I asked a body-builder friend if Tim Ferriss' workout could actually achieve the results Tim claims. He replied that a person can only gain weight that quickly with steroids. Research has shown that under optimal conditions, less than ten pounds of muscle can be added in a year.
Ferriss claims to have gained 34 pounds of muscle in 4 weeks:
Not a Feriss fan but it's not at all impossible to gain way more than ten pounds of muscle in a relatively short time if you aren't already very strong. His exact numbers sound excessive but I suspect he's gone up and down with that muscle mass several times in the past, which makes it a lot easier to rebuild it.
Why is it not all that impossible to gain way more than ten pounds of muscle in a relatively short time? From what are you basing this?
I haven't read Tim's books but this seems like a reason to not like his work. This isn't science. Now, if he said body weight from water etc. Which he could have for all I know.
What makes me most skeptical about his claims in that blog post is the time frame and the simultaneous loss of body fat in absolute rather than relative terms.
When I first started training Olympic weight lifting seriously I gained nearly fifteen pounds of muscle in six months (along with five pounds of fat; even vain bodybuilders who are obsessed with body fat have to alternate bulking and cutting cycles because it's very hard to gain a lot of muscle while keeping off the fat) and my coach has replicated that routinely starting with relatively weak beginners. About six months into a program like that, your efforts start to yield diminishing returns. This is true for total performance as well: when you're starting out, for the first six to eight months, it's easy to work out 3-4 times a week, do heavy squats every time, adding 5 kg to your old record with every single session, but once you get to about 2x body weight (around 150 kg squats in my case) on the bar you not only can't add things as fast anymore, but you have to totally change the nature of the program, and this is despite the fact that 5 kg represents an increasingly smaller percentage of your maximum capacity, so you might naively think it would get easier, not harder, over time to keep up a constant rate.
The short answer (upcoming pun intended) is that it’s simply not true that ten pounds is the maximum you can gain in a year, unless you’re talking about an <i>achondroplastic</i> dwarf.
I myself have gained more than ten pounds of muscle at many points over a twenty year history of bodybuilding. It’s even more possible when you’re a <i>green hand</i>, as you will gain a lot easier from day zero than you will five years down the line. I think you’ve missed that the first four responding posters in the second link you’ve provided all agree with this in different manners. And from what I can see, (I may be wrong here) but Tim Ferriss also claims to have started his training regime—specifically targeted at maximum muscle gain—from day zero.
Regarding your third link, well, just looking at the quote you’ve supplied beneath it is enough. There are two variables in that statement which need to be highlighted, “…the average bodybuilder…” and “…nearly impossible…”
If you consider the reverse of what the author seems to be saying it would be along the following lines: “…in order to gain more than ten pound of muscle in a year, you need to be an above average bodybuilder.” So, all we need to do now is figure out if Tim Ferriss is an ‘above average bodybuilder’ or not. If everything he is telling us is true, then there is the possibility that he is indeed above average, either in genetics, or in his understanding of exactly how to build quality lean mass. Or even better, both.
However, you’ve unfortunately taken the third link out of context. If you read on, John Little actually goes ahead and supports ‘mavericks’ like Tim Ferriss. Immediately following the point where you’ve cut off his sentence, he continues:
“…due largely to the person’s falling prey to the hype and outright B.S. that is propagated by most bodybuilding publications and that line the pockets of more than a few gym owners and personal trainers.”
By this comment it seems to me that John Little’s definition of an average bodybuilder is someone who chooses to follow popular techniques…as opposed to those who use a more scientific route.
Now I’d never heard of Tim Ferriss until today when I typed the word ‘superhuman’ in the Google Blog search for other reasons, but his thinking and techniques are very similar to the ones that I used when I was in training. People also found it hard to accept the accomplishments that I made relative to my time and frequency in the gym (whole body, once a month, average of 30 minutes per workout.) I never made gains to the tune of 34 lbs in 28 days though, but then I never had the luxury of constant optimum conditions within which to grow. Real life kind of gets in the way.
My routine was based on the theories and practices of Mike Mentzer, a strong science-based proponent of the Heavy Duty method of training, which Tim Ferriss’s method seems very similar to.
It’s a real difficult call to make—not being able to examine the Tim Ferriss’s results first hand—but I’m gonna stick my neck out and say that 34lbs in 28 days could be done by a beginner, under strict and optimum conditions…conditions which include choosing parents with the best genetics possible!
It'd be beneficial to everyone if you would voice some specific complaints again Tim. I know a lot of people around here don't like him, but I've never seen a criticism longer than "Pff. Tim Ferriss is a load of crap."
