It is possible and unfortunately common. My point was to emphasize that being in good shape doesn’t require any banned substances, and a single “tell-tale sign” doesn’t make anyone a juicer. Whether your body fat percentage is 30 or 10 also changes the face tremendously.
Regards, a bald guy who had bad skin especially when I was under thirty, and who has also been suspected of juicing at times 
My genetics are decent; I developed quite well when I was younger and thought I’d give it a shot once. I hired a fairly well-known coach who also acted as a “doctor.” I can say that the guy in that picture has made very good progress. Most people look like they barely even train, even if they are on gear. I mostly felt disappointed when the water weight disappeared and I realized I hadn’t kept as much muscle as I’d imagined. The fact is, however, that a pill a day ensures that a guy who only takes Vitamin C will lose no matter what he does. Unless he is genetically very gifted. That’s why the strength side is more interesting, because you can gain strength through honest means, and you don’t hit the limit quite as fast.
Be that as it may, building muscle is difficult. It takes time, and your rest and nutrition need to be on point. Muscle maintenance is also often forgotten. Bodyweight and strength challenges are much more concrete and easier to achieve. However, anything is possible; for example, Utti Hietala is a tough competitor and a natural.
I promised to give an update on the progress of my home gym project, so here is a status report: the Smith machine is assembled! 
A couple of workouts are already in the books. The first workout was largely chalked up to testing and adjusting: finding the right cable tension, getting a feel for it, and listing the changes that need to be made.
Originally, I was supposed to have a friend help with the assembly, but due to them falling ill, I had to do it all by myself. I don’t recommend it to anyone
On the shopping list, in addition to the Smith machine, were:
an adjustable incline bench
a separate barbell + weight plates
handles / accessories
The bar + weights arrived first, but due to poor packaging, the bar had bent during transport. I contacted the seller, and at this point, I have to give their customer service a 10+, the response came quickly and I got a replacement bar within a few days 
I cleared out one room entirely for gym use (the freezer also had to go). In hindsight, it was a very smart decision because the machine + free weights took up practically the whole room.
When I was unpacking the parts, I didn’t realize at first that the “handedness” (left/right orientation) of some parts was marked with tiny, fingertip-sized stickers on the bubble wrap. The parts themselves had no markings for orientation. Luckily, there weren’t many of them, so things didn’t get too mixed up.
The assembly went surprisingly easily, but when working alone, I had to stop occasionally to think “what do I do now so that I don’t have to take this apart later.” And still… I had to take things apart. There were many points in the instructions where you had to anticipate future work steps.
I am disappointed with the quality of the machine. I knew I had bought a more affordable set, and it really shows in many places. Here is one example:
Overall, however, I am satisfied with how the machine functions: it works as I expected and allows for a versatile workout. But working in the industry myself, I wondered many times where the professional pride was 
The biggest single challenge was installing the Smith bar alone, and in that scramble, I managed to accidentally break some kind of ball bearing / bearing assembly from the bar. I had to use some creativity anyway, especially when I had to screw things into a tight spot
The end result: after shedding enough sweat, blood, and tears, getting three full-body bruises, and throwing about 5 temper tantrums… the machine is assembled 
After that, I assembled the incline bench, and its quality was such that if I had known beforehand, I would have rather paid more to buy something a bit better.
In terms of workouts, the first “improvement list” is already clear: I’ll make proper safety bars for the free barbell as well as a rack for the bar so it can be mounted to the machine frame sensibly. The included safety bars are so short that I don’t think anyone would be that close when squatting, for example, and the same part is practically used as the “rack,” so the safety feature is currently pretty non-existent. Not a very practical solution.
Workout experiences: at this point, the feeling is good. I tested, among other things, one of my favorite exercises, the straight-leg deadlift in the Smith machine, and it was actually really good. When you turn the safety hooks aside and lower them, you don’t need a separate platform under your feet.
And here is a basic rope pulley: the feel and function are similar to the ones at the gym.
I don’t dare to load the squat properly until I’ve made proper safety bars and a rack for the bar on the frame.
As I gain more experience using it, the fix-it list will surely grow, and I can later do a showcase of everything you can do with this set (and what mods I make).
If I had to rate this Smith machine based on this experience (1–5):
Quality: 
Design:
Ease of assembly: (if you don’t have to assemble it alone )
Versatility and ease of training:
Sturdiness: (at least sufficient for my own use)
I particularly like that loading is done with the same weight plates as a standard bar, meaning this is not a selectorized weight stack machine. That was one important criterion for me when choosing this specific model 
Let’s wrap up the training year. Last year was a good training year, the one before was bad. At the start of the year, I set a new deadlift (mave) PR of 190kg, but I was 10kg heavier than I am now. My weight dropped 13kg during the year; I finished my diet in December. Currently, my weight fluctuates by 1–3kg and I’ve only slightly increased my carbs (hh); otherwise, the other macros are pretty much the same. In February, a reward awaits: a month-long holiday in the Canaries, where I don’t plan to do much of anything, just relax. I think there has to be some “spice” in life that you enjoy. Your own thing, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be training. My goal for last year was met when I reached 200 training sessions on Dec 26th, but I won’t embark on such madness again; the end of the year was tough. I don’t have any major goals for this year; it would be nice if my waist stayed under 90cm; currently, it’s 82cm. I already know it’s going to fluctuate, but we’ll just start working on it right away. Good workouts to everyone.
