I was thinking about how people say about bikini models and male action heroes that you can’t get their body, shown off as an ideal, unless your entire job is getting that body (and getting paid for it). So I got to thinking. Maybe our perceptions of what’s achievable are skewed by pop culture. If so, I wondered, what are actually realistic goals?
Does anyone out there have pictures of what you think the best body achievable by the “average” person looks like, for men and women? Assume for the purposes of this discussion that you’re single, no kids (or we’d never get anywhere), that you have a 40 hour a week job that pays you enough so you can afford either a gym membership or home equipment, that you have the time to work out as much as you like, and you can have any diet accessible through your average national chain supermarket.
Can’t link to photos at the moment, but something like “swimmer’s body” would be achievable with a lot of swimming. Tucks in the fat, burns lots of fat, builds shoulder and thigh muscle, puts your body in “proper proportion” everywhere. You don’t have to look like Michael Phelps but constant, vigorous, “I’m aching and starving afterwards” swimming would move the average American’s body as close to ideal as they could realistically get - aesthetic and health wise.
Don’t start with photo of someone else. Whatever you see will be a body achievable for them, it might not be achievable for you. Plus you have no actual idea what physical and mental pressures that person has undergone to get there.
Start eating a healthy diet, eat plenty of the right things, not too much of the bad stuff and find a means of exercise that you enjoy. Your body will then naturally find it’s own healthy appearance, whatever that may be.
One of my co-workers is a body-builder as a hobby. She doesn’t win competitions, but she is lean and fit. Her arms look like this, but I’m not sure if her stomach is that defined (I don’t see her stomach very often). Her legs are a good bit sturdier than that model’s. She works 45 hours a week and doesn’t have kids, and she takes the gym and her diet very seriously. I don’t think it takes a huge amount of time necessarily (maybe a 1-2 hrs a day) but just a lot of focus, and really caring about looks/health/fitness. I think the average person just doesn’t care that much.
Unfortunately there are too many variables to make this answerable, even within IMHO.
Age, gender and genetics make a big difference in what is achievable for a given degree of effort. And it also depends what we are considering the best looking: muscle mass, muscle definition, low bodyfat, sex appeal? These are related things but not the same.
If I had to answer the question though, I would have to say the sky is the limit. Because I know a couple of guys who work a regular 9-5 job, work out or do calisthenics* only 3 or so times a week, and look like this.
In fact I am not far off that myself and I’m 40.
But of course what is achievable, and what a given person can achieve…again, not the same thing.
IME there is a strong correlation between guys who do bodyweight exercises and guys who are ripped. Unfortunately for me, even though, like I say, I have pretty good muscle tone, I still find calisthenics too hard to get started.
One comment : if you look at a rough mathematical model of working out, you get a pretty interesting result.
Each lift causes changes to your muscle fibers. (damage and setting off sensors for mechanical strain mainly). Your muscle fibers begin the process of repairing. They then grow in response.
But the bigger you get, the slower this rate becomes. The body obviously has some mechanism to sense how hypertrophied your musculature is, which is why there’s “back pressure” - the bigger and more defined you get, the greater the catabolism.
What does this mean? It means something very interesting. It means that if, say, you merely wanted to reach 80% of your theoretical maximum, it will take a lot less than 80% of the effort required to reach 99%. There’s nonlinearities here. I’m not sure of the exact factors, and I’m pretty sure none of the research can define the precise equation. Your body’s maximum is an asymtope you can never quite reach. This is because the closer you get to maximum, the greater the daily losses from “catabolism”, and thus the smaller the daily net muscle gains. At the asymtope, gains (from maximum achievable daily workout) equal losses.
Note that the maximum achievable daily workout may not be 6 hours a day, or all day. It may be less than that. This is because above a certain intensity, the damage from working out is so large that you may actually be losing muscle faster than you gain it. (aka “overtraining”)
Still, if it took 6 hours a day of working out to be 90%+ as swole as you can get “naturally”, or on a specific weekly dose of steroids, you probably would be ~70% as swole if you worked out only 1 hour a day. And 50% if you worked out half an hour a day.
These numbers are more or less made up, though I have skimmed a few studies on the subject. Though most research studies involve relative small amounts of daily lifting weights. Other, more experienced gym bros can probably give a better estimate.