The article has some reasonable complaints against him, but I'm interested in why the opinion around HN is the way it is.
Avid, continual self-promotion is inherently distasteful to many people, myself included. I'm tired of Tim Ferriss telling me how great Tim Ferriss is and how I should be more like Tim Ferriss.
And then there's my general beef with all self-help gurus: if you really have it all figured out, why are you still trying to sell me shit?
The general essence of his book was start a dubious internet business which fools gullible people into parting with their money such as selling unregulated herbal supplements. Aside from the impact on your karma it can also be considered fraud to make inflated unsubstantiated claims and a very "success" herbal telemarketer is currently doing time for such an offense.
As far as I can see Tim Ferriss is all about short-cuts, not optimizations. There is a big difference.
No, that was what he did. The essence of the book was to arbitrage the difference in wages between 1st and 3rd world countries by becoming basically a manager and outsourcing all of your own work to Indians. Let others do all the work while you take all the credit.
You use credit in the HN "go change the world!" sense. In this case, it's about cash- the capitalist, the individual who provides capital to an enterprise and pays workers, is the one who receives cash. It's not about who gets credit and getting more gold stars than the next guy, it's about cash. That's capitalism.
Social entrepreneurialism, making a dent in the universe, helping those less fortunate, those are all awesome things. But capitalism, which is the issue at hand when talking about 4HWW, is about the accumulation of capital. Ferriss just talks about some cool ways to make money efficiently and spend money in ways that get you good bang for the buck.
And, with that, I'm going to stop procrastinating and go pack for my trip to Tunisia, paid for by creating an iPhone application, the development of which was made feasible by the savings achieved by moving to a country with low cost of living (Hungary). Cheers :D
Basically, I found few original ideas in his book–it read like a get-rich-quick-scheme aimed at tech-savvy middle managers who are stuck in a cube farm.
I don't want to work 4 hours a week ... because I actually _enjoy_ the things I choose to work on.
it read like a get-rich-quick-scheme aimed at tech-savvy middle managers who are stuck in a cube farm
what's wrong with that?
I'm the same as you in that I love what I do for a living, but to be honest with you, we're rare. Most people are stuck living boring lives, doing jobs that make them miserable.
I gave the book to two friends of mine in 9-to-5 jobs. One of them read the book and told me that she was legitimately blown away by what she read. Fast forward a few years and now she's got a side project going that makes her happy. It's not a "muse" per se because it takes quite a bit of work, but the point is, this book inspired her to start a startup so that she can one day quit her job.
The other friend I gave it to was cynical and echoed a lot of the sentiments I hear around here. It's not original, it'll never work, Tim Ferriss is dishonest. Well, it's been a few years and he's still stuck, stagnating in the same shitty job.
I actually _enjoy_ the things I choose to work on.
That's why Ferriss defines work as the stuff you do primarily for money and would prefer to do less of. Even if you love your job, there is going to be some of that in there.
But he seems to advocate outsourcing your workload to zero. If all of us outsource everything, who's gonna do the actual work in this world? Oh, right ... all the non-Westerners.
I think the anecdote he shares (in 4HWW) about becoming a National Chinese Kickboxing Champion is a nice example; he exploited a little-known loophole in the rules which stated that a combatant who leaves the ring forfeits, and racked up a series of victories by pushing his opponents out of the ring, sumo-style.
In my book, it was a "victory" in name only; it was clearly unsportsmanlike behavior, contrary to the essence of the game, and devoid of any of the skills the sport is based on, and yet he seems pretty damned proud of himself.
He's all about claiming the glory while avoiding the work.
I don't understand why you and the thirty-odd people who've chosen to use voting to indicate agreement are so uninterested in the topic that you would choose to come into the thread just to indicate your disinterest.
Stop paying attention to things you aren't interested in.
I don't really care about the claims. I'm more interested, like the singularityhub, in personal fitness research. Does anyone know of any resources on the topic? Even good phone apps or tracking programs would be cool.
I'm interested in the place where health, science, and startups combine.
Ferriss claims to have gained 34 pounds of muscle in 4 weeks:
http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2007/04/29/from-geek-to...
Here is a discussion by steroids users that confirms what my friend told me:
http://www.elitefitness.com/forum/anabolic-steroids/10-pound...
I couldn't find the relevant research that says ten pounds a year is the max, but here is a Google Books search result that confirms it:
http://books.google.com/books?id=VnpCA-Z1qcsC&pg=PT166&#...
"Unfortunately, the average bodybuilder finds it nearly impossible to gain even ten pounds of solid muscle tissue in a year's time..."