SuppVersity - Nutrition and Exercise Science for Everyone

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...

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...