Comment by asdff
2 days ago
The thing is, the fitness level OP is talkign about is not going to be compatible with the grown up playground sort of activities. You need to get jacked basically. You need to be lifting to failure 3x5ish hitting all muscle groups 2x a week with compound lifts. You should be struggling to go up stairs after working legs.
Working out is good, yes, but you need to actually work the body and make it suffer so that it may actually be damaged enough for high rates of muscle growth. So many people do not do enough because they don't like to push themselves, they take it easy and they end up wasting their time in the gym. Even more true as you get older and natural testosterone levels start declining and limiting your muscle growth.
This is why people end up taking spin classes when they can just do it at home on their own stationary bike. For some people, they need a jockey who will kick their ass along with the peer pressure of a room full of people dumping out sweat.
Huh? Knowing that the ceiling of diminishing returns is that high should make us even more optimistic about low-effort progress in the right direction. The 80/20 of weightlifting starts with no longer shifting your spine in a funny way for every slight inconvenience. That is a small distance from the feeble median status quo, and still very far away from jacked. To achieve meaningful reduction in injury risk and some forms of chronic pain, we do not need to focus as much on people going from already generally fit towards trying things that are naturally extremely difficult for them (or for their postmenopausal hormonal state). There is more net benefit per exertion at the very beginning of a resistance training voyage. Which could very well never reach the intensity of enjoying a proper "no please, no stairs!" moment that indicates maximum strength improvement per unit of time, and still have been best-in-class per unit of currency spent on nudging people into it.