Ep. #500: Lyle McDonald on How Much Muscle You Can (Really) Gain Naturally

Mike: Hey, Mike here. And if you like what I’m doing here on the podcast and elsewhere, and if you want to help me help more people get into the best shape of their lives, please do consider supporting my sports nutrition company, Legion Athletics, which produces 100 percent natural evidence based health and fitness supplements, including protein powders and protein bars, pre workout and post workout supplements, fat burners, multivitamins, joint support, and more.

More head over to www. legionathletics. com now to check it out and just to show how much I appreciate my podcast peeps use the coupon code MFL at checkout and you will save 10 percent on your entire order and it’ll ship free if you are anywhere in the United States and if you’re not, it’ll ship free if your order is over 100.

So again, if you appreciate my work and if you want to see more of it, please do consider supporting me so I can keep doing what I love, like producing podcasts like this.

Lyle, thanks for taking the time to come and speak with me, my friend. 

Lyle: Hey, Mike. Thanks for having me again. 

Mike: Yeah. So we are here to talk about something that I have written a fair amount semi recently over the last year or so. I’ve written a couple of articles on this topic directly and indirectly, and I recorded my own podcast actually on this point several months ago, but a buddy of mine had reached out and was contesting some of the things that I had mentioned.

And particularly about FFMI, which when I pass the mic to you, we can start with just defining what that is for people, but FFMI and how it relates to steroids, he very much did not agree that a normalized FFMI, which we can define what that is in a minute, of 25 is for all intents and purposes A cutoff for natural muscle gain that sure, there are some people out there who can get a bit bigger than that naturally, but they are extreme outliers basically.

And more middle of the bell curve people. It is not in their genes. It doesn’t matter how hard they work. It doesn’t matter what they do. The. Only way they’re going to get there is with drugs. And it was on Instagram. It was Instagram DMS. And so I was able to have a real conversation with him about it, but I understand where he’s coming from.

So I wanted to have you on the show. Cause you had recently, 

Lyle: yeah, last year or something. So 

Mike: I just came across it like about six months ago, three part series and FFMI, and just get your thoughts on the relationship there between. Total muscularity and steroid use and one of the reasons why I think this is relevant beyond just nerding out on minutia is for people who are on social media and they’re checking out other fitness people on social media, you have a lot of steroid users and very few people are honest about it and they use it to sell shit, including just themselves, but also even if they don’t mean to, They set unrealistic expectations for other people.

So either by implying that other people can do what they do just by like with their super advanced training techniques or by really watching their macros or by making people like people are instinctively, we compare ourselves to, if you’re on social media, you are going to compare yourself. To some degree to what you see there, and you could be a natural weightlifter and actually be doing very well and have a very good natural physique.

But then you look at the person on Instagram and you’re like, I look like shit can just be discouraging. So I think it’s also it’s just useful for the everyday person to be a bit more informed and a bit savvier when it comes to spotting steroid use, or at least likely steroid use, where at least you could say, eh, I don’t know.

If I had to bet money on it, I’m going to say steroids. So I’m going to give myself a pass. I’m not going to necessarily do his 30 hard sets per major muscle group per week, a workout routine. And I’m not going to get so down on myself because I don’t have 19 inch biceps. And I’m just going to try to stick to people who at least are believably natural.

And if I had to make a bet, I would bet on the natural side. So that’s my preamble for why I thought this would be a productive discussion. 

Lyle: Yeah, no, and I agree with all of that. I think especially just to go off on a quick tangent to a, this industry has always run like this, right? Like you go back to, the early bodybuilding days, especially Joe Weider and that, the muscle and fitness days.

And it’s okay, we’re going to hold up pro bodybuilders who are juiced to the 100 percent arm. Except for all natural Ronnie Coleman, but other than him, everybody else, right? You’re too young to remember that. In the nineties, he held himself up as all natural and he might, whatever. But they use that to sell supplements.

It’s Oh, here’s this guy that’s big and jacked. Who’s never used this product before. And he’s been huge because he’s on drugs, but we’re going to use them to sell an image to you. That is not realistic. And. We’re seeing a similar thing now and it’s actually worse now. Remember this was years ago, a guy in my forum and he was like 195 lean with a month of dieting.

He could have taken any natural show, but even then the pros were at like 260, 270 rep. How can anyone, you can be 185, a big dude, looks great. It’s obvious you work out and you look at a guy that’s 280 shredded at the pro level and go. I don’t even try. It creates such a disreality, that fine bigorexia and all that other stuff, comes out of that.

It gives people, of course, in America, the Puritan work ethic says you can achieve anything you want if you just work hard enough, there are no limits. There are no genetic limits. Yeah, I got bad news for you. I wish it weren’t the case. Like I’m not just trying to be a negative Nancy, wah, wah. It’s just, this is the reality that people need to face.

Even with the. Provably naturals and this gets into a weird circular argument. I’m sure we’ll come back to you, right? It’s very it’s a cop out to go Oh, nobody can get above 25 or whatever the cutoff is and anyone is I’m going to define as being on steroids I think that is a cop out argument but to your point we need to understand where this value comes from what it represents what the realities are and what the Statistical likelihood are of certain things like the whole fake natty thing gets a little irritating you But you’ve got guys that probably they’re at their genetic.

They’re genetically elite They wouldn’t be pro bodybuilders or natural pros if they weren’t, like in any sport, right? Before we get to the limit if I told someone, okay, Ben Johnson ran 9. 79 in the 100, Usain Bolt ran 9. 59 only 100 guys have gone below 10 seconds. If I said, flatly, and we all know, we know they were all on drugs.

If I said, there is a limit in the 100 meter, Below which no natural will ever get most people would go, huh? Okay. Yeah, you’re right and yet somehow in bodybuilding There is no limit because it’s the delusional industry filled with delusional people that want to believe and are sold Lies and bullshits by people that have a vested interest in making them believe.

So that’s, I think that’s as good as an intro as anything but yeah, there is that super reality. And I can also guarantee that the guys that are big and ripped and lean, they’re just bigger versions generally of who they were in high school. 

Mike: Ronnie Coleman’s a great example of that. Look at what he was massive in high school.

For his age, like you look at, okay, massive, maybe that, but for a 16 or 17 year old, like the dude was huge. 

Lyle: You look at Ben Johnson at age 15, he was already muscular and lean. At his peak, he was just a bigger version of himself after training for a decade. And we know he used drugs, right?

You don’t generally see guys start at 140 underweight with terrible muscle bellies and somehow step on stage at 210 naturally. I’m sorry. Someone will go, I knew a guy. Great. You’re the exception. Fantastic. On average, we know it doesn’t happen. The guys that were big, we’re always big or bigger. And we’ll talk, I’m sure we’ll talk about like potential limits of muscle mass gains, because what’s interesting is that some of the people who are like, And I don’t know I don’t necessarily want to call people out, but one of the ones who’s big about, Oh, there is no limit.

If you look at what he recommends as realistic weight gains over the first one to four years of your career, the math that he presents cannot get you above that limit unless you start close to it. So you can’t have the argument go both ways. You can’t say that. Oh, most people only have a top limit of muscle gain of so many pounds.

And then you math that out on the average body height of a given individual and go that won’t get him there. Unless they started close to there, but I’m sure we’ll come back to that too. And I’m sure you know what I’m talking about. 

Mike: Yeah, absolutely. Let’s start with what FFMI and what normalized F.

Let’s just start there just for anybody who hasn’t heard of these things yet. 

Lyle: Okay. So I imagine most people know what the body mass index is, right? It’s supposed to be a measure of something. And it is the, it is your body weight divided by your height squared. And this is a measure of your height to weight ratio and it correlates or not with a bunch of different things.

You can think of FFMI as the, FFM is fat free mass, right? Fat free mass represents everything that isn’t fat. That means skeletal muscle, water, glycogen, minerals, bone, organs. All of that is considered fat free mass. Anything that’s not body fat. So the fat free mass index is conceptually the same. It is the relationship of your fat free mass.

And I believe it’s just fat free mass divided by height squared and probably kilograms and centimeters. Because this stuff’s always metric. The normalized FFMI you can probably explain better than I can. So when they first did this paper and looked at this, one of the things they noted was that, Oh, FFMI does tend to go up with increasing height, I think.

Because as people are taller, they have more bone organs are typically a little bit bigger. They have there’s things that are scaling with body height that are not muscle mass, but our fat free mass. And so they made an equation where they normalize it to, was it a six foot tall person? 

Mike: I think it was five, 10, 

Lyle: something like that.

Mike: I might be remembering wrong. Yeah. Around there. 

Lyle: So basically all they’re doing is saying, okay, you say you’re five, five, we’re going to normalize your value. To if you were 5’10 and if you’re 6’2 we’re going to bring it back. And if you get really bored and go look at the original paper by Curie and Pope, whatever it was called, they show this pretty graph and un normalize the line goes up sloping with height and normalizes a flat line.

So what they’re trying to do is so that it’s like the Wilkes equation or Sinclair and Olympic in powerlifting and weightlifting. It’s okay, you weigh 114 and you weigh 220. We want to try to normalize your lifting poundages. 

Mike: Yeah, and determine, quote unquote, who’s stronger based to be relative.

Lyle: Correct and so that’s what they’re doing with that normalized FFMI. To this, I would add, there is another concept that I’ve seen, and I think I’ve only seen it once, but I don’t know what I was thinking about, which was the skeletal mass index. Which is the same, exact same concept, but rather than being fat free mass including everything non muscle, is your actual skeletal muscle relative to your height squared.

And in terms of what we’re going to talk about, that is a much better metric, right? I can carb load you and put 10 pounds of water of fat free mass on you, and that will raise your FFMI score, and we all know that doesn’t mean anything. I can dehydrate you and I will lower your FFMI score.

That doesn’t mean it, because we’re not changing your muscle mass, right? When we talk about FFMI and steroid use, we are talking about your muscular gain potential. And I know we’ll touch on this elsewhere. So skeletal muscle index, or skeletal loss of mass index, is probably a better measure, but it’s much harder to do.

The study that did it, what did they use? Ultrasound of eight different muscles and plugged into this super impossible thing, because the other difficulty is of your total fat free mass on average muscle makes up about 45, 40 to 45 percent of it’s a little bit lower in women, a little bit higher in men, but in high level athletes.

that have presumably gained a significant amount of muscle who are lean, it can be up to 50%. So you can’t automatically assume that if your FFMI is 20, that your skeletal muscle mass index is 10. So the skeletal muscle mass index is arguably superior, but it’s much harder to measure. And I don’t think a lot of studies have used it.

So in practical terms, we’ll be using FFMI in this discussion. 

Mike: Yeah, exactly. I agree. So where, maybe we start with this idea that a normalized FFMI of 25 is a natural cutoff and where that originally came from. When people argue against it, it’s often they take that original study, the 1995 Curry et al study, and they just point out the deficiencies and then they say, case closed, I win.

Correct. 

Lyle: Yeah. So the paper for anybody who want, the three people who want to look it up, it’s by Corey et al and Pope was the second author. It’s called Fat Free Mass Index and Users and Non Users of Anabolic Androgenic Steroids. Clinical Journal of Sports Medicine, 1995. And basically what it did is it took a whole bunch of different people, I think they were college age students and some competed in this and that and the other, and they basically had them report whether or not they used steroids.

