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New "Lean Gains" Study Confirms: IF Gets Athletes Lean & Improves Insulin Sensitivity W/Out Impairing Their Gains

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Intermittent fasting has accumulated lots of scientific back-up in obese subjects and rodent models of obesity. In lean, athletic folks, however, the "evidence" is - with one exception - based on hear-say and N=1 reports... until now! While previous studies in Ramadan fasting have already provided some evidence of the efficacy of intermittent fasting - lean gains style - aka 16h fasting to 8h feeding, the latest study from the University of Padova is the latest of two studies ( here's a write-up of the other one ) that were specifically designed to evaluate the efficacy of what the scientists call "an increasingly popular dietary approach used for weight loss and overall health" (Moro. 2016). As the authors likewise point out, the evidence that intermittent fasting (IF) can have significant beneficial effects on blood lipids and other health outcomes in the overweight and obese, albeit mostly using alternate day fasting (learn more), there's limited a...
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Significant Weight Gain W/ Whey vs. Casein?! Anabolism / Muscle-Protection or Fat Gain Despite Hitting the Weights?

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While being misinterpreted as an "anti-whey" study by one of you, the latest whey as your main protein source study from Brazil only adds to the evidence that there's something special about whey. One thing I like about writing this blog is that I have a lot of contact to you, the readers. One of you recently sent me the link to a study from the  University of Ouro Preto  in which the authors report what he called a "disconcerting" weight gain when exercise and weight training were combined. A closer look at the study reveals, however, that this "disconcerting" weight gain (even though that is not totally obvious) is probably good news. But before we get to the implications and interpretations, let's first take a look at what the scientists did and what they observed. You'll see that this is of paramount importance wrt to not misinterpreting the weight gain in  Figure 1 . Note that the study at hand is not about High-protein diets - w...
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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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Athletes Recover From Overtraining in Hypoxia - 4 Weeks of Low Intensity Training in Low Oxygen Environment Will Do

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With overtraining you have to undertrain to reverse the damage you've done. Doing so in intermittent hypoxia, returns important markers of OT to normal in less than 4 weeks in T&F athletes. As Davide Susta and colleagues point out in the introduction to their pilot study on the effects of repeated hypoxia–hyperoxia exposure and light exercise enhances performance in athletes with overtraining syndrome, "[o]vertraining syndrome (OTS) is a major concern among endurance athletes and is a leading cause in preventing them to perform for long periods" (Susta. 2015). As a SuppVersity reader you will know that as much and be aware of the benefits of training in hypoxia in non-overtrained athletes, where multiple studies have shown its efficacy to improve performance and body composition - often without exercising or at least only regular workouts. You can learn more about overtraining and checking your training status at the SuppVersity Heart Rate Variablity (HRV...
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True or False? Intra-Workout BCAA Supplements Are Useful Only For Those Who Produce, Import and Sell Them?

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Intra-workout BCAA supplements are marketed specifically to resistance trainees. If they do have anti-catabolic effects, though, those are - just like potential fatigue reducing effects - significantly more likely to occur in endurance trainees. If you go by the results of a 2001 study by Blomstrand et al., which is actually the only study to investigate the effect of BCAA intake on the leg exchange of amino acids along with the change in their muscle concentration during exercise and a 2-h recovery period, it would appear as if the claim that "Intra-Workout BCAA Supplements Are Useful Only For Those Who Produce, Import and Sell Them" was true. The study, which measured the amount of amino acids directly and does thus provide a much better proxy of proteolysis than protease measurements which are "a poor index of muscle proteolysis" (Attaix. 2010), did after all indicate that there is no decrease in the rate of protein degradation when BCAA are consumed during...
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