Great question,

A lot of it has to do with Juvenile muscle growth, or just young growth in general.

If you look at standard height and weight growth curves, men are expected to gain about 20 pounds between the ages of 16 and 20 (they also gain a couple inches in height).

Add in weight training during this same time and you can see where people get close to 40 pound claims.

The other things is that since lean body mass is related to height, these larger claims also come from taller people.

Gaining 15 pounds of muscle over a summer are possible for a 19 year old pro athlete who is 6’4″.

It’s a little different for a 34 year old who is 5’10″ and has been training for 20 years.

Brad Pilon Blog – If I put a person, a gorilla and a hippopotamus together in a room, chances are you would easily pick out the human….

As a fellow hockey fan, I think that analogy is a very apt one…..you always seem to have a knack for making a great point and doing so in a user-friendly way.

Dave

When it comes to the Tesosterone levels, my area of expertise is not disease prevention, especially cancer, so really, I can’t give you an educated answer..anything I write would be more of a guess.

When it comes to muscle, your right, I’m not including temporary increases like water retention for creatine, glycogen etc…to me this is where the money is. It’s the difference maker. Greatly overlooked and almost always ignored, but it’s what makes all the difference.

B

Thanks for the compliments on the blog.

I’m cool commenting on this stuff, I actually enjoy that site. For me its a source of entertainment, fun stories, and fun (sometimes a little offside) pictures.

I think of it a bit like reading about hockey trade rumors (I’m a big hockey fan).

It’s entertaining to read, a lot of times the trades make a lot of sense, but rarely to they ever turn out. But they ARE entertaining.

B

First let me say that as an American I would be remiss if not saying thank you on Thanksgiving for sites like yours where you get honest information from one of the most knowledgeable people out there.

As such, I was wondering if you’d give your take on the following (especially in light of this post on muscle growth), however I understand if you either do not have the time or desire to look it over or just feel uneasy about commenting on it via this medium.

[[Link to latest t-nation article....link removed to be nice - BP]]

This is either the greatest hoax of all time (and that would be saying something in the supplement industry), or it is the future in its nascent stages, which will get torn to pieces in the short term and criticized to no end but ultimately vindicated in the end. I can’t see it being anywhere between either one of those extremes, because then it truly would be a colossal waste of time.

Even if trying to give the benefit of the doubt, it smacks of snake oil sales tactics.