And presumably at least some of them were honest because the group, it comprised 183 steroid users and 74 non users, they defined FFMI, which we already talked about, corrected it to normalize it. And what they basically found was that no natural exceeded the standard. A value of 25. Now what was interesting is many of the steroid users didn’t get there either, but the only people who were above it were steroid users.

I hope that makes sense. So basically steroids didn’t guarantee you got above 25 within this group. You didn’t get above 25 if you. And they did some other stuff. They looked at old 20 Mr. America winners from 1939 to 1959. They tried to estimate normalized FFMI. And this is a crap show, right? This is trying to guesstimate weights and body fat percentages from presumably either visual records or Strongman used to lie about how much they weighed all the time.

This was part of, they lied about what they lifted. To try to get an accurate number on this is just, because unfortunately it’s going to be representing your own bias, which I already believe. So that’s a little bit right. But what they found was that for that group, the normalized FFMI was 25. 4. And it was only like five or six of them of the total group got above 25.

Most of them were below that. And now the criticisms was. The average group of trainees were just they were recreational trainees. Were they not sure. And maybe they’re not representative of, the hard training, natty body builder. And I don’t disagree with that criticism.

Don’t get me wrong. And trust me, when this first paper came out and I read it, I was much more. Absolutist than I am now because presumably in 20 years I’ve learned at least one more thing and I think the big take home like that got taken like that is an absolute if you’re above 25 you’re on there’s no debate okay that’s not true right and I won’t disagree with that is an incorrect interpretation it was one study with a limited group it would be far more interesting for them to either get good records of current natural bodybuilders or you know go to the gym get guys that compete in natural health.

hopefully tested contests, bring them in and see what presumably the hardest training guys who were doing things right, where do they fall, rather than the average gym dude who’s probably been training like a dip his entire career. So I don’t disagree with those criticisms. But this is sets the initial thing, in motion.

This idea of that there is some sort of cutoff that most people won’t get past. And notice keyword most, you and I’m sure we’ll harp on this constantly, will not get past without drugs. Does that mean nobody will? Of course not. Most, most probably won’t even get close. Which nobody wants to hear. I 

Mike: think we should follow that.

I think we should just follow that line and just jump into why that is. Cause that will take us into some of these other points of that are often used to justify the idea that there is no real, even for the average person, the cutoff is likely much higher than 25 and stuff on about sumo wrestlers and super fat power lifters and a bit of newer research with high level college athletes.

And so why don’t we just, why don’t we just follow what you were saying with, okay, so if you do currently believe that a normalized FFMI of 25 is a likely ceiling for most people, why is that? 

Lyle: I think, what it comes down to. Is, I think it, even if it’s not an absolute limit, it’s a practical limit.

And the reason being that whether people want to believe this or not, there is an upper limit of, I’m going to be very specific in my wording here, post pubertal, Muscle mass gains and I’m being very specific because one example people love to trot out goes I knew a guy who went from 120 to 160 when I hit puberty without even lifting, right?

Because puberty is a natural anabolic steroid cycle and you all know what we’re talking about and it’s not that so spare me the bullshit it’s a stupid argument because that’s not what we’re talking about. What we know is that okay, we’ve got that guy You’ve gone through puberty You’re untrained, right?

You are whatever, five foot eight and you’re 165 pounds or whatever it is at some reasonable body fat, hopefully. 

Mike: That actually might be big. I’m six two. And when I started lifting, I was like 160 and I didn’t look disgustingly skinny, but I was like a skinnier dude. I 

Lyle: have zero conception for any of this in the real world.

It’s just but whatever. So you’re five, seven and you’re one 50 right now you start lifting. Okay, you’re going to put on some amount of muscle at some rate, and we know this. And if you look at several people and I’ve repeated these numbers and these come from both Alan Aragon and Eric Helms. I don’t know where their numbers.

I looked at a little bit differently, an article I wrote called like maximum muscle gain. And I presented like Alan’s model and Martin Birkin’s model that came from observing a pile of natural bodybuilders. And so like in the first year. As a male might gain, what is it? 1%, what is it? Up to one and a half percent of their current body weight.

It works out to about two pounds of muscle tops, right? So if you do everything right, you’re going to gain 25 pounds in your first year, if you’re lucky. 

Mike: Just for people who want two pounds per month, right? Like up to two pounds per month. 

Lyle: Like I said, we’re assuming a lot of things, but that’s probably an upper limit.

And again, people will go I knew this underweight kid who did starting strength with milk. I’m not talking about some kid who’s 120 at five, seven. Let’s just keep, let’s just keep. 

Mike: Yeah. Who was eating 1000 calorie meal a day or something. 

Lyle: Let’s keep the argument within the realm of what we all know we’re talking about, because this is just ridiculous arguments.

So in his second year, he might gain half of that. So he might get another 12 pounds. If you, again, lucky, this is like the top. And if you look at their percentages, it’s a range. It’s like one to one and a half percent, and it drops to 0. 5 to 0. 75 percent of your current weight. And then by year three, it’s half again.

So if you’re lucky, you’re scraping to get five or six pounds. And then if you’re super lucky in year four, you might get a couple more. Okay, and if you add that up, optimistically, you might have the potential to gain 40 pounds of muscle from your starting post pubertal, non underweight self. If you’re lucky, but that’s the upper limit and most people probably won’t gain that.

And then if you probably go punch that into one of the FFI normalization calculators It’s not going to get you there or I mean it might get you know We’ve also got the issue Like I said ffmi or fat free mass includes a lot of other components and this will bring us into sort of the sumo and football thing Which is water glycogen, etc.

You can very artificially raise your ffmi by Being a fat bastard Because a lot of the weight you gain up to 25 percent is not what’s called non essential fat free mass, connective tissue, water, glycogen, minerals. When you diet that back down to a reasonable body fat percentage, it comes back off. So even that guy who’s okay, I’m, I went from 145 to 185 by gaining 40 pounds of muscle over four years.

Yeah, and if we diet you down to even a remotely lean level, you’re probably going to be 170. Yeah. And if I get you to contest lean, you’re going to weigh a whopping 160. And for anybody who doesn’t believe me, right? I’ve been making this argument with people for years about, it was like, Oh, we’ve got better nutrition and better training and this and that and the other.

And I’m like, then why aren’t the average body weights of natural bodybuilders going up, right? I know we’ve got more freak show outliers. Nesima. God, I forget. Oh, wait, I got it right here. Nesima and Yang is one of them. And we’ll come back to that because there’s possibly an ethnic issue, right? Go to a natural bodybuilding show, biggest class, the class with the most people, 165s.

These are the guys that are presumably doing it right, that are training their ass off, that are eating, that are watching every macro, that are as psycho as everyone you’ve ever met, and they are competing on stage at 165. And they might be 175 to 180 in the offseason because they’re at a healthy body fat.

And they’re what? Five, seven, right? Martin Birkin. He’s got a different equation and it’s something like height in meters or heightened centimeters minus a hundred equals your top end, like contest weight. 

Mike: Yeah. Like 5 percent body fat, like true stage lean. 

Lyle: Correct. And that is going to artificially lower FFMI just in the same light.

Cause you’re dehydrated and you’re losing non essential, right? So if you take these guys back up to their off season weight of 175, 180, more than normally hydrated. Go do the math and they probably don’t get a whole lot past that. 

Mike: Even that argument Oh our nutrition or training has gotten so much better, but yeah, but has it really if you go back and you look at what people were doing and even though the information was out there sure.

The evidence base has grown. There’s no question, but these guys have understood energy balance for a long time. They’ve understood the basics of macronutrients. It’s it’s that complicated. Eat enough protein and blast yourself with carbs. And okay. The training side of things. A lot of it is yeah. You got to work harder. It’s not like the key to making progress. Once you become the intermediate weightlifter is not fancy training techniques. It’s mostly just working harder and sure you can refine your techniques and you can find exercises that seem to activate muscles a little bit better for you than others.

That’s the remaining, and we’re going to get the majority of your progress out of just working fucking harder. And it’s not like the guys of the older times were not working hard and not being consistent. 

Lyle: One of the things I find, another argument that I’ve had thrown against me by a couple of people, and one, there’s actually, there’s an article you might’ve read by Jan Todd, who, she wrote a very critical article called Size Matters, arguing against basically the original paper, which is very easy to dismiss because there’s more to be said about it.

And A, that she went back and reanalyzed the Mr. America and. Picked different numbers and came because again, at this point, we’re just justifying our own biases, right? I don’t think that analysis necessarily, just because we don’t know. They weren’t as conditioned. We’re making a lot of guesses. She also invoked like these 12 strong men and lifters.

We’re talking about like from 1890 to 1930, right? We’re talking about these guys that, like I said, A, those guys all lied about everything. It was part of the showmanship. They all lied about their muscle sizes and how much they lifted and how much they weighed. But then it raises the question for me, okay.

By that argument, Guy’s in 1925. We’re better at training than we are now because somehow they were 210 and lean and the guys now can’t get past 165 or they were freak out liars that are irrelevant, or maybe they were lying. Steroids didn’t exist at that point, 1930s. So even by the 1930s, we can start to get like questionable about.

When did people stop being natural? And it’s a lot earlier than anybody thinks. And I talk about this in my little article series. Like we know when steroids were first synthesized, the athletes knew about them. These were in the game very early on. So if you’re going to throw a 1960s Mr. America at me, I’m going to go.

Drugs were already in the game. They got into the game more in the seventies, but they were already in the game. We know for a fact that the Olympic lifters of the day under, what’s his name, strength and health guy, the magic power racks, they were also using the magic Diana ball, and that was in the fifties and sixties.

So already by the, but again, if you’re going to throw some 1925 strongman at me, you’re going to have to tell me why he’s bigger than all the naturals today who have the high end technology, either we’ve forgotten how to train or there’s another explanation and I tend towards the latter. And again, this is partly my bias, but we don’t know how much they truly weigh.

We don’t, there are no records of any of this stuff. So I don’t think using it one way or the other is a particularly good argument, because we also have more current data. Now, something I want to mention about the natural bodybuilder thing, when I first got into this argument a couple years ago. So basically, one day I got bored and pissy, as I tend to do, and I decided to examine this whole thing of the natural limit.

And I looked at top natural bodybuilders in one of the federations, one of the dozens. And I looked at their competition results. These were winners of their class, right? And these range from 136 pounds. 

Mike: You knew some of these people too, right? 

Lyle: Sure. But what it means a couple of them are in my group or were, and I do believe that they are Natural, right?

I’m not going to play the game and go, Oh, if they happen to, I don’t know about all of them, but I will take it at face value that they are. 

Mike: It’s probably like one of those things where you’re like, if they are on steroids, they’re either doing it wrong or they’re really, they’re not taking much. 

Lyle: Sure.

Exactly. But I am willing to make that assumption. So took their body weight. Estimated body fat percentage at four, which is typically contest lean. So I was able to calculate their lean body mass, their heights were recorded. So I was able to do a normalized fat free mass. And so first I looked at the regular fat free mass, non normalized.

And of 15 athletes, five of them cleared 25. One was 25. 6, one was 26. 2, two were 25. 6, one was 26. 2, two, one was 28. 8, and one was an enormous 30. 1, that was the super heavyweight, 237 pounds. Okay, when I normalized the FFMI, now six people got across. So it was like 40 percent of the winning competition bodybuilders, right?

