http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21327794

n conclusion, performing leg exercises prior to arm exercises, and thereby increasing the levels of serum testosterone and growth hormone, induced superior strength training adaptations compared to arm training without acute elevation of hormones.

WTF???

EDIT: Interesting that I saw arms specialization cycle with 3x20 squat been performed before main arms workout.

This is interesting. Now it’s two against one in favour of acute hormonal changes working. Before it was one against one with the one on the hormones side being flawed by drop outs.

In the other studies leg exercise was performed after the arm exercise if I’m not mistaken? I have seen a study showing that if you perform hormone stimulating exercise before arm exercise androgen receptor upregulation will increase compared to training the arms with no hormone stimulating exercise before. Though we don’t know if this would also have happened if they did the leg exercises after the arms.

Elevated endogenous testosterone concentrations potentiate muscle androgen receptor responses to resistance exercise.

Karky - 08 March 2011 09:00 AM

In the other studies leg exercise was performed after the arm exercise if I’m not mistaken?

Yes

Let me read the study and I will get back to you. I saw this study in Lyle’s forum the other day.

Just looking at the authors (Raastad’s group), I can tell they are the hormone hypothesis proponents. And just giving a glance, some of the results are sketchy. I will talk about it later.

What do you mean by two karky? And where did you go for a while?

Thanks, Anoop.
Hope to get some clarifications about this one, seams very strange results

There was another study from 2006 by Kramer I believe that also showed better gains with leg exercise before arm exercise. They had drop outs making the high hormone group start out with lower values, though, so it was biased towards greater gains in the high hormone group.

I haven’t been gone, I check in regularly, just haven’t been posting much. Now a days I mostly read about endurance training, perhaps I should post some stuff up here if I find something interesting. But it seems that people here are mostly interested in strength.

EDIT: totally wrong about kraemer and the year.. This is the link to the study: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11782267

Hi Karky,

I have wrote about that study. http://www.exercisebiology.com/index.php/site/articles/can_workouts_designed_to_increase_testosterone_increase_muscle_mass_strengt/

The groups weren’t equalized in strength which the author himself mentions in the study.

And you can post endurance stuff. There are people reading the forum who are interested in this stuff.

Yeah, that’s what I said, they had drop outs making the groups unequal in strength at the starting point.

Couple of things:

1. I think the design is not good. Your neural drive is way higher after leg exercises that most exercises feel easier (potentiation & catecholamines). If you do 3 sets of leg press, leg extension and leg curls, you will be flexing your arms even if the author told them not to. They should have it the other way- arms after legs.

2. The muscle volume is same, but the LA (hormone group) had more CSA! How the heck is that possible? Maybe the muscle got smaller in the distal and proximal regions!!

3. 14% & 21% increase in strength for doing 6 sets of arm curls 2 days per week for 11 weeks is wayy too small for untrained. That means if you use a 20 lb dumbell and just workout legs and arms for 11 weeks, twice a week, at the end of 11 weeks, you could do 25 lbs or less!

4. And as I said before, people are always skeptical of studies coming from the labs who are proponents of the theory. People tend to believe results from other independent labs.

Thanks Anoop, for clearing this things up.

EDIT: Lyle is going to review this study soon

Great! I would love to hear what he has to say.

And one more: The Arm only group significantly increased CSA in 2 of out of 4 sections in the CSA. But no mention of this in the abstract. Talk about bias

And people said that in the previous study they had a within subject design and was in untrained and hence doesn’t count. I hope they won’t say about this bcos these guys had the same design except the change in order of exercises.

Lyle wrote a review on this study
http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/research-review/physiological-elevation-of-endogenous-hormones-results-in-superior-strength-training-adaptations-research-review.html

Thanks Anatoly for posting it. Good to see Lyle has similar things to say about it.I like how he talked about the 1 kg difference. That is difference between clinical significance and statistical significance.

I think I should post a review on the site.

How the heck did Lyle get a 1 kg difference? It should be around 3 ks, right

In terms of strength, the leg press strength went up 23%.  For the arm trained alone, the strength gains was from 39.2 to 44.7kg over 11 weeks; for legs plus arms the gain was from 37.5 to 45.3 kg so the relative improvement was greater.  It’s worth mentioning that the legs plus arms ‘arm’ started out weaker meaning they had more room to improve.  But note that the end result was only 1kg difference in maximum strength; sure it’s 20% gain vs. 15% gain but the absolute amount and the end difference is still pretty irrelevant

45.3-44.7 = 1.4

How can we take the difference of post test values when the pretest values are different?

The difference is 14% of Arm only group and 21% of the Arm + leg group. So the difference is around 7% which comes around 5-6 lbs.