Where do you get your protein from? For me, it looks roughly like this:
The remaining ~60g comes from food, i.e., meat, fish, milk, oatmeal. I’d rather eat more meat and fewer dairy products, but I have to keep my budget in mind.
Let’s make my own “base-building goal” public, to give myself a bit more motivation to stick to the plan.
Background & medical history:
Played football in the lower leagues until age 32 without any major injuries. The decision to quit gnawed at me so much that 10 years later I could no longer resist the call of the green spring pitches.
I spent a couple of years building a base with pure strength training - deadlifts, bench press, and squats became familiar. Once I hit a 200kg deadlift, 130kg bench, and 150kg squat, my recovery plummeted to uselessness. After even a slightly harder workout, I felt strongly hungover the next day. I certainly recognized the workouts were too intense. I just didn’t realize back then that for a desk jockey in their early 40s, even the “taking it easy” pace of a 20-year-old might be too much. Especially when life around the training wasn’t exactly supporting recovery.
Once I got my strength levels in order, I marched to my trusted physio to ask how to get that youthful speed back. I started casual football and mobility exercises.
Someone smarter might already guess what happens when a lower-league budget version of Romelu Lukaku (fit football condition 188cm/92kg) gets youthful strength levels back and even better mobility in some parts. Add to that 3x a week relatively intense ball-chasing in the summer, and 1-2x a week in the winter. Hamstrings and calves snapped every now and then. Stretching was useless. Every time I felt like I was getting into the best possible shape in every way, either a calf or a hamstring took a hit. This went on for a couple of years.
In 2020, a healthy-sounding ACL (anterior cruciate ligament) snapped in my knee. I canceled my surgery appointment and decided to quit football, only to return to light casual play after a year’s break and some minor knee rehab. The knee was completely asymptomatic, and light “taking it easy” slowly turned into agility maneuvering, which then resulted in a meniscus tear. The football gear went on Tori (local marketplace) that same evening.
I limped around super-passively in a bit of a slump for a while, and in the winter, I returned to the gym for light rehab. Thanks to my stubbornness, I repeatedly inflamed my already stiff shoulder because the machines forced unsuitable ranges of motion. Even though the workouts were “fairy tale gym” (very light), recovery was poor. Apparently, a vigorous self-massage of the shoulder finally inflamed the axillary nerve, and probably something else got inflamed too. The shoulder shut down completely for nearly a year. The orthopedist would have put in a prosthetic joint (osteoarthritis in the shoulder), the physio threw up their hands (rightly so), the osteopath recommended “tearing open the frozen shoulder” (wrongly), and even a top surgeon who cleared the cervical spine stated: “that might never return to its former state.” A specialist in physiatry gave the best and most realistic view. I also got familiar with a Kalevalan bonesetter and a nerve pathway massager. In the public sector, I’d probably still be waiting for a statement on the cervical spine scans. The healing prognosis was 1mm/day with the axillary nerve being 30-40cm, and it took about a year before I was able to control the eccentric phase of a knee push-up once without collapsing to the floor. During the first few months, I couldn’t hold my arm up while lying on my back; it would just fall limply in some direction.
Along with this, problems appeared in my pelvis and lower back. The lower back had been acting up during the football days, and now its condition collapsed. On a walk, my legs would go numb after just a few dozen meters. I was feverishly searching for information about my condition and considered buying a Fiskars shovel (wasn’t/isn’t in my portfolio) and having a hole dug ready as a viable option.
However, the physio squeezed out the root cause for the lower back and leg problems. They reckoned that only memories remain of the gluteus medius. Additionally, the gluteus maximus doesn’t really get nerve signals on one side and is very tight on the other. The TFL was also over-tight on one side, as were the hip flexors. The knee injury likely partly explained the “shutdown” of the glute on the same side and the imbalance. No wonder even walking was a chore.
Return to today
Thanks to precisely tailored glute exercises, my lower back is now completely asymptomatic. Now I can just jump out of bed in the morning! It even handles the mandatory long commutes without complaining.