This is the population I’m looking at. Okay, two of them, 25. 3, 25. 4. They barely get across. Next highest was 26. 2, 26. 5. They barely get they’re a little bit higher. And then two were at, both at 29. 7, the two biggest guys. So those guys are huge. And we’re like, aha, 25 is not a natural limit. And I’m not saying it is an absolute limit, but we are now looking at the top 1 percent of 1%.

And even the guys at 29. 7, they’re Josh Gilliam and Naseema Inyeng. And as I think we might come back to, I think there is an ethnic difference and both of them are, I’m going to say ethnically black and someone is going to call me out because I don’t know actually specifically ethnically what they are, they’re not Caucasian.

Let’s put it that way. 

Mike: They have black skin. 

Lyle: Thank you. I just, God, I hate having to navigate modern political. You know what I’m talking about, right? 

Mike: Anybody who’s going to get mad about saying Oh yeah, he’s a black guy. I guess maybe this is not the podcast for you. 

Lyle: Cause you’re right. And like you, again, I don’t know specifically what Nasima and Yang’s ethnicity is.

Obviously it’s. I’m trying to look it up right now in my browser, so it doesn’t matter. You know what I’m saying. Let’s move on with this. Okay. Now, yes, these guys are all super dieted down and I didn’t bother to go okay, let’s feed them back up to 12%. I’m sure most of them probably did get past 25 under those conditions.

And again, great. We’ve now got 13 dudes out of how many tens of thousands are training right now while we’re talking who aren’t anywhere close. This is an industry, people love the exceptions. 

Mike: And not just dudes who are training, but look at how many people are trying to be natural bodybuilders who are dedicating a large portion of their life to it.

Not to say anything of all the people who are into lifting, but they’re like not trying to become a natural bodybuilder. Like I’m into training, but I’m not trying to become a natural bodybuilder. So these are people again, who are like, they’re putting a lot of their time, a lot of their effort, a lot of their energy into just getting as jacked as possible.

It’s one of the most important things in their lives. 

Lyle: Sure. And fine. So we’ve got great at 15 guys to the list of the tens of thousands. It’s not an absolute limit, but it might as well be a practical one because this is the top 1 percent of 1%. Now, one example I brought up because people don’t want to believe there’s a limit.

They don’t want to believe there’s a limit to how much muscle they can gain. And this industry promotes that because when you hit a plateau, just add a new supplement. Or the new magic training program. 

Mike: Or information, right? Oh, here’s the new training breakthrough. That’s going to add five pounds of muscle in the next five weeks.

Lyle: And what’s interesting to me, powerlifting would do the same thing, right? We had, Oh my God, there’s all this new technology and there’s chains and bands conjugate in this and that and the other. And I went, okay, why aren’t natural numbers going up very much? If all this training technology is so good.

And so effective, why is it only the geared drug users who compete in progressively shittier federations that pass high squats that are moving more away? It’s just, that’s the reality. The average natural bodybuilder is no bigger now than they were 30 years ago. Even if the top 1 percent of 1 percent gets even close to the and oh, and here’s what’s interesting.

Here’s some of the lower FFMIs. The guy who’s under 36 pounds, normalized, 23. 5. I got a 22. 1, 23. 9, 23. 3. To your point, these are guys, and oh man, don’t want to say this, the 23. 3 is one of the people who argues most vehemently against 25 being a limit. And when I’m in a bad mood, I’ll point out, then why can’t he get past it?

Mike: My normalized is 23. I think it’s right under 23. Actually. 

Lyle: It would be closer if he were rehydrated. I’m not, I’m told that he’s a little bigger now. I did this analysis several years ago, but I’m sorry, if you’re going to make that argument, there is no genetic limit argument. Then you got to tell me, I did this with me years ago.

He’s squatting about 500 because there’s no genetic limits. I said, cool. When are you going to squat a thousand? Because at this point you’re gaining 10 pounds a year on your squad. When are you going to get to a thousand? Never. That’s when there’s a limit. Boom. You can’t tell me there’s no limit when you’ve hit a limit.

Sorry. So anyway, a lot of these guys, again, the best of the best training, the hardest of the hard with the most optimized everything, they can’t even get close. So don’t tell me that the average guy has even a decent chance. Which then people will go, Oh, you’re telling people not to even try to get any bigger.

No. Do not put words in my mouth. I’m not saying anything of the sort. Everybody can get bigger. Everybody can gain muscle to some degree. However, you need a reality check. 

Mike: I’ve said this a number of times, which is maybe not quote unquote, good business, but it’s, I think being a good person and giving people realistic expectations.

And that is if you know what you’re doing and you start out with good training, programming and good nutrition, and you just move along. Then you are going, you have about five years of gains to be had. At which point you will only be able to maintain whatever you’ve gained in those first five years, really for all intents and purposes, maybe if you then start, if you start measuring your progress in terms of like decades and you really keep working at it, you might see slightly better, I don’t know.

Your biceps might be a little bit bigger and. You might see a little bit better development in your quads and stuff like that. But as far as size, raw size and strength goes that’s it. That’s what you got. 

Lyle: People need to learn the concept of an asymptote and go back to high school math and realize what that means.

And I actually, I got into this discussion with someone in a different context, did a podcast and then some, and the guy was like, Oh yeah, this physique, it’s 20 years of hard training. I don’t know. It wasn’t, it was five years of hard training and 15 years of maintenance. Do not tell people that it will take them to, actually I put it in this, I said, How many quantitative gains have you made in the last 15, once you hit that limit?

Now people will go, yes, we’re presuming that it is 5 years of proper continuous training. Stop making semantic arguments, you know what we’re both saying, right? You could have trained like a dipshit for 4 years, from the time you’re 18 to 22, and you still have an effective training age of 0. You probably still made gains.

Yes. You may, it may take you three more years. Aha. It took seven. No, it didn’t. It took you four of a real training. And I said, this guy, I’m like, no, this isn’t 20 years of training. This is five years of proper training. And 50, and someone was like why do you know younger guys when.

World Cups. I go, wait, are we talking about sports now? I thought we were talking about bodybuilding. 

Mike: Yeah. That’d make that leap. 

Lyle: I have no idea what he was getting out. And even 

Mike: if it only were that easy to gain more muscle, you just have to get more skilled at the biceps curl. That’s what you got to do.

Lyle: And I would say if there’s anything that happens with experience, you learn how to diet. These guys, especially with conditioning requirements. Now you learn how to get stage lean without losing muscle, right? Every guy’s Oh, I came into contests bigger than last year. Cause you didn’t diet so badly, but you gave up five pounds of muscle.

But that even that’s irrelevant. And I said, but here’s the thing. We’re not talking about competition bodybuilders. I’m talking about the general training public to tell someone it’s going to take you 20 years is so disingenuous. And I get it. It’s to be like, Oh, I’ve been a hardcore trainee for 20 years.

Yeah, whatever you’ve been fighting. Trust me, as soon as you hit 35 and aging starts, now you’re just fighting decrepitude, right? You’re fighting the slow, you are maintaining at best. You’re as big as you’re going to get. Cause you look at these top guys who are making this, they’re like, yeah, I trained for a year, I gained a pound.

Mike: You don’t even know if that’s really a pound of muscle. I don’t know. I weigh a pound more, but who knows why? Yeah, maybe I ate more food or something. That’s right. Before I weighed. 

Lyle: And he was like, I actually just came up in my group today. I was like, I’ve been training for a bunch of years. I’m as big, am I wasting my time?

It’s that’s a judgment call, right? I can’t tell you what your priorities in life should be, but. If you’re training six days a week or five days a week in the hopes that you’re going to gain significantly more muscle, yeah, you are wasting your time. Cause it’s not going to happen without going on steroids.

And yeah, I told this, I’m like, yeah, don’t tell people it took you 20 years or 30 years to get there. It took you five. Cause if you gave me somebody at 18, you’d never trained and you let me control everything for the next three to five years. That’s as big as they’re gonna get. Period. Now, will they be able to make stage?

That depends on where they started. We may have talked about early on, but I know we talked about it in the pre recording. The guys that are big and muscular and have good symmetry now, they looked like that in high school. By and large. They are just bigger versions of themselves. And even if you look at the guys that hit that FFMI of 25 that are, or above, they probably started At 19, right?

They were just coming out of puberty because they were tall and had a certain amount of muscle mass. And it’s interesting, there’s actually a strong relationship. There’s been studies that have correlated the amount of lean body mass per height. Per inch of height or per centimeter of height. And I, and if you actually go look at those numbers and they’re super depressing, right?

Cause if you actually go, all right, at six foot tall, this is pretty much my upper limit. Now go crank that into an FFMI chart and see where it puts you. It’s probably not going to be where you want it to. 

Mike: And for anybody listening who wants to play around with some of these numbers, I have some calculators in this article I wrote.

So it’s at legionathletics. com. If you search for naturally, it’s a long article, but a lot of good information. It’s called here’s how much muscle you can really gain naturally with the calculator. So anybody listening, if you want to. Start playing around with, we have a calculator in there on that uses some of Casey Butts is information.

It’s pretty useful for getting a pretty good idea of how big you are going to be able to get. 

Lyle: And even that, I would say that is going to be your upper limit if you’re lucky. 

Mike: Yeah, I agree. I don’t think I ever could hit just according to Casey’s information. If I take off like five. percent or so maybe, but this is about it.

Like I weigh 200 pounds. I’m around 10 percent body fat. I’m six, two. This is the end of the road. 

Lyle: And for people, if you think about that that means you’ve got 20 percent by or 20 pounds of fat. If we dieted you down to 5 percent contest, lean you. You’d come in at one 90, which is big. That’s a big natural, and again, most guys come in at 1 65, but even the Casey butt numbers of those calculators.

Mike: So I suspect my weight would be a bit lower though, just because it always comes out like that. It’d probably be 180 5. 

Lyle: Sure. Which is still big, relatively speaking for a natural. But again, that’s, and I’m sure the one 60 fives are the biggest. You don’t see a lot of guys in the littler classes.

Sure. 185s is next. And then go look at the number of guys in the super heavyweights, right? That are above 200 pounds that are conditioned and they are in the minority. There are a lot of big boys on stage, but at least when I was looking at natural results, some of them seem to forget to diet. It was interesting because they stepped on stage with an ab.

But anyway, you diet them down, they’d be 195 if they were lucky. But realize there’s KC Button on those calculators for the majority of people are going to represent a maximum limit, not necessarily where you’re going to end up because this is like the upper limit at the far right hand of a fairly normal curve.

That’s if everything falls the right way. If you have good testosterone levels, there’s been all this research about intra individual difference, if you’ve got, whatever, you generate rhizomes better than others, you’ve got good mitocolonus, other molecular biology, that isn’t the topic here. And.

That’s if you’re lucky. Realistically, most won’t even get there, right? All these numbers we’ve thrown out are perfectly optimized, physiologically, those are the maximums. That doesn’t mean that’s what you’re going to get. 

Mike: And the good news, the Pretty significant silver lining is at least based on the majority of people I’ve worked with over the years, who would be the gen fit crowd of people who just want to look good and they want to feel good.

And they have maybe three to five hours a week to give to their training. And yeah, they’re willing to follow meal plans and things, but they’re not going to be neurotic about all of it. The type of physique that most of those people aspire to is not even close to what you’re A normalized F of 25, it’s probably right around where I’m at 22 to 23, your average guy would be very happy with that.

