SuppVersity - Nutrition and Exercise Science for Everyone

If there's one take-home message from the study at hand, it is: While both SB& BA work, it depends on the sport/exercise test if the effects will be significant. If you've been following my articles at the  SuppVersity  for some time, you will know that I have covered beta-alanine and sodium bicarbonate , two of the few ergogenic supplements for which we have enough evidence to assume that they actually work, extensively in the past. You will yet also remember that the synergistic effects you'd expect to see when you combine intra- (beta alanine) and extra-cellular (sodium bicarbonate) H+ buffers didn't show in every pertinent study in the  SuppVersity  archive. Danaher, et al. (2014) , for example, found no effect of combining both during performance test with fixed intensity and volume, while  Tobias et al. (2013) , whose study tested upper body performance and didn't limit either intensity or volume, did - it almost doubled the total work th...

Want to learn more about fiber types? ➫ review past SuppVersity articles I am not telling you a secret, when I say that testosterone alone - in the absence of training - will lead to significant increases in skeletal muscle mass (if you think that sounds like a secret you must have missed my previous article from the "Intermittent Thoughts on Building Muscle" series | read more ). To a certain extend, the same is true for DHT ( learn more ), and - as a recent 6-week rodent study by Karina Fontana, Gerson E. R. Campos, Robert S. Staron and Maria Alice da Cruz-Höfling shows even by the structurally similar, orally bioavailable derivative Mesterolone (aka Proviron ), which produces pretty drastic, fiber-type specific increases in muscle size, when it is administered in super-physiological doses for 6 weeks (Fontana. 2013). AAS +/- HIT = ? Basically the question the researchers from the universities of Campinas (Brazil) and Ohio had in mind, when they came up with the...

Blood glucose alone would not last for 90s of running up the stairs. 80 minutes! That's the SuppVersity Figure of the Week and the impressive timespan you could (theoretically) fuel your energy demands during exercise at 70% of your VO2max from your muscle glycogen stores. The latter hold the energetic equivalent of ~1,500kcal and are thus an almost 40x larger reservoir of energy than the tiny amounts of glucose that's floating around in your bloodstream (data based on Gleeson. 2008). If you had to rely on that alone, you would pass out after 2 mins of the previously mentioned exercise at 70% VO2max. Obviously no workout is going to be fueled 100% exclusively by glucose/glycogen, so that you can still use the amount of energy your body stores in the fat cells (~93,000kcal) and in form of tissue proteins (~49,000kcal) and keep running for another 7,400 minutes or 5.13 days... theoretically Enough of the figures let's get to some recent research results Yo...

Image 1: Who would you like to be? And how do you train to achieve his physique? Sprinter or marathon runner? Ripped and buffed or skinny and sinewy? Although this is, after all, a question of muscle vs. fat, bone and tissue mass , it is upon closer examination as much a qualitative question, as it is a quantitative one - a question that may well be influenced by the way you train! Unlike our adipose tissue which has almost unlimited capacity to grow, the size of our muscles appears to limited by a number of factors, among which the individual fiber-make-up , i.e. the ratio of slow-oxidative endurance-type fibers (type I) to fast-twitch type IIA (fast-oxidative glycolytic), and fast twitch IIX (fast glycolytic) seems to play an important role, when it comes to getting big and buffed or skinny and sinewy. Figure 1: Slow- and fast-twitch faber composition in athletes and non-athletes (data based on Carrol. 1998 ; Widrick. 2002 ) As the data in figure 1 goes to show...

Image 1: T2-based fat burners work! At least when interperitoneally injected in overfed rats ;-) Those of you, who followed my writings even in the pre-SuppVersity days may remember my Team-Andro review (original article in German, link is just a google translation) of the purported fat-loss effects of diiodo-L-tyronines. Almost two years ago, I concluded tha t scientific evidence for their use as "fat burners" in humans was non-existent , while the rodent data that was available at that point, only confirmed that high-dose supplemental 3,5 diiodo-thyronine (and to a lesser extent 3,3' diiodo-thyronine) was able to ameliorate the detrimental metabolic effects of hypothyrodism in rats. Now, the same group of Italian researchers who conducted the initial studies on the metabolic effects of these previously overlooked "by-products" (evidence suggest that they are in fact more than that) of thyroid hormone metabolis...