Originally posted by Blowfish
^ Oh I'm sorry man! You want to walk around like a monster... be my guess... FOOL
Call him a fool to his face when he's 250lbs and you're still a buck 65 soaking wet.
It doesn't matter whether you want to be a ripped 180-190 (men's health/male stripper look) or a superheavy 250+, both include putting on quality mass and regardless of your eventual physique goals, there's only one way to do it: hard training and even harder eating.
Now the men's health look is achievable for 90% of the people out there even with sub-par genetics. But why is it that people hardly ever get there unless they're born that way? I'll tell you why.
They persist in doing cable crossovers and dumbbell kickbacks (going all out for a mega pump!) and eating like birds because they're afraid to obscure their abs. Someone is 150 and they wanna be 180 but eat like they're 120. Their diets consist of plain chicken breast, brown rice, egg whites, and ricecakes. Once their abs start to fade they do five hours of cardio and starve themselves to get that sixpack back, and lose any muscle gained with it.
Hence their muscular gains of 2lbs one year, 1.5lbs another and so at that rate, someone's 150 will get to 190 in 15-20 years. But I'm betting that if you guys just loosen up a bit, eat like the mass monsters, forget the damned abs for a while and just grow a little, you'll get there in a couple of years. The abs'll come back - the bigger you are the easier it is to get ripped.
I'll use myself as an example, when I was just getting into lifting I was 170-180 and was stuck there for about a year. I did the whole egg whites/chicken breast/tuna thing with cable crossovers and five sets for everything (to really destroy the muscle, man) and got nowhere. Then I started eating whole eggs (six whole eggs for breakfast with veggies and a pint of milk to wash it down - yeah yeah, I didn't know about mixing carbs/fats then so don't anyone get on my case
), red meat (1kg of beef a day), whole milk, started doing just compound exercises (didn't like benching though, even then) and I gained 15lbs in two months. TWO MONTHS. The vast majority of this was muscle (I gained fat then but I'm wiser now). And I've kept those muscular gains to this day.
Bottom line: if you don't eat like you wanna be a monster, you won't grow.
People are really stupid when it comes to thinking about eating like a 250lber does. "I wanna build muscle but don't want to get all big and bulky!" or "Eww, bodybuilders are GROSS, I don't wanna be like that."
What, one day they're a skinny runt, they started eating and the next day they're Ronnie C? It doesn't work like that, there's intermediate stages. You don't go from 150 to 250 overnight, you'll get to 160, 170, 180 and so on - BUT IT'S EATING LIKE YOU WANNA BE 250 WHICH'LL GET YOU TO THOSE INTERMEDIATE STAGES AND GET THE SCALE MOVING IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION.
If you're 150 and eat like it then you'll probably see 170 in time to collect your pension. And all around you, people who just worked hard and weren't afraid to add .12313% bodyfat (not that I'm saying you have to get fat to get big) put on that weight while they were still young enough to enjoy it - not that I'm saying elderly people can't enjoy fine physiques, just saying that you guys are teens who wanna get big and ripped to pull chicks (or guys, whatever floats your boat I guess..).
Don't knock the 'monsters'. They got up to the 180-220 stage (by eating like they already even bigger than that) and chose to get larger. You don't HAVE to. You can stop at 190 and just work out for the pump. I'll still call you a candyarse pretty boy but if it's what makes you happy then to Hell with my opinion.
Now then, if anyone's got turkey/duck/goose leftovers from yesterday then my PM box is now accepting delivery.