And for your average woman, I don’t know, somewhere around 20 or 21, probably it’s harder with women. 

Lyle: And there’s a lot less data to try to identify where those numbers are. I had numbers in my women’s book plug, plug about the relationship between like height and. And I even talked about it with that, right?

Like I looked at the results of it was at the time, the top pro female bodybuilder who I guarantee was on steroids. She was 145 pounds in contest shape. That’s at the big end. And I realized that there’s women that are bigger than that. And female bodybuilding tends to be judged a little bit differently.

So it’s a weirder sport than the men’s event, but I’m like, women will be like, God, I weigh 120. And I want to get huge, I got bad news for you. That’s it, right? That 40 to 45 pounds of potential muscle gain for men, it’s about 20 for women, if they’re lucky. And what I did is I presented the ranges. I’m like, okay, here’s the low end of like muscle mass to height.

And then here’s the high end. And it’s if you’re a beginner and you’re low end, you might make the high end. If you’ve been training for five years productively and you’re the low end, you’re never going to get to the high end. You might make it close to the middle, but you’re never going to make it to the high end.

And you need to come to terms with that and men need to do the same thing. And there’s numbers for men too, but I don’t have them anywhere handy. But yeah, so that’s it, right? So we’ve got this thing. The top 1 percent of 1 percent may get there. I assure you they started big. I actually, there’s another weird paper I looked at and it’s really interesting because what they were looking at was how do different body types in terms of basically being small or big boned, it’s that whole thing, respond to training.

Cause that’s been one of those things floating around for years. If you are the classic ectomorph, the skinny, cause I think even Casey Butts uses wrist circumference. That’s been an old one. And it’s actually a decent indicator of other things, right? Where all that stuff tells you with what your prenatal androgen exposure was and all this other stuff that programs the physiology that nobody wants to hear about right now.

And. But what they did is they took these people that they either based on their current body weight and stuff, and they put them through the same training program and the guys with a light or lean body build gained for nothing. They gained like a pound and the guys with a thicker body build, the quote unquote mesomorph gained quite a bit.

Now, on the one hand we might go ectomorphs, whatever. The skinny guy needs a different style of training. I won’t disagree with that. What was interesting, if you look at it, the lean guys started with an FSMI of 21, and the bigger guys were like 24. And when you added it up, the lean guys got to 22 and the guys that started at 24 got to like 26.

But all that tells you if is if you start big, you’ll end big. Duh, because again, we’re assuming a relatively fixed amount of gain from where you are, right? If you started one 30 after puberty, you’re not going to be much bigger than one 70, no matter what you do, period. You’re not going to get to 200 lean.

Mike: And just to comment on that, I started when I started lifting, I was like 155, maybe 160 pounds, probably with similar body fat to now. Maybe I was somewhere in the teens and I’m a little bit leaner now. And here I am fluctuating. I’d say one 98, give or take. 

Lyle: And that’s just where the numbers fall, right? So you look at the guys that are 220 now and they started at 180.

They were big boys in high school. I would love to know, what Nassima and was it Josh Williams? I think was the other one that, yeah, sorry, Josh Gilliam, who had 29. 7 in that analysis I did. I’m willing to bet you, cause they competed respectively. Josh competed at 180 at a height of. Five foot five, right?

So just try to picture that picture. Say 65 inches in height. Picture a guy who’s five foot five who weighs 180 pounds in contest shape. 

Mike: Actually massive , 

Lyle: right? One of the other guys who was 65 and a half inches. Five foot. Five and a half. Weighed in at 1 45. So Josh Gilliam is 35 pounds of muscle heavier than him because he started big.

Yosemite weighed in at 237, but he’s also six foot one, right? But I guarantee you that when he was at his full height in high school, having hit puberty and stuff, I bet you he was already 190. In that range, he was already big. So he just got bigger, but if you don’t start there, you’re not going to get there, period.

If people still disagree with us, Arnold at his peak, depending on which numbers you believe, competed between 220 and 240. It’s very difficult to get realistic numbers. Now, if he was 220, that means that he was like no bigger than some of the top naturals now, which is, but even at 240. They weren’t as conditioned as they are now.

They didn’t have to come in as lean. He would have been easily 10 pounds lighter with current conditioning levels. So this is a guy with optimal genetics. We know you use steroids and he topped out at 230. So if you think as a natural. You’re going to be bigger than that. 

Mike: I was, I pulled up Josh Gilliam’s Instagram and there’s a throwback picture, this is timely of when he was 19 tanked, like he makes me look small at 19.

Lyle: Yeah. So he just got big. And again, I don’t want anybody to hear me. This isn’t meant as a criticism of either of those athletes, right? I’m not dismissing the fact that they went from being jacked to more jacked and that they’re amazing bodybuilders. I’m not. It’s to make the point. If you didn’t start big, you’re not gonna get that big wherever you were after decent.

Or if you weren’t super under fed at puberty. If you’re lucky at 40 pounds, that’s it. Go figure out relative how tall you are. That’s your personal FFI limit if you get all 40 pounds, but realize that’s four to five years of intense, productive, correct, consistent training to get there. And let’s face it, 

Mike: I just put into chat, check out this link that I just sent you, this is him at 12 years old at 12.

I’m not joking. He was bigger than me at 19. After a year of weightlifting. 

Lyle: Oh, good God. Yeah. That’s phenomenal. Look at those arms. Does that even mean those have got to be 16 inch guns and belts, right? 

Mike: And this kid is 12 for anyone listening. You want to see this? His Instagram handle is Joshua and then G L M.

And you look at him now and he’s huge and then go look at him at 12. That’s actually stunning. He literally at 12 was bigger than I was at 19. After I’d been lifting shred, I was doing stupid bodybuilding magazine workouts, but it doesn’t matter. I was going to the gym five or six days a week 

Lyle: and he was bigger at 12.

You can put him up against a lot of guys training at my gym right now. And he was bigger at 12 than they are now and probably will ever be sure. So it just, like I said, to the point. So yes. Is it possible, of course, are most gonna do it? Sorry. No. 

Mike: Hey, if you like what I am doing here on the podcast and elsewhere, and if you want to help me help more people get into the best shape of their lives.

Please do consider supporting my sports nutrition company, Legion Athletics, which produces 100 percent natural evidence based health and fitness supplements, including protein powders and bars, pre workout and post workout supplements, fat burners, multivitamins, joint support, and more. Every ingredient and every dose in every product is backed by peer reviewed Scientific research.

Every formulation is 100 percent transparent. There are no proprietary blends and everything is naturally sweetened and flavored to check everything out. Just head over to legionathletics. com and just to show how much I appreciate my podcast peeps use the coupon code. MFL at checkout and you will save 20 percent on your entire order if it is your first purchase with us.

And if it is not your first purchase with us, you will get double reward points on your entire order. That’s essentially 10 percent cash back in rewards points. So again, the URL is legionathletics. com and if you appreciate my work and want to see more of it, please do consider supporting me so I can keep doing what I love.

Like producing podcasts like this, and I guess that speaks to some of the other research that’s often held up as an example of why we don’t know what the limits are. There was a study by Hardy et al. And there was a study by Trexler et al. With college athletes. And I just want to get your comments on those studies.

And I have my opinions, but I was curious as to your thoughts. 

Lyle: Yeah. And I had one of those. I don’t remember which one it is. At the moment, and it was thrown at me and it was like, Oh, here’s a bunch of, they looked at like a hundred top athletes and these were like world, maybe it was, I forget how many it was.

And they were like, these are like world championships, a lot of Olympic sports, American football athletes, and of the a hundred, like 10 had FFMIs that were pretty significantly above 25. Like I said, these were world class athletes and the argument I had was like, Oh, and you look at the description and the athletes.

Said they didn’t use drugs. There you go. Athletes have never been known to lie about steroids in a world where they will basically completely lose their sponsorship. Why would they lie? What’s new for them? How 

Mike: dare I? And then why would they take steroids? Why would a football player take steroids?

What could possibly be in it for them? 

Lyle: Yeah. Oh, here we go. Here’s the paper that I’m thinking of. It is called Skeletal Muscle Mass in Human Athletes. What is the Upper Limit by Abe et al. with Jeremy Lenneke was on the end of the American Journal of Human Biology, 2018. So 95, quote unquote, large sized males and 48 controls were measured body, blah, blah, blah.

10 of the athletes had more than a hundred kilos of fat free mass. So that’s 220 pounds. The largest was 120. 2, right? That’s 250. Seven of the controls had more than 50 kilograms. Woo hoo! 110 pounds of muscle mass. Including the largest, you had a whopping 60. Fat free mass and skeletal, blah, blah, blah.

Skeletal muscle index was higher in the athletes. And this is important, right? The, it was like, 40 to 45 percent in the recreational athletes. And it was like 50 percent in the high level athletes, right? They have a greater proportion of muscle mass. And this was the one where the athletes were like, yeah, here’s just some stuff from my article.

They looked at 43 American college football players, 18 powerlifters, another sport that doesn’t have drug use in it, 28 college sumo wrestlers, which I have no idea what the culture is there, and six shot putters. Football players were division one NCAA, the other athletes national, international level.

And they all said, we don’t use drugs. Sure. I believe you. I believe you, because only the handful of cheaters that get caught are on steroids. We know that steroid use in high school football is enormous. Steroid use in college football is enormous. Nobody gets to the world level in any sport without drugs.

They’ve been part of sports since the 70s. 

Mike: You always have to giggle when announcers, when sports casters are like, Oh yeah, once he started on the college team and, he put on 30 pounds in that first, they have a really good weightlifting program there. Sure. 

Lyle: Yeah, exactly. And I’m not saying they were all using, I’m not, however, to even assume that a majority of them were clean.

Knowing what we know about the realities of high level sport in American football is nonsensical. Now, again, as part of my overall obsession I looked, and so here were the top ten athletes. Unfortunately, they didn’t do fat free mass in God, do I have these numbers? Probably not. So I looked at them and their fat free mass index ranged from a 25 was the lowest, 34.

49 was the highest. Interestingly, that guy had a skeletal muscle mass, he had 47 percent was the ratio of skeletal muscle. One dude had a 53 percent of his total fat free mass was muscle, and he had one of the higher fat free mass indexes. But these were 10 of the 100. So again, we’ve got 10%. Of these high level athletes, they’re the only ones that are making it pass, right?

Even the average FFMI, so yeah, 10 of 95 of the total athletes, which are huge outliers, pulling the numbers up, I can’t find what the average F fat free mass index was. Regardless, there was also, and I did some early calculations, and I’ve gone back on them because of some criticism, right?

Because of the way Like I said, fat free mass isn’t all muscle, right? One of the guys with the highest fat free mass index, that’s 28. 48, he only had 42 percent of his total fat free mass as muscle. That means he was carrying a lot of water and glycogen. His body fat percentage was probably higher. I don’t have the numbers in front of me.

And what that basically means, oh, yeah, no, I do, right? The body fat percentage on most of these guys ranged, they were in the mid 20s. One guy was 36 percent body fat. One guy was 10%. And he was the one I believe that had the most, regardless, if you diet these guys down, their FMI’s will drop because they’re losing the glycogen water and essential fat free mass.

When you start looking at these athletes and American football players and sumo wrestlers, right? These are two sports that have turned morbid obesity into performance. Fascinating. Yeah. These guys have some of the like sumo wrestlers have been measured as having some of the highest fat free mass values measured, like 120, which is considered the top end and Abe has done that research too, but a large percentage of that is inessential and I guarantee you like, and these guys are 600 pounds.

