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. 💪
Your brother is doing something that falls into your area of expertise and it’s expected that you’re excited and drawing up scenarios. Although I feel it’s worth respecting the bar your brother has set himself, no matter how low it is even if he is a beginner and may not know any better. To be honest, his idea is pretty smart if it’s how you described - work out at home casually so that he could be interrupted to help out his family.
You mention that he has been skinny his entire life, but when you asked him about building muscle you say it looked like it caught him off guard. My conclusion is it’s possible it doesn’t bother him that much and he may never actually lean more into bodybuilding as you’re hoping. Having a more ambitious goal would for sure make him do that and as a side effect allow you to become a proper mentor, but it sounds like he just want to work out unto itself and he’s ok with his body. He’s healthy weight after all. You’ll see in time if his motivation wanes in time and you could step in, anyway.
I’d say treat it more like a cool thing your brother is doing rather than a project where there’s your responsibility in the mix.