TheChubbyViking
Rip, Thank you. SS:BBT was strongly recommended to me by a mentor, and I am immensely grateful for having found it. I have read and re-read the book and am doing my best to follow it to a T.
Any opening pieces of advice/encouragement/critique/good-natured personal attacks (or poorly-natured, if you must, ha!)?
Mark Rippetoe
You'll have those numbers in 7 months if you continue to gain weight – 235 at 6'2" will have you close. But at 6'2" and 275 you can do 700/650/425/300. Think in those terms, not in physique. Outgrow that childish nonsense.
That is absolutely insane (with a positive connotation). I look forward to the journey!
pvchan
How concerned should I be about having high levels of creatinine? Is it common for athletes or people who lift and train hard to have higher levels of creatinine?
My blood test results for creatinine showed 1.15 last November and 1.3 now this month. GFR: 75 and A/G: 1.99.
I do take creatine, eat healthy and train hard 5-6 days a week. I'm 27 yrs old, 5ft 9" and about 175 Lbs.
Who told you to be concerned about elevated creatinine levels? What has your own research revealed?
Ericw
My in-laws think that balancing on one foot while doing dishes is better strength training for your ankles than a set of heavy squats. So weeding out bullshit is a valuable life skill.
jfsully
1.3 is a level that may (needlessly) raise concern in your doctor, if they don’t see a lot of patients who carry a lot of lean body mass.
In short, serum (blood) creatinine is used to indirectly measure kidney function, because creatinine (from muscle turnover) is removed from the blood by the kidneys, and generally, the more/better filtering the kidneys are doing, the lower the serum creatinine will be. The confusion arises when people train and have more lean body mass than average, which leads to more creatinine being dumped into the serum by muscles. Plus, creatine taken as a supplement gets converted into creatinine in the blood as well. Both of these things increase the level of creatinine in your blood WITHOUT affecting your kidneys.
This has been studied perhaps more than almost anything in ex-phys: neither taking creatine nor eating protein, in normal amounts like you read about around here, will harm your kidneys. But the number your doctor uses to assess kidney function will be artificially increased, which might cause concern to the uninformed.
Instead of just testing serum creatinine, the more accurate test of kidney function is to test the ratio of creatinine in your urine vs your serum.
If your doctor or you are concerned about your kidney function: say you have to take a medication that can sometimes damage kidneys or you have a strong family history of kidney disease, or you're sick and appear to have poor kidney function based on other signs, you can either:
Strength & Endurance, Pt 3 –John Petrizzo
Retirement Planning for Physical and Financial Health | Starting Strength Gyms Podcast #64 –
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