The Best Stretch For Your Shoulders
BEGINNER | July 24 2010
There are number of shoulder stretching exercises. But which is the most important and why?
Why stretch the shoulder posterior capsule?
- Shoulder Pain: It has been shown in number of studies that posterior shoulder tightness could be one of the risk factors for shoulder problems and pain.
Weight Lifters: It has been consistently shown in number of studies that overhead athletes, recreational weight lifters and bodybuilders have limited internal rotation or a tight posterior capsule.
The tight posterior capsule in weight lifters could be due the limited internal rotation end-range of motion exercises compared to external rotation exercises.
Figure: The figure shows how a tight posterior capsule can cause impingement and shoulder pain when you raise your arm.
What are the stretches for the posterior capsusle?
The two most common stretches for posterior capsule are:
1. Sleeper stretch
2. Cross body stretch.
So which is the best shoulder stretch?
Of the two, a recent study showed that the cross body stretch to be more effective for posterior capsule and increasing IR range of motion compared to sleeper stretch
Practical Application
- If you had to pick just one stretch to prevent shoulder pain and problems, pick the cross body stretch.
- If you have the time, do both.
The Best Scapular Muscle Exercises to Prevent & Treat Shoulder Pain
BEGINNER | July 17 2010
There are number of exercises to optimize scapular muscles to prevent and treat shoulder pain. But which are the best scapular muscle exercises?
What are scapular muscles?
Scapular muscles are muscles that connect to the scapula and give both stability and mobility to the scapula, which is unique among other joints . The major scapular muscles are shown in the below picture.
Why scapular muscles are important in shoulder pain?
Scapulothoracic Rythm: The scapula has to move in a well-coordinated manner as shown to bring about arm movements. Any change in the function of scapula muscles can affect the normal functioning of the shoulders.
Correlation: Very recently, number of studies have shown abnormalities in scapular position and motion to be correlated with shoulder pain caused by impingement symptoms, rotator cuff dysfunction, and instability.
Shoulder Rehab protocols: All shoulder rehab protocols now emphasize the importance of scapular muscle training as a component of shoulder rehabilitation.
Which scapular muscles are important ?
Most researchers attribute scapular dysfunction to scapular muscular imbalance rather than absolute strength deficits of the scapular muscles.
In particular,excess activation of the upper trapezius (UT), combined with lower activation of the lower trapezius (LT) and the serratus anterior (SA), has been proposed as contributing to abnormal scapular motion (muscles shown in pic).
Hence the best scapular exercises are those which have high activity of LT & MT and low activity of LT.
So which are the best scapular muscle exercises?
- The study looked at 12 different trapezius strengthening exercises and they found the below exercises to have the highest activity of LT & MT and lowest activity of UT.
- None of the exercises met the criteria for optimal intermuscular balance restoration of serratus anterior (SA) and LT. Push up and push with aplus are normally prescibed exercises for SA.
- The results of this study suggest that the exercises: A, B, and C are optimal for restoration of UT/LT muscle imbalances. A, B, and D are optimal for restoration of UT/MT muscle imbalances.
If you have any questions about the exercises, just ask in the comment section.
Why Some Grow Muscle Easily While Some Don’t?
BEGINNER | May 31 2010
The study shows why some folks grow like a weed while other struggle.
The study recruited 66 subjects.The training included 3 sets of squats, Leg Press and Leg Extensions 3 days/week for 16 weeks.
What were the results?
Based on the muscle fiber size, the participants were divided into three groups independent of age or sex ( using new method called cluster analysis):
Extreme Responders: 58% increase in muscle fiber size
Moderate Responders: 26% increase in muscle fiber size
Non Responders: 0% increase in muscle fiber size.
What are satellite cells and muscle nuclei?
Before you can understand the results of the study, you need to be familiar with some terms. I will keep it simple and short, promise.
Unlike other cells in the body, muscle cells (or muscle fibers) are multinucleated. Considering how a muscle cell is way larger and complex than the rest of the cells in the body, it makes a lot of sense to have more than one nuclei to control the complex tasks in the muscle.
For instance, if your favorite restaurant was a muscle and the cooks the nuclei, it’s pretty safe to say that the number of cooks sets the limit to the size of the restaurant. Similarly (or somewhat), the size of your muscle is ultimately limited by the number of nuclei you have in your muscle.
Simply put, you cannot grow bigger muscles without additional nuclei to take care of the extra muscle.
So where do we get these nuclei from?
Figure: A muscle fiber with nuclei shown in blue and satellite cell shown in red.
