An iPod Shuffle! For almost free! (Oh, and protein timing)
Eating protein before and after workouts has been touted to be one of the most important things you can do to decrease DOMS, increase protein synthesis, prevent protein breakdown, and in this article, increase your resting metabolic rate. The other claims…maybe I’ll tackle those another day (This post is hellishly long enough) Read More...
More is not better–when statistics turn bad (it’s just not as entertaining as when animals do)
As with everything, more is not usually better. In statistics, more actually makes you more prone to being accidentally wrong (or, in statistics-lingo, spurious). Today, I’d like to talk about a basic concept that is taught to students in their introductory statistics courses (and hence, you would think, most researchers): The effect of multiple significance testing. Read More...
This episode is brought to you by the letter p
What does the p-value actually mean? Read More...
Beta-alanine revisited: Failing to plan, or planning to fail?
In the past 2.5 years, a few more studies on beta-alanine have emerged. As I’ve written before, my goal isn’t to become the anti-beta-alanine blogger, but I do feel that watching this supplement develop from its relative inception to its current state does provide an interesting prototype for how similar products develop a strong following despite the limitations on the research available to support (or not support) its use. Read More...
The most successful people aren’t necessarily the ones you want to listen to
I recently joined Twitter. Mostly, because I wanted to see what the fuss was about and it seemed like a neat way to tap into yet another network. The interesting thing about Twitter early on, is that (for those of us who have attention spans of gnats) that Twitter feed page doesn’t change very often unless you start following people’s Twitter feeds (I’m sorry, but “tweeps”? Seriously, no.) So I started searching for names of people I thought would be interesting to follow and whether they had feeds to follow or not. And on my journey through Google, I stumbled on this excerpt from someone I would consider to be one of the most impressive physique models in the world. I’ve broken them down, point by point instead of the entire crammed-in paragraph. but they are sequential (and I don’t think they’re taken out of context): Read More...
Are your fitness decisions fully informed?
Everything we do shapes our opinion of effectiveness. The opinions of others also shapes our ideas of effectiveness. And while your own recall of what works and what doesn’t work likely falls on the side of the majority of the time (if you prescribed intervals vs steady-state cardio for a bunch of clients, and most of them lost more fat on intervals, chances are your recall bias is unlikely to think that steady-state cardio is the way to go), it is nonetheless, biased, because you are also less and less prone to prescribing other things when you think you’ve found the thing that actually works. And sometimes you remember the dramatic cases preferentially, when it’s the other thing that works most of the time. Read More...
New directions
I’m still surprised that people still come to this site and to all my readers: It’s incredibly flattering. I still get the occasional e-mail from a reader and every time, whether positive or not-so-positive, it’s still amazing. Read More...
Where is your information coming from?
Even though it’s been a year since I’ve written in this blog, I still get offers of sponsorship or “partnership” with other sites, services and products. Most of the time, it’s to create some sort of linking relationship: If I put their site on my links, they’ll put my site on their links and presumably, the traffic to both of our sites equilibrates to a higher level than ever before. Read More...
You don’t always get what you want, even if you get what you need
One of the newer supplements on the market are the aromatase inhibitors. They purport to increase free testosterone levels by inhibiting the enzyme that is responsible for converting androstenedione to estrone as well as converting testosterone to estradiol. By preventing the breakdown of testosterone precursors and the breakdown of testosterone itself, the concentration of testosterone should theoretically increase. Read More...
Why I’m not writing about beta-alanine lately
I’ve had a more than a few requests to write more reviews on beta-alanine, since it seems to be all the rage. It is so much the rage lately, that I get more hits on my reviews of the three beta-alanine studies than anything else, by a very large margin. The reviews have been linked by so many people that this blog is on the third page of a Google search for the term “beta alanine” (and this search includes hits from ALL of the supplement sites that SELL beta-alanine), and the FIRST hit when you search Google for “beta alanine studies”. The. First. Hit. Holy. Crap. Read More...