Julian Shapiro, YCombinator alum, has a very nice guide to building muscle.[0]

The gateway drug to the HIT tradition, which began with genius Arthur Jones and Nautilus in the early 1970s, is this video presentation by Doug McGuff[1], author of Body by Science[2]. Whether you follow a HIT protocol or not, you should be familiar with the theory covered in Body by Science. Doug covers the definition of fitness and health (which is unusual right there for a fitness book!), the confounding effects of genetics, fat metabolism, and much, much more. The High Intensity Business podcast has all the leading figures in exercise research as guests, with a rich back catalog and very detailed links in the show notes.[3] And if you plan to do this for the rest of your life, give your future joints a break by not destroying them in your youth.[4][5]

[0] https://www.julian.com/guide/muscle/intro

[1] https://youtu.be/2PdJFbjWHEU

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Body-Science-Research-Strength-Traini...

[3] https://highintensitybusiness.com/podcasts/

[4] https://www.amazon.com/Joint-Friendly-Fitness-Optimal-Exerci...

[5] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/billdesimone/the-joint-...

It doesn't take much time to exhaust yourself physically, at least to exhaust specific muscle groups. Systemic exhaustion (steady state exercise, like running) is another matter. It doesn't even cause sweating, as it is over too quickly. I have been experimenting lately with pushups to failure just before I turn out the lights and climb into bed. By failure, I mean MMF (momentary muscular failure), not being able to repeat the motion as hard as I try. An alternative is body weight squats by the bed, to failure. Pick the range of motion to be in the hard (low) part of the squat, move slowly (SuperSlow protocol is 10 seconds concentric, 10 seconds eccentric) to failure, and make it hard enough to fail in less than 90 seconds. Crawl into bed and fall asleep easily (after your heart stops pounding). Of course, you will also build muscle mass over time, which doesn't hurt.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2PdJFbjWHEU

[1] "Body by Science: A Research Based Program to Get the Results You Want in 12 Minutes a Week" https://www.amazon.com/Body-Science-Research-Strength-Traini...

Intensity is 80-90% of the determinant of a muscle's adaptive response to load. If you plan to get somewhere near your genetic potential in strength and size, you will need to use rather high intensity to deeply fatigue ("inroad") the muscle. But you also have to not repeat that stimulus for days to a week, to allow recovery in people like us with middle of the bell curve genetics. The ideal profile for building strength is exercise that is intense, brief, and infrequent. Yes, it is unpleasant for a couple of minutes per muscle group, once or twice a week. So what? Do you enjoy brushing your teeth? Or do you just do it and get it over with? Note, this is for strength training. Skill building for sports, or general physical activity, is a different protocol, depending on the activity.

One of my favorite recent book titles is "If You Like Exercise ... Chances Are You're Doing It Wrong: Proper Strength Training for Maximum Results"[0], which is another book about the work of exercise genius Arthur Jones, inventor of Nautilus and MedX equipment.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Exercise-Chances-Youre-Doing-Wrong/dp...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7GB3h82tcQ

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Body-Science-Research-Strength-Traini...

I like your reference to catabolic/anabolic processes. Alas, you then made some incorrect claims.

>you can't lift weights and gain muscle (i.e. grow) without also gaining fat

Of course you can. I'd be happy to share my Google sheet of daily weight, losing about 0.06lb/day, and my BodPod measurements showing going from 28% to 20% body fat while gaining 2.5lbs of muscle mass. Sarcopenia would have taken another 0.5lbs of muscle in that one year period.

Drew Baye has several articles on losing fat while gaining muscle[0]. In the first few pages of Body by Science[1], Doug McGuff defines health as (1) the absence of disease and (2) a balance between anabolic and catabolic processes. Except McGuff makes it clear that almost the entire population in the developed world lives in a catabolic energy state, eating way more than we need, never flushing the stored glucose out of our muscles, the tank is always full[2]. But while that is happening, sarcopenia [catabolic] is removing muscle mass as we age.

[0] http://baye.com/building-muscle-losing-fat/

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Body-Science-Research-Strength-Traini...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2PdJFbjWHEU

If you check, you will find it is incredibly rare for health and fitness books and articles to define "health", "fitness" or "exercise". Body by Science[0][1] gets right to it on pages 2 and 3 to define all three:

Health: A physiological state in which there is an absence of disease or pathology and that maintains the necessary biologic balance between the catabolic and anabolic states.