They are 50 percent body fat. Now tell me. You diet this guy down to 10%, I guarantee you he’s not going to have 120 kilos of lean body mass. Guarantee you. I don’t know where he’ll fall, but it’s going to be a lot less than that. So even if that’s considered an upper limit of fat free mass, that’s including glycogen, water, minerals, connected tissue, stuff that will go away.

Mike: And that applies to powerlifters too, like Ray Williams, for example, that’s come. 

Lyle: Oh, sure. Yes, which again, a sport where there we know is completely clean at the highest levels. People don’t lie. Why would they lie? They just follow the rules. Yeah, exactly. They just compete in untested federations and it’s funny that’s where the biggest, strongest numbers are.

It’s funny how that works. And again, I’m not criticizing steroid use. I don’t give a shit. Honestly, if there anybody wants to do as their own business, as long as they’re not using and competing in a tested or natural federation, my issue is that holding up, just with you, holding up these athletes.

As examples of people that cross the threshold because they say they’re not using, to me is a little bit of desperation. It is, we’ve run out of examples, so we’re going to throw, no, lots of people go past it in sports with rampant steroid use and that we know of in the paper you’re referring to, it’s called the fat free mass index and NCAA division one and two collegiate American football players.

And let’s see, they looked at 235 football players, 62 of them. So about 25 percent had height adjusted FMI above 25, right? So even in these elite athletes. Only 25 percent are making it across. The mean FFMI. It was 23. 7. So these big, strong, muscular football players, they’re still not getting past it on average.

Mike: That’s pretty telling, too. You find that 23 number coming around again, just like when you were talking about natural bodybuilding. 

Lyle: Now okay, so they looked at the numbers. Upper limit estimations for fat free mass index appear to vary by position. Duh. This value is exceeded by six linemen, three offensive linemen and three defensive linemen.

Now, I don’t know if you have non American listeners, but you need to understand something about American football. The front lines, the offensive and defensive lines, those guys truly have turned morbid obesity into an elite sport, right? Somehow 

Mike: they still can move. 

Lyle: And the high school level, those guys are typically about 300 pounds.

At the college and professional levels, they weigh, they’re in the 350 to 400 pound range. And most of them dropped out at 45 because of it. And in those six linemen, who are three to four hundred pounds, the maximum observed value of FFMI was 31. 7. Okay, so fantastic. Six morbidly obese athletes on steroids got to 31.

I’m not impressed. I don’t find this a partic And actually, just to put this in perspective, Nesima Had a normalized FFMI of 29. 7 at 4 percent body fat, right? So at 237 pounds, he had nearly the same FFM because he’s a genetic freak. Just like Josh Gilliam is a genetic freak. But as soon as you diet these guys down from 400, because they probably have 40 percent body fat, as soon as you diet them back down and all that nice connective tissue non essential F, guarantee you, yeah, they might still be above 25.

But that’s the drugs because collegiate football players use steroids. Back in the day, when Dianabol was first came or was first got super popular, and this was at the pro level, you probably heard it called the breakfast of champions. 

Mike: Yep. 

Lyle: You know why? The coaches would come into the food hall and they would shake pill, Dianabol pills out.

Onto the athlete’s breakfast cereal. 

Mike: Where did this happen? 

Lyle: This is in professional football in the seventies. 

Mike: Oh, okay. 

Lyle: They were legal. It was cheap. They would just come in and just sprinkle the stuff on their food. 

Mike: Taking your vitamins. 

Lyle: Sure. Taking your vitamins. So yeah. So again, we’ve got this point that yes.

So again, if only 25 percent of top level collegiate football players can get there. You’re not getting there. You’re not as the average natural bodybuilder or recreational weight trainee, you’re not getting past it. If the top 1 percent of 1 percent of natural bodybuilders only sometimes get there because they started big, you’re not getting there realistically, unless you started close.

And that’s it. That’ll be the exception. If you go back and look at yourself in high school and you were like 180 at five foot five, like Josh Gilliam probably was, he competes 180 at five five and he was already whatever, 170 at five five coming out of puberty. Yeah, you might get there.

Mike: It looked like he was 150 at 12. 

Lyle: Shit, when he was 12, right? So God, by the time puberty hit, God only knows. I would love to see a similar picture of Nesima, but I’m sure it’s exactly the same, where at 18, he’s bigger than most of us, we’ll get. Probably even with steroids just because of that’s a whole separate issue.

Why people, some people do and do not respond to steroids. So yeah, the people like, and again, I get what the folks who are using this argument are trying to say, but to somehow go they said they were clean and take that at face value. Knowing what we know is extremely either naive or desperate.

And again, I’m not saying all these athletes use, except that all these athletes use. Cause it’s just the reality of high level sport. It just is. Cause the guys that aren’t that big out of high school don’t play collegiate football. They just don’t. They don’t get there. There’s so much competition. I said, they’re using it at the high school level.

We know this factually. Not all of them. But as a tangent, people often ask me, Do you think that there are Olympic athletes who don’t use steroids? To which I say, yes, someone has to come in last. 

Mike: I make the same joke. I’m like, 

Lyle: but it’s not a joke. There are, there’s somebody who’s got to lose.

And that’s just the reality of it. 

Mike: Similar with natural bodybuilding. I asked Oh, do you think so and so is natural? I’ll say look at them stage ready. If they look good, but not that good, they look small. They don’t look, they don’t have the separation and the fullness. They just look good.

Then that’s a thumbs up. That means that there’s a fair chance, compare them next to people who are competing in untested and they look like shit. Yeah. Then now you’re getting into the realm of natural. 

Lyle: Yes, exactly. And this is, it’ll sound like that cop out, right? Oh, if. What’s the old joke?

How do you know if someone’s on steroids? They’re bigger than me, right? That’s the old joke. And yes, this stuff got taken to an extreme where, oh, anybody above that must, and clearly that’s not true. There are, like I said, I believe that the, I believe Josh Gilliam is natural because at 12, he certainly wasn’t using, but he’s bigger than you are now.

Deal with it. I believe that the other people on this list who, so many of whom that I know, I believe that they are natural. They get above 25 because they started big and their genetic. Elite specimens who have trained, do not get me wrong, they trained their asses off for five years. I believe Nassima Inyang is natural because, and I had, I found a paper, it’s in my article that I can’t find, that did show that there was on average a one point that blacks had an average FFMI that was one point higher than Caucasians.

And if you start looking at these numbers, that’s where they fall. It’s, if you look at them, it’s okay, yeah. The biggest Caucasian athletes, it’s about one point lower. Like I said, Gilliam and Yang are just freaks. They are freak outliers. I know within this list, there were a couple of other bodybuilders that 

Mike: were 

Lyle: African American.

Mike: Anybody who’s spent enough time in the gym knows that too, that the generally speaking, the jacked black dudes are just more jacked than the jacked white dudes. It is what it is. 

Lyle: Oh, let’s see. Yeah, I think I even look at least this is all I’m not going to bother with this. Oh, no, here’s what it was. So when I looked at these numbers, the first two bodybuilders who cleared 25 were both Caucasian.

First two were 25. 3, 25. 4. Next two were 26. 2, 26. 5. They were both black and they were about one point higher. And then Josh Gilliam and Nesimia and Yang throw the curve because they’re both at 29. 7 because they’re freak shows. And they train their nuts off, but they are the exceptions to the exceptions. Another example that’s been held up and I referenced for the same reason, and this is, I think, I don’t know if I brought this up yet in the actual recorded bit, we talked about this in the pregame is if I were to tell you factually, did I already give the sprinter example, the a hundred meter thing?

Am I losing my mind? I’m old. Don’t know. I’ll just briefly. Let’s just 

Mike: do it again. Yeah. 

Lyle: Only like a hundred sprinters have ever gone below 10 seconds of the hundred meter. 

Mike: Oh yeah. You did. You did. You did mention this. Yep. 

Lyle: And so if I said there is a limit beyond which you will never get, nobody would blink.

And yet somehow, and the exceptions of some interest, there’s one exception, that French guy whose name I forget different issue. 99. 9 percent of the ones who’ve gone sub a hundred. They were all black with the one exception. And that’s just a trend. He’s gone 9. 99 or something. He is four tenths of a second behind Usain Bolt, which is another area code in the hunt.

Every single Olympian, every gold medalist, every world record holder, they are all black. Of Jamaican descent from the same town. This is not a joke, right? Something about this one town, just like all, just like the guy who just broke the two hour running, like all Kenyans, Africans of East African descent.

It’s Kenyans and there’s one other group that’s doing okay, right? They are all Africans of Jamaican descent from the same town. It’s genetic. Again, they work their asses off. 

Mike: They need to keep those genes alive. They need to go back and reproduce there. Don’t muddy their superior running genes with us shitty white genes.

Lyle: I’m not touching that. 

Mike: No, you guys preserve what you’ve got. Us slow white people are going to fuck it up. 

Lyle: Which isn’t to say that every person from that town is a sprinter, right? That’s where the dumb argument gets reversed. Oh, if all sprinters are Blacks from this town, aren’t all Blacks fast?

No, of course not. We are looking at the 1 percent that has the genetics, the training, the exposure, the coaching, the et cetera, et cetera, right? It’s just without that, You’re never, and again, I’ve gotten into this argument, people who don’t want to believe that there’s a genetic or an ethnic basis, go to the high school level, you will see white track sprinters doing all right, depending on who their competition is.

Go to the collegiate level. Every top white high school sprinter in the 200, they’re done. I don’t give a damn how hard they work. I don’t give a damn how hard they train. They are getting blown off the track. Go to the Olympics, go to the Olympic final. The number of white athletes you can count on the line will be zero.

And the funniest argument I ever heard against this was by someone who’s, I won’t even get into it in detail. He goes not at the European championships. No shit, dude. I’m sorry. Cause there aren’t black athletes in Bulgaria. Spare me this utterly moronic argument. It’s the same reason Americans, because they couldn’t win in the marathon, started holding American only marathons, because that’s the only way they could win.

The only way they could win was by not letting the Kenyans run. And that’s the argument he was making. Yeah, spare me. Just, oh, for God’s sake. Anyway, so we’ve gotten off topic. So yeah, do some people make it past? Sure. The top elite naturals. Athletes that I will generally say are probably not natural because of what we know about elite sport, and even then only a percentage of them makes it.

Only 10 of a hundred in the one study, only 25 percent of a hundred in the other study. This is not compelling evidence. Yes, it goes the argument. Some people can make it. I’m not going to debate that. I’m going to debate that the majority never will, period. And I don’t, you’re not going to disagree.

They’ll continue to disagree. And in which case, fine. Why aren’t they? Just why aren’t they? Is it because Paul Carter says, cause they don’t train hard enough and they do? I A F Y M. That’s his argument, which is hilarious. If I asked him, yeah, the reason naturals aren’t as big as pros is because they practice if it fits your macros.

Okay. To which I asked him, then why are you on hormone replacement? Why don’t you just train hard and eat clean? Whatever. It’s something, I don’t know what it is, but this industry, yeah, it’s a whole lot of something. So yeah. So again, 

Mike: and then bring that around then to somebody again, who is scrolling around Instagram, keep that in mind.

