especially if you used to do tons of sports. Our joints are always the weak spot, going away much sooner than some muscles and bones, taking much longer to build safely (you really don't want to sprain or tear one). Training that takes much longer, and rebuilding muscles can only follow what connective tissues allow. I've spent countless hours in hands of physiotherapists since they come each time with novel ways and equipment use to challenge these tissues, also part of it was in the pool, really cool idea. yet still after 3 months of therapy there are still big differences in everything, at least I can walk cca ok and did a small easy skitour last weekend.
Comparatively, I can easily re-build all muscles I need with just some basic home free weight equipment, you just need few good exercises done in good form, with mild variations.
Muscle mass is lost quickly during detraining, but the additional myonuclei gained when someone puts on muscle are retained for much longer, potentially years. Myonuclei govern protein synthesis, so when training resumes, muscle returns more quickly.
Yes, my hope is that I'll be able to regain the muscle faster than it took to build the first time.
> So, there are no excuses to not get a pump :)
Well... in my case I'm recovering from a third surgery on the ankle and my focus is on regaining range of motion. Strength exercises increase swelling which negatively impacts range of motion, so I have to wait until I've got the flexibility I need and I'm out of the window of scar formation before I can really focus on getting the meat back.
It really is wild. I don't know how your recovery is going, but for anyone worried about this kind of thibg, I will say, that the body does seem to have some kind of memory for prior use snd development generally. For those of us who have worked out moderately to intensely only to suffer an injury or life getting in the way of maintaining consistent practice at the same level, you will find that when you return to working out, you tend to return to fairly close to your prior peak in far less time than it took to get there. Similar to how muscle memory can lead to very quick progression back to your prior level of skill in something that you haven't done in years.
You won't be back to your prior peak, but you'll close 70-90% of the gap shockingly quick.
EDIT: One thing to look out for in situations like GP though, in which development becomes lopsided, is your body will develop lopsided compensation for the disaprity. A lot of physiotherapy often involves learning to force your body to not engage in these compensatory measures so that the diminished or injured part of your body can rebuild its strength and stability correctly.
Due to a gnarly accident, my right arm was in a cast for six months. They had to change the cast several times due to shrinking soft tissue, and by the time the cast came off, from wrist to elbow was all the same width. It was awful. But, like you said, it came back to the 80% level very quickly. At first I was genuinely worried that I'd never recover, but at three months I was already two-thirds of the way to normal, and was at 95% by a year.
I've read somewhere that the peviously trained cells, while after injury and long rest period smaller and fewer are still built with a large number of mitochondria (that was needed for the previous performance levels). This seems to be one of the muscle memory mechanisms.
For muscles, at least, which are not single cells but actually syncytia with multiple nucleuses, weight-bearing exercise produces an increase in the number of nucleuses and thus a relatively permanent increase in the ability of the syncytia to synthesize protein.
So retraining tends to be about double or even triple the speed of the original adaptation. This is one additional reason you should be extremely skeptical about "before and after" photos
Slowly. Lots of complications. I'm eight months away from the accident and a month past the third and hopefully last surgery. Right now I'm focused on getting range of motion back before new scar tissue forms, then I'll switch to building strength back.
I'll probably always have some stiffness in that joint but with luck I'll be back to all of my usual activities later this year.
“Each astronaut aboard the space station engages the muscles, bones, and other connective tissues that comprise their musculoskeletal systems using Earth-like exercise regimens. Crews exercise for an average of two hours a day.”
This sort-of indicates that once someone goes, say, to the Moon, and stays there for five years or so, they might not be able to come back on Earth at all, or need extremely long adaptation. The difference between 0.16G and 1G would be massive.
Any deployment of people to the Moon will have to take this into account.
And kids born and grown in lunar gravity may not be able to come to Earth under any circumstances.
It should be noted that it's not even sure that people could survive with such low gravity for a truly long time, or at least thrive. It could be that various parts of the body get weakened to a point that is even dangerous in the low gravity conditions (for example, you might find that you get a bone fissure in your leg every time you bump into the bed corner).
Also, it's not at all clear that people could procreate and (especially) have a normal pregnancy in very low g conditions. We have nowhere near the kind of understanding of the gestational process that could allow us to know for sure before trying it out.
I guess the corollary here is that if it turns out some people could survive and procreate living in low-g, and some of their children could do the same, then the problem will sort itself out in couple generations :).
Kind of. The problem thete is that most of the cost of your space program becomes:
- palliative care for astronauts you spent millions of dollars training and billions of dollars sending to space.
- childcare for their kids before they're useful.
People going back to 52C (125F) after a few years cant deal with it either. I don't know if the same goes for -30C (-86F) but I imagine it wouldn't feel usual.
I would be sceptical about such a unique evolutionary adaptation occurring in such a short time period. _The_ ice age (the last one) was just yesterday in evolutionary terms.
Punctuated equilibrium [1] is one of the predominant theories of evolution so it’s not at all far fetched. In that theory population bottlenecks are one of the main mechanisms of cladogenesis.