For the last couple of years, I’ve been looking for the root cause of my symptoms, and at the end of 2025, I found it. “Lifestyle kyphosis” and a stiff thoracic spine, which was likely the underlying cause for the knee popping too. Smarter people feel free to correct me if I’m wrong:
Stiff thoracic spine + kyphosis → forces the shoulder blade into a faulty position and support for the shoulder is lost. Scapular support weakens. The joint capsule acts like a “limp mode” in a car, tightening and narrowing the shoulder’s range of motion to protect it. Even a light overhead press in a Smith machine doesn’t exactly fix the shoulder problem… Because the upper body’s posture has turned forward, the body compensates by tilting the lower body forward to maintain balance → hip flexors tighten. With a stiff thoracic spine, movement during running no longer comes from above but is attempted from the pelvis → the lower back gets tired. The lower back, glutes, and hip flexors continue to shift the load to the hamstrings → hamstrings get tired and tight.
Daily, gentle thoracic spine exercises have to some extent opened up shoulder mobility and hip flexors. The shoulder stiffness has completely disappeared. Even the hamstrings have loosened up without any stretching or strengthening attempts. I’ve never had a “Notre Dame” posture, but apparently, you don’t need one to go looking for trouble. The joint capsule has been tight for the last 10 years. There are no great hopes of it returning to its original state, but the current situation in this regard is already quite tolerable.
Apparently, it was such a hard lesson for the body that I still have to be very careful with training. At the moment, the body handles the following volume ~without complaining:
I look with longing at the kids training with “snot on their cheeks” (going all out) and with horror at middle-aged people doing the same. I no longer look at the “fairy tale gymnasts” with pity, though. 
I have now grasped my limited functional capacity and for the first time managed to tailor a rehabilitation program with low enough intensity for myself.
If I can’t give any other advice to other middle-aged casual hobbyists, it’s this: Learn to listen to your body. The wrong kind of pain is always a sign of potential challenges arriving. A symptom in one place can cause tightness elsewhere, and this chains up over time. An 8h trading/Inderes session cannot be offset by a 45-minute gym burst 4x/week. One fine day, you might have a bigger job ahead of you. For me, this physical collapse affected the mental side quite a bit too. Feels like going from a thirty-year-old to an eighty-year-old quite rapidly.
So, the plan is to drop weight alongside the exercises by spring from 98.7 kg → 92-88kg. The starting weight includes a couple of “easy” kilos from after Christmas.
People have argued about the right macro splits for ages. For me, the aforementioned works great, especially during a more passive phase, and I’m sure there are plenty of individual differences. Eating the same foods has never been an issue, though catering for the whole household is more of a chore.
I’ll get back to this by the end of April at the latest. If I’m not in my target range and feeling well by then, I’ll pay for a year’s subscription to Inderes Premium for one forum member chosen by a draw. More on the draw later if needed.
I’ll elaborate on this with a practical example. When an urbanized office worker like me can, after years of not doing it, pick up a chainsaw out of the blue, cut up trees felled by a storm, chop them into firewood, and then smoothly move on to pulling the kids’ steering sled, I feel like I’ve succeeded. Of course, that kind of unexpected ~8 hours of exercise over a couple of days makes itself felt in the body, but not in a way that interferes with life. In fact, chopping logs alone with my own thoughts was truly therapeutic 
This is something I have to constantly remind myself of: why I train. I’m no longer that teenager chasing kilos with unlimited free time and recovery capacity, but a middle-aged man who wants to be able to live without everyday life being a constant struggle against the limiter. The kilos will follow as long as the overall approach stays sensible.
By the way, last year I did 73 gym workouts; I didn’t count the cardio, but fortunately, raising the level from absolutely abysmal didn’t require much training anyway.
This is a good podcast related to the topic, I’ve listened to it a couple of times already: Spotify
During the same week, I also read a good book for the first time in a while: Onnen tiede - Bruce Hood - sidottu (9789524036214) | Adlibris kirjakauppa
This old-school way works much better for me for winding down than audiobooks.
Aerobic training (jogging, walking, and gym machines) is insanely boring. I don’t have any extra time, either. I decided to increase my incidental exercise: longer walks with the dog, always taking the stairs, and if I’m going downtown, I leave the car far enough away that I have to walk a bit. These days I even enjoy shoveling snow because it forces me to get moving. Walking is so monotonous that I get depressed halfway through. I’d like to try CrossFit, but I feel like it’s a sort of middle ground that doesn’t really build strength, and there are better aerobic alternatives? I might be completely wrong, but that’s the impression I get.
I agree about how boring cardio can be. By forcing myself and listening to a good audiobook, I’ve managed to get in 2-3 45-minute walks a week. On the other hand, ball games (badminton, squash, padel, tennis) are really enjoyable for me, and 1.5 hours flies by.
CrossFit is definitely a great sport where, depending on the workout, you can focus on either strength levels, the aerobic side, or something in between.
