SuppVersity - Nutrition and Exercise Science for Everyone

Don't worry, this exercise is not going to reverse all the effects of your training. Still, in view of the intriguing results of the study at hand, it would be interesting if the fiber-type unspecific effects in powerlifters are reversed when you stop powerlifting / exercise altogether and/or start lifting with higher volumes and lower intensities (bodybuilding style volume training). There are visible and invisible differences between bodybuilders, powerlifters and normal men. The former ones are so obvious that it wouldn't be very interesting to address them in a study. The latter, on the other hand, are, other than you'd expect, hardly researched, but - as the results of a recent study from the Manchester Metropolitan University , and a bunch of other European Universities and research centers shows - more pronounced and significantly more fundamental than some of you may have thought. As Meijer et al. point out in the introduction to their soon-to-be-published pap...

Don't eat unless this brunette,... ah, I mean her clock tells you to eat. That's intermittent fasting (IF) - well, at least one out of at least three versions of eating by the clock people call "intermittent fasting". Needless to say that this doesn't make it much easier to decide if IF works or not. It has been some time since I wrote about "Intermittent Fasting" ("lean gains"-style, i.e. eat in a 6h-8h window everyday), "Fasting" (don't eat at all) and "Alternate Day Fasting" (eat very little / usually ~800kcal one day / and normal the next one, repeat). Against that background it is worth devoting a whole SuppVersity Research Update to the latest studies and reviews of IF and ADF. In the corresponding papers, Tinsley and La Bounty review the "effects of intermittent fasting on body composition and clinical health markers in humans", Varady et al. discuss "the determinants of weight loss success wi...

While many athletes use it and trainers all around the world are convinced that it works, the evidence on what exactly massage therapy does or doesn't do to an exhausted athlete's muscle and lymphatic system is scarce. Even the assumption that it helps reduce DOMS may be based on a placebo effect. After all, it's impossible to conduct a truly double-blinded massage study. If they can afford it, athletes often employ their own massage therapist. It is commonly believed that sport massage after intensive exercise might improve power and perceptual recovery in sportsmen and -women. As Mehdi Kargarfard et al. (2015) point out in their latest paper, "few studies have been done in this area" to confirm what everyone appears to believe to be a scientific fact" (Kargarfard. 2015). Accordingly, the researchers' latest study aimed to examine the effect of massage on the performance of bodybuilders - a group of athletes of which only few will be able to afford...

Since the natural melatonin production decreases as we age, it is (unfortunately) possible that younger women wouldn't see the same benefits as the >56 year-old subjects of the study at hand. No, I am not recommending laziness here, and I doubt that you will arrive at a cover model physique with nothing but a handful of melatonin pills, but  the results of a recent study from the Aarhus University Hospital in Denmark are too intriguing not to devote a whole SuppVersity  article to them. In said study, Anne Kristine Amstrup and colleagues tested whether there's anything to the rumors that have it that "melatonin [has] a positive effect on body weight and energy metabolism" (Amstrup. 2015). As the researchers rightly point out, previous "evidence for this relies mainly on animal models" (ibid). It was thus about time for someone to "determine the effects of melatonin on body composition, lipid and glucose metabolism in humans" (ibid). Wan...

This is what it's all about. Real food does not come in form of "macros". It comes in form of complex food matrices that determine its effect on one's health - including one's glycemic health. You will probably remember that I have touched on a specific aspect of the effects of and interactions between different macronutrients in what scientists often refer to as "food matrices" on the glycemic response to standardized glucose loads in previous articles like the famous "True or False?" article that dealt with the question: "Will Adding Fat to A Carby Meal Lower the Insulin Response?" ( read it ). You don't remember this or any of the other articles? Well, in that case, I probably have to tell you again  that the mere fact that the postprandial glucose are lower does not mean that a certain food or combination of certain macronutrients would increase your insulin sensitivity (adding fat to a high carbohydrate meal certainly d...