Buy-to-let...


I've previously mentioned that I'm not a fan of buy-to-let.

A post over at Monevator caught my eye and sums it up well. As he says, and I agree (despite my cynical choice of blog post image),

Don't hate the player. Hate the game...

 UPDATE - and the hits keep coming...


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7 years on... Real world natural muscle gains

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I've been training consistently for about 8 years now and have made tonnes of mistakes along the way. Mostly it was trying to gain too fast and just getting fat.

I have a naturally small frame and generally weighed about 9 stone my whole adult life - see my early post.

Once I got rid of the fat, I was down to 110 lb (7 stone 12!). Since then, I've gone to the gym more than 1000 times.

I just updated my bodyweight graph, which I've kept since ~2008:


As you can see, it's been a very mixed journey! I let myself get much too fat, hoping that I could build muscle faster that way. I got better as I went along and I think I've got it nailed these last couple of years.
If I take out all the "noise" of the fat periods, and just take my low (lean) points, I get this:

I've gained 20 lb (18%) of my starting (lean) weight in 7 years. 12 lb of that was in the first two years. The last 5 years has been much slower. 
If you're heavier / bigger than me, I expect …
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UK House Price Update and Attempts to Model it...

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I haven't update my UK house price graph for a while, but this time, I thought I'd also include my attempt at modelling it.

I've previouslymentioned that I found an interesting correlation between the population and house prices.

In a very simplistic way, this makes sense. The UK is a fixed size, but its population is increasing, therefore prices go up. This is certainly the headline that's repeated endlessly on mainstream media. However, the subtlety that not everyone buys houses is lost in the noise. I doubt anyone under the age of 18 or over the age of 75 is buying houses for example. These days, it's also safe to assume that very few people under the age of 30 are either. (The average age of a first time buyer is now 30, compared with 23 in the 1960's.)

The other major factor in house prices is how much people are able to pay. Note that this is different from how much they are willing to pay. Unlike almost everything else we buy (with perhaps the exception…
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Real world example of muscle gains

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Now that I'm cutting, and enjoying the new challenge of maintaining my strength while reducing calories, I can look back on my second "bulk".
As you know, I'm a small guy and not taking steroids. Therefore the rate at which I can gain muscle is going to be fairly slow. I'm confident that this is a reasonable real-world example of a typical rate of muscle gain however, so let's take a look.


This is the graph of my bodyweight over the course of my second bulking phase. As you can see, I started at the beginning of May 2011, weighing 120 lb. I stopped at the end of Feb 2012, weighing 140 lb. I was reasonably lean when I started. See my previous post.

Some points I want to stress:

This was real-world. I have a full-time job and all the usual stuff to worry about.I was lifting twice per week (roughly each muscle group every 4 days, which seems to be optimal for naturals). Lyle McDonald reckons every fifth day, although he tends to split muscle groups up more - sin…
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