Adaptation need not only mean genetic (slow), it could just as well be epigenetic. The latter is not well-understood enough to be taught in school textbooks yet, but has been of great interest in recent decades.
Both the phenotype and the genotype of a species/population can, and do change overnight. Think about nazis killing people with big noses. The average nose size for humans shrank, and the responsible genes disappeared.
Evolution (as the change of the characteristics of a species) working in million years is stupid. It doesn't even need one generation.
Sorry to hear about your leg! When they said “80 year old bones” is that just due to the reduced usage from the broken ankle? Or something more?
I feel like my bone density must’ve decreased over the years from arthritis (diagnosed at ~ 25) - less usage of the legs, less bone density. But getting back into it now, and have found a happy middle ground where I can still be pretty active and not in the pain. Cycling is the way to go, and many shorter walks more often
> When they said “80 year old bones” is that just due to the reduced usage from the broken ankle?
Yes, just lowered bone density from not using it. Bone density increases in response to stress placed on the bone, especially impact stress. No stress on the bone and it basically hollows out.
> Cycling is the way to go
Yeah, I started biking to work a few years ago for my health.
That's how I broke my ankle. :-/ Slipped in a puddle and landed really wrong. Trimalleolar fracture with dislocation and severe fracture blisters.
Does anyone have more information regarding whether this effect is only observed in humans? I've always assumed that this is just how most animal bodies work, for the obvious energy and resource conservation reasons.
> Nobody says we have to be good at everything we do
This is advice I have to push on my kids constantly, because they are obsessed with finding that one thing they are better than everyone else in the world.
"Do some" is not advice I got as a kid, but my mom eventually figured it out and told me that when was in my mid 20s or something.
Her words (from Malayalam) are best translated as "For whom a little is not enough, nothing is ever enough".
I think that's true for everything from money to self-worth. Enough is too hard to have.
Can you help me understand your comment? Being the best at one thing is very different from being good at everything, so it's unclear how that advice applies to your children.
> Being the best at one thing is very different from being good at everything, so it's unclear how that advice applies to your children.
My kid pushes too hard when he realizes he's plateau'd at some skill level and then gets disappointed at the steepness of the learning curve.
It'll go from chess to skiing, then it is swimming and now he's running a trail 10k in March. While he's able to say Good morning in everything from Esperanto to Klingon, by way of Welsh and Japanese, he's not gotten fluent at any language so far.
Not that any of that is bad in itself, but he goes into a maximum-effort "not fun" mode when he gets moderately good at anything.
The "not fun" mode kills the joy and then the activity becomes almost painful.
Mostly I try to help him stay in the happy zones with "A little is enough" instead of setting himself up for failure constantly like this, by failing his own expectations.
The younger one is obviously out to out-compete the older, so hopefully I only have to do this teaching once for both of them.
I'm not a parent and I know very little about it outside of being an old guy, however I wanted to say for whatever it's worth, this is exactly what I imagine great parenting looks like, so kudos.
Sounds like you got a bright child! I think one shouldn't stop a child from exploring many things like that. Not saying you are. I think it just means, that they have not yet found the thing that keeps them coming back for longer time, while they are learning many skills, that can be useful in the future.
Also being a generalist is OK.
Perhaps the best approach is to have conversation with the child, that furthers reflection/introspection. Basically giving the child the tools to notice such patterns themselves and make decisions based on their iwn insight.
That sounds like great parenting, like the kind that figured out what life is about a few times and just passes the wisdom onwards. Reading this made me realize how far I am from being a good parent - I relate more to your child than to you.
Keep up the good work! Parenting is hands down the best thing in the world, ironically, excelling at it goes a really long way.
Not OP but I read it as: It's ok to just do some. People stress about their abandoned side projects, their career progression, being the best, this world has become hyper competitive, hyper "do" - this wasn't and isn't the default for a lot of people and a lot of history, there is a lot of joy to be found in just "do some" - but it's a dying art.
To add to this, I think the stress of wanting to be great, or maybe profitable in a certain realm, can stop people from anything like practice on a regular, consistent basis.
They’ll maybe read, watch tutorials, engage in social media, chat about doing a thing, but then never actually do it regularly enough (even poorly or briefly) to see what their improvement trajectory looks like.
They’ll go a week or month between engaging in doing a thing (even if not specifically denoted “practice,”) and only do when bursts of excitement or inspiration hit. And because of the gaps between starting basically from scratch each time, they stay a beginner for years and years with no insight on their actual capabilities. Certainly guilty myself.
Yes, to me this is the movie jiro dreams of sushi. Consistently just do some amount every day with no real expectation and you may very well become the best in the world at it, but that wasn't really the goal, it was the byproduct.
I think “do some” is about putting reasonable effort into things.
I read it as you don’t need to play football, basketball, and be writing a book, but you probably should do something. At the other end you don’t need to be the best in the world at anything, but you should try.
Knowing to cook is a useful life skill. That doesn’t mean learning a dozen types of ethic foods or preparing instagram worthy meals, but it does mean you should learn a little. Thus “do some” not “do everything” or worse “do nothing.”