When you see a lot of guys on Instagram who are jacked, who’s normalized FMI’s would be North of 25 or North of 25. And really what you have to realize is you’re either looking at a super freak genetic outlier. Or you’re looking at steroid use. And by the nature of super freak genetic outliers, when you can just go from one to another on Instagram, that should tell you something.

And you can’t just say that, Oh yeah all of the top genetics just somehow found their way into weightlifting and then found their way onto Instagram and are popular. Is it that, or is it steroid? 

Lyle: And I would even say we’re also dealing with a weird selection pressure, right?

Like this industry is basically predicated on you have a career if you’re. Buff and jacked as a dude and know how to pose that booty if you’re a female. And I’m still, since I do Instagram, I’m still my long term plan is I want to be a a big booty Instagram model. That’s currently my, I’m working on it.

Mike: You have to transition first. First, you have to. 

Lyle: My low back doesn’t arch like that and I’m going to need a whole lot of electrolysis, but moving on. So this industry has always been predicated on that as a primary goal, so I do think there’s a selection pressure. I think there’s an inherent aspect that the people who are going to either be drawn to the business end of this or be successful in their career, almost by definition, have to be those genetic outliers.

Now, again, are there, sure, there’s going to be some guy who’s going to send you and me both a pissy email. Go, this is what I looked like in high school, and I busted my, and that’s great. And I’m so happy for you. And that’s just skippy as all hell. I don’t care. Because this industry loves to focus on the exceptions.

How come all the biggest guys do one body part per workout and do 30 sets? I don’t know. Why do all the smallest guys do the same thing? Don’t tell me I don’t care about the one it works for. I care about the 999 that it doesn’t. It’s like contest dieting. Everyone holds up contest lean athletes.

This is proof of concept that the diet, that’s how you should diet. Great. Let’s talk about everybody who didn’t make it to stage. Let’s talk about the 98 percent who cracked, who ended up with an eating disorder, who binged, who fell off. It’s like Bulgarian powerlifting. People love, oh, that’s the way you should train because Bulgarians win the Olympic gold medals.

They break 65 out of 66 athletes doing it. I don’t care about the exception. I care about what’s going to apply to the grand majority of trainees. And the grand majority probably won’t even get close to the limit. If they get above it, it’s only going to be by a little and only because they started big naturally.

But the people who by definition are in that category are the ones you’re going to see on Instagram because they’re successful because they’re successful and it’s a very circular thing, they’re big and lean because they have the genetics and again, they trained hard and the whatever to get big and lean, and then they’re held up as, Oh, see, there’s lots of people.

Doing this, who exceed that limit, right? Cause the people who don’t have Instagram accounts, right? They’re not going to do it. They’re not going to go on Instagram and do shirtless poses. 

Mike: I still do it now. And again, with my measly 23, 

Lyle: which again is still big. And that’s the other thing, right? People have gotten this.

Oh my God. If you go cap math it out for your height at what a 23 fat free mass index would put you at lean, it’s going to be decently big, right? It’s not, but again, we get into this issue there of God, compared to pros, I’m positively tiny. Yes, because they’ve got a hundred pounds. The guys now are 320 ripped.

They make Arnold look small. Lou Ferrigno competed at 270. He was a giant. He was huge. And it was funny, he retired. And then when he came back, when there were way more and newer and better drugs around, Suddenly he was competing about 30 pounds heavier than he had when he competed against Arnold.

I guess he did one of those collegiate football weight training programs. 

Mike: Advanced training and nutrition techniques. 

Lyle: He probably did drop sets or something. I’m sure he did. Or maybe he used bands. And chains maybe that was the secret overload, eccentrics or flywheel 

Mike: train. And he also, he cycled his carbs too.

Lyle: He probably did intermittent fasting with an eating window. Cause that’s totally anyway. We’re yeah. So stop it. We can stop being snarky. So I guess that hopefully I think we’ve beaten that into the ground. Is it a hard limit? No. Is it a practical limit? I personally think so. Do the people who get past it, they’re either the 1 percent outliers or they’re.

Using and saying they’re not, which I think brings us into maybe the fake natty part of this. 

Mike: And so that’s, of course, why this has really even become mainstream ish I guess in certain circles of the internet is so and so natty or not. Okay, so we’ve talked a lot about FFMI and how it relates to muscularity.

And so I think it’s fair to say that if their normalized FFMI is 25 or above, It’s a red flag. It doesn’t necessarily mean automatically on steroids, but it means that the likelihood of steroid use has just gone way up. Would you agree? 

Lyle: Yes. And that’s it. Like I do think what happened and we got very absolutist about it.

So if you’re above 25, that’s how my you’re on because of the Pope study, which had severe limitations. So it’s not an absolute. There are guys, again, I firmly believe are provably natural that exceed it, who are the top 1%. And the majority, I would say, like you said, it will statistically indicate a greater or a great likelihood.

But this is the case, is it going to absolutely, and that’s what it became. It became a, I’m going to throw someone under the bus, someone who says they’re natural because they’re above 25 and by depth, no, I disagree with that. We are talking about statistics and statistics never represent the individual, but they are more likely than not in most cases to probably, be using something.

And it’s interesting, right? I think we get into some gray areas of, are SARMs considered natty? I think some people hell, in the drug subculture, I’ve heard people go, the body makes testosterone, it’s natural. I know guys that think they’re clean if they’re only taking a gram a week, which is hilarious.

That’s where it’s gotten in the powerlifting subculture. If you only take a gram a week, you’re clean because that’s baby dose, right? That’s, there’s a guy who passed away last year and I don’t, I, I’m not trying to speak ill of the dead, but they calculated out his testosterone and what his weekly, he was taking 12 to 13 grams of testosterone.

Oh my 

Mike: god, I’ve never even heard of that as a dose. I’m not, I haven’t looked deeply into drug use in, but I was always under the impression. It was in the range of like sub 10 grams when you include other drugs as well. 

Lyle: And that’s pot like, I don’t know if they said that, but his testosterone level was 25, 000 nanograms per deciliter.

Mike: For people listening, just to understand that your average dude walking around, it’s probably five or 600. And if he’s older, it’s probably three or 400. 

Lyle: Yeah. The high normal is 1100. 

Mike: But it’s hard to find though. You’d be hard pressed to find. It’s out there for sure, but your average dude wishes he had that high of a testosterone level.

Lyle: And I dare say, the naturals who are getting past 25, I guarantee you they’re in that upper range. There’s something, I’m sure you’re familiar with Jacob Wilson’s amazing studies and by amazing I mean they get results that are completely impossible. 

Mike: Like HMB is better than steroids, did you know that?

HMB 

Lyle: fatty acid puts on more muscle than D ball. But if you actually look, the subjects in his group seem to have been fairly carefully selected because the average testosterone level’s there, like a thousand. He’s picking high responders. And I guarantee you the guys are at the top have high testosterone after they hit puberty, right?

That’s the big part of this when you hit puberty and your testosterone is a thousand Naturally the amount of muscle mass you’re gonna put on even without training is going to be high and you’re going to be primed When you add training in to just grow like crazy 

Mike: You also, you have an advantage just starting with more muscle, as you’ve said, because you only have so much muscle you can gain and you’re just going to, that’s one of the reasons why guys can gain a lot more muscle than women, right?

Cause we’re just bigger and we start with more muscle. 

Lyle: Oh, careful. It’s all social constructs. Don’t go down that road. There’s actually an utterly stupid, I’ve read a couple of places and I’m not getting into it. Someone wrote, suppose it’s smart guy researcher, testosterone is so important for building muscle.

How do women build muscle without it? Which is just some of the dumbest shit I’ve ever heard. He’s thinking in absolute terms. Since women are only 70 and men are 600 yeah. Is it not possible that women’s bodies respond differently to lower levels? Cause if you double a woman’s testosterone with PCOS, she has more muscle.

If you give women even low doses of testosterone, so they just came out, they gain muscle mass. People want to dismiss the testosterone on women for a bunch of political sports reasons that I definitely don’t want to touch. Yes, but that is the primary difference. Why, when you hit puberty, and this is why it’s so funny that people dismiss it, at puberty, what’s the big difference in hormones?

Men’s testosterone goes up. Women’s estrogen and progesterone goes up. Men gain muscle. Women gain body fat. Done. That’s it. That’s all there is to it. When men’s testosterone hits at puberty, they lose body fat and they gain a ton of muscle. Guys that are higher will not only end up higher after puberty, but will have more potential to gain when they train.

Mike: And something else just to mention about estrogen is estrogen also enhances muscle gain as well. So women have I don’t want to get us completely off track, but that’s an area that you definitely know. I had written an article sometime ago on female muscle gain and was going into this, why women can actually gain muscle fairly well.

It’s just, they start out with a lot less and they are never gonna be able to gain as much as guys. And I was talking about this hormonal aspect that yes, having lower testosterone is theoretically a disadvantage, but The female physiology, it’s not that simple. It also has some advantages as well. 

Lyle: And when you look at it again, without getting them, we’ll get right back to the topic is if you wait, train men and women, beginner men and women, they will gain roughly the same.

They’ll make the same percentage gains in both muscle mass and strength percentage. The difference being that. A woman is starting with about half as much muscle or less. So they will both gain 5%. It’s just, or strength is a little bit easier, right? If a woman is benching 40 and a man is benching 180, they both gain 5%.

The woman gains two and the man gained nine. Because they’re starting at a higher, so like the relative gains tend to be fairly similar, but then you start looking at like the average muscular levels in especially like natural female bodybuilders. If they come in, in contest lean, they’re like 116, right?

Pro female, like Guarantee was using, she’s 145. So already, With drugs, a woman might get to 20 pounds less than like the average male natural at 165 in contest shape. The average female natural, it’s going to be 40 pounds less because her testosterone levels are 1 10th to 1 30th of time. 

Mike: Probably a bit shorter though, too, as well, right?

Lyle: Oh, yeah. Yeah. And that’s why it’s more useful to look at it relative to height and stuff. And we, that’s a whole separate topic. So back to the natty or not thing. 

Mike: So I, just to throw out a couple other things, just for people wondering again okay, so these people I follow, how many of the, some of these super jacked guys likely on drugs or not.

So we’ve talked about the FFMI and we can, in the spirit of I think we’re too long for brevity, but we don’t have to go another hour on these points, but I just wanted to throw them out there and just get your thoughts on okay, so for me, by my lights, you have the muscularity for sure. And then you have strength as well.

So if you have, some dude with a normalized FFMI of let’s say it’s 26 or 27, and he’s benching over 400, he’s squatting over 500, he’s pulling over 600. That’s another thing where I’m like, okay, that. To me says likelihood of steroid use has just gone up. And then there’s leanness with the other big things.

So if they’re very lean and also if they generally stay lean. So if you go look through their feed and their version of oh, I’ve been bulking is like 10 percent body fat. And otherwise they just hang out year round at seven or 8 percent or even nine where they just, they have vascularity everywhere.

And they look like they’re a few months, a couple months out from just stepping on stage at that point is where I go. All right. If I had to put money, it’s steroids at 10, 000. Okay. God, tell me. 

Lyle: Yeah. If you were a betting man and that’s the thing, you will find the exceptions and in this vein, right?

I had a training partner in my twenties. He is a beast, right? He had trained since he was in high school. And actually here, as a super just random different note, there seems to be people that train in high school during puberty, right? During that for pre brutal development, they I think a lot of them, whether genetic or not, they seem to not only gain a lot of muscle, but just keep it right.

