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Blood Flow Restriction Training 2020: What's New on Age, Sex, and Contralateral Gains | Plus: Limiting Discomfort!?

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It may sound awesome but eventually training only one arm is no viable long-term strategy. Having learned about the ability of BFR to increase/facilitate contralateral gains in today's SuppVersity  article, you could yet well use it when you're injured and unable to train one of your limbs (legs/quads should work, too).  In today's third installment of the 2020 research updates , I want to take a look at all that's new and interesting in the realms of blood flow restriction aka # BFR . How effective is it? Who benefits? Who benefits the most? Will it speed up or slow down recovery? And why will it help you make gains even on untrained limbs?  Sounds interesting? Well, here you go: My overview of selected new studies investigating the effects of blood flow restriction from early 2020 will answer these and (hopefully) any related questions you may have. "Blood Flow Restriction" aka # BFR is becoming more and more popular - rightly so? BFR, Cortisol ...
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Will Partial Reps Give You Those Horseshoes Everyone Else But You Seems to Develop? 20% Increased Gains in 8 Wks

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Partial reps for maximal increases in horseshoe (=triceps) size? Believe it or not: A recent Japanese study suggests that "doing everything right" may be holding you back: doing triceps extensions over the full range of motion seems to be inferior to throwing around the weights over a partial range of motion - the effects may be mediated by temporary hypoxia, but before we delve into an analysis of the mechanisms and the practical relevance of the results, let's first take a look at what exactly Masahiro Goto and his colleagues did with their 44 resistance-trained male subjects (members of a resistance weight training club) before they arrived at the conclusion "that intramuscular hypoxia might facilitate muscular hypertrophy with PRE [partial reps] being more effective than FRE [full reps]" (Goto 2017). Read about the latest nutrition, exercise & supplementation science on the SuppVersity Alcohol, Microbes & International Chest Day Cannabis,...
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Rest-Pause Yields 36% Greater Gains in Thigh Size in 6-Week Study With Trained Subjects - Awesome!? Well...

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Yet another study, where reading only the abstract - let alone the conclusion - may be utterly misleading. Always ask for effect sizes and absolute changes. Not even hot off the press, but still weeks before its official publication is the latest paper by Jonato Prestes and colleagues from the  Catholic University of Brasilia , the  Rocky Mountain College in the USA and the  Faculty Estacio of Vitoria  in Brazil (Prestes 2017). The corresponding study was designed to eventually fill the research gap that exists with respect to the longitudinal effects of the rest-pause method on muscle strength and hypertrophy; or, as the authors write, "the purpose of the present study was to compare the longitudinal effects of six weeks of rest-pause versus a traditional multiple-set RT on muscle strength, hypertrophy, localized muscular endurance, and body composition in trained subjects" (Prestes 2017). Are you trying to optimize your training for gains ? Find in...
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Chains & Bands Can Double Your 1RM Strength Gains on the Bench and in the Squat Rack, Meta-Analysis Shows

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Dude, it won't suffice to just bring your chains to the gym to show them off, you will also have to attach them to the barbell before squatting and benching to see results... and bro, the science on the benefits of elastic bands is much more solid - even though they are not as "cool"! I've written about the use of bands and chains in previous SuppVersity  articles, but Miguel A. Soria-Gila recent paper is the first meta-analysis that aggregates the available data to answer the important question, whether the use of "variable resistance" training (VRT), as the use of bands and chains is usually referred to in the literature, is generally advisable, or if the existing positive results are nothing but outliers. Retraction alert: In November 2018, the paper by Soria-Gila that is at the heart of this article was retracted due to "honest error [...] which completely invalidated the results and interpretation of the findings ( read more ). Unfortunately...
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Super-Setting is Time-Efficient, but What About the Volume and Quality of Your Workouts? They Will Improve! The Question that Remains is: Will Size & Strength Benefit, Too?

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Supersetting is fun, time-efficient, exhausting and based on the reasonable assumption that you can benefit from training agonist + antagonist together, but does it build size & strength? If you've been around the SuppVersity for some time, you will probably know what "super-setting" or "paired-sets" is. Right? Exactly! It's doing different exercises back to back. Like doing a bench press first and go to bend-over rows without taking more time to rest than it'll take to grab the barbell you already placed next to the bench. Yes, that's intense and yes, that's fast, but the question is: "Super-Setting is Time-Efficient, But is it Also "Gain-Efficient"?" And we will deal with it at the bottom of this article. Before we do so, let's take a look at what happens to workout volume and the quality of each of your reps when you super-set. No matter how you train. You must  periodize appropriately to maximize your ga...
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