SuppVersity - Nutrition and Exercise Science for Everyone

In case you wondered why 'that guy' at the gym, today, kept swearing despite the critical glances of the rest of the gym members? Well, he has probably read the SuppVersity  article at hand before everyone else and decided to put performance before decency, bro ;-) It may sound odd and unlikely, but eventually the hypothesis Richard Stephens and colleagues came up with is logical: "Given the links between swearing, sympathetic activation and the subsequent release of epinephrine and nor-epinephrine, [it is possible that] swearing can affect physical performance via similar changes in organismic milieu" (Stephens 2017). The corresponding paper that has been published recently and ahead of print in Psychology of Sport and Exercise  examines two scenarios where this might be expected. In Experiment #1 a well-known high-intensity 30s anaerobic cycling power challenge known as the Wingate Anaerobic Power Test (WAnT) was applied (Bar-Or, 1987) while in Experiment #2 a...

Spiking insulin w/ high GI carbs before a workout doesn't blunt the release of fat from the stores covering your abs. Whenever I hit on journals like the latest issue of Medicine in Sports Science , a publication by the American College of Sports Medicine . I contemplate using them as a resource for an installment of the short news - albeit only if more than one of the studies in said journals are actually worth talking about. For the November issue of Medicine in Sports Science , this was the case for four studies. First and foremost, probably Baur's experimental counterevidence to the hypothesis that the carbohydrate-induced surge in insulin would 'seal' your subcutaneous body fat stores. It may not be necessary to attack your ab-fat, but fasting does have a handful of benefits: Monthly 5-Day Fast Works "Lean Gains" Fast Works Habits Determine Effects of Fasting Protein Modified Fast 4 Health IF + Resistance Training = WIN ADF Bea...

Is the literally "raw" raw material that's used to manufacture "native whey" worth the extra bucks the final products cost? Native whey fails the real world test. In February this year, I already predicted that the "benefits" of "native whey" will probably turn out to be practically irrelevant. In the corresponding article "Native Whey, a Superior Muscle Builder? Recently Observed Impressive Absorption Rates Tell You Nothing About 'Gains'" ( re-read it ). Back in the day, I made a point that the improved amino acid kinetics, i.e. the more rapid appearance of amino acids Hamarsland et al. observed in their first study this year (Hamarsland 2017) for native compared to 'regular' whey protein was unlikely to trigger significant differences in actual protein synthesis - let alone long-term gains. Now, a recent study by Hamarsland et al. (2017b) confirms just that - as early as in the title, by the way: "Nati...

12 weeks of serious resistance training will transform the body of beginners, but it'll do that regardless of whether you supplement with protein or not, doctoral thesis shows. The headline of today's SuppVersity  article summarizes the research question of a recently published doctoral thesis by Christopher Brooks Mobley (Mobley 2017). In that, Mobley started with the hypothesis that "[w]hey protein in combination with resistance training will provide the greatest anabolic and ergogenic response" - Was he right? Well, without giving away too much, the most appropriate one-word-answer to this question is "No!" How's that? Well, let's take a look at diet, training, and supplementation and you may be realizing why the only "magic" whey did was to increase the skeletal muscle satellite cell pool ( learn more about Whey's effect on satellite cells ). High-protein diets are much safer than some 'experts' say, but there are...

If we go by the results of this latest meta-analysis, athletes and experienced gymrats don't benefit from HMB supplements. Roughly 4 years ago, HMB, which, once hailed as "as potent as a weak androgenic steroid", had been forgotten by most fitness enthusiasts, when - all of a sudden - a single study by Wilson et al. put it back into the limelight. In fact, there's hardly a study that has been so heavily debated in the fitness geek community as Wilson's infamous HMB paper with the steroid-like gains from March 2014 (Wilson 2014). Since Wilson's paper has (as of now) not been retracted, it does seem odd that a group of scientists from Chile and Spain write in the conclusion of a new meta-analysis that's about to be published in the  Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport  (Sanchez-Martinez 2017) that they found "no effect of HMB supplementation on strength and body composition in trained and competitive athletes" (Sanchez-Marrinez 2017)... u...