***Official H&F LC Thread***

https://enhanced.org/

I only learned about this today. It'll be interesting. Albeit my guess is that I don't think the performances will be as good as the Olympics because I'm guessing it'll be past their prime athletes competing. and anyway, a lot of Olympians will be enhanced or have top tier sports science programs that these guys won't have

WLing being one of the five events is a god send. If this pops off and ends up happening every year, WLing is not just officially saved, but actually improved as a professional sport with a level playing field and higher degree of professionalism. I haven't performed a snatch since 2016 or so but I still watch WLing regularly and I'd be pretty crushed if it died or was relegated to powerlifting style fragmentation. The barriers to entry are just too high for it to succeed as a "professional amateur" sport in the way that powerlifting does. But some annual huge untested meet with a big prize pool and ostensibly national glory for the loser countries to feel more prideful about when they win medals? That could prevent WLing's death and make it even better, possibly.

I have a feeling the audience will be almost entirely gym bros and active people rather than NARPs who watch the olympics.

Yes agreed

Really hoping my all time boy Ilya Ilyn is in lifting shape

You’d think the entire Kazak WL squad will attend given they’re all banned from the Olympics

I remember a couple years back Ian Wilson admitted to getting on gear and working some full time job while lifting only 3x/wk for 90 minutes and ending up with results that would have been fairly internationally competitive. Having used gear myself, yes it really is that much of the equation in strength sports/bbing. Gear and limited training with imperfect nutrition will outperform optimizing everything perfectly with recovery/nutrition/training but no gear.

For this reason, paradoxically, we're not going to see a bunch of anglosphere country athletes dominate or anything. The sports infrastructure isn't there yet. But the gap will mostly definitely start to narrow. The anglosphere still has way more amateur/recreational olytards than any other part of the world and some of those people will reach Clarence type numbers in untested comp and draw more people into the sport.

Dreaming too big right now though... let's see what happens when the games actually happen. Maybe they actually won't be that popular or profitable.

maybe fat mendes will get off the reality TV circuit and rejoin the lifting lolz

John Broz suddenly became active again on youtube/instagram. I ****ing love the guy and his videos/athletes are legendary, but man he had some bad advice. There's another guy that's been doing a natural squat every day program for about 3 years straight and logging it on youtube. You know how much his squat has gone up? like maybe 30kg with 20kg of that being in the first few months... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X44bZMwE...

The squat everyday thing was island tribe volcano level of superstition. Take a bunch of dbol, squat every day, assume that the gains in squat were become of number 2 and not number 1. Plenty of people have put a **** ton of weight on their 1rm hbbs/fs squatting only 1-3x/wk too, but he just got so incredibly married to this squat every day thing it was complete insanity. He could have kept in the high dose long duration dbol part of the equation and done a more sensible program for squatting and probably ended up with the same or more increases in squat strength with far less burnout/injury/lifters quitting on him. If they'd used the dbol (even at a lower dose) and just front squatted a max set of 1-3 and 2-3 backoff sets on Sunday and a 5x5 with last set at RPE 8-9 hbbs on Wednesday, they probably literally would have ended up with more gains in 1rm.

that said, I can see a strong argument for snatch or jerk every day (not necessarily to max) for the skill/motor learning and mobility gainz and lack of CNS fatigue these cause.

I bought into it completely for a time, ******ed as it was. Broz training was just straight up suboptimal, but bear in mind his mentor was coached by somebody who was literally prescribing his athletes 180mg/day of dbol for more than 6 months at a time. In hardcore bodybuilding/pling circles, 50mg/day is considered a very hardcore dose you shouldn't run for more than 6 weeks and if you suggested 100mg people would call you ******ed. In modern intelligent bodybuilding or pling circles, people say any oral steroid should be used only during contest prep or meet peaking phase in the final 4-8 weeks and using one like dbol in the offseason is really stupid.

Remember how many of his lifters quit on him or quit the sport entirely and never came back at all? There's a reason for that. ******ed training and most likely ultra extreme PED regimens that make people on the Olympia stage look like pussies. They probably grew to hate it after a while. Clarence mogs all of them and he never trained like that and he's been going at it from age 15 to 32 or 33 or however old he is. AFAIK Clarence doesn't slam orals and just dose test+tren, or at least that's what he's inferred in a few of his videos when he addressed PEDs.

But Broz he's just so hard to dislike on a personal level. Not a grifter, really passionate guy, obviously believes in what he teaches, authentic, charismatic. Just wrong and misguided. If those guys like Pat and Rob were on the same amount of PEDs but with intelligent coaching they probably would have gotten a lot further.

