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. 💪

  • givesomefucks@lemmy.worldEnglish
    33·
    5 days ago

    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.

    at least 2500 per day (or more) if he wants to gain weight

    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.

    would see reasonable gains

    He literally won’t because of conservation of energy…

    Like, you can’t just ignore physics.

    • Lodespawn@aussie.zoneEnglish
      12·
      5 days ago

      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.

      • givesomefucks@lemmy.worldEnglish
        32·
        5 days ago

        Op:

        My brother won’t eat

        You:

        He should eat protein! He can’t just drink something like fatty cow milk, nothing on earth has ever grown and gained muscle mass from fatty cow milk! How could anything ever gain weight and muscle mass from something evolutionary designed to cause an organism to gain weight and muscle mass?

        Like bro, you could have at least asked me questions and learned something.

        Now you have to find someone else.

        • Lodespawn@aussie.zoneEnglish
          11·
          5 days ago

          Oh I forgot icecream came about through evolution, silly me, what was I thinking …