SuppVersity - Nutrition and Exercise Science for Everyone

Are today's "muscle men" not going to be able to procreate? If you are frequenting any of the popular fitness and bodybuilding bulletin boards, you will know that "broscience" is a mixture of anecdotal evidence and hilarious claims that is spiked with cherry picked scientific references. Against that background it may sound funny that researchers from the New Castle Fertility Center  devoted a complete study to the analysis of drugs and protocols highlighted by the online community of users for prevention and/or mitigation of adverse effects of steroid use. If you think about it, however, it's only logical that doctors will be better able to help their patients if they understand what brought them in a situation in which they have to see a doctor at a fertility clinic. Resistance training is the only powerful  muscle builders  with positive health effects! Tri- or Multi-Set Training for Body Recomp.? Alternating Squat & Blood Pressure - Pro...

SARMs may build muscle, but they don't have significant effect on body fat and thus the visibility of the muscles. Scientists from the  Institute of Cardiovascular Research and Sports Medicine at the internationally well-known German "anti-doping university", i.e. the German Sport University Cologne, have recently published an interesting paper in which they compared (to my knowledge for the first time) how metandienone aka dianabol , estradienedione and the selective androgen  receptor modulator (SARM) S-1  affect the body composition, hormone levels and selected health parameters of ... yeah, of course, of rodents . Before you are now telling me once more that "rodents are no little men", let me remind you of the fact that other SARMs, like LGD-4033 have recently been tested in humans at the Boston Medical Center (Basaria. 2013). Learn more about powerful muscle builders at the SuppVersity Tri- or Multi-Set Training for Body Recomp.? Alternatin...

Breakfast of a supplement junkie. In the latest issue of Andrology , scientists from the  University of Tennesse e Graduate School of Medicine attempt to provide an overview of the most common designer anabolic steroids on the market. As Kim et al. point out, recent evidence suggests that these agents "may be the most common cause of hypogonadism in men of reproductive age" (Rahnema. 2015). Despite all recent regulatory efforts the FDA is having a hard time to keep up with the tricks of the "supplement" industry who releases one structurally slightly modified, but effective AAS derivative after the other. Learn more about natural   muscle builders  at the SuppVeristy Optimizing Rest for Size and Strength Gains Alternate Squats & BP for GAINS! Farmer's Walk or Squat? Is Strong- men T. For You? Full ROM ➯ Full Gains - Form Counts! Battle the Rope to Get Ripped & Strong Up Your Squat by 25% With Sodium Bicarbonate More specifical...

We are what we eat! Acknowledged, but does this also go for your hormones and different in protein intakes? Let's have another look at the contemporarily available research to figure that out. In recent study in the International Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism a group of researchers from the Faculty of Physical Education and Recreation at the University of Alberta reports: "Supplementing a typical daily food intake consisting of 0.8 g of protein ·kg-1·d-1 with a whey protein isolate (an additional 0.8 or 1.6 g·kg-1·d-1) [...] had no effect on glucose, insulin, testosterone, cortisol, or growth hormone following the final mea l" (Forbes. 2013). I know, anything else would have been a real shocker. What it wouldn't be, though, is a total surprise. If you dig through the available literature you can easily find data that would support the scientists' assumption that doing an experiment "to investigate the effects of a controlle...

Image 1: Luckily "gyno", or in this case lipomastia, does not always look that bad. Oftentimes it is more subtle, yet still annoying a psychological burden for men suffering from it. This pictures alone should be reason enough to give all the 45+ contributing mentioned in this article a wide, wide berth (image from  cosmeticsurgerybangalore.com) If you type "gynecomastia" into your favorite search engine, your chances to find one of the major fitness and bodybuilding forums among your first hits are about 99%. This indicates that gynecomastia, lipomastia, "bitch tits", "fat tits" and whatever else many people use to measure by the same yardstick is much more prevalent than you would think if you conducted a survey on the street. The reasons for that are manifold. Men, who frequent those bulletin boards are oftentimes more conscious about their looks than Mr. Average, they are also more prone to be exposed to exogenous hormonal agents that can...

Image 1: If you start thinking about whether or not the product you just bought at your local supplement store works, it is - for a non-negligible amount of supplements - unlikely that you will see any results (photo Scientific American ) I guess, I don't have to tell you what the term "placebo effect" stands for, right? It is the occurrence of an effect that - assuming the effect could speak - would say of itself "placebo", i.e. "I am pleasing" (1st person singular, presence active from lat. "placere", i.e."to please" ). And while the medical establishment is still arguing, whether it was feasible, and, in view of the fact that this must obviously happen unbeknown to the patient, even ethical, to deliberately exploit the placebo as a "medical" treatment strategy, there are certain supplement companies that generate up to 90% of their revenue from an allegedly muscle-packed cousin of the placebo effect, the brocebo eff...

Image 1: "An apple a day keeps the doctor away!" And though the ursolic acid in its peel may be part of the underlying mechanism, this does not make it a "natural anabolic", but rather another item on the list of "healthy stuff from real food" The number of purported natural anabolics increases year by year. Against the background that most of these products are nothing but supplemental nonstarters in shiny bottles and boxes with "non-FDA approved" promises of "unparalleled muscle growth" on them, the recent release of a broad range of ursolic acid supplements must already be considered a "highlight". With a peer-reviewed rodent studies backing its anti-catabolic, pro-anabolic properties ( Kunkel. 2011 ), it appears as if ursolic acid could be more than another potent placebo. And if we put things into perspective, in the end its potential beneficial effects on skeletal muscle hypertrophy are rather negligible compared to...

Image 1: With regard to IGF-1 and its splice-variants like MGF, there is probably 10x-100x more bro- than pro-scientific data out there - this does not help us, though, since you never know which of the bro-reports is bogus and which is not. In view of the fact that we have not covered much ground with the last installment (we did build a pretty solid foundation, though ;-), I will try my very best to steer a middle course between presenting impressive amounts of facts and explaining the complex and in part not even completely elucidated physiological underpinnings of skeletal muscle hypertrophy, or, as the bros would say, getting big and buffed! A pros pros Bro, you will unquestionably have read on one of the myriads of bodybuilding-related bulletin boards how the injection of X amounts of IGF-1 right into the muscle made BigGuns , or whatever the poster's pseudonym may have been, grow "3 inches in 2 weeks"... ok, his profile picture looks impressive, but is that cre...