Yes, pushing ones boundaries is a science experiment.
i'll agree that it can be, but pushing one's boundaries may be nothing more than personal satisfaction. just because you're going harder than the other guy it doesn't mean you're a science experiment. people push themselves all the time in many different ways. can you qualify this in a manner that's more than opinion?
There are very few 40+ year old's who want to lift over 600 pounds but predominantly spend their time doing gravity sports and who sit for long periods of time because of their line of work and refuse to abstain from beer drinking and eat pizza more than they should and who really like the idea of an 8-pack but know they won't really put the effort into it but have that in the back of their mind so they will eat pretty decently a percentage of the time. Given that, there is no literature on how to go about what I want. There is only general literature which I need to piece together in the best way that suits me.
All science that is telling us what to eat with any decent sample set will be coming from sedentary people. Which is where your 1 to 1.5 is lying. I need more. How much more? I have no fucking clue, but it usually equates to a shake right when I get up and a shake right before I go to bed.
I know this as fact from my lab experiments.
So no, not a strawman, just a circuitous route at getting to my point.
perfect! if you apply methodology to it then i can agree, in that particular circumstance it can be viewed as science; but not everyone does that. some people just go out and train hard and don't worry about the details.
wrt to protein look at your calorie intake, your macros and then work backwards from there. if 1-1.5 fits your profile then great, but that can't be stated as a rule for everyone. it's the correlation is not causation principle. i'm not saying don't use protein, i use it too 3 or 4 times per week as part of the breakfast smoothie, but it's the significant overfeeding that makes me question things. if people are needing these overly high doses then maybe that's a sign that the human body is not adapted to handling that level of activity.
Now, regarding supplements, I never take them as I find them completely useless. Except for creatine, that seems to work as intended.
there's no doubt it works, but it puts you in an unnatural state. it's an artificial advantage (not on the same as some subtances though) that you can't get through eating. on your typical loading phase with creatine one would need to eat 10lbs of beef/most fish per day or 5lbs of herring per day to get the level of creatine via supplementation. maintenance would be half that but i still don't see many people stuffing down 5lbs or 2.27kg of beef on a daily basis. again, nothing wrong with that (i used used creatine 20 yrs ago as well) but let's just be honest about what it is and recognize the performance advantage we're getting from these things that we couldn't get from a whole food based diet.
We don't know what our limits are, so to start something with the idea of being limited actually ends up limiting us.
Ellen Langer