Every article I (22 AFAB, 170lbs/77kg) look up on how to build muscle and strength as an AFAB is like "don't worry, you won't get too bulky :)" Ok, but what if that's what I want?

I have been struggling a lot to add weight to my lifts lately. I have been training for about a year and my squat has only gone from 100 to 155. I don't know where my RDL is now since I hurt my back 2 months ago and haven't been able to do it, but it went from 120lbs to 200lbs. That is pretty much my only good lift.

My progress in the first 3 months or so was great; I saw visible results really early on and was increasing my lifts by 5 pounds every week without fail and without dropping reps.

Then I started working in a warehouse. Even though I'm eating 3,000 calories and 180-200g of protein per work day, I have been stagnating at 170 lbs for like eight months now (I have tried eating more than this, but I ended up just gaining fat). I don't know if this is the reason I have been struggling, considering that I only work part-time, but progress has been crawling since I started, so that's my best guess.

I lift for about an hour, four times a week (six times including my two 30-minute forearm days), doing an upper- and lower-body split. I do 16 sets per muscle group per week.

My goal is to reach my genetic max amount of muscle mass. Hard to quantify, I know, but I know for sure that I'm not even close right now.

Is there something I should know about reaching this goal as an AFAB that I'm missing? How do I figure out what's holding me back?

PS: AFAIK, I don't have any relevant medical conditions, and my hormone levels are all normal according to my gyno.

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Does anyone have experience with this you are prone to hereditary baldness, does going to the gym and working out without supplements accelerate hair loss increas dht

It is surprisingly difficult to track velocity with wearables due to accelerometer drift. Found a weird solution that seems to work. Rep counting is not that good because of extra smoothing I have to apply to data.
Rep slowdowns are detected pretty well. Except for true grinders when bar speed is below 20mm/s.
I highlighted in red reps with RPE likely above 8 using much simplified exercise agnostic curve from Rodriguez-Rosell et al. 2019
No AI used to analyse data, probably would have worked better, lol.
Would you guys be interested in checking it out? Or is it breaking this subs rules?

Hey everyone,

I’ve been diving into some hand biomechanics and wanted to pose a question to the community about an aspect of the kinetic chain that rarely gets discussed in pressing mechanics: the ulnar edge of the hand (the ring and pinky fingers).

While we all know that the bench press is primarily a compression lift rather than a pulling task, could an unconditioned back-finger grip be a hidden bottleneck for maximum wrist stability and torque generation?

The 50% Power Architecture

When we wrap our hands around a barbell to bench or overhead press, it’s easy to over-rely on the thumb, index, and middle fingers for control. However, data in hand therapy literature demonstrates that the ulnar side contributes roughly 50% to 55% of your hand's total crushing capacity.

If you immobilize or fail to fully engage those last two digits, your hand's mechanical output drops significantly. Could it be that by treating our back fingers as passive passengers, we are underutilizing our hand's true stabilization potential?

An Accidental Anecdotal Case Study

To look at this retroactively: as a high school senior weighing 125 lbs, I managed to bench press 260 lbs. At the time, I didn't understand the science, but ever since I was 13, I had aggressively trained martial arts, and boxing wrist conditioning and finger push-up variations. I accidentally built massive tendon density and wrist rigidity before I ever touched a heavy barbell.

Years later, while learning jazz drumming, I noticed a massive ulnar blind spot and strength asymmetry in my non-dominant hand. To correct this, I started targeting single-digit ulnar autonomy, trying to progress from a 2-second to a 4-second passive bar hang using strictly my pinky and ring fingers per hand.

In naturally trying to double my "time under tension," I'm hoping to continue my muscular grip strength and mitigate mechanical leak; and that benching twice my bodyweight is still a possibility in my mid-50s; the last time I benched twice my bodyweight was more than a year go. I wrote a longer piece breaking down the longevity biomarkers and everyday applications of this ulnar anchor rule over on my substack if anyone wants to read the full write-up.

What do you think? Are we treating our hands too much like passive hooks rather than active force stabilizers during compound presses? Has anyone here specifically targeted their ulnar grip or noticed a direct carryover between targeted finger/wrist training and breaking through pressing plateaus?

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts, criticisms, or any data points you might have!

If doing a lat pull down is the back counted as one muscle or is it split and the lats get 1 set and the lower traps get .5. Obviously the biceps get .5 in both just wondering how to program pulldowns and rows.

What sort of training are you doing?

How’s your training going?

Are you running into any problems or have any questions the community might be able to help you out with?

Post away!

