• jj4211@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    Strong is not mutually exclusive with fat.

    I have a friend who made ability to lift heavy stuff basically his whole identity. Correlated with that was at any gathering he made a big show of eating just way more than everyone else because he’s a “big guy” and his muscles demand that much. So long as he could lift, obviously he must be fit, he works out after all. Basically his concept of masculinity is lift the heaviest stuff and eat the most stuff.

    Now he’s struggling with diabetes and liver problems, despite being crazy strong. Never did cardio, and ate way more than he needed.

    Yes, BMI can be misleading and being a bit muscular can have a higher BMI and be healthier than BMI says, but odds are if you are up in the obese territory, you probably are packing a lot of visceral fat screwing up your gut.

    • StaySquared@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      So I’m not strictly a powerlifter. My first 15 years of gym training was for the sake of size (bodybuilding), once I reached a certain size I decided to move onto powerlifting for the sake of strength. However, in order to maintain my size I mix both powerlifting with bodybuilding, or what we call, “powerbuilding”. After two years of strict powerlifting, I noticed smaller muscle groups were getting outshined by other muscle groups and it was causing not just visual imbalances / asymmetry but also strength and stability imbalances (the heavier the weight the more strength you need in all working muscles and these muscles also need to keep me stabilized throughout the movement) which was impacting my bench press for example.

      So at best, I can promise you, I’m not obese. Obese for me would be entering about 25% BF, which would push my weight to around 270lbs if not a little more than that.