I wrote my college admissions essay, back in the day, on the virtues of being mediocre at a particular sport, and I'm like, 85% sure that's how I got in.
A great advice. I also put emphasis on a fact that one doesn’t have to be good at something to enjoy it OR need to make money when they’re good at it. Both might be trap.
The first step to becoming anything - an artist, a programmer, a fit dude - is falling in love with the process, or at least developing the discipline to practice regularly. I heard from gym people that just being at the gym free regularly without even doing anything there is a better first step than going all out once then never going again.
In a similar vein there is a wonderful video essay called The Toolbox Fallacy. It's about how people fancy themselves artists and keep delaying the things that would make them an artist. They wait for the right degree, the right tools, the right breakthrough. In the end, painting is what makes a painter, not collecting paintbrushes.
I could only apply this advice when I accepted that the output of my work would suck for a while. I went to sketching sessions and sketched wildly deformed bodies. But damn it I was drawing. Same with blogging, and with talking to strangers.
In the words of a cartoon dog, "sucking at something is the first step towards being sorta good at something". While most wisdom is gained as you age, this one is progressively lost. We lose the ability to play, and the willingness to fail.
We also enjoy doing things that we are good at. So you need a lot of discipline and patience if you want to become good at something you're bad at. There's usually beginner "gains" meaning that something might seem impossible at the beginning, only to become easy within a few weeks, so you best wait until you have got the "beginner gains" before you decide to quit.
This reminds me of the concept of "no zero days": To build up a habit or a skill, do at least the minimum required to acquire that habit or skill. If it's push-ups, do just one push-up, just to keep the streak of no zero days. If it's writing code, write one line of code. The magic is that, the greatest friction comes from the resistance to doing anything at all instead of doing it all the way.
Exercise does however explicitly require some zero days, a lesson I've learned the hard way. You need time to recover, and that involves doing nothing.
To my experience this is only true if you totally max yourself out when exercising. An alternative is to do light (ish) exercise every day. Makes getting totally ripped pretty much impossible, but it makes staying fit easy, because it's easy to build a habit around and it's easy to make fun.
A streak strikes me as a very different thing than a habit. Habits aren't hard to pick up after a break, streaks are. I have a hard time to figure out what it means for someone to "purposefully break a habit", except in the context of bad habits of course (eg a smoker trying to not smoke for a day). This is my whole point I guess, if you manage to make exercise a habit and not a streak (by making it fun, and feeling good, and having space for it in the daily calendar), then you can stop worrying about 0 days altogether and just do it every day except when you don't.
> by making it fun, and feeling good, and having space for it in the daily calendar
That's definitely the healthiest approach to it. I agree with you it won't matter if you stop for a while or not, as it was done for pleasure in the first place.
The OP comment was pretty specific and explicit that it is not going hard every day, it is about doing some minimal something every day to maintain and reenforce the habit. You asserted that you “explicitly require some zero days” but that is not true. You can have no zero gym days by using your heavy lifting rest days to do mobility exercises and stretching.
If you're damaging the muscle while stretching… Okay, I'm gonna assume you're not letting any of you're stretches produce pain. You should feel tension, only, which should not be harmful.
In my experience and training, stretching every day is practical and effective. Skipping a day can cause noticeable tightening. Tension for the purpose of becoming more limber should be held for a minimum of 10 sec, but 30 sec. is a much better basic level. There should not be tremor or pain; either of those will be counter-productive and potentially result in injury.
What are you basing that on? Elite mobility coaches like Kelly Starter recommend daily - even hourly -mobility and stretching workouts, with the goal of being constantly mobile.
With many types of skills putting in some time every day can be very beneficial.
Keep in mind though that with things like strength your body also needs recovery time (in fact your gains happen during recovery, not during the workout).
I spent most of college in the gym. I quickly hit my size limit. Strength seemed to improve slowly. Then I did a popular steroid cycle. Of course I got huge. 5 years later I did trenbolone so I got big AND strong.
But the relevant bit is 5 years after that, I tried 1/4 the dosage, plus only 15 minutes in the gym every day (1 set of 3-rep max of each of the major lifts). I got just as big, and was actually stronger than I had ever been thru the full dose cycles.
Outside of the gym, I regularly halve the dose of any prescriptions or suggested dose of recreational drugs. A friend even told me he saw a Buddhist monk take a tiny shot of liquor and sit and meditate on that single shot for hours.
And finally, if I may take a sad turn, my father got trigeminal neuralgia but he's largely avoided all drugs all his life, so the standard dose hits him way too hard.
No, muscle memory refers to a different phenomenon where nerves outside of our brain can be trained and get better at skills.
I think what you're seeing here is that when you initially build muscle, you are building new muscle cells. When you lose those gains, you still mostly have the same number of cells, but they muscle fibers in them reduce. When you go to regain it, it's easier to regain because you still have most of the celluar framework there.
Or, at least, that's how it was explained to me. I probably have some details wrong.
