What is the relationship between weight lifting and diet? How do people in prison become so jacked when their diet is likely terrible? Does weight lifting account for more than we think? I always hear how the gym is 80% diet but idk if that’s really true.
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So long as you burn more calories than you consume, you’ll lose weight no matter how crappy the diet is. You could eat nothing but 1,000 calories worth of Oreo’s daily, and if you’re burning 2,000 calories you’ll lose weight.
You can gain muscle so long as you’re eating calories and lifting weights. In fact, this is where you’ll hear most of the stuff about diet being 80% of the work. When you lift heavy things, you damage your muscle fibers. Your body builds back repairing the damage, and if you’re giving it extra calories it’ll use that fuel to go ahead and build back bigger and better than it was before, thus the growing muscles.
The real key here though, is if you want to actually look good. The strongest men the world low-key look awful and borderline morbidly obese. To look like the Rock while he’s starring in his latest action flick, that’s when diet really become 90% of the work. He has to eat A LOT of calories, like 10,000-12,000 per day while working out 5-6 times per day in order to build up the amount of muscle he needs to look like that. Meanwhile it needs to be very lean food, because eating a ton of fat or too many carbs will just bury all of that amazing muscle behind fat and he’ll just look like a strong-man competitor instead.
In short, looking amazing and actually being at peak human strength are 2 very different things. Depending on where you want to fall on that scale of being fit/strong or actually strong/looks strong, becomes a math problem with diet being the most important factor.
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