SuppVersity - Nutrition and Exercise Science for Everyone

While there's some evidence that other plants from the genus "Rhodiola" may have similar effects, you want to rely on the std. exctracts from "Rhodiola Rosea" that were used in several studies if you want to try it | for dosage recommendation, see bottom line. Some of you will probably remember that " Rhodiola " aka"Golden Root" is a putative adaptogen, i.e. a "nontoxic [sic!] substance and especially a plant extract that is held to increase the body's ability to resist the damaging effects of stress and promote or restore normal physiological functioning" (Merriam-Webster Medical Dictionary )... No? Well, I remembered "Rhodiola Rosea", as I should have written before to avoid confusion with other plants from the  same genus , when I saw a recent post by Jason Cholewa on Facebook. The link to a study that was attached to the post didn't just remind me of this almost forgotten herb (ten years ago it was used...

While cigarettes are neither effective performance enhancers nor safe, nicotine, one of their key ingredients, may be the effective ergogenic aid with a reasonable sides/effects ratio you have been looking for... well, that's at least what the recently published 1st RCT with reliability test and crossover protocol seems to suggest. Yes, nicotine is the main (psycho-)active ingredient in cigarette smoke. It is, however, - and we tend to forget that in the debate about (ab-)using nicotine as a "supplement" - only one out of many "ingredients" of cigarette smoke; ingredients that ruin the health of our lungs and promote the risk of lung and other cancers. It would be haphazard, though, to exonerate nicotine completely, as there is "a direct contribution of nicotine to cancer onset and growth" ( Grando 2017 ). The research on the interaction of individual genetic susceptibility and nicotines ability to activate "nicotinic acetylcholine receptors...

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...

Pre-workout drinks were yesterday, the modern athlete snorts his ergogenics. No, I didn't mean the headline to be figurative. A recent study in the International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance  built on the observation that nasal sprays (NAS) containing caffeine (CAF) or glucose (GLUC) activate the sensory(motor) cortices in your brain. In their latest study, Kevin De Pauw, et al. investigate whether this effect would translate to real-world increases in exercise and/or cognitive performance (reaction times). You can learn more about coffee and caffeine at the SuppVersity For Caffeine, Timing Matters! 45 Min or More? Caffeine Helps When Taken Intra-Workout, too Coffee can Help You Get into Ketosis Caffeine's Effect on Testosterone, Estrogen & SHBG The Coffee³ Ad- vantage: Fat loss, Appetite & Mood Quantifying the Benefits of Caffeine on Ex. For their study, the scientists recruited eleven non-smoking and moderately trained ...