> Doping with anabolic steroids also seem to act partly by recruiting new nuclei.[7][8] It was recently shown in mice[9] that a brief exposure to anabolic steroids recruited new muscle nuclei. When the steroids were withdrawn, the muscle rapidly shrank to normal size, but the extra nuclei remained. After a waiting period of 3 months (about 15% of the mouse lifespan), overload exercise led to a muscle growth of 36% within 6 days in the steroid-exposed group, while control muscles that had never been exposed to steroids grew only insignificantly.
aqueueaqueue probably meant this part ^. If you do steroid once, then you stop doing steroid, its effects remain, according to wiki (in mice).
It is apparently easier for someone who has done strength training or body building to get back into it then the first time around. I don't know the science behind it but I've heard it from many sources.
I don't know if muscle memory is a scientific term but I understand it as adaptations of muscle and nerves that are skill specific as a result of training. I think it's hard to put a boundary around the brain here. The brain and the nervous system is also a component of strength.
There was/is a trend of "science gyms" that do 20 minute per week personal training.
The meticulous PT format and exercise selection allows them to achieve more muscle gain in 20 minutes per week than median trainees achieve in 2-3 hours. The short sessions make personal training economically viable.
That said... optimizing that heavily tends to eliminate all unmeasured benefits. The habit forming. Mentality/personality changes that would occur from more typical exercise approaches. Cardio. Etc.
But... it does demonstrate the principle.
Minimum effective doses are powerful. But, they require precision.
Also... you need to consider the candidate. If your body is adapted to almost no exercise... it is also highly sensitive to seemingly small doses of it.
What is or is not "exercise" is mostly determined by proximity to your day to day.
If you never exercise, never speak to other people, or never eat any fresh food... a little goes a very long way.
> The meticulous PT format and exercise selection allows them to achieve more muscle gain in 20 minutes per week than median trainees achieve in 2-3 hours.
This is a strong statement that is presented without evidence, and which conflicts with scientific consensus.
Studies show again and again that the most important factors are consistency and training volume.
If the program is more effective, which is questionable in itself, then the reasons are likely 1. reduction of burnout and/or 2. much more intense training. Not PT format or exercise selection.
> Minimum effective doses are powerful. But, they require precision.
And it's also important to think about the fact that an MED doesn't get you the biggest effect size. It's the minimum to get a desired effect, but that doesn't mean you get the most of that effect.
You may get more fit in 20 minutes per week than if you did zero, but you certainly can't match someone who works out 5 times a week.
An MED is great for something necessary you want to get out of the way. But this kind of thinking takes the joy out of doing things you thoroughly enjoy and perfecting minute details nobody else will ever care about, just because you care so much about the craft.
Judging by length of audiobooks, four hours is the length of the novella long essay A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf, Terry Pratchett’s Discworld adaptations all come in around 9-10 hours and those are short books that require my full attention due to the wordplay and setup for jokes sometimes being longish. One would have to double the speed and sacrifice comprehension to meet this goal. I had to listen to first hour of some Greg Egan book and the glossary about ten times before I grokked it.
I read light prose several times faster than an audio book; 60-100 pages in an hour for a typical paperback. That works out to 240-400 pages for the author's 240 minutes.
I read Going Postal by Pratchett in under 4 hours.
[edit]
Also, consumers of audiobooks may turn the speed up. My wife listens at 1.25-1.5x speed, depending on the narrator's pace.
How do you do that? Are you hearing the words out loud in your head? Is every sentence being parsed? Or is it like touch typing where you're hitting just close enough to get meaning but not enough to go deep?
Also, what is light prose? Is it just something you don't care too much about extracting meaning from?
> How do you do that? Are you hearing the words out loud in your head? Is every sentence being parsed?
Yes, I still have an internal voice when I read (and when I touch type for that matter).
> Also, what is light prose? Is it just something you don't care too much about extracting meaning from?
- The words are familiar (a counterexample would be any work written in Elizabethan English, since I'll trip over archaic word meanings)
- The organization is such as to make for easy understanding what is happening. Some authors do the opposite as a literary device; highly non-linear works or an extremely unreliably narrator are counterexamples. This does not exclude allegory. Arthur Miller's The Cruicible is a straightforward dramatization of a story in colonial Salem, but is rather transparently an allegory for McCarthyism.
I think that extracting meaning is largely orthogonal to whether prose is light or not. Certainly many important works are intentionally dense, but there's also overly pretentious drivel dressed up in hard-to-understand clothing.
One of the interesting things I've found in picking up a few languages is that listening to a foreign language is quite different from reading one.
When listening, especially to a recording (that is, you can't simply ask someone to repeat themselves, though you can usually replay a passage), when I hear a word I don't immediately recognise or am unfamiliar with ... my mind just sort of skips over it. Often I have some idea of meaning (previous encounters, or more often, context), even if that's vague. When reading, however, strange words cause me to stumble and I'll slow considerably. Consequence is that I can listen faster than I can read.
The dual option of listening and reading simultaneously is particularly effective, and I'm fond of options (often podcasts) which offer both audio and text transcripts to read along. This also seems to be more useful for expanding my language skills.
Oh man. I’d go higher. Especially compared to vocalizing at “storytelling pace.”
