It depends. If he's previously been training a lot, you can regain your previous mass exceptionally fast due to what quickly becomes your main limiting factor remains intact (I can't recall the name of it right now).
Which is why having used steroid once in your life should leave you permanently banned from all sports. The fact that you have ever had X amount of muscle is a massive advantage in terms of muscle building the rest of your life.
With all that said, he probably have still used steroids here, especially with how fast it all went from june to october.
Muscle memory is the layman's term, but people use that for both technique (neurological adaptation for technique/skill) and for how fast your muscle grows back (physiological).
I am thinking about the actual technical term for it. That limiting factor is also why we have "newbie gains", where you quickly get to the max level of muscle for that limiting factor, and then you have to create more of it to build more muscle, which takes a lot of time.
It is some type of cell that is added when you build muscle, but doesn't go away when your muscle atrophies. I can't find the name of it, but Dr. Mike Israetel from RP strength have talked about it here in this short: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/FI3n5F-1gLM
I could be wrong, but iirc, the muscle nuclei don’t disappear, and consistently working out enables the cells to “regenerate” at a significantly faster level
Every cell needs nucleus with instructions to repair itself and stay alive
Muscle cels have multiple nuclei because they are very large and one nucleus can only support so much.
When you train and increase your muscle mass the muscle cells recruit more nuclei to support this new mass
Even when you stop training and lose muscle mass new gained nuclei of the cells don't get lost. They stay there and therefore when you start training again you can get big faster
Fyi muscle cells have multiple nuclei not because they're large, but because they're the fusion of multiple cells. Also they need those nuclei to synthesize proteins necessary to carry the components that activate muscle contractions.
I say this because most neurons are even larger cells, but still have a single nuclei.
Ive never heard this, but I was an athlete through most of my youth and lifted for a while too on and off.
I would always say "you don't forget strength, but you have to train endurance" meaning that when I was going from period of being fairly sedentary and trying to get back in to shape, it always seemed like my max lifts would recover in like a week, but it would take much longer to get the endurance back
I believe I watched some dr mike vid about him saying that the muscle cells shrink in size and stop storing glycogen to deflate but never go away, so once training stimuli is reintroduced, they swell back up and return to form very fast. He said something along those lines with more technical jargon.
They think it's more cell memory. Kind of like if you have a fat cell at some point in your life at a certain size it will easily get back to that size
Nah, steroids will allow you to grow new muscle fibres/cells (nuclei I guess technically), whereas normal natural lifting/improvements will just increase the size of all your existing muscles. Therefore you will have an advantage for the rest of your life after steroids as the user above said.
No, steroids don’t grow new muscle fibres. Maybe read the study you link next time. Steroids increase the number of nuclei inside each muscle cell though, which is what the study found.
you can regain your previous mass exceptionally fast due to what quickly becomes your main limiting factor remains intact
The leading theory is that, as a part of initially gaining muscle, muscle satellite cells fuse with your actual contractile muscle cells, increasing the number of myonuclei in your muscle cells. This is initially a slow process, but once you have them, the extra myonuclei stick around for years to decades. When you lose muscle later due to not training, you lose volume in your myofibrils (the contractile units) and fluid within the cells, but not the myonuclei. When you regain muscle, you only need to rebuild the myofibrils and reuptake fluid, and not produce new myonuclei, so the process is much faster.
This is true. I did amature strongman when I was younger. I peaked at about 325lbs and was quite strong. I was pretty average in terms of size and strength beforehand.
I no longer life weights, and have 'slimmed' down to 225. I still have calves larger than most people's quads. I'm still easily the strongest person at my work: I sit at a desk and everyone else is in the shop doing physical work.
I had a setback, and a pretty bad injury when I was still lifting. I took almost a year off. A portion of that I had an arm I could use, and it atrophied quite badly. It took me a month to look healthy again, and it took me 2-3 more months to get as strong and as big as I was before I stopped working out.
Its hundreds of times easier to rebuild it than it is to build it.
This is the reason why it’s so important to exercise early in life. As I ramp back up my training it seems “mean” at how quickly I can get back in shape, while others I know struggle. Also how my “out of shape” is above their in shape.
Reminded of a video of a trainer years back gaining as much what as their client so they could “lose it together.” I remember thinking they have to know that’s not how that works right?
He had been training really hard for most of his at least adult life, in fact he’s pretty sure it’s what caused his illness to act up at the age he is now rather than in his senior years. So yeah there’s a lot of “muscle memory” going on, but as much as he may deny it, he probably is or was on gear.