To corroborate what people are saying, without even getting into specialized techniques such as bodybuilding, if you can afford good food and a good gym membership (which is saying a lot) and regularly do your circuit training, swimming, etc., then you will definitely be in great shape, better than any random bikini model.
The problem is the opposite: it’s not that exercise, even moderate exercise is ineffective, it’s that, due to various factors, many people eat crap/too much/not enough, are subject to high stress + little sleep, can’t afford nutritionists/trainers/equipment, and the consequences are as you might expect. How many miles did you jog this morning?
We go the the pool regularly. While the majority of folk there are not in the best of shape*, there are some there that are in fine shape. And I’m not talking about the 20 year olds. There’s people in the gray-hair department that are trim and can swim quite well.
There’s one old-ish dude there that could be an actor for that commercial where the guy gets ogled by two young women as he gets out of the pool. He just swims regularly, eats well, etc.
And props to them for doing their best to get in shape.
Single, no kids, good job, gym membership, and a willingness to put a couple hours a day into being the best you?
You could look a lot like the personal trainers at most gyms. Not the super-swole competitor types, but the ones who are coaching people on how to use all the machines.
For examples from popular culture, think Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2 (as opposed to Terminator 1), or Clark Kent in Smallville. Daniel Craig in Casino Royale. Vasquez in Aliens.
Well it’s accurate what he’s saying: there are indeed diminishing returns.
But probably the example numbers are overstating things a bit.
A couple hours a day!?
I guess that could be what the OP is fishing for…How big could you get if working out is the focus of your non-working life? But I wouldn’t read “reasonably achievable” as that.
At the point of 2 hours a day you are definitely overlapping into the set of people whose job relies on them showing off their body e.g. I am sure many bikini models, as alluded in the OP, will spend the same or less than that on exercise / working out.
The concepts controlling this, as I learned them (at Juggernaut Training Systems and RenaissancePeriodization) are:
Minimum volume - the least amount you can train and not get worse
Minimum adaptive volume - the least amount you can train and get better
Maximum adaptive volume - the most amount you can train and get better
Maximum recoverable volume - the most amount you can train and not get worse.
These are going to vary from week to week, depending on diet, stress levels, rest, and anabolic usage, but the average person wants to keep somewhere between 2 and 3. But you aren’t going to get that much better from doing 18 work sets per week vs. doing 10 per week. And depending on your genetics, you might get better results overall from 10. And it takes less time.
I lift for 60-75 minutes three days a week and walk the dog for an hour or so a day. I’m 63 - I don’t look like Mr. Universe, but I have a reasonable V-taper from shoulders to waist and my neck and flexed upper arms have the same measurement. And I don’t live at the gym - I have a full time job and time to hang out with the wife and our friends.
I don’t think it takes two hours a day. The biggest issue is keeping your fat levels low for most people I would assume. Building and keeping muscle only requires a few trips a week to the gym. If you are naturally thin and have trouble gaining or holding onto bodyfat, I would assume being in shape isn’t extremely hard.
Fit people I know generally do about 3-4 sessions per week and often not even an hour each. Plus you can substitute a session with other activities like yard work, going for a walk, etc. So many people like this might be doing less than 2 hours a week of “official” exercise.
If he had only said that there are diminishing returns the further you progress, you wouldn’t have heard a peep from me. But anyway, my point was to say he sounded like someone who had read a few articles about lifting but had never actually lifted.
It absolutely does not take hours a day. When i first got into lifting, about 20 years ago, I did engage in marathon workouts. I was young, high metabolism, so i was lean. But in hindsight I realized i wasnt doing myself any favors spending 90 min on triceps. As I progressed, the total time i spent in the gym slowly but steadily decreased.
Today I spend a max of 45min lifting. My arm workouts average about 30 minutes (I superset bis and tris). I also do less cardio and pay much closer attention to nutrition. You can spend all day, everyday on a treadmill but if you aren’t also eating smart, all your probably doing is at best treading water. Back in the day I’d do “cardio days” where i spent hour+ on the armbike. Today, I do 15-20 minutes sometimes before bit usually after my workouts. And at 39, I look better than i did at 23.