I remember a while back being surprised to learn that there are readers who process language phonographically as opposed to orthographically, even when silent-reading. That is, they might read in their minds at the same pace that they speak, or “subvocalize”—reading aloud in everything except for producing the sounds. It was a dinner-party-grade conversation, not an academic-grade one, but once somebody talked to me about that distinction I’d notice people mouthing along to what they were reading—and it made sense why that was slower.
I’m not up on the details, but I remember an estimate in the 150-200wpm range for reading out loud. A little north of that for silent reading with subvocalization, and comfortably in the 400-600wpm range for skilled silent readers in an orthographic mode. And then the whole “speed reading” crowd clocking in faster, but at significant cost to comprehension. The general idea being that skilled orthographic readers can “chunk” entire words and phrases into larger visual units that they can parse all at once.
Looking for references now this is the best I can find:
I can definitely read 4 times faster in my head than out loud. I've read books to my kid out loud that take like 30 minutes per chapter, and i doubt it would take more than an hour to read the whole book. I read on the faster side though, and don't have an internal monologue.
For me it's 1:1. I read aloud in my head at the same pace that I speak. It seems slow, but little by little I get through what I need. Also, I don't know how to do it another way. So it goes.
It depends upon the material for me. Sometimes with technical or historical books that are essentially reciting data points then conclusions I can read much faster than 2x because if one is paying attention one kind of knows where the writer(s) are going - though I might repeat or pause to write notes or do online research sometimes to memorize and understand new terminology, but for fiction I have to be in a very specific mindset to imagine all the things going on appropriately with movement and emotion and pondering character motivation and the setting, sometimes I just pause and think about what is being described in my minds eye before moving forward in the text.
My wife asked me this question, since I'm a considerably faster reader than her. We discovered that (if I try reading aloud as fast as possible) I can read aloud faster than she can read without speaking, though my tongue does occasionally trip over words at that speed. I read in my head faster yet.
I've tested myself several times and found I can usually read 1.5 to 3 pages per minute for a typical-size paperback, depending mostly on how "in the zone" I am (with a minor effect from complexity, but most published novels don't different much in reading level). Even down at 1 page per minute, there are plenty of 200-page books so 1 is a reasonable lower bound. Except, the article spreading it out to only 8 minutes per day means you'll never be reading long enough to get in the zone, so ...
One notable observation: you need to aggressively prune away the possibility of reading anything with bad (or even inconsistent) grammar; exposure to it poisons your brain's ability to read and write correctly.
Stands out to me too. I’m usually at 1-2 pages per minute when I’m focused and reading something easier but long non-fiction is more like 240 minutes for 10% of the book
Yeah a minute a page is a decent equivalence depending on the book and reading speed. 240 pages is still a rather short book. A book a month ain't bad though!
I recall Rippetoe & Kilgore speculating in Practical Programming for Strength Training that 70-80% of all muscular gains occur in the first set.
I had OpenAI's deep research look into this and its sources concluded that "One-set routines can achieve roughly 60–70% of the muscle growth that higher-volume (3–5 set) routines produce".
You can do one set of various exercises and be out of the gym in minutes.
Of course, this sounds ridiculous, but appears to be true.
I also understand the stretched muscle pose is where the biggest gains are coming from. So one could theoretically cheese, by doing only a quarter of the exercise. (Don't do this, you will damage yourself).
Theres not really much documented benefit of warming up for injury prevention as far as i know. I think it improves performance, but its definitely an area where much time can be saved.
There have been a few research articles showing that in the last few years too that says the same thing. The minutes thing won't be true, for heavy weights you need to warm up and ramp up, but yeah it can cut down your gym time significantly, and if you are fatigued from lifting, this can cut down your fatigue significantly too.
I'm not sure there's a ton of point warming up. It feels good, sure, and if you are doing maximal lifts it's probably a good idea to feel out how close your are to your limit, but otherwise I don't see how warmups help.
I didn't bother most of time when I was training. I might do a couple reps a plate down, or a set with just the bar, but never did more than that.
> There have been a few research articles showing that in the last few years too that says the same thing.
It's been known for decades. I remember 20+ years ago pointing out to people that according to the research, multiple sets are inferior to one set (i.e. load that one set high vs a smaller load so you can do 3 sets).
I've been doing it for years with no issue. Intuitively, the idea that muscles/joints require "priming" seems really odd and not very useful from an evolutionary perspective. Cats don't warm up when they jump 5 ft.
Form is the major thing. I have to get used to the exercise, remember good form, get used to the good form, before ramping up to heavier weights. I don't want to go heavy quick and have problems if I have more fatigue on a particular day or I am not concentrating. Honestly, I have never not ramped up, so I don't even know if I could do that, but I am not about to try either lol.
I don't think "priming" your muscles is necessary because it's an evolutionary advantage, but because that's the best muscles evolution has come up with so far.
It's like saying "why would I have to change the oil in my car, why would an engineer make an engine that needs that?".
And jumping 5ft for a cat probbaly is the priming, that's not peak performance for them.