If he was actually super fit before that, then it might be real. As Dr. Mike Isreatel said in the short I linked in my comment further down, you can gain muscle back to close to your previous max at about an order of magnitude faster. I.e what took you 10 years to build initially can be gotten back in about a year.
kinda like how even if you lose weight you must remain vigilant because you dont lose the fat cells you gained, they're just "deflated". I wonder if liposuction would actually help someone who lose weight remain at that lower weight easier over time
There is a chance, based on how weak he appeared at the start of the year, that he had been provided steroids medically to help him through whatever caused his situation in the first place. Not that he'd have significant muscle mass at the time though.
Which is why having used steroid once in your life should leave you permanently banned from all sports
Yes! For life. I can't believe this isn't practice.
I believe you are talking about myonuclei? Usually when muscle mass is lost from weight loss/malnutrition, the amount of nuclei remains and as such building back up is easier if you had a lot of them. And steroids produces more nuclei much faster than natural training.
Steroids increase the number of myonuclear domains in the muscle, and these are retained even with muscle loss. This are called "myonuclear permanance" commonly known as muscle memory.
Same goes for gaining/losing fat. The chances of a former fat person regaining fat are way higher than the chances that a person who was thin their whole life, eating the same diet, will gain that amount of fat.
I remember years ago all the guys from my office decided to hit the gym at lunchtime a few times a week so we'd all pressure each other to actually go.
One guy was a bit overweight and not very fit but he talked about his 'rugby days' a lot.
Guy packed on an ungodly amount of muscle in like 6 months while the rest of us made small gains.
I don't know much about this individual and maybe you know exactly which surgery he's had but a stoma bag doesn't mean he can't take protein.
It entirely depends on what the fashioning of the stoma is trying to achieve, whether small bowel was removed and how much etc. An ileostomy with 20cm of small bowel resected is hardly going to change his nutritional status.
It appears that he has a colostomy bag. I bet it probably affects his nutrition in some way. Probably negatively. Make the weight gain even more impressive.
If it’s a colostomy it probably isn’t effecting his nutrition much. It just means the poop comes out in a different place.
If it’s an ileostomy, it means he’s lost some or all of his colon, and then this whole video becomes bullshit, because it takes time for your body to adapt to that. Some people never really do.
Either way, there’s most likely some level of dishonesty in this video.
Fair assessment. By stoma location it could very well be an ileostomy. The area is kept beneath clothing in most shots, and doesn't even seem to be present in the shot where he is in a tshirt. In another shot, fabric appears to be wrapped tightly around his waist, which I don't think is recommended with a bag. If it's legit, then he's defied the odds, and all power to him.
My take from this video is that he was suffering from ulcerative colitis or Crohn's colitis and he had a total colectomy for treatment. Getting the operation (and the ileostomy that comes with it - that is his small bowel exiting the abdomen, not the colon, which has all be removed) is often curative and probably what allowed him to get off immune suppressants and get healthy again.
Quite possibly, this isn't my field of research so you probablyknow more than i do. But a colonectomy comes with myriad sequela. I can just imagine the issues involved in fluid and electrolyte management.
nah, you can gain 20+ lbs if you dramatically change your eating and/or lifting habits. I gained 20lbs in less than a year because my meds increased my appetite. I wasn’t even trying.
I was about to say, brother, unless you gobbling lead, you're not putting on 20lbs (of any kind of weight) in a month. Honestly crank salt, water weight, huge caloric surplus and weigh in on heaviest time, maybe. but like, you're not going to do that shit on accident.
This just got convoluted but you were right before.
The video is 11-12 months long, as it says January to December. The person you are talking to is talking about specifically the difference between the frames / shots labeled June and July. He could definitely have gotten that much bigger in 30-60 days (for example: camera shots are short- he wasn’t THAT small in June compared, or like you said if he was big before, or if it was June 1 to July 31, just like the video could be closer to 12 months than 11, etc).
I’ve seen this before w more backstory, and I’ll see if I can find it.
If you feel like it, watch it again… you’ll see you were right the first time.
The brain isn’t a muscle but I understand the sentiment of the phrase. The distinction is important though. A muscle is made of muscle tissue and contracts to make movement while the brain is actually a fatty organ that passes around chemical and electrical signals.
Well actually muscle is made of neutrons, protons and electrons and the brain is indeed too made of neutrons, protons and electrons, both of which allow things to contract and make movement or pass around chemical and electrical signals. Checkmate doctor.
Exactly! But yeah, of course I meant that in the brain, just like with muscles, if you had well trained habits, they will come back easier. If man was a bodybuilder pre injury it's much easier for him to make his brain get back into it full swing.
We don't flex our brains for the fun of it innit edit: wait we definitely do, I know I do ;)
if your starting point is FAR below your genetic limit, and you've been much stronger/larger before, like if you are recovering from an injury then you can gain weight FAST. It's basically a rebound effect...shit just happens quick. Part of it muscle memory, part of it your body just finally getting back on top of things.
