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.
It’s not that the gym is 80% diet, it’s that weight loss (or weight gain) is largely diet. Getting jacked is easier when you take in lots of protein and are in a caloric surplus, but your body can do amazing things with whatever it has to work with. Lift a lot and skimp on protein while eating like crap (lots of “empty” carbs for example)? It’ll be more difficult to build muscle, but as long as you have a surplus of calories to work with, your body will be able to more or less repair the damage from lifting which builds muscle and strength.
You can eat a ton of prison nutraloaf and white bread and still build muscle as long as you’re in a caloric surplus and lift heavy things. Better to eat things like chicken breast, whole grain rice, veggies, etc., but it’s not absolutely necessary. The critical part is getting enough calories to add mass, the quality of the food is secondary (but still important to your health). If you ate nothing but free-range organic chicken, fresh organic veggies and rice, but you only ate half the calories you’re body needs to maintain itself, no amount of lifting will pack on muscle (in fact, you’ll waste away and have a really hard time lifting at all).
A prison diet isn’t as terrible as you think it is. Sure, it’s cheap ingredients and very little care is taken to make it taste good, but they still get a basic allotment of meat, carbs, fruit, and veggies. It’s similar to American school lunch. Also, inmates who have commissary spending money can buy tuna packets, pepperoni sticks, and other sources of protein. When you combine that with unlimited free time to do body weight exercises, you can get ripped pretty quickly.
Diet is a surprisingly flexible thing. As long as you get the appropriate amount of calories, enough of the amino acids that your body can’t produce, and enough vitamins and minerals, it’s good enough. Prison food has all these, in spite of being the terribly unappetizing cheapest stuff that can provide it. It’s actually optimized to be the cheapest version of food that’s still nutritious because no prison wants to get in trouble for starving its prisoners.
Out in society, it can actually be hard to get a balanced diet without self-discipline because you can eat whatever you want, and what you feel like eating might not be balanced.
As for muscle mass, regular weightlifting will build and sustain it, and a prisoner has a lot more time to lift weights than someone out in society with the freedom to choose from an unlimited range of activities.
The food in prison is crap quality, but it does not lack for calories or protein. They are low grade and not that appetizing, but there is plenty to build muscle with
Well it also every much depends on what kind of training your doing. Like body building would require much more food to be able to put on more mass but with things like calisthenics you can build crazy strength and some muscle on a lot less food.
So can you lift while also doing things like intermittent fasting? Or will the caloric deficit defeat any potential gains?
Being fit is 80% diet and 20% lifting weights, being muscular is 80% lifting weights and 20% diet.
That’s not to say that both parts aren’t important, but a half-assed diet and heavy, consistent, structured weight training will make you more muscular than the perfect diet and half-assed weight training.
But are people in prison really jacked? Isn’t that just a movie thing? I’m not from the US but here in north western Europe I’d say the inmate population is very average in body size and shape.
The food inside prison might not look or be tasty, but it’s not really unhealthy. It’s also not “more” than you need.
If you want big muscles you need to exercise.
If you want your big muscles to show (abs forinstance) you need to remove the fat that covers them. And that mainly happens through a healthy diet.
That being said, far from everyone in prison is ripped. Except maybe locally.
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