Torvum

I'm talking about endogenous and exogenous hormones. Peptides, steroids, sarms and the like. But with training, recovery is always the most important factor for muscle growth with synthesis, so unless you have perfect conditions all the time (impossible for a natural) it's better to optimize around recovery than being in the gym. Starting Strength is great for beginners like OP.

I've been doing a volume Bench Squat 5x5 Dead 1x5/intensity (start by doing heavy weight for sets of 5, when that's too heavy do sets of 3, then down to 5 sets of 1, 3 sets of 1, a single max, then reset) 2 day split with one light day with band work to improve ligaments and neck work to avoid another herniated disc. I honestly consider this the best for naturals in both recovery and time, but with more exercises added in. I'm restricting to the main lifts for powerlifting competition, but adding accessories to focus more on triceps, or rack pulls, etc would be good. Since starting this a few months ago my squat has gone from a 1x5 315 squat to a 415 max and 325 5x5 as a 6'2 natural powerlifter (I've only been lifting seriously for 3 years and powerlifting for a year and a half, my trainer has been training for 15 years and hit a 610 deadlift naturally but now in his 30s with low 300 free test he takes TRT)

5x5s are great, Practical Programming is a good book to follow Starting Strength, I recommend reading Alex Leonidas' Naturally Enhanced for a more hypertrophy approach. The Texas Program is good. Most of these are designed around the same concept of a 2 day full body one volume heavy the other intensity.

Also helps that if you're eating protein from a whole foods perspective, an 8oz chicken breast is a lot of food for only ~380 calories. Same goes for all lean proteins and even the fatty kind. You can fit a whole lot more in for equal calories going at whole foods than eating a 1200 calorie muffin.

That and fighting millions of years of evolutionary instinct screaming at you to eat everything you can when you start reducing calories in case you won't eat again for a few days.

It's only been MAYBE ~150 years that all classes of society had ready access to food.

Unless you take drugs, doing two or three full body workouts a week separated by 72 (for 2) or 48 (for 3) hours is far more optimal for protein synthesis operation. PPL and upper lower bro splits only work when you literally don't have to worry about recovery (perfect T and other hormones).

But the rest of this is great advice and would recommend Starting Strength before 5x5.

Techbros just needed to use the search engine optimization buzzword tbh.

Really wish the term virtual intelligence was used (literally what it is)

Online features, like the Brotherhood multiplayer, or those annoying older ads to use the mobile app while playing. The game itself can still be played.

Some of you are city dwellers and it shows

Being that he was a longtime alcoholic and was found drowned in his hot tub, it's a pretty solid guess what happened. Not a rare way to go.

I can see your point, but I am also tired of pointing to CEO salaries and thinking that reducing them will make any meaningful increase on company wide salaries.

There's always making cost scalable to reported profit. It's annoying to see a company like Amazon make so much but pay employees so little because it's"competitive pay" to the business they're ruining through monopoly.

It's better to place the burden on the company as a whole per revenue than per CEO pay differential. Amazon for example made somewhere in the 500 billion dollars in revenue for 2022 but for all ~1.5m employees only spent ~42 billion on salaries for an average of ~28k a year.

They have so much ample revenue to use for increased salaries that goes unanswered.

Yeah this isn't Spotify's fault really. It's a cringe over prostitution of the industry with increased server cost, record studios asking more in premiums, and growing pains from increased salaries. It's unfortunate we can't ever just let something exist for the sake of general good without the greedy asking for their take when it becomes popular.