SuppVersity - Nutrition and Exercise Science for Everyone

The squat was not part of the training regimen in the study at hand - that's bad because it would certainly have made the workout more intense and might thus have affected the results. If you don't remember what it was, I suggest you (re-)read the classic 'SuppVersity Athlete Triad'-Series ( read it )... and if you don't have the time to devour those classics, here's the gist: While it is often accompanied by eating disorders, the athlete triad can also arise in periods of either low energy availability or high training loads. Next to an ongoing decline of physical (and eventually also cognitive performance), the main features of the female athlete triad are amenorrhoea / oligomenorrhoea (no, or a disturbed menstrual cycle, respectively), and - in the long(er) run, i.e. after months and years - an often highly significant decrease in bone mineral density (osteoporosis and osteopenia). As et al. point out in their latest paper, the female athlete triad ...

If you feel totally wasted after every workout, I have bad news for you. In the two-a-day studies at hand the rest between the first and second workout was only 2h! Not exactly much time to recover, but the idea is to "train low" (on glycogen) on the second workout. It sounds like madness or something for the "enhanced" athletes, but an older scientific study I recently dug out, accidentally, says that "training twice every second day may be superior to daily training" (Hansen. 2005). When I tried to learn more about this topic, though, I had to realize that the evidence is scarce. Similar results have been presented by Yeo et al (2008), though, albeit for trained triathletes and cycling. In their study, Yeo and colleagues determined the effects of a cycle training program in which selected sessions were performed with low muscle glycogen content on training capacity and subsequent endurance performance, whole body substrate oxidation during submaxim...

If you train twice a day, that's certainly too little time for your strength to recover from workout A to workout B. So, if  you feel that you must  do this (for whatever reason that eludes me) try to put the strength training (like 5x5) first and the strength-endurance workouts (like 3x12-15) later, to make sure you have enough power when you're the most (prolly not fully) recovered. One reason that it is difficult to impossible to determine the optimal rest time is the fact that we don't have an objective parameter to assess whether it's time to get back to the grind or time to rest. One of the potential and probably useful markers to determine if you're fully (or sufficiently) recovered is the acute decrease in muscle strength in response to intense resistance training that may persist for several hours or days following the training session (Flores. 2011, Nosaka. 2002 & 2005). Previous studies have linked the early decrease in muscle strength after ST ...

A personal trainer who knows what he's doing is that he will push you exactly so far as it is necessary to make maximal progress. Interestingly, even the best trainers will fail doing the same for themselves. The more is better mentality that's so characteristic of our lives in the Western world of affluence is imho the most important obstacle trainees all around the world meet on their way to increased muscle strength, size and performance. Against that background it's a pity that the results of a recent study from the School of Kinesiology and Health Studies at the Queen’s University relate to sprint training, only. So, after having a look at Jason G. E. Zelt, I will briefly take a look at similar evidence from the more popular field of "working out to look good naked" and to be as strong as Superman. But let's not waste any more time and sprint straight to the point! Zelt et al. published the results of the initially mentioned study in the peer-revie...

In general, you have to count and limit your weekly HIIT sessions. Doing as much as humanly possible, could yet make sense, when you're preparing for Olympia 2016 and realize 5 weeks before the event that you have been lingering for too long ;-) I think as a SuppVersity reader you know by now that " more won't yield more " - no matter if we are talking about supplements or exercise. Now, while we've had countless examples of the "more ain't more" principle that's also at the heart of the "Three Simple Rules of Supplementation" ( read article ) for supplements (e.g. zinc , chromium , etc.) and the simple notion that eating less won't always result in greater weight loss, evidence for the pro-anabolic / adaptive effects of exercise in general, and non-steady state cardio, in particular is scarce. Against that background it's all the more important for us to cherish the publication of a paper from the Norwegian University of...