A new meta-analysis of 14 studies found that the addition of stretching to weight training programs reduced strength development.
Is it cheating to use a wide sumo stance for the deadlift? Officially, the sumo stance is accepted, but unofficially, many people claim that sumo is cheating. The idea is that it's easier to lift a given weight with a sumo stance than with a conventional stance.
Most people’s idea of which muscles are small and which are large is based on their outward appearance. This is like trying to determine how many square feet an apartment has by only looking at it from the street.
A new 3-month study with over a 100 participants compared eating 25 vs. 125 g of unprocessed beef daily. The researchers reported 2 interesting findings.
In yesterday's post I discussed a large-scale study showing that IF diets are no better for fat loss than other diets, given the same macronutrient intakes. Many people are aware of this now, but many people still practice IF diets for their proposed health benefits.
Red meat consumption is correlated with cardiovascular disease in many studies. However, people that eat more red meat on average also have a significantly worse lifestyle than people that eat less red meat.
Last week I posted a review on the ketogenic diet for concurrent athletes that concluded keto diets are actually equally effective for both fat loss and muscle growth.
During a set, your velocity gradually decreases until it reaches 0 in the biomechanical sticking point when you reach momentary muscle failure. The level of velocity loss can thus serve as an objective measure of how close to failure you are.
A new systematic review of the literature investigated how fast you should perform your reps. Their conclusions were:
One of my first articles was about the myth of 1 gram protein per pound of bodyweight. I argued 0.82 g/lb was more than enough to optimize our gains based on the research, in contrast to virtually every other source in fitness at the time.
That's what a new study by De Freitas et al. found. This phenomenon is called post-activation potentiation and it's one of my favorite advanced training techniques.
Overall, there were no statistically significant differences between the groups, but the magnitudes of improvement differed between groups. Women showed greater effect size gains from training closer to failure than men for 1RM strength and power.
Anabolic signaling (mTOR) and myofibrillar muscle protein synthesis (MPS) over the 5-hour post-workout recovery period were similar after eating 30 g of protein from either raw or boiled eggs.