SuppVersity - Nutrition and Exercise Science for Everyone

Crossfit doesn't fit well with everyone. In  fact you have to be pretty fit already if you intend to benefit - specifically if you don't have someone who tailors the workouts to your specific needs. If you don't or are still miles apart from being fit, don't be bamboozled by the results of people who have been training for years. This certainly sounds a little sadistic, but I hope you've been missing the Science Round-Up last Thursday. If that's the case, you will be happy to hear that Carl and I are back on track, and ready to talk about topics ranging from magnesium supplementation over the potentially fatal combination of NSAIDs and exercise and what's that got to do with gut health / integrity, how light therapy won't make you lighter, but help you cut body fat , how intense workouts compromise your sleep , and how intense sweeteners make you fat - at least if you add them on top of a Western diet. If we will have time, we will also take a loo...

This is how the "buffered" alternate day fast works: You eat 1/4 of the White Choc Banana Cream Pie on your fasting day and a whole pie on the next one - well, not really, but the ratios would be right ;-) I guess at least the SuppVersity facebook friends are probably going to remember the study today's article is dealing with: "Alternate day fasting and endurance exercise combine to reduce body weight and favorably alter plasma lipids in obese humans." To me that sounded like Intermittent Fasting Done Wrong Does Still Produce Great Results, When You Combine It With an Aerobic Exercise Regimen" , when I first read the abstract. After taking a brief look at the full-text (thx John!),  however, my perspective on the study changed from "even a dog has its day" to "that oes look interesting, let's see whether this kind of buffered alternate day fasting" is able to take bear up with a classic intermittent fast.  A brief warning w...

Concentration curls are among those exercises, where eccentrics can easily be incorporate. Plus. As the EMG Series shows, this increases the biceps activity by almost 50% compared to the regular barbell curl ( learn more ). But will it also make you grow faster? Just let me get this straight right away: I am well aware that it is still debated if and if so to which extend skeletal muscle damage affects or even determines the training induced gains in strength and/or lean body mass and it is not my intention to rekindle this never-ending debate. At least in my humble opinion, it does yet appear that a certain degree of "damage" is necessary for "optimal" gains. Anything that passes this threshold is however, as Schoenfeld points out in what I believe is the most recent review of the literature, not going to "further augment muscle remodeling and may in fact interfere with the process" (Schoenfeld. 2012). The potential of negative interference is obvi...

A bigger biceps and less body fat to cover your precious gains? At least for CLA this has in fact been observed in a human study (see figure 1 ). About two weeks ago, I stumbled across an interesting paper that had just been published in the peer-reviewed journal Nutrients , filed it and got so much to do that I would almost have forgotten about it. When I was just thinking about which topic to address next, I did yet remember the auspicious conclusion to the abstract, which says "we can hypothesize that fat supplements may improve the anabolic effect of exercise." (Macaluso. 2013). "May" and "hypothesis", those are terms I like and since fish oil and CLA were implicated in the previous lines, I suppose you are going to like it as well. So what would be more obvious than to apply the "SuppVersity Sniff Test" (I am beginning to like this term, Carl often uses on the Science Round-Up ) to this ostensibly well-researched review of the literature...

The left part of the image shows what scientifically proven hypoxic training looks like. You wear a mask with an exogenous supply of low oxygen air. The right part of the image shows you what the fitness industry will try to sell you as "hypoxic training". That being said, did you know that at least the left version could also help you shed 11%% of your body fat in three weeks ( learn more )? Based on the feedback I got on the mini-summary of the latest review on "Kaatsu" aka blood flow restricted training I posted as part of last Monday's Exercise Science Round Up , I gather that many of you will be interested to hear about the results of a pertinent experiment that has been conducted only recently at the Lincoln University in Christchurch; New Zealand (Manimmanakorn. 2013). To elicit, whether a combination of resistance training and vascular occlusion would modify the patterns of muscle activation, the development of muscle strength and hypertrophy, and...

Won't take long until China is the world economy #1 and not much longer until they are the fattest economy, as well ;-) Let's see which one do I pick? Oh, ok... The SuppVersity Figure of the Week is 0.19 . This is the correlation coefficient that describes the statistical relation - which is as every SuppVersity student knows no evidence of causal relationships (!) - between the per capita gross domestic product (GDP) and the prevalence of obesity as it was calculated by Mario Siervo and colleagues from the Newcastle University and the UCL Institute of Child Health in London as part of their analysis of country-specific prevalence estimates of overweight, obesity and hypertension and their relation to nutrient and food intakes and (and this is new!) the economy (Siervo. 2013). The scientists used the WHO Global Infobase database, year- and country-specific Food Balance Sheets (FBS) and information on urbanization rates, per capita GDP and physical inactivity and did ...