My brother is an amazing person. Has a great job, wife, family, etc… but he’s 6 feet tall and 145 pounds and in his mid 30’s. He just got back into weight-lifting by re-starting his adjustable dumbbell program and he texted me this pic earlier of his workout today.
I don’t want to give him a firehose of information as I watch/listen to about 2 hours of fitness & hypertrophy videos per day. His motivation is also very fickle and I absolutely do not want for my advice to make him feel like he needs to push himself too hard (his burnout risk is high). He also has been thin his whole life and says he wants to put on more weight but he always goes back to his old eating habits after 2-3 weeks and loses any weight that he gained.
Muscle growth is metabolically expensive so should I just recommend that he train only 1-2 muscle groups (such as shoulders and biceps) if I’m 100% confident he won’t eat more?
He is motivated enough to try but his effort is mostly wasted since he doesn’t want to invest into a real gym membership because he had a nightmarish experience trying to cancel his old gym membership 5 years ago so that ship has metaphorically sailed. He also doesn’t eat enough calories nor protein.
What am I missing? I feel like there’s some helpful advice I could probably give him but I’m unable to figure out what to tell him that he should mostly focus on (since he’s still a beginner). Any/all recommendations for how to traverse this situation/opportunity would be greatly appreciated. 💪
You get him professional help for his eating disorder…
If he’s refusing to eat, gaining muscle mass is going to increase how many calories he uses for basal metabolism. But the truth is at that weight he won’t build any muscle because there’s nothing to build it with.
Like, you need to get him to eat, not exercise.
Where did you get that from? 145 lbs at 6" is 19.7 BMI, which is “healthy weight”. 18 is the threshold for underweight. Sure it’s skinny but jumping to “eating disorder” isn’t exactly welcoming to skinny people struggling to build muscle.
Even from the screenshot, he just looks fine.
From the title:
But:
Did you really just ask why I didn’t travel to the future to click a link that hadn’t been posted in reply to my comment yet before making the comment?
I like Paradise too bro, but real life ain’t TV
Yeah, he needs to be eating like 120g of protein a day min and pushing his carlorie intake up to at least 2500 per day (or more) if he wants to gain weight. If he doesn’t want that to turn to fat he needs to be doing some kind of training, even body weight squats, lunges, pushups and chinups (if he has access to a bar) would see reasonable gains from his current state provided he’s eating.
If he’s 6 foot 145lbs, he needs to be microwaving ice cream and drinking it…
It doesn’t matter what the Macro is, he needs a shit ton of calories.
2500 daily calories is at the low end for sustained weight at that age group.
He can do all the exercise in the world, you can’t make muscle out of oxygen.
He literally won’t because of conservation of energy…
Like, you can’t just ignore physics.
Like I said “at least 2500”, he’s pretty light, his maintenance calories will be about that. He can build muscle at that if he’s untrained. He needs to focus on protein if he wants to build muscle at mid 30s, if he was 20 then sure, icecream milk shakes or whatever.
Op:
You:
Like bro, you could have at least asked me questions and learned something.
Now you have to find someone else.
Oh I forgot icecream came about through evolution, silly me, what was I thinking …
I’m 8 years older than him and he’s always been very underweight his whole life since as long as I can remember. Here is a timestamped youtube screenshot of how my brother approximately looks (very tall and skinny but not sufficient to suspect eating disorder). If it were an eating disorder, then at some point in life he would have been a normal healthy weight but he’s always been shaped like a toothpick. 😣
How exactly? Should I just frame it in a clever way so he thinks of it as “non-meal eating” or similar? (i.e. if I tell him to eat 500-600 calories before and after his workout, with at least 40g of protein each) I also thought about framing it as FOMO (fear of missing out) and that he’s leaving gains on the table if he isn’t in a daily 200 calorie surplus, which makes it sound not that difficult to eat an extra 200 calories per day.