SuppVersity - Nutrition and Exercise Science for Everyone

If you put some faith into the marketing campaigns of supp producers, there's a creatine for everyone: one to get lean, one to get strong and one to get big and buffed... bullocks! It has been a while since I've discussed the bioavailability of different forms of creatine . On various supplement sites, the notion that there was one form of creatine that was significantly more bioavailable and would thus allow you to 'load' muscle phosphocreatine (PCr) faster and more efficiently is obviously still a matter of constant debate... a debate of which the latest study by Ralf Jäger et al. (2016) indicates that it may argue based on a fundamentally flawed premise, i.e. that higher serum levels of creatine after the ingestion of a given product would signify an increased efficacy in terms of performance / strength / size gains. How come? Well, the previously mentioned, as of yet unpublished data from a study by Ralf Jäger, Martin Purpura, and Roger C Harris did not just ...

DCL, i.e. using daily changing loads worked for both, men and women. The object of today's SuppVersity article comes almost from around the corner: a study conducted by Christoph Eifler, a scientist from the Department of Applied Training Science at the German University of Applied Sciences for Prevention and Health Management (DHfPG) in Saarbrücken (Germany) that is supposed to provide "evidence based training recommendations to the 8.55 million recreational athletes [who] perform fitness-related resistance training in German [gyms]" (Eifler. 2016) - advice that's valid for US boys & girls, Frenchmen & -women and even the Brexiters, too ;-) As the relatively unspectacular abstract says, "[t]he purpose of this investigation was to analyze the short-term effects of different loading schemes in fitness-related resistance training and to identify the most effective loading method for advanced recreational athletes" (Eifler. 2016)... not exactly s...

This is the cable curl as it was performed in the study at hand (Signorile. 2016) As Joseph F. Signorile et al. point out in their latest paper, "cable resistance training machines are showing resurgent popularity and allow greater number of degrees of freedom than typical selectorized equipment" (Signorile. 2016). Ok, the "freedom" maybe not as absolute as it is with our beloved free weights, but cables come sign. closer than the average rigid Cybex machine. It is thus only logical that the scientists assume that "given that specific kinetic chains are used during distinct activities of daily living (ADL), cable machines may provide more effective interventions for some ADL" and eventually certain athletic endeavors (Signorile. 2016). To identify these activities and corresponding exercise equipment, the scientists from the University of Miami came up with a study that examined differences in activity levels (rmsEMG) of six major muscles (Pectoralis...

Unfortunately, it is not even clear if you need the "white stuff", i.e. pure steviosides, whole leaves of leaf-extracts to maximize the anti-diabetic effects of stevia. What is clear, though, is that there's still a lot of research to be done. "Can Stevia Help You Ward Off Type II Diabetes?" That's not just the title of today's SuppVersity  article, it is also the research question of a recent paper by Esteves A.F. dos Santos from Farmácia Progresso  (dos Santos. 2016). An interesting question with an obvious answer: if you replace  sugar in your diet with stevia, it will help. Now, you know that this would not be worth discussing in a SuppVersity  article of its own. What is  worth discussing, though, is that stevia contains "compounds and other substance obtained from stevioside hydrolyses" (dos Santos. 2016) such as isoteviol  of which studies show that they can be used as 'active' diabetes treatments - meaning: they help, eve...

While the study at hand appears to confirm that the DNAFit test can tell you if you're an endurance or strength athlete, it won't help you achieve goals you were not "made for" - it eventually you may thus have to give up your dream of being the fastest, strongest or most chiseled guy / gal on the track, field or in gym. You probably know that: There's that guy at the gym who has been training only half as long as you and still made twice the gains, ... must be juicing that idiot, right? Well, even if we assume that you're not one of the >50% of trainees who overtrain (and undereat) that's by no means the most likely explanation for the astonishing discrepancies. A recent study that was conducted by a consortium of European researchers is now the first to impressively demonstrate that "matching the individual’s genotype with the appropriate training modality leads to more effective resistance training" (Jones. 2016) What the scientists s...