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HMB for Every, Not Just Strength Athletes? Lower Body Fat, Improved VO2, Muscle, Testosterone in 2x12 Week Study

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Lean muscle for athletes? HMB could help, irrespective of exercise type - by increasing strength, lean mass and VO2. In the study at hand, all three increased and that is / was in highly trained athletes. You've read all articles about HMB at the SuppVersity ? In that case you will be aware that HMB has hitherto been perceived rather as a strength / bodybuilding than an endurance supplement. Against that background it may come as a surprise that researchers from the Poznán University of Life Sciences in Poland chose to study the effects of HMB on the aerobic capacity (Burkalec-Michalski. 2016), instead of the usual study outcome, the subjects' strength. Is that a bad thing? Not at all! After all, there are  more sports that require optimal aerobic performance than sports that require (only) optimal strength performance. It thus makes perfect sense that Krzysztof Durkalec-Michalski and Jan Jeszka chose aerobic performance as their primary, but not only study outcome. Lea...
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Arginine Blunts Growth Hormone Response to Resistance Training: Will the -41% Reduction in Post-Workout Growth Hormone Release Hamper Your Strength & Size Gains?

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Arginine-based pre-workout products are more popular with guys than with girls. Could this be the reason that only women complain about unlovedly rapid muscle gains? ;-) No, this is not a typo! The verb in the headline of today's SuppVersity article really is "to blunt", as in "to neutralize partially" (OED Online 2013). I have to admit that I was also surprised, when I spotted the study over in the "ahead of print" section of the International Journal of Sports Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism . Unless Forbes, Harber and Bell, of whom you will learn later that they've already conducted another 'arginine study', messed up, the results of their most recent experiment do yet leave little doubt: Arginine, an amino acid that is used to test the function of the GH-releasing somatotropic cells within the lateral wings of the anterior pituitary, does - when it is administered at a dosage of 0.075 g·kg-1 body mass right before an acute bout of...
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Tapering 101: What It Is, How It's Done and Why It Works. Plus: Why Tapering & Detraining Are Not Interchangeable

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Tapering is a must for professional athletes before an event like the Olympic games. Many recreational trainees think of more as a necessary evil that should at least be able to replace the dreaded detraining phases... little do they know. Since the feedback on yesterday's post on detraining tells me that this is a topic of interest for the majority of SuppVersity readers (which it incidentally should be), I thought I'd follow this up with a brief review on tapering, which is often falsely considered as a "not so hardcore" alternative to keeping away from the gym all-together. While detraining means exactly what the word implies "away from training", tapering is usually described as "the training phase characterized by a  reduction of the amount of training that athletes undergo" (Mujik. 2010), which is often timed before the final days leading to a major competition.  In that it is up to the athlete / trainer to pick whether he/she wants to ...
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Intermittent Thoughts on Intermittent Fasting - Programing Success: Building Muscle Begins With Losing Body Fat.

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Image 1: Arnold does the "double bicep" + vacuums. If you want to look like a bodybuilder, muscle alone is not enough. First, I want to thank Jahed, Pablo, RF, Angimal, Garrett and Rudolf for their patience. After all, it has been two weeks now since you have submitted your (meta-)goals, which were all more related to building muscle and increasing performance, then to losing body fat, which was the topic the last installment of the Intermittent Thoughts dealt with. Yet although, at first sight, both topics have little (to nothing) to do with each other, there are are at least three important factors by which a reduction in body fat is very well related to increased muscularity and skeletal muscle hypertrophy . Let's get back to the "Peter Griffin" type of chubby person from the last installment , for a few seconds. Imagine "Peter" has packed on, say 10lbs of lean muscle and now stands in front of you, does the "double bicep" and vacuu...
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Lose More than 2 Pounds of Fat-Mass in Less than 30 Minutes: The Illusiveness of Bioelectrical Impedance Analysis

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Wouldn't it be nice to burn more than 2 pounds of body-fat within 30 minutes of exercise? Well, according to your body impedance scale this is easily possible! You would even gain 1 pound of solid muscle... In a recent study Selma Civar Yavuz (Yavuz. 2011) had 52 healthy volunteers perform an exhaustive treadmill exercise (Bruce test) and evaluated the body composition changes by the means of bioelectrical impedance analysis. The results summarized in Table 1 are amazing: Table 1: Comparison of the body mass index (BMI), fat mass (FTM), fat free mass (FFM), total body water (TBW) and bioelectrical impedance measurements taken before and after the exercises. What is amazing about these results is yet not the amount of fat the subjects burned in <30 min of running. Its rather the inaccuracy of the impedance analysis. In view of the results of this study you better throw your expensive body-fat scale out of the window and revert to using an old fashioned tape measure to ...
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