Krieger, J. W. (2010). Single versus multiple sets of resistance exercise: A meta-regression. Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 24(4), 1150-1159.
This meta-analysis found that multiple sets lead to ~40% more muscle growth compared to a single set.
Schoenfeld, B. J., Ogborn, D., & Krieger, J. W. (2017). Dose-response relationship between weekly resistance training volume and muscle growth: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Sports Sciences, 35(11), 1073-1082.
Concluded that higher training volumes (≥10 weekly sets per muscle group) produce greater hypertrophy.
Ralston, G. W., Kilgore, L., Wyatt, F. B., & Baker, J. S. (2017). The effect of weekly set volume on strength gain: A meta-analysis. Sports Medicine, 47(12), 2585-2601.
Found that strength and hypertrophy improve as volume increases up to a certain point.
Schoenfeld, B. J. (2016). Science and development of muscle hypertrophy. Human Kinetics.
Discusses the mechanisms of hypertrophy and the role of training volume.
American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) Position Stand (2009). Progression models in resistance training for healthy adults. Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, 41(3), 687-708.
Provides guidelines for resistance training and muscle growth.
Haun, C. T., Vann, C. G., Osburn, S. C., et al. (2018). A 6-week resistance training study on the minimum effective training dose for muscle hypertrophy in trained men. European Journal of Applied Physiology, 118(3), 593-605.
Found that low-volume training still leads to substantial hypertrophy but not maximal growth.
Heaselgrave, S. R., Blacker, S. D., et al. (2019). Effects of resistance training frequency on hypertrophy and strength: A systematic review. Sports Medicine, 49(12), 1935-1947.
Concludes that training a muscle 2–3 times per week is more effective than once per week for hypertrophy.
I've done a lot of broad research on exercise in recent years. While there is certainly a dose dependent relationship with results, it's amazing how little you can do to get "some" results. A few stats from studies or articles I've seen in the past:
- Just twelve minutes of exercise is correlated with positive health improvements
- As little as two minutes of walking after eating has a positive improvement in blood sugar
Can relate with the whole "It may come as a surprise how little time we truly need at the gym to gain strength and muscle. I think it is all about sending our bodies the right signals" thing.
Just jumping in the pool to swim 20 minutes 2 or 3 times a week dropped my resting heart rate significantly week over week, as measured by my watch, although it's a low amount of exercise... I wake up to notifications for sub 40 BPM whereas I did not before.
One set a week per muscle group of weight training can already give you some gains. You'll max out your gains at a lot higher (10-20 maybe).
When you start working out a lot of your strength comes not from your muscles getting stronger but your body learning to use them properly. I.e. your nervous system.
Are you doing interval training in your swimming? I think how you train can have a big impact on your VO2MAX improvement vs. time invested. That said long distance running does require a lot of time investment. I'm not sure if you can get to run a marathon by running an hour a week but I expect that answer is no.
> Are you doing interval training in your swimming? I think how you train can have a big impact on your VO2MAX improvement vs. time invested. That said long distance running does require a lot of time investment. I'm not sure if you can get to run a marathon by running an hour a week but I expect that answer is no.
What had the biggest impact on RHR was when I was just swimming 1km per session at normal pace (it took me about 25 mins, I'm a beginner). RHR dropped week over week down to 42. When I got a coach he had me do mostly interval training and interestingly my RHR crept higher although I did improve in terms of speed. Past month I've been lazier and training again to swim continuously and I see my RHR decreasing again. Unsure about the science of it and whether it applies to others. I don't think RHR is necessarily a marker for fitness but I thought it was interesting that pretty significant change was happening although I was maybe swimming 30 mins a couple of times a week.
You're lucky. I've clocked in almost 3000km and over 20'000m of elevation gain cycling last year. I also swim and hike. My resting heart rate dropped by about 1BPM and it's nowhere near as low as yours.
I think resting heart rate is mostly genetic, from what I read it tells very little about fitness - if you're already fit you may already be at your "optimal" heart rate. If you stopped exercising it may go up.
If it’s the same as mine, it measures your heart rate overnight after you settle in. Then, when you wake up, it tells you your “resting heart rate” number.
It can be an indicator of short-term stress if it is higher than normal, for example. But the interesting part is the trend over time. As you get more fit, the average drops
“Minimum effective dose” is a concept I picked up from years of amateur bodybuilding. Seeing that same context in the beginning of the article was a treat! Minimum effective dose has been a pretty powerful concept for me over the years and has some overlap with “The 80/20 Rule”. It’s allowed my to make small investments in goals and snuff out insecurities that arise, such as the feeling of not trying hard enough.
I’m hauling my ass to the gym 7 days a week, just to build consistency and make it part of my life.
Does that mean I push hard 7 days? No! I do intense weights 3 times a week, accessories 2 times a week, and cardio and Pilates 2 times a week.
The other day I was borked from work, so I just did a very light 30 minute bike ride.
It was enough to feel good and feel on track.
Just a side note: there is a lot of time in a day, once you reduce social media usage and information gathering, you have loads of time, especially if you’re young and single and childless. Make the most of it :)
There’s something I’ve noticed lately. The only thing that differentiates bad from great is time, and IMO talent is often mistaken with preference.
