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Upper Body Workout Doesn't Impair 48h Leg-Day Recovery, Lactobacillus for Immunity & Alcohol Impairs Your Gains

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PWO alcohol is not for male athletes. But before you rejoice, ladies. The ill health effects of a given amount of alcohol are more severe for the fairer sex. It's Christmas! And you can almost smell the new year with its smell of alcohol approach... and that's bad news for your gains, as a recent study in the latest issue of the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research  shows. With a study on the possible interference of upper body training on your leg-day recovery (Abaïdia. 2017), and the purported benefits of lactic acid bacteria for athletes' immunity (Michalickova. 2017), Duplanty's study, which shows that alcohol will impair the adaptation to resistance training in previously resistance trained men , but not female trainees w/ RT experience (Duplanty. 2017), constitutes what's probably going to be the last SuppVersity  Science Update for 2016. Read about rather exercise-related studies at the SuppVersity TeaCrine®, Tribu-lus, Cordyceps, ALA, Se...
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The Latest on Combined Training: 15% Increase in Muscle Size in 24 Weeks in Healthy Moderately Active Young Men Regardless of "Cardio First" or "Weights First" Training

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If you think even non-significant differences in "lean gains" are significant, "weights first" is for you. If you are about to embark on a combined strength + endurance training regimen in 2015, it does not matter if you do "cardio first" or "strength first"... well, almost. If you stick to the traditional exercise order, you may gain a non-significant 2% extra on your vastus lateralis (some people would wrongly say "quads") size. You've read evidence for both, the superiority of "cardio first" and "strength first" on the SuppVersity before and it may in fact be a matter of personal preference, whether you do your cardio or strength training first. You can learn more about the optimal exercise order at the SuppVersity Before, After or In-Between? Exercise Order & Leptin Cardio First for Anabolism? Large Muscle Groups First? How to Combine Cardio & Strength? Exercise Order Rel...
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Upper & Lower Body HIIT for Fitness, Performance, Fat Loss & Lean Gains? Adding Arm-Cranking to Your High Intensity Interval Routine May be Less Beneficial Than You Think

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No, this is not the arm-cranking ergometer that was used in the study at hand, but for those of you who like to do their HIIT exercise on the road this would be an alternative. What happens if you have 14 healthy, normal-weight, but not exactly "uberfit" men 20-50 year-old men work out twice a week for only 16- to 24-minutes for 16 weeks (total 32 sessions)? Not much, right? Well, if you make them do regular steady state cardio training on a cycling ergometer that would certainly be right. If you have them work out on a leg-cycling (LC) and an arm-cranking (AC) ergometer, though, things obviously look different... that's at least what a recent study from the Gaduate School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Tokyo , the Sports Medicine Research Center , the Institute for Integrated Sports Medicine , the Department of Internal Medicine and the Department of Radiology at the Keio University would suggest (Osawa. 2014). You can learn more about HIIT at the...
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Baking Soda & Beta Alanine Synergistically Promote Upper Body Power Output by 14%. Body Part, Dosage or Subject Specificity? What's Behind the Newly Found Synergism?

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Finally, beta alanine passes the baton to sodium bicarbonate ;-) The hypothesis that the combination of an "internal" (as in inside of the cell) and an external H+ buffer would be a perfect match is unquestionably straight forward. What was yet about as straight forward were the results of a study by Ducker et al. you've read about, here at the SuppVersity on March 28, 2013 : While the combination looks perfect on paper, the real-world results were more than just disappointing. The additional beta alanine did not only fail to promote the ergogenic effects of baking soda ( NaHCO3 ), it did in fact thwart them ( learn more ). New study, new participants, new protocol, new results Now, I am pretty sure Gabriel Tobias and his colleagues from the University of Sao Paulo (Brazil) and the Nottingham Trent University in the UK, had not heard about the results Ducker et al. reported a couple of weeks ago, when they set out to test the effects of beta alanine (BA;   Carn...
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"Just One More Set" (2/2): Three Sets of Three Exercises Three Times Per Week - High Volume Can Work. With Appropriate Rest Also to Build Strength & Power

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High , not insane (!) volume training can be productive. I hope that you have already being waiting for this post, so I'll try to cut myself short and get right to the facts. In yesterday's first part of "Just One More Rep" it turned out that a higher training volume sucks, when it comes to what is often thought would be its prerogative, i.e. using strength training to induce excess post-exercise oxygen consumption (EPOC) and lean out. In view of these results you could argue that it would be totally logical that a higher training volume cannot be ideal for muscle gains either. After all those require energy and if the RMR does not go up, this would suggest that there was little to repair and supercompensate. A recent study (Naclerio. 2012) does yet refute this already intrinsically non-stringent considerations. High volume can work! As long as it's high , and not simply insane. The study was conducted by researchers from the University of Greenwich , ...
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Three is More Than One: Higher Volume Increases Strength Gains in Legs, and Satellite Cell Recruitment and Fiber Size in Legs & Traps. Plus: Data on Myostatin, IGF1, MGF & Co.

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Image 1: The green dots that are crowding left and right from the blue myonucleus are the satellite cells ( Hanssen. 2012 ) In case you are not really sure what a "satellite cell" is and why you should care abouts it's "recruitment", you have probably missed the Intermittent Thoughts on Building Muscle series and should get into detention. Otherwise, here is the news: In a study that has been published in the latest issue of the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine in Sports Science T.S. Hanssen et al. published a paper with the auspicious title "The effect of strength training volume on satellite cells, myogenic regulatory factors, and growth factors" ( Hanssen. 2012 ). Exactly that kind of study that would have the potential to take the mostly common or bro-sensical reasoning behind the current recommendations on training volume to the next, a scientific level, if it the scientists would finally realize that strength training noobs are ...
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Order of Exercises Does not Matter if you Train Upper Body & Lower Body in One Session - Testosterone & Cortisol Response Identical

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You will probably remember my post on the effect of leg training on biceps size !? Well, although it is necessary that you train your legs, if you want to grow, a recent study by Jason D. Miller (Miller. 2011) indicates that hormonally it does not make a difference which part of your body you train first; or, in other words, you will get the same hormonal response (measured as testosterone (T) to cortisol (C) ratio) if you bench press (BP) first and do leg presses (LP) as your second exercise (both at 73.5% of 1RM for 4 sets ), as you will get if you start with the leg press and finish your workout on the bench. There does not appear to be an affect of resistance the exercise order of LP [leg press] and BP [bench press] on T [testosterone] and C [cortisol] . The exercise orders resulted in the same exercise volume and lactate responses which in turn resulted in no interaction in T and C between the UB-LB and LB-UB exercise orders. Miller does yet speculate that a higher volume a...
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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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