Your personal narrative/will power/mental toughness will not allow you to exceed muscular failure by definition. You do you man but I stand by my comment that you're way over thinking this.

Aye shhhhh! Dont tell the feds about the bodies in the lake . Those are the only ones they havent found yet...

if you can stabilize them then maybe you can use them as a deep ome legged squat platform? Or maybe jump on some of them?

Or you could use them to weigh down a homemade work station

Exactly ! They said 'standard vegan diet' ...Like.... the only tjign that I would be able to eat if I followed a 'standard vegan diet' would be spinach, rutabaga, tofu and vegetable oil.... Only those.... That gets boring veeeery fast.

...Where is all the starch in my diet please?

Lets assume that your activities represent mental toughness. Does that translate to knowing how hard you can push yourself during a set? Why would it?

I plan to answer this final part of your question as a standalone post that I will share here next week (and reply again to this comment and link you to my OP).

The "short answer" is probably yes because it allows you to go beyond muscular failure from the perspective of someone with normal intent and normal pacing issues that we all face at the gym. As a 15 second thought experiment, if you have a grueling 15-working-set gym workout and you "go to actual failure" on your first set, how do you know that your brain is not secretly limiting your intent based on the fact you still have 95% of your workout remaining?

In summary, intent & pacing are 2 things I have spent dozens of hours thinking about this year because it seems that most pop-sci influencers (such as Jeff Nippard) seem to treat the concept of pacing/intent as less interesting and less important than the main hypertrophy concepts (which is true, admittedly) but pacing/intent are the 2 topics to fitness which I find the most interesting. I love asking myself "why did I reach muscular failure"? Could I have tricked my brain into forcing 1 more rep by manipulating my life story temporarily so that my brain believes that my entire life has been leading up to this 1 singular moment?

You are entirely correct that I’ve never done an ice bath or a water fast and see no reason or benefit to doing either one. Why should we assume either activity translates to strength training in any meaningful sense? Lets assume that your activities represent mental toughness. Does that translate to knowing how hard you can push yourself during a set? Why would it?

That's fair -- I encourage not just you, but also anyone reading this, to try an ice bath at least once during their lifetime. Fill up their freezer with large water balloons for 3 days. Break off the water balloon and break the ice with a hammer, otherwise the "cooling effect" of the water balloons on the interior of the frozen ice blocks are wasted because only the outer surface is exposed to ambient bath water.

I only began doing ice baths after listening to many people swear by them and due to my curiosity, I must know whether or not they are over-hyped. Most people do not take adhd meds and therefore the biggest benefit (according to some people) is the week long benefit of something to do with a flooding of neurotransmitters -- I'm being intentionally vague because I don't want to explain it incorrectly.

But the biggest benefit I see (and is within the top-3 benefits most people agree on) is that it "resets" your brain's relationship with pain, discomfort, or adversity. That resetting of your brain's relationship with pain, discomfort, or adversity makes you immediately halfway between the person you used to be and the metaphorical David Goggins:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bklrNzdtU3Q
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPwFimMcoCI
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtQ8Z--SN4I

I say metaphorical because I don't know if he's legit or a con artist because I don't know him personally. But according to the youtube summary of the final video, ice baths callus your mind as explained below:

• Callus Your Mind (9:55 - 12:07): Regularly seek out intentional discomfort and do the things you hate. This practice uses neuroplasticity to rewire your brain to stay calm and resilient during chaos.

You are entirely correct that I've never done an ice bath or a water fast and see no reason or benefit to doing either one. Why should we assume either activity translates to strength training in any meaningful sense? Lets assume that your activities represent mental toughness. Does that translate to knowing how hard you can push yourself during a set? Why would it?

If you’re 40 and have been lifting for 10 months you probably literally don’t know how hard you can push yourself

I've done a 10-day water fast and the ice baths I do are far more difficult. You come across as someone who has never done an ice bath in your life because you chose to ignore that detail and instead focus only on an irrelevant detail (that I've been lifting for 10 months).

My mental toughness claim rests on my ice bath statement. I also video-record them and take pics of submerged thermometers and use timers so I don't cheat the duration or intensity data on my ice bath logbook. I never said that lifting for 10 months is the justification for my mental toughness.

Why worry about minutiae like optimal weekly set range for hypertrophy or your mesolimbic neurotransmitters when you’re a novice lifter? You aren’t eating in a calorie range for optimal hypertrophy no matter what set range you are at. By your own report what you’re doing is working so just keep it simple. Don’t go looking for problems you don’t have.

I agree with this part of your statement, though.

"I pride myself on mental toughness so it’s not simply a matter of being lazy or cowardice." What? What does what you take pride in have to do with your performance? You could just be wrong. Your post gives the very strong impression of someone who's dramatically over thinking their training. If you're 40 and have been lifting for 10 months you probably literally don't know how hard you can push yourself, you haven't trained long enough or hard enough to have that experience.

Why worry about minutiae like optimal weekly set range for hypertrophy or your mesolimbic neurotransmitters when you're a novice lifter? You aren't eating in a calorie range for optimal hypertrophy no matter what set range you are at. By your own report what you're doing is working so just keep it simple. Don't go looking for problems you don't have.

The other area you can improve recovery and overall capacity with is performance enhancing drugs. That’s something I don’t really know too much about, but that’s the way I’ve heard it described - you heal faster, stronger.

You're right and I'm so glad that thought hadn't even crossed my mind! Before this year, I planned to hop on testosterone through one of those "pill mill clinics" that advertise on facebook that operate in a legally gray area. But now I realize that if I took performance enhancing drugs (i.e. "gear" or TRT) then I would regret it, maybe not immediately but 5 or 10 or 20 years from now.

