Ladies: Want to supercharge your breast milk to provide baby with even more benefits and help stave off obesity? Exercise directly before you breastfeed and your milk will be packed with even higher levels of a powerful metabolic hormone. 👇
Researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology collected 240 samples of breast milk from 20 new mothers before and at intervals after two HIIT exercise sessions. They then compared these with samples taken at the same intervals after periods of sedentary behavior.
The mothers who had just completed an HIIT session had much higher levels of the hormone adiponectin in their milk. Adiponectin is involved in regulating the body’s metabolism and ensures the availability of energy and essential substances for bodily functions. Low levels of adiponectin are linked to insulin resistance and Type 2 diabetes.
The implications of this study are very interesting. As one of the researchers explains, "the period from conception to two years of age is considered the most critical period for possible development of obesity later in life.” So the boost provided by an active mother could play a significant role in ensuring her child is able to maintain a healthy weight through childhood and into adulthood.
It was already known that the composition of women's breastmilk varied with their body-mass index. Overweight mothers may, quite literally, be transmitting their overweight status to their children via their milk.
Here's a link to the new study, which you can read for free:
"Sharp, well-built abdominal muscles are worth a king's ransom. To my mind, there is no more treasured possession," said Vince Gironda. Here are the fundamentals of his approach to training the abdominals. 👇
1. NO SPOT-REDUCTION.
Sorry, but no amount of sit-ups will burn the fat off your stomach. Fat loss doesn’t work like that: it isn’t specific to the region that is being worked. Vince knew this way back when, and it’s been wholly substantiated by scientific studies as well.
2. IT'S NOT THAT HARD.
Once you know you can't spot reduce, and you instead focus on reducing your body fat levels by dieting and intense exercise, things become much easier.
Eating vegetable and seed oils is bad enough, but eating them when they've been reused in deep-frying is even worse.
A new study suggests that long-term consumption of food cooked in deep fryers is linked to serious neurological damage. 👇
Researchers divided female rats into five groups that each received either standard chow or standard chow supplemented with either a) 0.1 ml per day of unheated sesame oil, unheated sunflower oil, or b) reheated sesame oil or reheated sunflower oil for 30 days.
The rats that consumed reheated sesame or sunflower oil showed increased oxidative stress and inflammation in the liver. These rats also suffered significant damage to the colon that caused changes in endotoxins and lipopolysaccharides—toxins released from certain bacteria.
"As a result, liver lipid metabolism was significantly altered, and the transport of the important brain omega-3 fatty acid DHA was decreased," explains one of the researchers. "This, in turn, resulted in neurodegeneration, which was seen in the brain histology of the rats consuming the reheated oil as well as their offspring."
Another study shows heated soybean oil causes the body to go into "skinny-fat" mode, losing weight but also converting lean tissue into fat. This is interesting because it's specifically heated soybean oil (heated for just 3 hours) that has the effects described.
New research has shown that too much exposure to a growth factor called activin A in the womb prevents the proper development of the testes in male fetuses. And what increases activin A production in women? SSRIs. Women are generally told SSRIs are safe during pregnancy. 👇
The research, published in Frontiers in Endocrinology, is the first to show that increased exposure to activin A leads to some of the worst effects caused by endocrine-disrupting substances.
The researchers showed that elevated activin A not only damages germ cells (sperm precursors) but also the Leydig cells, which produce testosterone in men.
"Unusually, germ cells exposed to high activin A frequently contained more than one nucleus (multinucleated—see image below) and were abnormally localized outside of the testis cords, reducing the number of sperm precursor cells at birth by half," one of the researchers said.
"Was there ever a hero who didn't have broad shoulders?" Vince Gironda knew that the shoulders could make or break a man's physique, as this image of Steve Reeves (far left) shows. Let's dig in to Vince's approach to shoulder training. 👇
The quote below is from Vince's 1984 book The Wild Physique. Vince's main emphasis with the shoulders, as with every other body part, is proportion. You need to work with your body's natural endowment to ensure you maintain balance even as you add mass.
For Vince bodybuilding was about “creating an illusion”. That didn’t mean that the bodybuilder aimed simply to “look big”, but that visual size was a function of the relationship between parts of the body.
A massive pair of shoulders will look smaller if the bodybuilder has a thick waist. A smaller pair of shoulders may even look bigger than a set of larger shoulders if the bodybuilder’s waist is tighter. This should be simple to understand — size is relative as well as absolute — but many failed and still fail to grasp this very basic point.
It all started with a few soyjak stickers. Here's a great recent primer from 4chan on how to wage a successful low-intensity meme warfare campaign in your local town. 👇
One thing you probably know about Vince Gironda is that he didn't like the bench press. It's true, but he had good reason. Let's look at Vince's unique approach to chest training. 👇
Gironda believed that the bench press is more a shoulder than a chest exercise. Simply put, it's not specific enough to be used as the main exercise for building your chest--if your goal is to build a rounded, aesthetic physique. Obviously, if you're a powerlifter you have to focus on bench press.
All quotations are from Vince's book The Wild Physique (1984), by the way.
Although specificity is a key Gironda principle, he also recognised that not every body is the same. Some bodybuilders, like for instance Serge Nubret, were able to build amazing chests using the bench press and not much else.