I was dumb to listen to him also, but I was still new to this whole fitness world and everyone new ends up clinging to at least one ******ed and counterproductive training dogma.

Holy ****, Kelvin Kiptum apparently died in a car crash - he was one of a few candidates to break a 2 hour marathon legitimately.

https://www.espn.com/olympics/story/_/id...

Damn. That was depressing news. I really thought he was gonna get it in Berlin.

Guy,

There is something to be said for a self-selecting training method that will only yield the best and brightest. Westside is great and all, but would any truly elite lifter do great on that program? Prob not.

That being said grinding out a true 1RM every session is prob peak dumb. You can totally work upto a heavy single where bar speed deteriorates every session, use that metric to help track CNS fatigue and gauge other training. But I don't think Broz puts a lot of thought into how to change his method or how to optimize training for folks. Then again all your big WLing nations basically utilize some other equally insane variant of way too high intensity/volume or both and the 1% who thrive on it eventually become WR holders and the others have a bonk knee while working their janitor jobs.

For sure, but even within elite wling national programs there's a range. The Chinese are only 6 days/9 sessions per week with way more sub maximal work, the Russians even still follow a more periodization based model where heavy singles are restricted to pre-competition phases. Probably a lot of them might end up with a lot more good lifters but marginally worse GOATS by dialing it back a bit. Chinese at the elite level have a pretty surprising amount of efficacy over their own programming, as it turns out. There's an interview with one of their foreign physical therapists who says this.

OFC when you're a 20 year old kid who just saw a few Klokov videos on proto-youtube and read a few Broz posts in his legendary bb.com forum thread, you don't know any of this **** and just jump in at 110% because, as a wise man once said "I MUST TRAIN HARD, EAT RIGHT, AND **** DUDES IN THE ASS TO BE THE BEST". At least I had the foresight to develop good technique in the snatch and the clean (but not the jerk) before starting my own dumb oly overtraining nonsense. Going back I would have trained about 90 minutes 3x/wk with a lot of submaximal RPE 6-7 sets just emphasizing perfect reps and retested maxes after a little mini-peak/taper every 3-4 months or so. And a ****ton more mobility in the jerk overhead position, more front squatting, and very little back squatting.

Recreational oly is taking off in China and the retired bonk knee folks are way less screwed than they were in times past. Plenty of them are opening their own clubs and charging 3x the price of a commercial gym and still getting lots of members or doing the online coaching using Chinese tiktok to attract signups. But that's only the good communicators, most Chinese WLers come from rural backgrounds and are complete tards that wouldn't be able to handle managing an online coaching business or their own little studio WLing gym.

IDK about Russia, but just on my Thailand vacation so far I've met one forermly aspiring pro WLer (left b/c the war lol) who I watched hit 150/170 at 89 and one recreational amateur girl who was switching over after getting frustrated with powerlifting memery.

It's actually pretty wild to me just how much more the internet collectively knows about programming for bodybuilding/powerlifting/oly lifting than it did ~10-15 years ago when I was getting started. It actually seems like the amount of misinformation and bad advice has collapsed down to almost none these days.

Guys maybe this is gross/TMI/oldman, but I need some medical help. I get up to pee at night way too many times every night to where it affects my sleep and I feel like i need 9.5-10hours to get a full nights rest because I'm getting up 3-4x/night. It can be worse when cutting or the days when I train legs, especially since I usually train after work close to bed time.

What are some OTC supplements or pharmaceuticals I can use to help with reducing night time urination frequency? I tried flomax but it had bad sexual side effects. Does anyone have any suggestions or experiences with this?

I tried cialis at 5mg/day in the morning and that helped slightly but not much and the boners were a bit distracting.

At your age you should be getting up exactly zero times. I'd start by seeing a doctor

I’m over 50 but I’m generally a minimum once, often twice a night and sometimes more. More observations than recommendations below

- it’s definitely linked to anxiety. Ymmv but I pee more when Ive got difficult stuff on my mind and I’d bet most people are the same.

- drink less in the evening LDO.

- I do 2-3 visits in the last 15 mins before lights out. I’ve become obsessive about it

- seems to be related to dumps too. If I haven’t done a quality **** or two the day before, I need to get up to pee more. We have doctors in this thread and I’m sure they can refute/accept that

I'm also over 50. I go 0 times per night.

I used to go more frequently; it was because I was developing diabetes. Losing weight fixed the problem.

So seeing a doctor sounds sensible. I am a doctor, but of pure maths not medicine. So I'd be inclined to ignore my own advice for most medical things.

When I'm cutting/losing weight its exacerbated and I start going even more often than if I'm maintaining/gaining weight. It is definitely steroids+bodybuilding related. I'll go see a doc tomorrow.

