Training 7 Years with Minimal Results

Hi,
I’m 23 and been training since 16 and I have not seen many results.
I also got a DEXA scan done recently and it showed 31% body fat.
The thing is that I feel for any healthy male even with a garbage program and average diet they could make more progress than I did in 7 years.

My stats:

Height: 6’0"
Weight: 179 lbs
Body fat % (DXA confirmed 2x in last 6 months): 31% body fat
Dumbbell Shoulder press: Max 50 lbs dumbbell x 12
Dumbbell bench press: Max 75 lbs dumbbell x 5

The pics include a shirtless pic and the 2 Dexa pics.

So I am wondering about consulting a doctor as to whats going on with my body in terms of muscle gain and fat loss. Any time I tried losing fat I always lost a lot of muscle and during any time i tried to put on muscle i put a lot more fat and the cycle continued so I’ve basically not made much progress in 7 years whereas newbie kids who started gym after me always got more jacked in front of my eyes.

I am wondering what you guys think about the genetics/Hormone/Insulin/++ components here and what I should do/doctor to consult next? There is type 2 diabetes rampant in my family and nobody has ever been non-obese, my recent blood sugar was around 100 (borderline pre-diabetic) so that must play a role too.

Please help!

Based on the detailed diet and training program you described I can confidently say that more horsemeat is needed, and you are lacking wrist rolls in your training. Godspeed.

If you weren’t putting on much muscle in the first place, how did you have a lot of muscle to lose when you were losing fat?

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I admire your perseverance to keep at it, though you seemed to get such less than satisfying reward for your work. I’d have given up and gone to some other life endeavor.

You have my best wishes that you will find a satisfying remedy.

My input from what you have stated is what is your quality protein intake?

What does your training look like?

What about your average diet?

At you dead-set on following Garbage Programs and eating an Average Diet? Or are you willing to follow and excellent program and a special eating plan?

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That points heavily toward lifestyle. Diabetes, heart disease, obesity all may have a genetic component, but are drastically exacerbated by lifestyle.

So what are you willing to do differently?

It sounds like you are destined to be a T2 diabetic if you don’t get your act together. (By ‘get your act together’ I mean lose bodyfat and gain muscle.)

Apparently, you didn’t win the genetics lottery. Very few of us do. But having a genetic predisposition to obesity and/or T2DM doesn’t mean they are inevitable. You are in control of what you put in your mouth and of how effectively you exercise, not your genes.

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No-one here is qualified to give you medical advice, but we can definitely advise on diet/exercise if you give us some details.

While genetic components can get passed through a family, so can poor lifestyle habits. I would first look at those factors since they are 100% within your control.

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Nothing to add here, OP, except it’s rare we get a consensus on this site - here we just did. Good luck managing your blood sugars levels - I hope you do so with urgency.

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Please tell us what your training regime and diet look like?

It’s hard to share proper advice by just knowing your limitations. Based on the information provided - The only thing I can say is you need to do things differently.

I believe the other posters had a similar opinion.

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Hire a professional coach. Not a typical 2 bit globogym instructor that make £50 a month out of 40 year old mums.

A proper coach that’s taken people from where you are to where you want to be.

We’ve asked repeatedly for a description of what you’re doing and you haven’t provided one beyond a very vague, meaningless blurb.

You also believe that diet should be fine which reads as unwilling to do anything differently.

This doesn’t look good.

Do what ever you’re going to do. The results are yours and yours alone.

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Brooooooooo

You’ve got some experienced jacked mother truckers in here trying to help you aka spoon feed you!

Spill your damn guts. Obviously nothing is good or you wouldn’t be in the shape you’re in after all these years

Edit to add:

I went back through to see who all has commented in here and it literally is some of the biggest and/or strongest people on this site. Don’t waste this opportunity

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Let me make this simple. How many grams of protein do you eat per day? What are your protein sources?

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So you give as much attention to your biceps as you give to the entire lower part of your body?

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Gonna speak the hard truth. If easy to offend or have a vagina, dont read any further.

If “what you do for training” you describe like this :

I am willing to bet that you havent trained a day in your life. What is very difficult to understand is how one can be doing something for 7 years and not bother to learn?

Yea, so is your “training”.

So basically, from what you can tell about yourself, we all can understand that… you have no idea about dieting, measuring foods, macros, any regimen of eating.
And you have absolutely no idea what does training mean. What you probably are doing are “workouts” not “training”.
Also, if you cant tell the difference between working out and training, it just futher proves my point.

But you havent trained probably like…ever. And your high fasting glucose is probably high due to shit diet.
You dont know a single thing you could tell us about your training, progression model, or diet specifics which means you have no clue.

Yes, your genetics are not the best. Mine also are pretty crap, but thats the point. Only guys who can eat whatever “calories” and whos training can be “arms on monday, ass on tuesday, back on next day” are the genetic elite.
Everyone else actually have to study diet, experiment with foods and most of all - TRAIN HARD. Not go to the gym and do exercises, but TRAIN.
The worse genetics you have, the more you need to know. Going by what you are wrinting, you know much too little about everything, and it is kind of even offensive for you to say that you do this for 7 years, because as a person who loves this lifestyle, i find it sad how you couldnt bother yourself to even fucking steal a PDF version of some whatever basic strenght training book.

With your stats, you should be able to bench 220 for a few reps. I bet you cant to this. Why? Well because you never trained.

With this attitude you get the results you have.
And also, no, you are very wrong. Its the Instagram lie. 99% of people who just go to the gym like you do, dont look any different from you.

In order to be able to tell that you are on a right path you should be able to answer these question to yourself :
1)What are you eating every meal, what macros, and why exactly this food this meal, not some other food, and why exactly these macros at this given meal?
2)Why are you doing this exercise, not a different one? What is the goal of this exercise short term and long term?

If you cant explain in detail ANY of your meals, or ANY of your exercises, you are leaving tons of room for failure.
The less meals of a day, and the less exercises you can explain, the MORE room for failure you left there.
I am sure you are clueless about every single meal, and every single exercise you do, so - you have a very normal result for the work(or lack of it) you do.

I guess the only thing worth asking at this point is, are you willing to change your workout routine and your diet, or are you just looking for someone to confirm that you’re genetically and biologically doomed?

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My concern is that the OP might be dealing with both.

Usually when we get people on here who just want to hear they’re doomed, they aren’t actually that interested in changing what they’re doing. If we just tell them “you’re correct - you’ve done everything and nothing will work”, it’s got a double benefit - they don’t have to feel as if they’ve wasted time, and they don’t have to change their lifestyle whatsoever.

But sometimes, we get people that are a bit hard to get to, but they end up making some changes and killing it! Typically, those people don’t respond too well to attacks, so in hopes that we can help this guy, I’m wondering if he’ll provide us some real info (like your question about how many grams of protein he ate), scrap his 6-day PPL, and fix his diet.

Side note: What is with 6-day PPL’s? I’m a big fan of “everything works”, and maybe I’m imagining things but that structure in general seems to just leave sorrow and despair in its wake.

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Everything works with enough effort. It’s really easy to not work very hard on a 6 day PPL.

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