SuppVersity - Nutrition and Exercise Science for Everyone

Even though the study has male and female study participants this study is still more geared towards the men - why else do we have testosterone, but not estrogen measurements? As the scientists point out as early as in the title, a recent paper by Trexel et al. (2017) is indeed (at best) a "pilot study" to "evaluate changes in body composition, metabolic rate, and hormones during post-competition recovery" in "physique athletes". In view of the lack of reliable data from the contest preparations o bodybuilders and other physique-sport athletes, even this "pilot" data is more than worth reporting. That's particularly true, because it is still not clear, as Trexel et al. write whether the "physiological effects of contest preparation persist after competition" and thus whether "they may predispose [...] to preferential gain of fat mass and prolonged, deleterious endocrine side effects" (Trexel 2017) Read about rather...

This is not the weight class we are talking about, here. With a baseline muscle mass of 75.2kg and exactly 15.9kg of body fat, the natural bodybuilder in the case study at hand is far away from a monster back like this - for natural reasons ;-) Studies about bodybuilding are rare and if there are some, they are usually dealing with the dark sides of "un-natural" bodybuilding. Against that background I am happy to report that today's SuppVersity article continues what I would love to become a tradition that started in March 2013 with the ahead-of-print publication of Lindy Rossow's article "Natural bodybuilding competition preparation and recovery: a 12-month case study" in the International Journal of Sports Physiology & Performance ( learn more ) . I am talking about a tradition of articles about Scientific Natural Bodybuilding Contest Coverage, a coverage such as the one Brandon M. Kistler, Peter J. Fitschen, Sushant M. Ranadive, Bo Fernhall, an...

Image 1: At least in his later life, Muhammad Ali could hardly be considered a "bro". Notwithstanding, he was 100% convinced that having sex the night before a fight was a total no-go. I you are a bro, or frequent one or many of the pertinent boards, the question whether or not sexual intercourse with yourself or your partner will have beneficial, neutral or negative effects on your performance in the gym, and more importantly your gains and endocrine system probably is not news to you. Even in case you do not belong to either of the former categories, I am sure you will have heard about Olympians or other athletes refraining from the previously mentioned exchange of bodily fluids on the day, if not during the whole week, let alone weeks before a competition. Now, as chance would have it, I stumbled across an interesting study that was conducted by a group of researchers at the University of Liege in Belgium (it goes without saying that Liege is in Wallonia, the French-s...