At least once a night, usually 2 or 3. Been like this for years. Not a problem.

Bill Perkins bought out of the bodyfat bet, so Shaun deeb gets 800k. A few thoughts

* I mentioned this before, but the most important factor was cherry picking Dexa. There is one that includes essential fat, including the head (Head is 2 pounds of uncuttable fat). Shaun used the fake Dexa. He forced buyout at 22% bodyfat 215lbs bodyweight with 2 months to go, looks like he didn't even lift. Waist probably still 40 inches, looks great from the face though.

* 22% to 17% is a bigger difference than it looks. I would have not bought out if I was Bill Perkins. Great decision by Shaun and his wife.

* Shaun was on mounjaro. As a stated last year, a must for a fatty.

Overall I am happy for Shaun. It was disappointing that Polk lost his bodyfat bet with Perkins, but Polk used real Dexa. He is 6'1 175 and lost on getting to 15%.

Shaun first thought he was gonna win this at 215lbs. When I said Polk lost at 6 inches taller and 175lbs, Shaun responded with yeah but Doug is a skinny fack. I loled, they both look like they have never touched a barbell in their lives.

But overall the public didn't learn much. Fake dexa the main culprit. Mounjaro aided should not be allowed. It basically allows an uber fatty like Shaun to have my appetite.

His goal is to still get to 17%. With mounjaro possible, without it impossible. My guess is he never sees 17% and coasts at 200-225lbs for life, aided by mounjaro. Good for him, just added a decade to his life and 800k (8 to 1 payout). Applause for Mr Deeb.

Yeah I go through cycles of keto diet all the time, and whenever I shift from normal food to low-carb, it's miserable for at least a week. To make it worse, my mouth is like the damn desert when I wake up, so I pee and then take a huge swig of water which isn't exactly the best thing for not waking up a second or third time.

Re: Deeb, I didn't realize he was using Mounjaro, but it makes sense; from what I know (just a little bit), they're basically making up the "how do you cycle off" protocol up as they go along, but it seems at least possible that a medium or superfat losing 100-200 lbs should be able to reverse pyramid back down off the dosing ladder and finally get off completely after a 3-5 year period with some non-zero chance of keeping the weight off. I suppose time will tell.

Re: him being able to win the bet at 215, I had similar thoughts; him getting to 190 is likely the maximum at which he could end up at 17% per his type of scan, but I hope he keeps his word and finishes the process even without the incentive. I'm definitely interested to see what the six months after the bet end up looking like.

I was very surprised Perkins bought out.

Also the fake dexa thing seems legit because he looked way way fatter than I thought 22% looks

Guy,

That is v ****ing weird. Any amount of eating/drinking results in 1-2x peepee breaks a night, and generally only when I'm a relatively light sleeper. (These are smaller peepees than the usual morning "omg I'm cooooooooming peepees")

loco/Monte,

Interesting story. Don't follow it but I guess one less fattie is good!

In the before times, when commercials were unavoidable, pills for overactive bladder were advertised with similar frequency to boner pills. Your issue is not quite the same, but I suspect the same kinds of drugs might be useful. At least in USA#1, they would require a prescription. I assume that wouldn't be a problem for you given where you are and your general ability to source pharmaceuticals.

I guess my real question is: "Has anyone tried any OTC solutions? Any pharmaceuticals that don't screw up boners/gasms?"

Going to a doctor in Chengdu is a very lengthy task. Suzhou was great, I could literally drive my motorcycle 7 minutes down the road to see a singaporean guy with great English or ~14 minutes to see a ******ed monolingual Chinese if I just needed something simple like accutane re-fill. Where i live now, options are all pretty horrendous.

We can buy basically any prescription meds that wouldn't be of recreational use on our equivalent of amazon 2 day shipping from 2023 onward though. That's pretty great. GH soon I'm sure.

It's something basically everyone with a lot of muscle/on roids deals with. Mineral retention and water/glycogen gets funky the more lean body mass you're carrying and the steroids themselves have a direct impact on mineral balance/water retention/peeing at night as well even holding LBM constant.

I've worked so hard to improve my sleep the past 2 years and have the perfectly optimized OTC stack, blackout curtains, humidifier, pre bed ritual to get rid of electronics, consistent bed time, dealing with sleep apnea/snoring without having to use a cpap, etc. This is like the last thing I need to do in order to be able to rest 8 hours and actually feel recovered like a normal person.

I noticed taking out deadlifts/squats from my routine massively improved sleep quality even on the days I don't do them. CNS and getting the olds and all that.

I'm the opposite. Lifting heavy just knocks me the **** out. At least it used to. I don't do DLs or BB squats any more.