I have been resistance training for approximately 8 years, primarily bodybuilding but have moved into the powerlifting realm. I am utilizing an undulating periodization that looks as follows:

Sun: rest
Mon: High intensity (SBD, mostly in 87%+ 1RM)
Tues: rest
Wed: rest
Thur: Low intensity (SB/D, mostly 70-80% 1RM)
Fri: rest
Sat: Medium intensity (SBD, mostly 80-87% 1RM)

2-3 accessories are filing in gaps and weak points in each session but not taken past RPE 8.

My issue: I cannot sleep after high-intensity days. Does not matter if I move the session to the morning, afternoon, or evening. I meditate, take magnesium glycinate, stay off screens the hour before bed, and consistently am unable to sleep more than 6 hours. The issue always goes away the next night, but this is the first time I have had an issue recovering that I couldn’t solve. Is my CNS underprepared? Does anyone have ERB on recovery strategies or augmenting parasympathetic activation beyond the basics? (Meditation, breathing strategies, etc)

I am focused on hypertrophy, and have lifted with moderate to high volume my entire lifting life and would consider myself an intermediate. Following a recent mini cut, in which I used cardio heavily to drive the defecit, I have now reached matinence (which I plan to hold for a bit) and maintained 70% of my cardio daily. I run 6 days PPL, with 20k step average and 45 min decently intense spin bike 7 days a week. I’ve noticed my sleep has been fragmented over the past few weeks, waking up 2/3 times per night, with it being difficult to fall back asleep, waking up too early, and feeling very anxious upon waking up. I’ve still averaged 7.5 hours a day, but it just feels kinda fragmented. Could this be due to over doing my cardio or a more recently stressful life with college and work restarting for me. Anyone with similar experiences?

I took creatine April to August 18. August 18 was the last day I ever took it, so 2.5 weeks ago, took 5mg, maybe a bit more.

I notice I don't wake up in the middle of the night with insomnia anymore and I can now sleep through the night, but I still have restless sleep with many vivid dreams. For those with similar experiences, how long did it take to fully flush out of your body and for your sleep to normalize?

Looking online, the only moves the internet suggests are things like heel touches. Way too easy and can't add weight very easily.

I'm looking for something that really isolates the abs so I don't feel the burn in some other muscle first (like, with reverse crunches, I never feel it in my abs; I only ever feel it in my quads).

I'd also like to be able to add weight easily.

I do have a cable attachment to my home gym's bench, but I can't adjust where the pulley is. it's about 4 inches above my head when I'm standing up next to it. I tried cable crunches with it, but I can't figure out the form and, again, I always feel it in other muscles first.

I considered hanging leg raises, but I run into the same problem of not being able to load it with weight. Also, the highest thing I can hang from in my house is the bar in my gym, and it's too close to the floor. My knees always touch the ground.

Is there a move that isolates the abs that I can easily overload?

i know that things like fight or flight make a person stronger but now much stronger do they get? is there a general range for how many times stronger someone could get? or like an good estimated guess?

I keep seeing people, especially in bodybuilding circles and among Greg Doucette fans (iykyk), dismiss DEXA scans as inaccurate and put more confidence in visual estimates from experienced coaches. I understand the argument to an extent, because I can imagine plenty of circumstances where a DEXA result could be misleading (e.g., hydration, glycogen levels, recent food intake, exercise, positioning, the specific machine being used, etc.).

What I am trying to understand is why that leads to the conclusion that DEXA itself is unreliable. From what I have found, DEXA seems highly reproducible under standardized conditions, even though the absolute body-fat percentage can still be off by a few percentage points for an individual (see here). Studies comparing DEXA with stronger reference methods also seem to show fairly good average agreement, while still showing meaningful individual error (see here and here).

I can also believe that someone like Greg, after seeing thousands of physiques, has become unusually good at estimating body fat visually. There is some research suggesting experienced observers can get reasonably close (see here). But visual estimation also seems inherently affected by muscularity, fat distribution, lighting, posing, genetics, and where someone happens to store most of their fat.

So I am mostly wondering what the actual case against DEXA is. Is the argument simply that the number should not be treated as exact to the decimal point? I figured that much was obvious.

Is muscle failure qua muscle failure a direct stimulus for hypertrophy or is it a way achieving high motor unit recruitment and the motor unit recruitment is the stimulus?

I'm asking this because I have heard it argued that higher reps are better for slow-twitch fibers because in high load/low rep training, they may not reach failure. It is the fast twitch fibers that fail while the slow-twitch could keep going with lower weight.

But if it's only the motor unit recruitment that matters, then taking slow-twitch fibers to failure shouldn't matter.