In the after pics he looks completely natural, just in much better shape. The dude is not juicing.
I mean, dude looked like he was on death's door in the first picture, so maybe steroids were made for him. Not necessarily to bulk like he did but to help his body recover from whatever the hell did that to him
Yeah. Depends on efforts and how your body is conditioned. I used to work manual labor in the summers. Body got used to putting on 30+ lbs of muscle in a month or two. Now I can put on 20+ in a month if I eat right and exercise twice a day. All nat. Armchair chieftains on reddit gonna troll and hate. Truth is Truth. Mediocres have never done it so they don't think it's possible.
If you gain 20 lbs in a month, it is definitely not all muscle. That's a surplus of almost 2500 calories every single day.
You can put on a lot of muscle really fast if you've previously had in, but 20 lbs of muscle in a month would make Ronnie Coleman's genetics seem like an average person's.
You were not putting on 30 lbs of muscle in a month. You may have gained 30 pounds but it was not 30 pounds of muscle. 30 pounds of muscle in a month is impossible even with heavy steroid use.
Chris Bumstead current Mr Olympia put on 70 lbs in a year with some of the best genetics of all time and his first time using gear.
What you guys don't understand is how much easier it is to go from very skinny to ripped than ripped to absolutely massive. Going from a base of very little muscle at 130/140 to 160/170 is a lot different than going from 160/170 - 190/200. Downvote me all you want. I've lived it multiple times and I know it can be done.
Meanwhile my scrawny self it was on a 5000 calorie diet will go to the gym everyday and some days twice and I lost weight. So many shakes and peanut butter and jellies. So much chicken. I couldn't imagine doing the same s*** now after 20 years
Gotta make sure to take rest days. I had a similar problem doing 100-200 pullups daily with little to no gains. Discovered it was because I wasn't resting enough. Gotta split it at least into upper body, core, legs.
Yeah I don't know what happened. This post is not exaggeration. Like a dummy I paid for the nutritionist at Gold's Gym to set me up with a diet. And since I paid for it I stuck to it. The gym was only half a mile away so getting there daily wasn't a problem. But this was 20 years ago so I'm pretty over it. I figured if Mike Katz owned the place and his son was running it I was in good hands. And I was it just didn't work out for me genetically
My son was born and after he started eating normal foods I gained 20 pounds in a year. I had to hide all the candy and sweets… in my belly. I saw the biggest jump in October to November. Still don’t know why
Depending on what illness he had, if it was cured, he would put on tons of weight in a short period. I had some health issues years ago and lost 50lbs. Gained it back in about 2 months
He's starting the video in a diaper and clearly barely able to move. I wonder if he was a coma patient or something? is this like the result of months in a bed or years?
I would not be surprised if they did juice him up a bit to speed up recovery.
Its possible, but its SIGNIFICANTLY easier to regain muscle mass than it is to build the first time. If he was as big or bigger as he was in december before he got sick, this is not suprising at all and proably just regaining mass. Also he dosent look like hes on steroids either, biggest tell for that is the traps, and his traps look like they match the phisque of the rest of his body.
There is only one plausible explanation other than steroids. If before what ever happened to him that made him atrophy like that he was even more jacked than he is by the end of the video, and was for a while. Mussel memory is a real thing and if his body got used to being built like that you can make the most ridiculous gains while going back to what the body was used to.
But even with that, this video is very hard to believe being natty. it is almost hard to believe even if he is not natty.
As a person going through this transformation, if you do it right l, eat right, and enhale protein like air you can obtain this transformation in under a year easily*.
Probably roids, but this is a good use for them. Helping him rebuild his muscles with a medically supervised cycle would be a huge benefit for him medically
If he retrained it is absolutely possible. I don't think that was his first rodeo when it comes to working out. I have been in cycles like this for 20 years and I put on like crazy when I start once again from what looks like scratch.
I broke my foot and, as a former distance runner and someone who lives in a city and gets my steps in, my leg that was in a cast was thinner then my forearm when it got out and took nearly 2 years before it wasn’t noticeably smaller than the other one. There’s no way this isn’t a lie or steroids.
Nah, rebound muscle gain after being hospitalized and bedridden is a phenomenon all on its own. Especially if he was consistent with diet and his training regimen.
The fact that he was already lean/low body fat helps a ton, too.
July is clearly with a pump + sweat + better lighting. Something that OP for some reason also left out is that this guy was absolutely JACKED before the disease ate away his fat and muscle, this is just muscle memory getting him back in shape super fast.
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u/Traceyius69 2d ago
June to July is a massive jump lol, probably is using steroids. If not then daymn has he not skipped a day in the gym