What price would you pay for muscles?

Not everyone works out for performance. I would count myself amongst the folks who work out basically for looks. There was a time when I lifted to get better at my sport, but the reality is that my career and most of my current hobbies don’t require me to perform at a much higher skill level than sewing two hollow tubes about 1mm in diameter together, which clearly doesn’t require heavy squats to improve.

This entry’s article came to my attention from Ryan Zielonka, who wrote, Read More...

If you’re going to claim to improve hypertrophy, measure hypertrophy. (P.S. Your experiment has to be replicable)

There’s been lots of attention to one of the latest studies out of McMaster University on low-load high volume resistance exercise and protein synthesis. I, for one, am not beneath jumping on bandwagons of any kind. However, let’s strike to the core of the matter, as opposed to dancing around all the peripheral (and also somewhat inconsequential) criticisms of the study.

Burd NA, West DWD, Staples AW et al. Low-load high volume resistance exercise stimulates muscle protein synthesis more than high-load low volume resistance exercise in young men. Public Library of Science 5(8): e12033, 2010. Read More...

Beta-alanine: The Harris Study (this is what grad students are actually used for)

I was going to write a review of the Harris study on beta-alanine, but after reading it in detail, I realized it wasn’t a randomized controlled trial at all, but rather a physiological study, with biochemical outcomes, but no “functional” ones. And despite the fact that one of their experiments was a “quasi” randomized controlled trial, I haven’t got a lot to say about it because this was not a study to look at the effectiveness of BA, but rather to profile its effects. On the up side, there was a rather nice recipe for chicken broth–which is where they got their beta-alanine for one of the experimental groups: Read More...