Fitness: The bodily state of being physiologically capable of handling challenges that exist above a resting threshold of activity.

Exercise: A specific activity that stimulates a positive physiological adaptation that serves to enhance fitness and health and does not undermine the latter in the process of enhancing the former.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Body-Science-Research-Strength-Traini...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2PdJFbjWHEU

It looks like the X3bar (really bands) suffer from the classic problem of mismatch to your strength curve, with the strongest resistance where your lifting is weakest. Nautilus equipment generally solved that problem by the 1980s.

Free PDF of Nautilus Training Principles: Bulletins No. 1-3 http://baye.com/store/nautilus-bulletins/

Summary of research and evidence-based exercise as of 2009: Body by Science https://www.amazon.com/Body-Science-Research-Strength-Traini...

Author Doug McGuff MD has been operating a training facility since 1998, 100-120 client sessions a week, and he reports zero injuries to date. Most injuries come from excess force/acceleration, so pick an exercise protocol with very low acceleration that seriously fatigues the target muscle.

It's surprising that no one has mentioned Body by Science[1], SuperSlow from Ken Hutchins, Arthur Jones and Nautilus, and other research based programs from the last forty years. Free weights can be very dangerous as you approach muscle failure, and all sorts of momentum, breath holding, etc. are problematic. Unless hypertrophy and/or bad time management are your goals, I prefer the system of deep muscle inroading in 12 minutes a week, and then I work on sport skills, not building muscle mass, the rest of the week. I have a median genotype, not the genetic makeup of a muscle magazine.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Body-Science-Research-Strength-Traini... "Body by Science: A Research Based Program for Strength Training, Body building, and Complete Fitness in 12 Minutes a Week"

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2PdJFbjWHEU

[3] http://techzinglive.com/page/1500/268-tz-interview-dr-doug-m...

I got my exercise list from [1]. Per training I typically do 3-4 different exercises with one or two sets. I do not do any warm ups or stretching. I train mostly with machines as that is safer for me. Training purely with barbell inevitably triggers back pain.

[1] - http://www.amazon.com/Body-Science-Research-Strength-Trainin...

Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind — Shunryu Suzuki [1]

Body by Science — Doug McGuff, MD and John Little [2]

1. http://www.amazon.com/Zen-Mind-Beginners-Shunryu-Suzuki/dp/1...

2. http://www.amazon.com/Body-Science-Research-Strength-Trainin...

While some are able to extract valuable benefit from gyms the vast majority are wasting time and money. In addition to that, most of these articles are very thin on reproducible facts and true research-based data.

This is, by far, the most interesting and useful resource I have found when it comes to fitness:

http://www.amazon.com/Body-Science-Research-Program-Results/...

The author covers cellular biology and debunks ideas such as "cardio workouts", treadmill bunnies, jogging and walking around your neighborhood to loose weight with plain-old science. Here you'll learn about the cellular metabolic process, Krebs cycle, Insulin resistance, fatty acid synthesis, glycolitic cycle, Cori cycle, Bohr effect, glycogenolysis, amplification cascade and whole host of other topics that are important, relevant and reasonably well understood.

What's more important is that everything that is proposed in this book is backed by science and scientific studies. It's like open-source software. If you care to dive deeper into why something works the way it does the scientific references are provided. The book has over 25 pages of listed references (about 10% of the book is reference data).

Anyhow, one of the claims of the book is "12 minutes a week" every seven to ten days. In other words, that's the actual time under load you need every seven to ten days to affect significant changes in your body. This does not include time walking around, watching TV or resting. Time under load.

I have to say that it works pretty much exactly as advertised. After reading the book I tried it and had a friend try it. We'd spend about fifteen minutes under load at the gym once a week. For me it changed to fifteen minutes every 9 to 12 days (you track your data in order to determine frequency). I got stronger with every passing week. Something that I was not able to do without a ton more effort in the past.

If you are interested in learning about this, start with Dr McGuff's (the author) videos:

http://www.bodybyscience.net/home.html/?page_id=2