E.g. it’s not like great engineers become great by work and talent. The best I know love reading, talking, experimenting and exploring. In the evenings, over weekends. It’s time, but time over the preference.
I liked to ask people during job interviews what they find fun in computing and (anecdotally of course) even deep introverts have that spark in their eyes when they’re fascinated.
Edit: I also remembered that Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg talks about that topic. Good read and strategies there worked for me.
Regarding the gym, specifically lifting -- progressive overload ( thus muscle growth) can definitely be accomplished in a minimal amount of time. BUT, it requires a high to maximum amount of effort to be effective, so not sure if that counts.
This could depend a bit on what your goals are with respect to minimal dose training.
If your goals are just longevity and health, you do not actually have to train very close to failure to reap most benefits of strength training, up to a point of course. Training even to mild discomfort is enough for strength gains and modest hypertrophy for beginners. So effort can be moderate up to a point.
Additionally a trained lifter who is just looking to maintain on minimal doses can do so with what research has shown is as little as a staggering 1/9th of the volume they normally use, and they would likely be accustomed to hard training.
If your goal is continuing progress it's sort of an optimization problem when it comes to minimum effective dose.
I think it still counts because it makes sense as with any task. You must make the tradeoff that while you are minimizing time at the task, you must increase the effort to match if you still want to see gains past a basic level.
I think the science says you need <= 3 reps in reserve to build muscle. But yes, it is easier for beginners.
Also yes on the 1/9th of the volume but from what I've read you still need to obey the <= 3 reps in reserve. e.g. you can get by with one set per muscle group per week.
Progressive overload forces you into close to failure territory regardless of volume/time.
The other thing to be said is there are variations between people and something that works for one might need to be tweaked for another.
Its more like <= 2-3 reps to achieve roughly equivalent muscle growth - but the science here is still shaky since studies contradict each other all the time due to so much individual variance. Some studies show consistently going 2 reps from failure vs going to failure all the time result in roughly equivalent muscle gains, but from what I've read and watched the running hypothesis seems to be this is due to to volume being roughly equated. i.e. Going 2 reps from failure all the time means your rep count can stay still pretty high across sets, whereas going to failure typically results in the first set having more reps but higher dropoff per set leading to roughly equivalent volume overall.
But nonetheless it doesn't mean you have to go that far to get any gains at all, up to a point. It depends on whether your goal is maximal growth vs getting some growth at all and just looking for health benefits.
Regarding the lower volume to maintain, like I said before - anybody who got to a significant amount of muscle mass would likely have already been accustomed to frequent strain/hard training, but yes I agree.
And yeah a lot of this is hard to generalize since studies show so much individual variance to training that it makes it hard to generalize. But regardless, just train hard and you'll see benefits whether you do minimal sets or many sets lol.
Another thing is many beginners have no idea what real failure is, so while they may be able to not hit failure and see growth, its still recommended to take some sets all the way to failure. Beginners tend to underestimate how much more they really have since they have lower pain tolerance/adaptation to straining their muscles than others. They often are actually 5+ reps from failure when they would have estimated they were only 1 or 2.
It absolutely applies to lifting and progressive overload. A measure of progressive overload can be applied to amount of time spend lifting, also knows as time-under-tension, it can also apply inversely with shortened rest periods. Whether or not these methods align with your fitness goals, is a separate issue.
Effort, or what the fitness industry calls Rating of Perceived Exertion (RPE), is another lever to pull with progressive overload, and is necessary in programming for all experience levels. Beginners start their programs using minimal weights, slowly increasing the weight each week as their skill improves and through that process their strength and muscles grow.
A more advanced lifter, will need a higher minimum effective dose due to what is needed to trigger adaptation, will manipulate RPE throughout their programming to manage fatigue accrued throughout the program.
A great personal trainer is someone that will help their clients find their own personal mimimum dose of training that aligns with their fitness goals.
A full body 40 minute routine using supersets will work great for most people. x3 a week (might be too much if you're just starting so ease into it) is going to also be great for most.
I think the latest science favours full body workouts over splits. I find it easier and more enjoyable as well.
Absolutely agree and my intent was more that the majority of the proven routines can have you out of the gym pretty quickly. Full body, upper / lower split, PPL, etc.
The only exercise that counts is the exercise that you do. If you start with a five-minute walk around the block, that's better than a three-mile run that you never actually do. And you can gradually increase the length of the walk when you feel comfortable with the current level.
> even if I can only read 5 minutes before bed, I do it anyway
I would worry about operant conditioning myself to associate reading with sleep.
One friend put on movies to help them go to sleep. Later she struggled to watch movies without falling asleep.
I overthink this concept, so I'm overly cautious about what activities I mix together because I fear the risk of training strange subconscious responses in myself.