You want to see big, strong dude, find a kid who worked on a farm, bailing hay when they were in high school. These guys are monsters. 

Mike: I’m having deja vu right now. I was just talking recently. Who was I talking to about exactly this point? 

Lyle: Corvallis, Oregon, a truly nowhere little town. And there were a bunch of guys at her gym that had grown up on the farm, bailing hay, and they could just deadlift the world, because once you’ve dealt with bailing hay.

or like a cow that doesn’t want to be picked up, picking a bar up off the floor is easy. But not only that, not only do they seem to gain a lot of muscle during puberty, they never lose it, right? It’s not like training induced gains, where you train and train, and if you take a bunch of time off, you lose a lot of it.

The hypothesize they speculate, is there’s something going on that we know that The teenage body is very plastic and malleable, and there’s a lot of epigenetic programming and all this other boring scientific stuff that I think something happens when you train during that time period that you’re going to get results that won’t occur as an adult to the same degree, because you are basically just you’re leveraging a steroid cycle.

I know there’s athlete or there’s coaches. That feel the top level athletes, if they didn’t train through their high school years, they can never reach the top. And I don’t think that’s necessarily true, but there is something, there’s an extra set of gains you get when you train through high school. So any of my training partner, he did that.

His dad trained he and his brother from the time he was 15. When I met him, he was in his late twenties. He is a beast, right? He was in off season. He was 5’5 about 220. He was built like a fireplug, right? He would compete at 195. Like in NBC, he was natural, but because he had good levers and it’s funny, you mentioned those numbers, right?

His best, I saw him squat 315 for 20 and he did 400 for at least five. He pulled 500. His bench was only 315 wonky shoulders. He could incline 275 for fives. He dumbbell bench press with 120 in each hand, which man, that was a pain in the ass handing those things off to him. 

Mike: I’ve almost got there. I did 115 for 20.

Sets of four. 

Lyle: The hard part is just getting started, right? 

Mike: You have to get him onto your, I got him onto my, so I like deadlift him up onto my knees and then kick him one, 

Lyle: what we had to do, he would put one on his thigh and I would pick up the other one by the ends. And as he kicked up, I would hand the other weight into his hand so he could get a bounce and go to the top.

It was terrifying, right? To do this with one twenties up. 

Mike: I just started at the bottom and ate that first rep basically. 

Lyle: Yeah, basically it just exactly. And that’s it. He wasn’t getting any bigger. He would die it down to one 95, but again, at five, five, he trained all through high school. He had good genetics and he was never getting any bigger.

He was just. The only way that he could be any better on stage was just dieting more effectively. But yeah, so like you see those guys like that’s, that ends up being a top limit and that in strength, right? Cause again, guys will go, man, only bench 405. And they’re like, there’s guys benching a thousand.

In goofy federations that passed ridiculous lifts, they’re 350 pounds and somehow still relatively lean. I think they’ve got an advantage that you don’t, right? Or, an example I use in a recent paper, recent article I wrote, which had to do with gaining strength over time in terms of how that developed muscle mass.

And it’s like Benedict. Benny Magnusson? Is that his name? He’s the freak deadlifter. 

Mike: It’s not. No. I’m thinking of a different guy. Go ahead. I was thinking of a Sigmarsson. 

Lyle: Yeah. No, this was Benny. I don’t think he competes anymore as Norwegian dude. His first day in the gym, he pulled 405. 

Mike: I know a guy like that.

Actually, no, I know he’s a friend of a friend, but my friend was there to see it. That was literally his first deadlift ever was 405 with janky form, but it doesn’t matter. He picked the weight up. 

Lyle: Yes. And years later, Benny did 900. He doubled his strength and like even Cone, like the first time he lifted, he pulled some ridiculous amount of weight.

Like his first competition, he’s I just maxed every day. He’s in high school, maxed every day for two years. My first meet at 16, 140 pounds. I squatted 400 or something just depressingly ridiculous. And it’s yeah. And a decade later, he weighed 220 and he squatted over a thousand. We know they all used.

That’s not a criticism. The greatest of all time, but this is like the reality we need to face, right? There’s an old set of numbers, old hard gainer crew, that if you did a legitimate 300 pound bench, 400 pound squat, 500 pound deadlift, all right, I’m American. 315, 405, 495, because those are three wheels. 405 is four wheels, and 495 is five wheels.

Tacking that two and a half on, I get it. Those were held up as good, natural goals for someone who is six foot tall and like 180. And people will just, ugh, it’s such a limitation, like no, he’s not holding that up as an upper limit, he’s holding that up as a goal. Because if you get there as a natural, You will probably, you’ve got as big as you’re gonna be, and you’ll go what, but these top power, I don’t give a shit about these, these 300 pound, go into your gym.

Today, ask yourself, how many legitimate 315 benches have you seen? By that a controlled descent, at least a brief pause on the chest, not a bounce, hips down, no bridging, no spotting. Tell me, how many legitimate 405 squats, by that controlled descent to below parallel, I’ve seen a lot of 405 quarter squats, how many legitimate 405 pound deadlifts have you seen by someone weighing 180?

Probably zero. Gym 

Mike: squat, right? 

Lyle: Yeah. Four or five squat, and then 500 pound deadlift. We’ll call it four ninety five. How many? 4 95 legitimately good deadlifts like in the deadlift, I realize you can get away more slop, but how many legitimate 500 pound deadlifts have you seen in the average commercial gym by someone weigh?

Yeah, there’s a 200. 80 pound dude who can do it. How many? And the answer is generally zero. So if you as a natural were to get to those numbers, you’ll be right on the edge. I wouldn’t call that, say, yes, automatically. You’re using that as impressive and you probably trained your Or you have really good levers, right?

Because the average, quote unquote, hard gainer typically doesn’t have good levers. Somebody would go, Oh, I know a guy who weighs 150 and he benches all this. I’m like his arms are 6 inches long and he’s got a barrel chest and he’s, there’s videos of Chinese women who were benching 500 in a shirt and their range of motion is an inch and a half.

I’m like, you know what I’m talking about. So stop making stupid arguments. Not you, but the people who try to make those kinds of things. I’m like, we’re talking about outlier freaks with great levers. 

Mike: For anybody wondering, just so I, my best numbers. Now, to be fair, I didn’t explicitly train to try to max those key lifts out.

I was still doing a good amount of volume on bench squat and deadlift every week. And the best numbers that I got to were. For about 295 for, I think it was two on bench and 365 for about three on squat. And my deadlift wasn’t as it was maybe four 35 for two. Now I know that I could have gone further.

The reason why at that point I was like, I think I was lean bulking for a bit at that point. I was like, I think I’m just going to cut and I’ll do some photo shoot stuff or whatever because I started to get joint pain. So like my knee was starting to bother me. And my neck was getting pretty tight during pressure.

There were just things that even my SI joint got pissed off dead lifting. And at that point, I just, it became a matter of like risk and reward where I was like, I think physically I could go a bit further. I wanted to get to the three, four, five. That’s what I wanted to do. But I called it off for those reasons.

And. I felt like it was the right decision at the time. 

Lyle: Yeah. And and there it is, you would be presumably there’s a practice effect to get that big one around, but you were in range, right? With probably with six to eight weeks of pure powerlifting training. Yeah. You would have made those numbers and yeah, that’s pretty damn good.

Go look at some of those elite strength numbers and it’s yeah, one and a half body weight bench, double body weight bench is huge for most people, Double body weight squat, two and a half body weight deadlift. And you’re right up there now. But if you see that guy and he’s ah, I’m 180 and I have a 500 pound squat and he doesn’t have superior levers that might raise red flags for me.

Am I saying in absolute terms? Absolutely not. You can go to powerlifting contests and see that. But again, if you look at the average numbers. The outliers are only that. The guys who win are the guys who win because they have the exact combination of genetics, levers, technique, training, drive, et cetera.

And if you look at everything below the top 10, suddenly you get a check of okay, I’m going to win. This is what average people are lifting. 

Mike: And one other thing just to look for that, I think another red flag is when people who have a lot of training experience suddenly get a lot stronger or suddenly gain quite a bit more muscle, but that when you see less, what you see more often is suddenly adding, 30 pounds to a big lift in, I don’t know, three to six months or something like that with a legitimate training age of, maybe seven years.

And you’re like please explain, did you work on your form a little bit there or? 

Lyle: No, they got on one of those collegiate weight training programs. Come on. 

Mike: That D was lifted. By 

Lyle: which I mean, yes, by which I mean they went on the collegiate drug program. Let’s just, there’s someone in the industry and I’m not going, this was years and years ago who I will not name in this case because it’s not worth it.

And they were prepping for a contest and they hit a wall. And they were, I don’t know, 10 percent body fat. And they said, I decided to go see, one of the top contest prep gurus. For those that are not involved in bodybuilding, contest prep guru is like cycling guru. It means drug coach. All right.

Now, and he told me, it’s like, this guy was amazing. Two weeks later, I dropped 4 percent body fat. Oh, you must’ve cycled your carbs. Clearly you switch out your fish for chicken. Did you change your carbohydrate sources? Cause clearly that’s what did it and not adding Klenin thyroid. Just don’t, right?

Just don’t even try to pretend that this is not what happens because nobody does that. It’s, there’s another individual who I’m also not going to name. Who makes some astounding claims. Shit, Poliquin was one of them, right? His numbers were ridiculous. He was like, Oh, I took, once wrote that he took the aluminum fillings out of someone’s teeth and they gained 23 pounds of lean body mass in a month.

Not a type, I’m 10. 

Mike: I love that. That’s so Poliquin. Oh my. 

Lyle: And I maintain that Poliquin’s decimal key was broken. Cause if you take all of his numbers, the 30 grams of fish oils, the 25 pounds that people gained in a month and divide by 10, they’re actually right. That’s my belief, because I can come up with no other explanation other than he was just a consummate pathological liar and con man.

Anyway, this other individual claims these amazing transformational results, perfect recomposition, losing 20 pounds without a change in body weight, and I’m like, okay. Either this is the greatest coach who’s ever lived in the history of ever, or I don’t necessarily think they’re a drug coach, or they’re just completely full of shit.

It was like Jacob Wilson’s numbers. And I think what you end up seeing is some weird, because what Wilson would do is he would Carb deplete and dehydrate, you do this weird cyclical ketogenic diets and he would make sure and measure a lean body mass at dissimilar situations to go, Oh yeah, they gained eight pounds of lean body mass in three days.

Why? The two week overreaching cycle? Please, just don’t even pretend. Anyway, to your point, yes, when someone who’s been training for a decade suddenly adds 50 pounds to their squat in six weeks and gains 10 pounds of lean body mass I, I guess I’m going to have to buy the book they’re going to write.

On what they did, because I’d be really curious to know what the magic training program is that, because it just doesn’t work that way. And if you talk to the guys in the industry who are provably natural, who do contest prep, they’re like, yeah, I diet for six is even the same thing, right? Back in the day, you died for 12 weeks for show.

This was at the pro level because they starting at 10 to 12 percent and with enough drugs, you can do it. And naturals try that and never make it or they lose too much muscle. Naturals now diet for at least six months and do a show because they are trying to lose maybe, 0. 5 to 0. 75 percent weight per week.