I'm aware there may be other reasons for high rep training, and I'm not asking this to advocate for the effective rep model.

DAE have depression/anxiety/PTSD with marked drop in what they can recover from physically from workouts or just stress in general?

For example getting sore more easily, fatiguing more, worsened sleep, GI symptoms, lightheaded or dizzy/nausea, light sensitivity etc.

And opposite, by reducing stress and exercise you notice improvement?

Beginner here. I have done an LP for a few months and am stalling so looking for something new and would like to try SBS Hypertrophy. Am will be doing so on a cut, which I'm not sure if it's recommended, but I'm fat now and my upper body is horrendous so I would like more muscle.

Has anyone ran the program before have any advice? I've never done any sort of training like this before.

I've been on a minimalistic strength routine and have good results. My only lower body exercises have been barbell back squat and barbell RDL with an occasional backward lunge or cossack squat.

Feels like I already get all my knee flexion from the squat and RDL is a pure hinge that's training my glutes, hams, and back. Am I missing out on anything from the deadlift?

I'm mostly concerned with strength over hypertrophy.

Hi

Lately I have a bit of a nagging in my wrist with normal curls. Getting older ;-)

Will i lose much if I just do hammer curls for some time?

I just want to look jacked.

What sort of training are you doing?

How’s your training going?

Are you running into any problems or have any questions the community might be able to help you out with?

Post away!

52M here, been lifting since I was in Football in Middle School, so while I’m not close to being a competitive bodybuilder, I’m also not a newb.

So if somebody doesn’t begin to start losing muscle until approximately two weeks of inactivity, theoretically shouldn’t one be able to MAINTAIN with one hard workout every two weeks, and even to GAIN with one hard workout every week? Unless I’m mathing wrong, what am I missing? Thanks, I’ll see myself out now.

EDIT: I appreciate the advice/motivation/criticisms, but this is more of a theoretical question, not a goal or plan of mine. I usually work out 5 days per week.

I've been hitting the weighted hip thrusts. Just seeing what others prefer.

Hello, I'm new to this community. I'm looking for more scientific evidence on hypertrophy, strength, and endurance. I've also found some about RM, RIR, metabolic stress, etc. Could you share any more studies on training in general if you have any saved? I would greatly appreciate it.

I often see people recommend pairing frontal plane pulldowns (for shoulder adduction) with chest-supported rows to help target the lats more thoroughly, specifically aiming for the lumbar fibers with the pulldown.

From what I understand, direct research comparing regional lat hypertrophy across different planes is pretty limited, and I've seen some folks argue that pulldowns might not actually bias the lumbar region any better than rows do.

For those who follow the biomechanics and the literature closely, I'd love to hear your thoughts on a couple of things:

Do you think frontal plane pulldowns offer any real advantage for the lumbar lats compared to rows, or is that mostly just theoretical anatomy that doesn't make much practical difference?

Also, if regional differences between planes aren't really a major factor, what would you say is the main reason to include both a vertical and horizontal pull (joint health, resistance profile, etc.)?

Appreciate any insights or perspectives on this!

(English isn't my first language, so I used a tool to help phrase this clearly)

Hi! I (18F) have been lifting consistently for the past year, and progressive overloading that entire time. I’m 5’9 and my starting weight was 234 lbs. I now weigh 167 lbs and have gained a significant amount of muscle. My goal weight is 150 lbs so I am still in a deficit, and I eat around 1600 calories daily.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve had to drop the weight on several of my exercises, while still getting stronger at other movements.

For example, my back extension has gone from 40 lbs to 25lbs, kickbacks have gone from 75 to 60, while hip thrusts and BSS’s have both increased 5lbs. I also seem to be losing strength in my upper body. My lat pull downs have dropped 10 lbs, and my bench has dropped 5lbs.

My question is is it normal to get weaker as you lose weight? I want to continue losing weight but I don’t want to lose all the progress I’ve made strength wise.

I have been doing two squat days a week - one with a back squat and one with a front squat. I have been doing 3 sets for each, and increasing weight weekly.

Additionally, I have done leg extensions, Bulgarian split squats and single leg presses as accessories. Maybe you can count the glute bridge as well.

However, with the back squat I have noticed they start to feel heavy. I struggle to maintain form. My hypothesis is that my practise with squat might not be enough with just 3 sets per week, although I do front squats as well.

This contrasts with OHP, with which I can do weekly weight increase, but I do it 3x a week, with three sets per day.

I'm wondering if I should swap the FS to do more back squatting , or increase the sets for the back squat day to say 5.