How many coaches are just "MacroFactor Dropshipping"?

I've noticed more than one personal trainer/coach at my gym straight up just walking their client through a workout that they have loaded on their phone with macrofactor, loading tup he exact weights from the app and basically just being a middleman.

Its made me wonder how many coaches out there making a living just copy and pasting the macros or workout generated with MF? Have you witnessed this at your gym?

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u/Far_Line8468 — 24 days ago

"X blew up my Y" No, lifting for a year blew up your Y

"This is me eating 1800 calories. This is me eating 2500 calories *picture of a much better physique*"

"I didn't see any progress until I started doing this exercise"

"I switched to this split and made the best gains in your lift"

You know what ALL of these claims have in common? The person in second half of the claim has been lifting longer than the first half of the claim claim.

Muscle growth is slow. If you aren't a beginner, we're talking 3-7 grams a day. Assuming you aren't just fucking around, the difference between someone who trains optimally and someone who doesn't is probably like an additional gram a day at best, maybe 2.

Here's a fun video .

Magician Derren brown locked a bunch of people in a room. They could only leave when they scored 100 points?

Inside the room, there were a wide variety of objects. As the participants experimented with using the objects (putting them on their head, spinning them, moving them from one place to another, etc) they watched the points go up above the door, and began to figure out exactly what they had to do to score points.

In reality: there was a fishbowl on the other side of the door, and every time the fish swam past a line on the glass, the points went up. But, the participants were convinced that they had discovered rituals that would lead to more points.

The human brain is really good at creating associations, and will fight tooth and nail to validate those associations.

There are absolutely things we know work in the gym. Training close to failure works better than not training close to failure. Training a muscle twice a week is better than training it once. But, as we get more into minutia, the differences are so invisible that you're very likely just associating the passage of time with a deliberately chosen training variable

My hot take: this is responsible for so much of the belief that bulking is necessary for muscle growth. Does having 200 cals extra of carbs help training performance? Sure. But the other difference between a bulk and a cut is bulks are often 2-3x longer than cuts. Of course you gain more muscle during a bulk, you're training for longer!

If a lift does not improve for entire months at all, yeah that's probably a sign you have to fix something, but when it comes to muscle gain, you gotta look over LONG time periods to actually be sure something is working or not.

u/Far_Line8468 — 25 days ago

[WTB] ~20F Down Quilt

Hello,

Looking to get a 20 degree quilt (though I'm a warm sleeper so somewhere in the 20-25 degree rating could be fine.

Regular/Regular size. If a custom size, I'm a thin 5'7" man whose a side sleeper.

Budget is pretty loose, as I'm looking at just getting a new quilt if I can't get something here, so I'm likely in your price range. Prefer a well regarded cottage brand thats with competitive weight (19-22oz)

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u/Far_Line8468 — 28 days ago

If literally all bodyfat measurement tools are wrong, how do we even know what bodyfat %s look like?

This is barely even a bodybuilding question, but its been bugging me

Obviously, electrical impedance/InBody is nonsense on face

Then, theres DEXA

When Jeff Nippard released that video trying to show various bodyfat percentages between men and women using DEXA, many said the video is ridiculous because DEXA has a high margin of error. I see many people online getting told they're like 5% bodyfat, or fooling the machine by drinking a lot of water, etc

Then, theres hydrostatic weighing, which I thought was objectively correct since it just weighs water displacement

Brian Shaw does a video doing hydrostatic weighing, which comes back saying hes 17.6%. Anyone with eyes can tell hes well over 20%, possibly into 30%. What I was unaware of was that you have to blow out all the air you can, which introduces a massive human error.

One of the most annoying trends on instagram is someone making a video saying they are a certain bodyfat, then all the comments being like "no you're actually x%". Then, they all tag one of the many "bodyfat % experts" who make some video saying how their scans are all wrong and they're actually y%

So...if the one and only way to actually measure bodyfat is the autopsy table...how do we even know what bodyfat looks like? Do we actually have a bunch of examples of dead bodies to know just *how* much ab definition a corpse at 15% bodyfat has?

I know its easy to just say "it doesn't matter, do you like what you see?", but if I'm structuring a cut I may want to be able to numerically estimate how much I have to lose to structure the diet.

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u/Far_Line8468 — 1 month ago

Guys on social media are dropping 2-3 pounds a week with seemingly no visible downsides. Has muscle loss on deficits been overstated this whole time?

The disclaimers before I start: Yes I know some of these guys are not natty. Yes I know many of them are probably just retamaxxing and lying about it. I doubt its all of them.