It’s like men, a pound, maybe a pound and a half early on. If they’re bigger pound women, quarter to a half pound a week. So when some guys like, yeah, I lost 4 percent body fat in two weeks. Yeah, I don’t think that was by skipping breakfast. 

Mike: Maybe it was a breakfast of champions. 

Lyle: So yeah, so I agree with that’s another big sign when somebody just starts making, those incrementally, you see the people who are grinding along, cause yeah, these big naturals who are still grinding at it and they’re like, yeah, I trained for six months to gain this potentially measurable pound. I’ll believe that. 

Mike: I 

Lyle: don’t 

Mike: know if, 

Basically it’s I think I made progress. I can’t really prove it to you, but I think I did. 

Lyle: Sure. Cause at that point you can’t even, it’s noise at that point.

You can’t even, Oh my tape measure on my biceps went up by 1 16th of an inch. Okay. Or whatever it is. I’m not trying to dismiss that even if they are making those, that progress over six months. BFD. I got better things to do with my life, presumably. Same thing with powerlifters, right?

If you see someone who is grinding for four months to put the next two and a half kilos on their bench, I will believe that’s being done naturally because that’s realistic. That’s a realistic rate of gain. Okay, if they’ve been training that long or at a high level and suddenly they ten kilos from me to me, either they got a really good new shirt.

Which is always a possibility. There wasn’t an old, somebody said, if you want to get your bench numbers up, just buy a tighter shirt. I think that’s pretty much what it came down to for a while. Which there’s truth to. And or there’s something, it wasn’t because they incorporated bands and chains or compensatory acceleration at that level.

There was something, and same thing in muscle gain. It just doesn’t work that way. It’d be lovely if it did, but like we talked about starting, we’ll wrap it up, you put in your five years of consistent training, it’s about as big as you’re going to get. If you started big, you’re going to end big.

If you didn’t, you’re not. And I wish it weren’t the case. Dan Duchesne once famously said, with the new supplements and nutritional strategies, naturals will eventually surpass drug using bodybuilders. Now, I love Dan. I miss Dan. He’s one of the most creative people and most interesting people I’ve ever known.

But that was so laughably wrong as to hurt. He was thinking that creatine and HMB was going to be the great equalizer. But he realized this was back in the 90s. 

Mike: Was he a friend of Bill Phillips? Like, why would Do you have a stake in a EAS or what’s going on? 

Lyle: He did not. He wrote for muscle media, which was bill Phillips magazine.

But no, I think he truly believed it. I think he truly legitimately believe drugs cover up a lot of mistakes and they did a lot of dumb things nutritionally and he had better nutritional strategies and supplements seemed to be really interesting, but. It was still a pipe dream. Nothing beats 600 milligrams per week.

And certainly nothing beats 12 grams of testosterone per week, right? People thought I was kidding when I wrote in an article, 

Mike: just what would that even be like? We can, my best. Guess as to what it would feel like to be on a TRT level is if I can think back to when I was a teenager. Okay.

That’s what it’s like to be on a lower level of anabolics. What would it even be like to take that much? You’d have to have lost your mind and transcended into another realm or something. 

Lyle: Yeah, I can’t, I truly can’t imagine there’s, I’m trying to find somebody posted a case study in my group and like any, case studies are what they are.

And they worked it out, and the guy, seriously, he was taking, oh, here we go. During the peak of his cycle, he injected 60 milliliters of anabolic steroids per week, which is about 15, 000 milligrams of testosterone equivalents. As it’s steroids or not, I know enough about steroids to be dangerous. 60 milliliters of oil.

A one milliliter needle that’s a lot of 60 per week. 15 grams of testosterone equivalents. Anabolics, he’s currently using growth hormone clenbuterol, T three Tamoxifen, two estrogen blockers, well as protein vitamin mineral supplementations and I’m sure they spontaneous hemorrhage of his lip. I’m sure they blame the protein somehow.

But yeah, 60 milliliters of te, I can’t, what is steroids? A hundred milligrams per milliliter. So to take 13 grams, that’s 13 milliliters. Of injection, this guy’s taking 60. Okay. I just can’t even, I can’t even fathom it. I don’t think anybody else who even knows about steroids can fathom it either. But yeah, that’s that’s the numbers we’re looking at.

Somebody thought I was joking. I wrote an article once the 600 milligram thing. And I’m like, that’s a baby dose. I go, you’ve got pros who are taking a gram a day. And they thought I was kidding. And then this case study came out okay, maybe not. Maybe there are guys taking 12 grams a week. I’m like, I wasn’t digging a dry well, but even at the lowest levels, right?

That 600 milligrams study, the basin study in 20 weeks, those guys put on 10 kilos of lean body mass. No, some of it was probably water, but they measured a lot of it was muscle. They gained 20 pounds in 20 weeks. With 600 milligrams in the simplest, stupidest training program you’ve ever seen. That’s a year’s worth of work for a beginner.

Mike: Was that the paper where the testosterone only group gained more muscle than the natural training group? 

Lyle: That was a different study. They did a different one where they compared. Steroids only to training only to steroids plus training. And the steroid group gained more than the training group and the steroid plus training group gained about basically if you added them together, it was like four pounds for steroids, three pounds for training, seven pounds if you did both.

So basically drugs beat training. And that’s what you have to keep when you start looking at this and go, okay, you’ve got these handful of top naturals that barely get across it. You’ve got these guys that, Are way past it. And unless they’re just a genetic freak show, Statistically, they’re going to be on drugs.

And none of this changes the fact that 99 percent of people training will never get past it or even get close to it. And that’s fine, but they need to come to terms with it. 

Mike: Awesome. This was great. I really appreciate it. Let’s wrap up with what’s new in your world and let everybody know where they can find you.

But do you have a new project that you’re working on? Anything that you want to tell people about? 

Lyle: The website, bodyrecomposition. com, my store. bodyrecomposition. com, my Facebook group, which is where I am most of the time. My forums are currently dead and will probably stay dead because the two posts a day weren’t worth keeping them up.

About a month ago, I released a little booklet on birth control and athletic performance, just trying to get something. I should be working on volume two of the women’s book, but it’s just an overwhelming. Concept to even consider. So I’ve got that little booklet. It’s a very common question. I’m half editing.

So back before the women’s book came about, I decided to update one of my older books because someone had ripped it off and plagiarized it, which just pissed me off and I ended up writing about 400 pages on just like this tome on fat loss and then that led into the women’s book and I got sidetracked for three and a half years.

So I’m working on that a little bit cause it’s way easier to edit stuff that’s already written. We’ll see if anything comes of it. People have been telling me I need to write something about training, but there’s already so much out there. And I don’t know, I’m just if folks haven’t seen, I’ve started doing some like little shorter video pieces on my website and YouTube.

Like I said, it’s all leading up to being an Instagram big booty model. That’s really been my dream from the start. So I’m working towards that. But yeah, 

Mike: we’ll 

Lyle: see. You got to have them right. And you got to go where the money is. And that’s, Instagram apparently is where everybody, all the cool kids hang out now.

Facebook, isn’t really it anymore. So I will never Twitter. 

Mike: Yeah. You gotta get ahead of the curve and get on TikTok. That’s the next one. I 

Lyle: don’t even, I’m old. I barely know what TikTok is. 

Mike: I actually don’t exactly know either. I’m not on it, but it’s apparently it’s where all the kiddos are hanging out these days.

Lyle: I thought it was something, what was the one, was it Snapchat that it was seven seconds long? 

Mike: No, was that Vine? Was that Vine? 

Lyle: Yes, like Vine was a thing for a while and I get the impression TikTok is like Vine, but I don’t know, I’m old. The kids today, they dress funny and they don’t want to work.

Millennials are killing the Facebook industry. I don’t know. Like I’m just an old man yelling at clouds now. 

Mike: Like we were saying before we got on, just watching the world burn. And 

Lyle: I, it was, it happened early for me. I was 25. I drove past my old high school and I was like, you know what these kids today need discipline.

And then I took a step back and went, crap, I’ve become my father. So I went and bought some khaki shorts, got a pair of sandals and black socks, and it’s just been downhill ever since. 

Mike: Embrace it. 

Lyle: Yeah, trust me, you’ll get there. I’m sure you’ve seen The Simpsons with A word. I’m on the way, I’m 

Mike: 35, I have two kids.

Lyle: Whatever, you’re a child. Just wait, there’s an old Simpsons thing, and then I’ll let you go, where Abe Simpson grandpa goes, I used to be with it, and then what it was changed. Don’t worry. It’ll happen to you and it will. I’m okay with it. Yeah. If you haven’t reached the point yet where you just try to listen to pop music and go, this is all crap.

Mike: Oh, I’m already there. I’ve been there for years. It actually is demonstrable trash now. It 

Lyle: is actually scientifically mathematically trash. They’ve shown this, that it is actually objectively worse than previous genres of music. So it’s not just an age thing this time, but have you gotten to the point where you’ve tried to recollect all the music of your high school years?

Yeah. 

Mike: To some degree on Spotify. I haven’t made a playlist for that, but a lot of the stuff that I go back to and listen to regularly is from that period. Yeah, 

Lyle: that’s the next step. You get to the point where all you want is nostalgia, where all you want is the music of your youth and the media of your youth, and you actually, you kids today do have it easier.

So all the stuff I listen to. Was on cassette and most of it is not available online in MP3 or iTunes. So there’s a lot of it that I have been fighting, but yeah, you get to the point where all you want to do is just, I’m enjoying, I’m a kid of the 80s. All these TV shows that are just nothing but 80s references because the people my age are writing the scripts now and I’m seeing it shift already.

I’m seeing the shows that is all 90s references at which point. I’m done. And I’ll just have to keep watching the original Star Wars trilogy and remembering how it used to be. 

Mike: All right, Manuel. I appreciate the time. It’s always entertaining. It’s always informative. And I look forward to the next discussion.

Sounds good. Hey, Mike here. And if you like what I’m doing here on the podcast and elsewhere, and if you want to help me help more people get into the best shape of their lives. Please do consider supporting my sports nutrition company, Legion Athletics, which produces 100 percent natural evidence based health and fitness supplements, including protein powders and protein bars, pre workout and post workout supplements, fat burners, multivitamins, joint support, and more.

More. Head over to www. legionathletics. com now to check it out. And just to show how much I appreciate my podcast peeps, use the coupon code MFL at checkout and you will save 10 percent on your entire order and it’ll ship free if you are a member. Anywhere in the United States. And if you’re not, it’ll ship free.

If your order is over a hundred dollars. So again, if you appreciate my work and if you want to see more of it, please do consider supporting me so I can keep doing what I love, like producing podcasts like this. All right. That’s it for today’s episode. I hope you found it interesting and helpful.

And if you did, and you don’t mind doing me a favor, could you please leave a quick review for the podcast on iTunes or wherever you are listening from? Because those reviews not only convince people that they should check out the show, they also increase the search visibility and Help more people find their way to me and to the podcast and learn how to build their best body ever as well.

And of course, if you want to be notified when the next episode goes live, then simply subscribe to the podcast and whatever app you’re using. To listen and you will not miss out on any of the new stuff that I have coming. And last, if you didn’t like something about the show, then definitely shoot me an email at Mike at muscle for life.

com and share your thoughts. Let me know how you think I could do this better. I read every email myself and I’m always looking for constructive feedback. All right. Thanks again for listening to this episode. And I hope to hear from you soon.