In my opinion, you’re missing the mark a bit if you try to find the “best workout on paper.” The best workout is the one that actually gets done, so it’s worth starting with whatever you find enjoyable. I’ve never seen an out-of-shape swimmer, climber, CrossFitter, skier, marathoner, or powerlifter—at least not one who has really gotten into the sport and does it consistently year after year. There are plenty of sports out there, so just go out and give them a try.
Are you going to get yourself really shredded? 
Overhead press 100kg x 10 is tough; at what body weight were you planning to do that? I’d be happy if I could get my own body weight that many times in the overhead press; right now I could maybe get 10 reps with 95 percent of my own body weight.
And what about the deadlift? 300 kilos is a long-term goal of mine, as I’m sure it is for many, but for me it also means that I have to get my own body weight up.
I’m not going to get shredded, but I’d say that at 90 kg I should be in decent beach shape. In my opinion, a single at body weight in the overhead press is a pretty good result. I thought I could weigh 105 kg, but if it feels too heavy, then 110–112 kg. You can always lose weight after that. I haven’t done deadlifts in about seven years. I’d guess that 260 kg would go up right now. It’s a good situation in the sense that there is plenty of room to improve. I haven’t trained my core and lower back regularly, so I believe strength will come quite easily. My hamstrings have put on some nice mass and strength lately. I tried the overhead press last week for the first time in a couple of years and lifted 90x10.
Currently, my lower back is somehow strangely tight. We’ll see if rest and massage help. Others might disagree, but overhead presses aren’t necessarily good for the shoulders if you start doing them with high volume and weights. Dumbbell presses feel ergonomically better. You shouldn’t break yourself for the sake of numbers. Deadlifting eats into recovery capacity, at least for me, and leg workouts might suffer because the lower back takes such a beating from the pulls. I prefer very short sets or staying far from my maximum.
New PR in dumbbell bench press: 60kg x 18.
I hit my beach shape when my weight is under 70 kg, but even then I’m not exactly shredded.
It’s easier to lift heavier weights relative to your body weight when you’re light; if you look at powerlifting stats, if a big guy can, for example, manage reps of his own body weight in the overhead press, that’s impressive. Since I’m light, it’s pretty normal at this weight.
The deadlift is nice because it’s such a simple movement in a way; your numbers don’t drop massively because of a break, and after a month or two, you can get pretty close to your old weights if you’ve been training otherwise.
Strong
Marathon training follows a pretty repetitive pattern. Personally, I usually have a 6-8 month training season aimed at a race.
The mileage is around 100-120 km per week, taking up 8-10 hours. In addition to this, I try to fit in two gym sessions, but it often ends up being just one. In the gym, I basically only do exercises that strengthen the legs and core.
A training week includes two hard workouts and one long 25-35 km run. The other runs are then easy.
What kind of gym workouts do you do? Are we talking about high-rep sets, or how do you train for a marathon in practice? I assume you can’t do any intense workouts without your running suffering?
Crossfit is surprisingly effective, at least for an office worker used to gym training (with a couple of minutes of rest between sets). I went to try it a handful of times last year and noticed that my aerobic fitness was surprisingly poor. It started to improve quite quickly with a small amount of training, though, and this year I’ll continue to make progress!
Well, this is what we’ve been waiting for! Here is a new podcast episode from Markku Tikka.
Finally, after a long time, a NEW Q&A Podcast No. 8, for which Sensei’s Newsletter subscribers were able to submit questions late last year, so let’s dive in. About half of the questions received are in this one, and the rest will be in the next episode.
Have you guys ever done any crazy challenges?
I’ve only had some light attempts, meaning 100 reps of squats with 100 kg in under 10 minutes (didn’t finish)… I might try 100 pull-ups in 10 minutes. 
Markus Heinonen and the 1000 BURPEE CHALLENGE:
EDIT: Sorry if the link was “fast-forwarded” to the end earlier.
Sikakyykky (pig squat), meaning the first set is 20kg x 20 reps, the next is 30kg x 19 reps, etc. The last one is 210kg x 1. It doesn’t sound bad, but it starts to feel nasty surprisingly quickly. Of course, the weights are already quite heavy by the end.
Completing the pig squat is a tough achievement, congrats!
My one-rep max squat is around 210 kilos, but I weighed more then than I do now, and in the pig squat, I’d run out of steam much, much earlier. Those who have completed the pig squat seem to be guys who have squatted over 250 kilos.
I wonder if it would be just as heavy if you start from the “top of the pyramid” when squatting?
First that 210kgx1, 200kgx2, etc.
I’ve come across many challenges like “75 hard” on TikTok. It seems to be especially popular among women.
I actually had to Google what it’s all about:
The challenge lasts 75 days, during which you choose a healthy diet for yourself, and you aren’t allowed to eat any treats or use intoxicants during the challenge.
Every day you must:
If you deviate from the rules even once or fail, you have to start the challenge from the beginning.
I’m not going to try that challenge, and it feels like it divides opinions for and against.