Logarithmic PE Gains

Here’s another way of looking at the data. Here, everyone’s cumulative gains each time they reported them are thrown into a scatter plot. Each point represents one gain entry for one poster.

Y-axis is inches; X-axis is days.

M, can you run that thing for more days, like say 1110. I’d like to see how it looks against the line chart.

Does that surprise you? I made my most dramatic weight lifting gains in literally the same period = 6 months. However, I made greater gains thereafter; although, not percentage-wise.

1st 6 months: 120 lbs on benchpress [starting at 180 lbs]
Subsequently: 135 lbs on benchpress (in a much longer time, of course) *

I was in fact still gaining when a shoulder injury sidelined my training, and a thing called Life (job, kids, getting older, etc.) got in the way of my ever getting back into it fully - so, I most likely would’ve finished with even more than an additional 135 lbs of gains after my initial 6-month newbie blowout.

My point: there’s a newbie curve, or honeymoon period, in virtually any endeavor dealing with the physical body. But the cessation of that sweet phase should not breed discouragement - you may have much more gains to look forward to, only they won’t be as “dramatic” (i.e., seemingly overnight).

I’m not surprised and expected that curve.

Good benchpress, 435 max?

Yep, back in the day. Lifetime drug free also.
But if you compare that 6-month curve to any endeavor regarding the human body, you come damn close - whether you’re taking lessons from a golf pro to improve your drive, working with a sprinting coach, taking Karate or gymnastics, etc. It’s the same thing regarding that initial blitz you undergo, then it’s slow & steady thereafter. But you can still look forward to even more progress than you received in the first 6 months - it just takes a lot longer.

Wow, 435. I can’t imagine your joints being able to handle that kind of weight for long. I started to feel pain in my right shoulder from doing lat-pulldowns behind the neck with around 250 lbs., so I began doing them in front, but even with half the weight it still hurt. Now I can’t do them anymore at all, and even sleeping with my arms above my head hurts my right shoulder. I’d rather not be in pain through my 40’s, 50’s, and on.

Here are similar plots up to 1200 days and 5000 days. The 5000 day plot shows an interesting trend—many people clearly lost size. I think what’s happening here is that people are reporting change in size over a number of years without having done PE or done it consistently. This supports the maxim that, “if you don’t use it, you lose it.”

This chart should be required viewing for people who question the long-term permanence of PE gains. Apparently, natural size isn’t as “permanent” as one might have thought, either.

Anyone help me ? I can’t read the above files because I can’t enable the Adobe add-on in internet explorer. Stupid message says I have to be the system administrator to enable it but I already am logged in as the system admin.

There’s that one guy that caused the spike in my chart, he’s a the top of yours at 900 days too. Not sure why you think people are showing losses, because you’re not plotting individual lines. You could take those individual points and show their lines separately. They could be slow gainers.

mbuc, what OS are you using? Double check you are logged in as SysAdmin.

Windows XP, Wangchung, and I’ve double/triple checked I’m logged in as the admin. It’s very annoying because to look at anything with an Adobe file I have to leave IE and use MSN.

Look here:

Thanks for that Wangchung, very good of you to take the trouble to post it. Its getting late here in the UK so I will I try to sort it tomorrow. Ta very much for your help. :up:

Sorry. I need to explain better. Each point on these scatter plots represents a cumulative gain entered for an individual poster, i.e., the poster’s measurement on day “x” minus the same poster’s measurement on day zero. If a poster entered his stats N times within the time range indicated on the chart, that poster’s gains would be represented with N-1 points.

Therefore, negative numbers indicate real losses with respect to the posters’ start measurements. The 5000-day chart shows a number of length losses around the 3500 day mark.

Interesting. I didn’t know Thunders has been up since 1993…

I looked back at the data, and this is what I saw:

1993 has 160 entries
1994 has 9 entries
1995 has 3 entries
1996 has 3 entries
1997 has 0 entries
1998 has 3 entries

The first member that I saw with an entry back in 1993 having a loss was 9cyclops9. I checked and this user first gained membership in Sept-2003. Most likely these members were not posting losses, the clock on Thundersplace got screwed up around October 2003 and was set to 1993 for a while. I will contact Thunder about it and we may be able to pinpoint the exact time-frame it happened and set the data straight (gains in 2003 opposed to losses from 11 year PE’ers), but for now I would just throw out anything from before 2000.

WC

It would be interesting to know if the data is corrupted. I actually thought the data made sense. Many people report losing size over a long period of time if they don’t PE, regardless of whether they ever PE’d or not.