SuppVersity - Nutrition and Exercise Science for Everyone

Image 1: Believe it or not, Arnold is just "pre-regenerating" ;-) If you have not taken a mental health day for your gray matter the past two days and skipped your obligatory daily visit at the SuppVersity , you will probably have noticed that the last posts on the overtraining induced shift in the ratio of pro- to anti-inflammatory signals (cf. " Overtraining, Inflammation, Insufficient Repair ") and yesterday's hot bath "pre-regeneration" post (cf. " Speed Up Your Regeneration and Propel Your Gains by Taking a HOT Bath Bath 2-Days Before Arduous Workouts "), share a common motif: He who recovers the fastest spends the least time on repairing and the most time on building muscle! Today you are going to learn about yet another pre-regeneration technique... Muscle preconditioning by maximal isometric contractions Similar to the hot bath, of which I know that it's probably not for everyone, a recently published paper by Hsin-Lian ...

Image 1: Are women tougher than men, because bathe more often? If you define toughness by your muscles resistance to eccentric exercise damage, the answer could be "YES!" If you listened to Brooks, Carl and me on Super Human Radio , yesterday ( download the podcast ), you may remember me stating that 48h appears to be a good rule of thumb, as far as the rest periods between workouts for individual body parts are concerned (this assumes that you are young, healthy, reasonably conditioned and lift heavy). A recently published paper by Chad D. Touchberry  does now suggest that there may be another 48h window before your workout ( Touchberry. 2012 ). One you would use a priori to improve your recovery a posteriori - preconditioning in a hot bath for 20 min at 41°C, 48h before a hard workout or competition! Eccentric treadmill running = maximum muscle damage At least in a rodent model, those 20 min of heat exposure in 41°C warm water lead to statistically highly signific...

Image 1: Part of Christian Bale's protocol to become the skinny Machinist was, you guessed it, overtraining - accompanied by undereating, the results (left) were profound. The debate on the practical implications and even the existence of a certain physical condition that is generally referred to as "overtraining" is probably one of the most longstanding debates in the realms of physical culture. From a scientific point of view, it stands out of question that the same exercises that turn a stringbean into a heavily muscled berserk can also change him back into a stringbean, when the narrow yet tremendously productive margin between "just enough" and "already too much" is repeatedly exceeded. Scientists from the Department of Sports Medicine at the Shanghai University of Sport probed the underlying causes of this phenomenon and came up with a few interesting observations ( Xiao. 2012 ). Update: My friend Carl Lanore from Super Human Radio hap...

Image 1: Did you ever take into consideration that your body may refuse to produce vitamin D with good reason? Do you know that? You have an idea, a hypothesis, a stroke of genius, but for whatever reason you don't have access or time to do some research to probe it!? For me that was the case with my "phosphorus <> vitamin D" hypothesis. And in view of the fact that I started to ignore the dozens of weekly papers on the great importance vitamin D, by the means of which their authors obviously hope get their share of the sudden media attention, it took a more or less unrelated post by Mallory Pazdersky on Highbrow Paleo about the paradoxically low vitamin D levels of astronauts to remind myself that I wanted to do some research in this area... and what should I say? It did not take very long to find evidence in support of my theory. Hypothesis: Our bodies reduce vitamin D to cope with the high phosphorus load in our diets Don't get me wrong, I don't ...

Image 1: Coffee vs. tea, if it comes to the persistent dopaminergic "get going" effect it appears that a hitherto hardly known tea variety, Camellia Kucha has the edge on the #1 average westerner's #1 morning drink. Caffeine is the #1 drug for anyone looking for that little extra of burst of energy and yet there are people who claim they would kill for their morning coffee, while others swear by having one cup right before bed to keep the blood sugar levels from dropping during the night. Whatever your personal preference may be, it probably did not escape your notice that cup no.10,000 does not exert the same magic as cup  no. 10, decades ago. The reason for that is a pretty rapid habituation effect, the extend of which varies remarkably from person to person.If you do belong to the vast majority of people for whom  the morning coffee has become more of an entrenched habit than an energizer, you will therefore probably be interested in the results of a recent study...

Image 1: Is it what he eats, is it what he drinks or is it just  andropause? Whatever it may be, Jack does not have the "classic gyno". In the last installment of this two-part series on gynecomastia, lipomastia and co. we have seen that the number of appellations this common, mostly benign enlargement of the male breast has been given, is easily outnumbered by the potential, mostly pharmacological, but also supplemental and/or dietary factors which have been implicated in its development. In a recent paper, Krysiak and Okopien estimate the incidence of mild proliferation of the glandular breast tissue to 30%-50% of the male population ( Krysiak. 2012 ). Against that background, the universal ignorance towards the profound psychological effects, as well as the tacit acceptance that, breasts or no breasts, "men don't cry" are certainly uncalled-for. If it's benign you got to live with it! The idea, "if it's not cancerous", it won...

Image 1: Hard to imagine, but this man was not born with outstanding abs and even believed it was "not in his genes" to attain a physique like this. I don't know if you have noticed, but our common friend Adelfo is stepping up his game. I can still remember when it took him a week to come up with an article which still needed way more than just some superficial editing. These days however, he is not only training and dieting harder than ever (and I am absolute certain, this time the judges won't be able to place him second!), he is also making himself a name as an author, both here, at the SuppVersity , as well as over at his sponsors' Myotropics Physique Magazine . His latest article on Confidence as the key to a "sexier you" is as much of a motivational slam-dunk, as today's installment of the Road to Wheelchair Nationals series , here at the SuppVersity. So, after you have internalized, or as Adelfo wrote "packed away the psychological w...