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Body-builder, YouTuber and actor, Kali Muscle, claims in this video that he weighed 99 pounds (45 kg) when he was 16.

When I first started training, when I was 16 years old, I was 99 pounds.

That sounds impossible to me unless he was facing starvation.

Later in the same video, he says:

Y'all listening to these no-muscle-having Youtubers[?]. They haven't got a bit of muscle. Look at 'em! I was bigger than that when I was 15.

Oddthinking
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Count Iblis
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  • I wonder if he intended it literally, or as a reference to [Charles Atlas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Atlas)'s "97-pound weakling", which has been misquoted as [98 pounds](http://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/barack-obama-98-pound-weakling/article14315072/) and [99 pounds](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0650670/). – Oddthinking Jun 25 '16 at 04:29
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    The number 45kg is pretty much useless without saying his height. A lot of people tend to grow in the years between 16 and 20 (e.g. I was ~50kg at 16 and got to 75kg at 18-19 years), females tend to grow earlier than that. I don't find this claim particularly spectacular. – Bakuriu Jun 25 '16 at 13:52
  • @Bakuriu claims don't need to be spectacular –  Jun 28 '16 at 13:18
  • @Dawn I was referring to the OP words " unless he was facing starvation." which clearly show that the OP doesn't really image how a 14 years old looks and how much it weights. So this "claim" is more a misunderstanding from the OP point of view. Do we really want people asking "Was guy X, Y meters tall at Z age?" questions? And more so if X, Y and Z are perfectly average values? I can understand people being skeptic at Robert Wadlow being 1.8m tall at 9, but what about myself being 127cm at that age? There's no reason to be skeptical about a random person having an average property. – Bakuriu Jun 28 '16 at 13:50
  • If the claim is notable (believed by many people), narrow, and not opinion-based, it can be asked here. If you wish to argue for a stricter test, there is a meta question open here: http://meta.skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/3626/can-we-make-a-community-decision-regarding-an-interestingness-consequence-relev. The "unless he was starving" part is only the asker's personal reason for disbelief, but while maybe a misunderstanding, doesn't change the claim. –  Jun 28 '16 at 14:06

1 Answers1

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Chuck "Kali Muscle" Kirkendall, Jr. writes in XCON TO ICON - The Kali Muscle Story

[referring to the summer before his first year of high school, 9th grade, at Castlemont High School] Luckly I made the team but I barely made the cut because of weighing in at 99 lbs. Coach Green said I would have to gain 1 pound to make the team, so all summer I ate a lot of McDonalds and the day of the weigh in I weighed 101 lbs.

...

[end of 10th grade] I was around 165 pounds

...

[at the end of July between Sophomore and Junior years of high school] I now weighed 175 pounds

...

I had reached a weight of around 185 pounds, which made me look like I weighed around 200 pounds to everyone else. My body had definitely matured since being the scrawny, 100 pound kid I used to be in ninth grade, the one that didn't play but one down his entire freshman year of football

So it was more like age 14 that he was 99 pounds (born 1975, graduated from high school 1993). His current height is 5'9", so 100 pounds at age 14 is entirely reasonable.

DavePhD
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