Aside - last I read, ice baths are counterproductive to muscle growth because they reduce the inflamation that signals to growth. They’re useful for competitive scenarios where recovery is prime, but they don’t help with improvment. By all means keep doing it if you enjoy it. My strong preference is for a sauna!

Indeed they are. I do them once per month now and in the middle of my de-load week. But when I first started, I did them weekly to build them into my identity as justified by the famous book "Atomic Habits" since an identity-based motivation lasts forever and doesn't drain mental resources compared to white-knuckling it.

First - everyone’s capacity is different; science discovers averages. There’s freaks who can do 20 sets and people who can do 5.

Over time you may be able to increase your tolerance slightly but recovery is ultimately a limited resource. Sleep, diet, and reduced stress outside of the gym are the only three things that I’m aware of that will help. When I had a job that basically was 2hrs a day, my diet was clocked in, and i was sleeping super regularly, I could do a lot more in the gym than I am now. I’m repeating a cycle from several years ago and I think my fatigue is more than just age.

The other area you can improve recovery and overall capacity with is performance enhancing drugs. That’s something I don’t really know too much about, but that’s the way I’ve heard it described - you heal faster, stronger.

Aside - last I read, ice baths are counterproductive to muscle growth because they reduce the inflamation that signals to growth. They’re useful for competitive scenarios where recovery is prime, but they don’t help with improvment. By all means keep doing it if you enjoy it. My strong preference is for a sauna!

From experience, it is quite difficult to add significant volume in a deficit. The more extreme, the harder it is, especially as you get leaner and leaner. I could do 20 sets per week starting out at 220 lbs, but as I got closer to 15% and, I had to drop back to just 8-10 hard sets per week per muscle.

It sounds like you're doing solid though. I think it's worth just focusing on sustainability during the cut to get to your lean-ness goal, then really hammer down when you switch to maintenance or a clean bulk. I think you'll be surprised how much more you'll be able to handle with you're not in a deficit.

That last bit, I meant sets, not reps. So fair catch. The first few sets do the majority of the growth stimulus compared to the later sets. Doing 1-2 hard sets a week gets you like 70℅ of the potential gains (I don't remember the exact number) and as you add sets, you get asymptotically closer to 100% of potential gains.

I'll edit the comment for clarity.

I would say that increasing your total weekly volume should be one of the last things you should do to increase hypertrophy.

According to Jeff Nippard, you must do a minimum of 2 hard sets per week per muscle group to maintain muscle mass. (or 1 near-death set where you collapse to the floor immediately after your final rep, Mike-Mentzer style exertion)

I only hit 10 weekly working sets for 1 muscle group (front delts). I do 2 working sets of lower body weekly. 6-8 hard sets per week of side delts. 4 hard sets per week of triceps/biceps. 2 hard sets of chest. No weekly minimum for calves, quadriceps, trapezius, back, lats, etc... (I just only care about front delts so everything else is deprioritized until I've dropped 50 pounds (25kg) of excess bodyfat very slowly)

My weekly volume is pathetically low, especially now that I'm in a very modest calorie deficit of ~400 calories or 3 pounds per month. I should have mentioned in OP that I can only do 10 working sets per day when I'm not in a calorie deficit -- but my question is still the same as I will still want to know how to fix this in a year when my diet is over.

Reps 5-10 do a lot more for you than 11-20

Doesn't this go against the idea of "effective reps" for hypertrophy? i.e. the last 5 reps before failure are the only reps which matter? (as explained in this Jeff Nippard video below):

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiJKa41Fsxo

This isn't a direct answer, and I'm not an expert. I would say that increasing your total weekly volume should be one of the last things you should do to increase hypertrophy. Volume itself has pretty drastic diminishing returns, and early on is a good way to push, but it falls off fast for the effort involved. Sets 5-10 do a lot more for you than 11-20 (edited reps-sets).

I would focus on training sufficiently close to failure, them increase your frequency. If you can hit the same muscle 3x a week instead of 1 or 2x, it's going to be a much bigger difference than slamming more reps onto the same workouts.

With that being said, for increasing lifting stamina, I wanted to do it, I would make sure your nutrition is on target and get good rest, then just slowly ramp up the volume and see what you can handle and adjust accordingly.

nowadays trainer😵‍💫

If sumo squats hit your quads or lower back instead of your glutes, your stance width, foot angle, or hip hinge might be off. Focus on pushing your knees outward in line with your toes and driving up directly through your heels while squeezing the glutes at top. Reviewing upper and lower body alignment tips at https://betterme.world/articles/calisthenics-arm-workouts/ helps maintain proper posture across all home bodyweight exercises. Tweak your form and feel the targeted activation!

Find form videos for roman deadlifts. You can do single leg roman deadlifts without any weight, but pretending you have a bar for balance.

Physically squeeze your glutes when you come up and while not locking your knees, push your hips out. That should be able to get you to feel the muscles activating. You won't be doing huge growth without weights, but it is good for building the mind-muscle connection for that muscle group.

Why the fuck is Gerald doing midnight sexy pushups?

To add onto this, 2 chairs with the seats facing each other works well for dips. Place a hand on each seat and have legs forward (or down if your chairs are tall and legs are short). Then you can adjust how much force your legs are providing.

Two chair method is more stable than 1 chair, and you can get better range of motion.

I applaud you for coming to us instead of your dogshit chatbots but it's still very rude to put AI in front of people.

Chair is one. Bannister if you have those. Even a kitchen counter corner is workable. If you're struggling with full bodyweight dips, try inclined dips off a chair or park bench first.

Your body will generally compensate for muscle weaknesses by having other muscles make up for the deficiency, and/or limit your range of motion for certain movements.

While weights are preferable, you should be able to get some mileage out of bodyweight exercises. Glute bridges are a classic for glute activation, and they require no equipment.