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Build Muscle While Cutting Weight! Beta Alanine @4g/day Helps Wrestlers Achieve Their Weight Goals and Build Lean Muscle at the Same Time.

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Figure 1: The structural difference in their molecular structure is the outward sign of the very different biological functions of alanine (left) and beta-alanine (right); one part of the energy supply chain, the other a potent H+ buffer Initially heavily marketed as creatine for athletes competing in sports with weightclasses (similar effects, no water retention) by supplement companies, it has become sort of quiet around the hydrogen buffering amino acid beta-alanine , lately. While most pre-/ and post-workout products have it, hardly anybody seems to care whether it is actually worth adding to the formula - it certainly ain't expensive, though. Thanks to B.D. Kern and T.L. Robinson from the Human Performance and Physical Education Department at the Adams State College in Alamosa, Colorado, this indifference may well change into a new craze in the future. In their study ( Kern. 2011 ) that is going to be published in the Journal of ...
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Bench Press Before Triceps Extensions: Conventional Wisdom or Conventional Bullshit?

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It is set in stone that you first do your bench presses and then finish up with some sort of triceps exercise. A group of scientists from Brazil ( Simao. 2010 ) wanted to check, whether doing it the other way around may not have its own, unique benefits and - you knew it - it has! The 31 participants who had a military background were randomly assigned to one of three groups, the first of which began with large and progressed toward small muscle group exercises (LG-SM) while another started with small and advanced to large muscle group exercises (SM-LG). The exercise order for LG-SM was bench press (BP), lat pull-down (LPD), triceps extension (TE), and biceps curl (BC). The order for the SM-LG was BC, TE, LPD, and BP. The third group served as a control group (CG). Figure 1: 1RM tests and muscle thickness effect sizes and magnitudes across 12 weeks of resistance training. Although the overall effect size was relatively small, the results suggest that conventional wisdom is mislea...
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Whey Protein Hydrosolate Better Than Whey, BCAA and Casein as Post-Workout Supplement

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The initial hype around Whey Protein Hydrosolates (WPH) has ended and everybody returned to his favorite whey protein or one of the hundreds of BCAA products on the market. A new study by Kanda et al. ( Kanda. 2010 ) does however suggest that this might be a mistake. In their study (unfortunately done on rats) they compared the immediate effect of supplementation with carbs + either WPH, Whey, BCAA or Casein and found: WPH caused significant increases ( p < 0.05) in skeletal muscle glycogen level (5.01+/-0.24 mg/g), compared with whey protein (4.23+/-0.24 mg/g), BCAA (3.92+/-0.18 mg/g) or casein hydrolysates (2.73+/-0.22 mg/g). Post-exercise ingestion of glucose plus WPH caused significant increases ( p < 0.05) in both phosphorylated Akt/PKB (131%) and phosphorylated PKC ζ (154%) levels compared with glucose only. There was a significant positive correlation between skeletal muscle glycogen content and phosphorylated Akt/PKB ( r = 0.674, p < 0.001) and PKC ζ ( ...
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Yes, Skin Bursting Pumps Will Make Your Muscles Grow

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Arnold already knew: "If you want to grow, go for the pump!" A recent study by Soltow et al. ( Soltow. 2010 ) expands on Arnold's hypothesis - what you need is pump and stretch . The scientists studied the effect of nitric oxide (NO) on C2C12 myoblasts and found: NO, COX-2, and NF-kappaB are necessary for stretch-induced proliferation of myoblasts. Although COX-2 and NF-kappaB are both involved in basal proliferation, NO does not affect basal growth. Thus, NO requires the synergistic effect of stretch in order to induce muscle cell proliferation. So, more NO, some stretch and / or skin bursting pumps? That reminds me of the good old first generation pump supplements with arginine, of which I can only repeat do not dump your good old NO Xplode , White Flood , Super Pump 250 , VPX Shotgun , etc. down the toilette. It is not for nothing that they have been around for years! What's more, Arginine and Ornithine (ingredients of the first generation Pump Supps) ha...
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Still Waiting for Big Guns? Patience is the Way to Go!

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click to enlarge ( Abe. 2000 . Figure 2) A study by Abe et.al. ( Abe. 2000 ) analyzed the time-course of strength and muscular adaption to a 3-days-a-week training protocol over a timespan of 12 weeks. The results show that while muscle gains take their time, "time", in this case, is relative and depends both on the individual muscle (e.g. quadrizeps size increases before significant gains in hamstring size can be observed) and the gender of the trainee (e.g. the initial increment in upper body muscle size appears to be greater in women; propably due to the fact that most women did not do upper body exercises before). Be patient, be consistent, train hard, rest well and eat smart. If you do all that + pay a short visit to the SuppVersity everyday you will see that after having red the next 100 newsitems you will already have gained a significant amount of strength and muscle.
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