Dr. Andy Galpin

Now, there's actually a famous case report that came out of one of the best powerlifters of all time, Ray Williams.

Now, of course, his name wasn't used in the paper, but effectively everyone knows who that was.

And he scored a 41.

on that metric, which just tells you how enormous and an incredible athlete that Ray is.

Again, don't know about his steroid use in the past, doesn't matter.

What I'm trying to show you right now is just what is the human potential for total amount of muscle mass we can put on a frame.

Now, the magical number that tends to be thrown around here in terms of amount of lean body mass one can have is somewhere in the neighborhood of 110 to 120 kilos.

230 pounds or so, something like that.

The example I gave you earlier, of course, is a little bit higher than that, but that tends to be the kind of spot we can be.

As you start manipulating body weight, hydration status, what that does to muscle glycogen, pulling water, this is something, again, this can alter this number sort of day to day.

So it's a little bit hard to interpret, but that's the kind of number we're going to put in terms of what this would put you in.

in terms of absolute muscle mass, probably 60 kilos or so.

And the reason is, maybe we'll back up one quick second, lean body mass of let's just say 120 kilos.

It's kind of the upper limit of what we think you have.

Well, about 50, 40, somewhere between 45 to 50% of that will actually be skeletal muscle.

And so if you have 120 kilos of lean body mass and half of that is muscle, this would give you the stratosphere of about 60 kilos or so of total amount of muscle mass.

That's about the upper limit of what you'll ever see a human can have.

Obviously, the numbers I'm giving you here are all in men.

For women, that number gets significantly lower.

But that just kind of gives you a ballpark of how much skeletal muscle one could have, how much lean muscle they would have, and then what their corresponding FFMI score would be.