Another Look at the Fat Free Mass Index (FFMI)

[lylemcdonald]

Part 1

[BEATMEOUTTAME]

When I've seen you address this in the past it's always made intuitive sense to me that for all intents and purposes there is a genetic limit for 99.999% of the population and that yes there are a handful of absolute freaks of the freaks who MAY be natural and exceed that...

But for practical sake I'm just going to go through life assuming it's not the guy two stations down from me at the Gold's Gym in Lincoln, Nebraska... and take solace in the fact that I'm right 99.999% of the time. Especially if he's bald, super weird, and has a bumper sticker on his car that says "Natural Bodybuilding".

I grew up in an era where the sports stars of the time were truly larger than life... guys like Bo Jackson... i mean he made every other guy on the field look like a joke... so I'm willing to accept the fact that he was PERHAPS just one of the freaks of the freaks, much like these handful of generational freaks who exceed 25 FFMI...but I'm also willing to accept that Bo Jackson might have been one of the early NFL players who used steroids.

Just like most of the Jose Canseco/Mark McGwire athletes of that time frame that were clearly a cut above turned out to be using..



I don't have much trouble just assuming the really huge guys are on gear. I think it's harder to decipher with some of these guys (especially older guys) who seem to be just absolutely ripped at impossibly low bodyfat levels and stay that way for months on end... they're all over youtube. I mean what do i know maybe they are the types that weigh their bananas each morning, but if they've got a product to sell doesn't it just make more sense for them to be on drugs?

[kc2010]

but if they've got a product to sell doesn't it just make more sense for them to be on drugs?

Perhaps. Also could be that they need to hawk a product line to be able to afford their drugs. Could work out pretty well...buy some juice, start to get jacked, start hawking a product by convincing suckers that you're jacked solely because of said product, recycle profits into more juice, get even more jacked, sell even more products (or expand your line!) by swindling more folks, and so on and so forth.

[lylemcdonald]

Originally Posted by kc2010

Perhaps. Also could be that they need to hawk a product line to be able to afford their drugs. Could work out pretty well...buy some juice, start to get jacked, start hawking a product by convincing suckers that you're jacked solely because of said product, recycle profits into more juice, get even more jacked, sell even more products (or expand your line!) by swindling more folks, and so on and so forth.

The entire industry has been based on smoke and mirrors from the get go.

Some big huge jacked pro is in an ad "This supplement helped me get big"

Pro has been huge for 5-10 years. Supplement is just released.

It's all selling lies to the gullible and has been for decades.

but supplement endorsement money is easier than taking naked showers for politicians to get your drug money.

[kc2010]

The entire industry has been based on smoke and mirrors from the get go.

Some big huge jacked pro is in an ad "This supplement helped me get big"

Pro has been huge for 5-10 years. Supplement is just released.

It's all selling lies to the gullible and has been for decades.

but supplement endorsement money is easier than taking naked showers for politicians to get your drug money.

In retrospect, my friends and I were to be counted amongst the gullible back in high school, circa 1990. Back then all we knew was what we read in the popular muscle mags of the time. Seem to recall Muscle & Fitness as one of the main offenders. Thankfully for us at the time, none of us had any real money to be able to waste on the popular 'supplements' of the day (just the cost of the magazines). What we did waste plenty of, though, was our time. Time employing movements and workout strategies that I now know are totally inappropriate for anyone but drug-soaked meatheads. It's a wonder we got any results at all, meager as they were, and what we did gain was almost certainly due to our status as newbie lifters in our teens, where pretty much anything will get you something. Shame is that with an honest-to-God basic lifting routine focusing on the fundamentals and a solid, nutritious diet, (now see, how unsexy does all of THAT sound?) we could've gone so much further over that time, and built a solid foundation for future decades of natural lifting. Instead, in my case for instance, I just pretty much stopped, being disillusioned, only to lift uninformed and sporadically until I found some real resources and picked it all up again (really, started completely over again, from scratch) in my mid-thirties.

[lylemcdonald]

Part 2

[lylemcdonald]

Part 3