eli5: why is it that fatter/bigger people in general have an easier time gaining strength and putting on muscle than skinny people?

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This is not the place to give any measurements, so I’ll just say I was fat 7 months ago and I’m not anymore.

I put on a lot of muscle mass while losing quite some fat, so I can lift rather heavy (on my own perspective), but when I mock my friends about lifting more than them even though they’ve been training for years they all go “well, you used to be fat” or “that’s easier for you because you were bigger” and I have come to understand that’s just how it works because of the Internet too, but I don’t really know why.

I don’t know if it’s the language causing a misunderstanding here, but when I say “mock” I mean we joke with each other playfully in a way that everyone’s comfortable with.

In: Biology

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Lets say we have two 6′ tall men. Man A is 300lbs, 40% body fat. Man B is 175lb, 15% body fat.

Man A has 180lb of non-fat mass. Man B has 148lb of non-fat mass. Their organs and skeletons will both weigh approximately the same amount, lets just call that, I don’t know, 20lbs.

That means the obese guy, just because he’s obese, has a good 30lb more muscle mass than the normal weight guy. It would take man B **years** to gain another 30lb of muscle mass.

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