Already Past My “Genetic Muscular Limit”

There’s a Limit, But It’s Probably Not Genetic

Back in 2019, based on my ever-slowing rate of progression, I figured my “genetic limit” was around 24FFMI — fat free mass index, a measure of how much muscle you have.

I hadn’t been gaining as much the past year or two of training, and so I thought 24 would probably be about where I ended up at the end of my “lifting career”. I had already been training for five years and I had seen charts online showing how little it’s possible to gain after that.

Wrong.

What I failed to consider was something every stock trader knows:

“Past performance is no guarantee of future results”

Looking back at my training, it’s clear I had a lot of room to optimize, even if I didn’t really realize it at the time.

Exercise Selection

It could have been worse. I was focusing on basic movements in 2017–2019. In the previous couple of years, I had wasted a lot of time on gimmicky bullshit, and thus was really just focusing on progressing on squats, deadlifts, bench presses, overhead presses, pullups, dips, bent over rows and other simple movements.