SuppVersity - Nutrition and Exercise Science for Everyone

Image 1: Caramel blueberry pancake? Exactly! Food for SkipLoading. Thursday, another week literally flew by and the last of Adelfo Cerame's pre-contest-prep experimentation weeks has begun. About time for an high-carb re-feed, don't you think so? "Re-feed? High in carbs? Isn't that this bullshit that leaves you bloated, fat and ugly?" In case this was what you just thought, when you heard the word "high-carb re-feed", it's about time you let Adelfo explain to you, why he thinks (and knows from experience) that an occasional carb-binge will do way more good, than harm. Re-feeds keep things going, physiologically, as well as psychologically Every Sunday I do a re-feed or carb load.... From what I have heard and learned from my own past experience a re-feed or carb load (even, or rather especially on a low carb contest prep diet) can be very beneficial. As someone once mentioned (I can't remember whom or where i had heard it from), ...

Image 1: This drawing from a German 1885 compendium on the flora in Germany, Austria and Switzerland shows that other than Acai & Co, pomegranate is no exotic (expensive and useless) discovery of some fly-by-night supplement vendor. People are always all the rave, when some clever scientist (or should I say business man?) dug up another of those exotic fruit from a godforsaken valley somewhere in the African or South-American primeval forests. With the hype around ACAI & Co they often forget that there have been real Superfoods just around the corner, right in their local grocery store for years. Pomegranate, as it becomes increasingly evident from recent research, is one of these Superfoods - one that has even been mentioned in the Book of Exodus and has been part of the Ayurevedic tradition for centuries, now. While I have been following the research for some months now, the one mind-boggling study result has always been missing so that this is in fact the first blogpos...

Image 1: Who would you like to be? And how do you train to achieve his physique? Sprinter or marathon runner? Ripped and buffed or skinny and sinewy? Although this is, after all, a question of muscle vs. fat, bone and tissue mass , it is upon closer examination as much a qualitative question, as it is a quantitative one - a question that may well be influenced by the way you train! Unlike our adipose tissue which has almost unlimited capacity to grow, the size of our muscles appears to limited by a number of factors, among which the individual fiber-make-up , i.e. the ratio of slow-oxidative endurance-type fibers (type I) to fast-twitch type IIA (fast-oxidative glycolytic), and fast twitch IIX (fast glycolytic) seems to play an important role, when it comes to getting big and buffed or skinny and sinewy. Figure 1: Slow- and fast-twitch faber composition in athletes and non-athletes (data based on Carrol. 1998 ; Widrick. 2002 ) As the data in figure 1 goes to show...

Image 1: Was it school stress that cost Michelle Obama her famous "guns" (=muscular upper arms)? Probably not - and despite contrary conclusions in the study at hand, I doubt that it is school stress that leaves our daughters fat, but undermuscled. What do you say? According to the results of a recent evaluation of the data from the European HELENA trial, school, or rather the stress your children are exposed to within the educational system, may be one of the reasons for the increasing number of obese adolescents (age 12-18 years) - at least if we trust the statistical finesse of Tineke De Vriendt, Els Clays and 10 other scientists who recently published a paper on European adolescents’ level of perceived stress and its relationship with body adiposity in the European Journal of Public Health ( DeVriendt. 2011 ). The study was part of the Healthy Lifestyle in Europe by Nutrition in Adolescence cross-sectional study (HELENA-CSS) , the aim of which is to obtain "reli...

Image 1: Any roundworms reading this? I hope you know that by not eating enough and feeling miserable you can extend your lifespan ;-) Thanks Caenorhabditis elegans , or "C. elegans", almost everybody who is able to read a newspaper or online magazine will have heard of the miraculous effects of calorie restriction and fasting on longevity (of this worm!). Since I assume that you possess more gray matter than this transparent nematote, you will probably have asked yourself how, or rather if these results from a worm with an average lifespan of 2-3 weeks translate to human beings,... well, all I can tell you is that leading a miserable life of lifelong dieting appears to work in non -human primates, as well ( Kemnitz. 2011 ). Now, the obvious question is: How does all that relate to Intermitent Thoughts on Intermittent Fasting ? Obviously, none of the roundworms or rhesus monkey's followed Martin Berkhan's intermittent fasting approach, did they? No, I have not ...

Image 1: Cover of the September issue of the International Journal of Wrestling Science - don't tell me you don't have a subscription, yet! I don't know about you, but I feel that it's quite interesting to look at the highly heterogeneous dosage suggestions on the labels of the ever-increasing number of BCAA supplements on the market. Interestingly, almost every producer claims in his "non FDA-approved" statements that his supplement contains "scientifically supported" or "clinically validated" amounts of branch-chained amino acids in the "optimal" (whatever that may be) ratio of 2:1:1, 3:1:1, 4:1:1, 8:1:1, ... and all the other variations that appear to be limited only by the patent applications and lawyers of the financially more potent players in the business. From a scientific perspective, however, this "optimal" amount has still to be elucidated - at least to my knowledge, no respectable scientist has yet claim...

Image 1: An Under Armour Performance Mouthpiece - hitherto not a bodybuilder's 1st choice from the Under Armour line-up; something that may change when Cutler & co get wind of its effects on post exercise cortisol levels ;-) Any (semi-)professional boxers out there? No? Football players? Ice-hockey? Lacrosse? Did you ever think of wearing your mouthpieces in the gym? No? Well, I guess then you have not heard about the surprising performance enhancement the stabilization of your temporomandibular joint by a well-adjusted mouthpiece may have on exercise performance and recuperation, have you? Studies into the effects of mouthpieces on exercise performance date back to the late 1970's and early 1980's, when Stephen David Smith published two studies on the effects of mouthguards and jaw posture on strength and exercise performance in the New York State Dentist Journal ( Smith. 1978 ; Smith. 1982 ). In spite of that, a proper, experimentally verified explanation for th...