I mostly find short form video fitness culture distasteful but I can't help but notice a trend this summer: guys are doing extremely aggressive cuts, ending at 10% or less bodyfat in like 6 weeks with what seems like no loss in size. I'm talking 1000-1500 calorie deficits.

The conventional logic that has been preached since I started has always been that you aim for 1 pound a week, any faster and you lose your size. The famous Helms metanalysis showed this pretty clearly.

But that study has the typical issue most exercise science studies have: most subjects were older, obese, no control over macros, and don't really train that hard.

The claim these tiktok/insta guys give is as follow: Muscle protein synthesis is signal driven, not energy driven. Your body builds/maintains muscle when it receives a signal from mechanical tension (aka training close to failure with adequate frequency) and has adequate amino acids to do so. Your body burns fat when it lacks the energy to perform the task at hand. It makes no sense that your body would start "switching" to protein breakdown when the deficit is high when there is still perfectly good fat to metabolize. Therefore, as long as you get your 0.8/lb protein and 0.3/lb fats with just enough carbs to maintain performance in the gym, theres no reason not to cut as fast as possible.

Now, some of these guys are taking it to high school cheerleader tiers of eating disorders: literally just getting their minimum fats/proteins on off days and adding like ~40g of carbs on training days, ending up at like 800 cals a day, shredding nearly a pound a day.

And, for those who need science, this study put guys into a *5000 calorie deficit* by making subjects walk 8 hours a day for 4 days. It showed they they indeed were able to burn a full pound of actual adipose tissue every day doing this, which shows your body is capable of metabolizing fat as fat as it needs.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24602091/

For your average person, obviously we need to take adherence into account

But the siren call of "1000 calorie deficit for 8 weeks vs a 500 calorie deficit for 16 weeks" is strong.

If you can handle the hunger and if you can maintain performance in the gym, why shouldn't you cut as fast as you can handle?

u/Far_Line8468 — 1 month ago
▲ 406 r/DMAcademy

Player keeps casting Gentle Repose on random bad guys

The Eldritch knight in my party has been using Gentle Repose on nearly every boss since he learned it for laughs. It’s flavored in my campaign as a sort of cryogenic freeze, turning the corpse crystalline.

What are some things I can do with this?

I thought about there being some “Collector” baddie thats aligned with the BBEG that releases them all from their freeze and turns the endgame into a boss rush, but Im more trying to think of ways to reward him for this behavior.

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u/Far_Line8468 — 2 months ago

I don't know if there was any new research to support an algorithm change, but when I first started using MF during my first cut, 1% bf per week seemed to be its recommended range (as well as the general recommendation coming from people like Jeff, SBS, etc).

That + a year long bulk later, I'm starting my next cut today. When I started the goal on MF, it not only recommended just 0.5 pounds per week, but also put 1% bf per week in its "caution" range. My partner, who is also cutting, got similarly conservative recommendations.

I set it to 1% anyway, since that's what I did before, but I'm wondering if new research has dropped in the past year or so to drive this?

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u/Far_Line8468 — 2 months ago

For reference, most of my understanding of lifting was built during the "Powerbuilding" era of the online fitness space. Basically, before short form video, when people still took Rippetoe and Stronglifts seriously.

Regardless of that, the "basics" seemed simple enough

Eat at a surplus to gain muscle, eat at a deficit to lose fat while doing a moderate amount of volume, and you'll be set. Works well enough for me

Only recently did I look at "fitness instagram" for the first time and nearly every top influencer says that

a: Bulking is vaulted. All you gained was fat because hypotrophy is not energy dependent. Just eat a maintenance, or a small surplus to give you extra carbs to fuel workouts (which of course, would be non-falsifiably similar to if a surplus actually fuel muscle growth itself)

b: Everything passed the second set is junk volume.

c: Volume doesn't actually matter. All studies that demonstrate volume = more gains are actually just swelling, and compensation for poor intensity in the study subjects (which again is mostly non-falsifiable)

And to be clear, this mentality appears to be universal, and said with total confidence.

Now, it doesn't matter for me. I know what works on my body, and stick with it, but I could not imagine being a beginner in this environment where depending on the roll of the algorithmic dice you are given such fundamentally contradictory advice to what another person might get, with both sides saying you won't have any success if you follow the other.

Has the "content" economy just made the entry into this hobby a mental DDoS (with the end result just being peptides)?

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u/Far_Line8468 — 2 months ago