I’ve been reading in bed before sleeping since I was a kid. For years, I’ve almost exclusively read in bed (+ public transport, but that’s rather rare, less than 1/month). Yet when I am tired, or just don’t have the time to read 30–60 minutes, I have as much trouble skipping reading as I have going to bed early to get an extra hour of reading in, which is to say none at all. All this to say: YMMV ;)
There's a technique called "Shadowing" that only takes 15 minutes a day which worked for known polyglot Alexander Arguelles to learn and maintain the many languages he knows.
https://youtu.be/MqR3K1alUio
So true! May I add that timing and context matters too. When I was living in Paris I used to read on the subway to and from work, which added up to 30 minutes a day. I went through lots of books that I would otherwise not have the mental strength to bring myself to read when I’m at home and I have my laptop as an alternative…
Another area where this is effective is in learning a language. Just 5-10 minutes of Anki practice a day is a lot better than nothing but hopes and dreams. And flashcard apps work in such a way that even if you get lazy for months, you'll be surprised at how quickly you are able to remember and catch up.
This goes back to the goals vs systems debate that Scott Adams talks about in one of his books. Over a long period of time, systems improve your life in compound.
I agree with this though it's only relevant beyond newbie periods. PTs won't talk about it since it's not motivating, which makes sense.
During a stressed part of life, I slid into staying with the same routine, doing 70% intensity (cutting a set or two off each workout, or rushing them), and stopped going up in strength and muscle size. You could say I have bad genetics but I've had some sport talent and been considered "fit" by a few people so I think I'm average/lucky on muscle genetics.
I basically maintained the muscle but I threw away that time. I kept going into the gym 4-5 days a week like I had when putting on gains, but I could have maintained the muscle (as I have since) on 2-3 days a week.
All the difference was in that 70% --> 85% intensity difference. Once I did that, without changing programme, gains came back. I think that this "hidden plateau" is secretly why so many people bail on the gym.
I spend enough years when being teenager at the gym to know a thing or two, i saw lots of people doing half ass job and still being skinny twat months later.
合抱之木，生于毫末；九层之台，起于累土；千里之行，始于足下。 [1]
This is not secret, almost everyone knows it thousand years ago,
but most of people won't do it. Minimum effective dose is another
way to say be consistent on thing that you feel important. The 3rd
chapter on Atomic Habit also give a very detailed explanation.
And it is so easy to find real word examples:
"Mental toughness and resilience fade if they aren't used
consistently. I say it all the time: you are either getting better,
or you're getting worse. You're not staying the same." [2]
"That’s often all that’s necessary to get the snowball rolling, the
action needed to inspire the motivation to keep going. You can
become your own source of inspiration. You can become your own
source of motivation. Action is always within reach. And with
simply doing something as your only metric for success—well, then
even failure pushes you forward." [3]
In cycling training:
- "I have always been a really consistent rider" [4]
- "The biggest difference in my training in in 2018 to today is
consistency" [5]
- "My Top 5 Tips To Increase Cycling Power: Number one is
consistency." [6]
- Let's finish up with the five key points to how you can improve
your FTP. Number one, be consistent. [7]
- I have three kind of important specs in training, so the first
one and arguably the very most important is consistency. [8]
But if most people agree with this idea, why not everybody do this
way? I think is lacking a clear goal, and a good way to measure it.
I used to be competitive as cyclist, but as I getting older, I
start lossing this part of motivition. Nowadays, I am not training
for FTP anymore, but training for "I don't want to make this f*k
run in this frozen winter". I want myself to become as hard as
Goggins.
Life is short, what would you like to be consistent with?
[1] 道德经【第六十四章】
[2] Goggins, D. (2022). Never finished: unshackle your mind and win
the war within. David Goggins.
[3] Manson, M. (2016). The subtle art of not giving a f*ck: a
counterintuitive approach to living a good life. New York:
HarperOne.
[4] 12 questions with Greg van Avermaet
https://www.cyclingnews.com/features/12-questions-with-greg-van-avermaet/
[5] 300+ Watt Ramp Test, My 66 Watt Increase - Trainerroad, Zwift,
Sufferfest https://youtu.be/HPQUgrd7zR0?t=292
[6] How I Increased My FTP By 140 Watts & My Top 5 Tips To Increase
Cycling Power https://youtu.be/FVetgOjQxak?t=313
[7] How to Raise Your FTP || Workouts and Strategies to Boost Your
FTP in 2021 https://youtu.be/ECpZ1KxUfyM?t=802
[8] How I´ve doubled my FTP in 3 years https://youtu.be/UJTHfK-hmYw?t=336
It is wild how intense this effect is. Last year, I broke my ankle. I couldn't use that leg at all. Within two months, almost all of the muscle in that calf was gone. Just eight weeks and while one leg still looked normal and the other was a stick. Even the flesh that was still there was soft and spongy.
When I got an X-ray later, the surgeon said I had the bones of an 80-year-old in that leg. All the bone density, just gone.
It's crazy how rapidly a human body will cannibalize itself if you don't use something. From what I've heard, this is an evolutionary adaptation unique to humans. Most other animals just have the muscles they have regardless of use. But, perhaps because we went through a narrow population window during the Ice Age, we've evolved this ability to harvest our own resources to survive.
Probably great for not starving to death, but a real bummer if you're trying to be fit.