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Excessive Cardio & Testosterone: The free T / Cortisol Ratio Revisited | Plus: Why Even a 72% Decrease in fT/C May be Less Significant for Your Gains Than You Thought It'd Be

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Cardio - Only "too much" can hurt you. Let me get this straight: this is not an anti-cardio article. There's not just little, there's rather absolutely no doubt that a sane amount of endurance training is nothing but healthy for us, but done in excess, especially "running has been demonstrated to provide a large physiological stress to the body, resulting in large neuroendocrine system responses" (Anderson. 2016) - more specifically, running to exhaustion will have the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) axis overproduce the glucocorticoid hormone, cortisol, which in turn appears to suppress the production of testosterone. Now, cortisol - you've learned that in previous articles - is not the villain as which it is portrait by companies that are trying to sell you useless and potentially counter-productive "cortisol blockers". Rather than ruining your results, normal amount of cortisol will aid in substrate mobilization (including the us...
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Fragmented Sleep Reduces 24h Fat Oxidation by > 50% - Not Getting a Good Night's Sleep Sets You Up For Obesity.

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Image 1: It looks awkward, but sleep masks and ear-plugs are effective, cheap and save ways to improve sleep quality (image from lackofsleepsymptoms ) I think you will be familiar with the idea that an insufficient amount of sleep has been found to correlate (! not induce !) with visceral obesity and other negative health markers (e.g. Strian. 2005 ). Now a study from a the Department of Human Biology, Nutrition and Toxicology Research Institute Maastricht (NUTRIM) at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands found that not getting a good nights sleep or, in this particular case, waking up every hour, reduces the amount of fat you burn in a period of 24 hours by -52% ( Hursel. 2011 , cf. figure 1). Other than in the initially mentioned epidemiological guesswork ... ah pardon, correlation studies, Hursel et al. had their 15 healthy male volunteers report to the laboratory twice (>2 weeks between the sessions of the randomized, single-blind cross-over study). Du...
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Taking a Week Off? Sudden 7-Day Exercise Cessation Perceived as a Strain by Highly Trained Athletes. Overtraining is the Culprit!

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Did you ever decide to take a week off and felt like hell? Did you feel how the gym, a place of which, only two days before, you thought you would be happy not to see for at least a month, suddenly seemed to draw you in as a giant magnet? Yes? Then you are either an exercise addict or just a highly trained athlete (probably you are both), of whom a recent study ( Zeller. 2011 ) published in the Israel Medical Journal reports that exercise deprivation is associated with change in non-articular tenderness threshold and reduction in quality of life scores.  I already hear the exercise junkie within you jubilating: "24/7, 365 days a year! That's the way to go. That's my way." Before you do fall for this misunderstanding, you'd better thing about possible underlying reasons for the sudden tenderness and the decrease in perceived overall health (-4pts out of 100) the 26 asymptomatic healthy athletes who regularly exercise 6.75 ± 3.65 hours a week reported after the 7 ...
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Exhaustive Aerobic Exercise Increases Serum Calcium Levels and Dietary Requirements

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You probably have heard of the fundamental importance of calcium as a structural component of bones . Yet, calcium is way more than the building block of our bone structure and the concrete the of the hopefully non-existent plaque in your arteries. It is also one of the major players in muscle contraction . Thus, it is not very surprising that a group of Iranian Scientists ( Pourvaghar. 2011 ) found major effects of pro-longed (15min) high intensity aerobic exercise on serum calcium levels of 12 randomly selected student athletes (22.36y; 75kg @ 1.76m): […] the participants' mean of serum calcium concentration in the first stage and before Balke exhausting aerobic exercise was measured 98.38 ng/mic L. In the second stage, i.e. after the exhausting aerobic activity, it increased to 114.96 ng/mic L. Research results indicated that the difference in serum calcium concentration between the first and second stages is significant (P= 0.0001). With the calcium that is appearing in the bl...
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3g BCAA + Arginine + Carbs Pre-Workout Modulates Hormonal Response to Single Bout of Treadmill Running to Exhaustion

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BCAAs + Arginine + Carbohydrates before workout!? Sounds familiar, doesn't it? In fact many of the first generation preworkout products were either formulated like that or consumers were advised to stack them with a branched amino acid (BCAA) product of the same company. Studies which investigated the combined ergogenic effect of these nutrients are yet scarce. So, I thought that it would be worth posting the results of a recent study from China ( Hsu. 2011 ). Before they started exercising on a treadmill, the subjects, 14 male physical active college students, received a beverage containing either 3g of BCAA (2:1:1) + 0.5g Arginine + 12.1g carbohydrates or placebo. Blood samples of each subject were collected before exercise, 0, 10, 20, 40, 60, 120 min and 24 h after exercise and the procedure was repeated after two weeks (cross-over design). The results were as follows: No significant differences in the levels of lactate, ammonia, creatine kinase and glycerol between t...
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