These muscle nuclei sprouts from specialized cells around the muscle called satellite cells. So any increase in satellite cells means some of these cells could be “blossoming” into new nuclei.
So how did the extreme responders grow muscle easily?
- The extreme responders had higher satellite cells to begin with. The authors speculate that your muscle growth potential is partly dependent on the availability of satellite cells before training.
- The satellite cell pool increased a remarkable 117% in the extreme responders during training.
- After training, the Extreme responders had significantly more myonuclei per fiber than Non and Moderate groups .
NOTE: It is interesting to note that 1/4(non-responders) of the subjects experienced no growth. The authors speculate that this might be because of a lack of greater recovery period between workouts and/ or additional weeks of training. Studies with 2 days/week has shown better results in older adults.
Practical Recommendations
- The extreme responders in the study are the genetic freaks who can do whatever and still grow like a weed. So don’t think it is their program as most folks do, and copy it blindly.
- As far as I know, the only natural way to increase satellite cells is by creatine. Creatine has shown to increase satellite cells substantially compared to training without creatine.
How Graphs Can Fool You
BEGINNER | May 17 2010
You can be easily tricked into believing things if you don’t read the actual data and just glance at the graphs. Below are some of the ways how graphs tend to fool you.
Distortion of Scale
Here the units of the graph are distorted to make the differences between groups to look much larger than what it is. The second graph shows the more accurate representation. The difference in strength in Group A is made to appear triple that of Group B though it is only a 10 lb difference.
The score above 70 represents clinical depression. The decline of depression scores over 72 months is only 3.5 scale points but is made to look significant by distorting the units. The second graph is shown in the correct scale.
Distortion of Meaning
The graph shows the difference in tempertaure to be trivial though 98.6 is normal and 102 is significantly elevated. The second graph shows a meaningful representation considering it shows the percentage of people in each group who exceeds the normal temperature of 98.6.
Linearity Distortions
In longitudinal studies, it is usually customary to connect the pre and post test values with a straight line which can distort the true picture.
The graphs shows the changes in weekly income. The first graph shows measure taken only at the start and end dates which misleadingly suggests a steady rise in income. The bottom graph provides the monthly data and the true picture.
The Fall of The Greatest Theory of Muscle Growth
Beginner | May 09 2010
The recent study was the final nail in the coffin for one of the greatest theories of muscle growth-the hormone theory - proposed by the prominent researcher William J Kramer.
What is the hormone theory of muscle growth?
- Growth & Development: Hormones like testosterone, growth hormone, & IGF-1 are important for growth & development.
- Injection of hormones : Injection of hormone,s especially testosterone has shown increase strength and muscle mass while suppression of testosterone has shown to decrease in muscle mass & strength.
- Acute Increase after exercise: These same hormones are elevated acutely after resistance training. The magnitude of increase depends on rest times between sets, the weight used and so on. For example, the large rises in these hormones are observed after high intensity exercises with short rest periods using big muscle groups (multi-joint exercises).
Based on the above hormone hypothesis , it is assumed that
- Exercise induced muscle growth is primarily due to an acute increase in these hormones.
- Hence workouts should mainly use multi joint exercises with short rest periods to raise the hormone levels.
- Small exercising muscle groups (e.g., biceps), which are incapable of causing large increases in anabolic hormones when used in isolation, should be trained concurrently with large exercising muscle masses like squats or leg press that can elevate testosterone and GH.
The fall of the hormone hypothesis
- Local factors in muscle growth: The recent discovery of local factors like MGF,muscle IGF-1 showed that it is local factors that are mainly responsible for muscle growth and not systemic hormones. The discovery of these local factors, which are found inside the muscle, showed why muscle growth is specific to the exercised muscle. If systemic hormone were indeed responsible, you would have seen an increase in muscle growth in the non-exercised muscle too.
- No effect of GH administration : Injection of high doses growth hormone to raise resting levels resulted in little increase in muscle growth or strength. So the benefits of these tiny spikes in GH after exercise which do not even change the resting levels are questionable.
- Unilateral exercises: Increase in muscle growth has been observed with unilateral exercises like biceps curl without any increases in systemic hormones. For example, unilateral exercise like biceps curl and leg extensions which do not cause a spike in systemic hormones have shown to increase muscle growth and strength.
- No Increase in protein synthesis: There was no significant increase in protein synthesis due to an acute increase in systemic hormones after the workout.
BUT the question can these spikes in systemic hormones play a small role if not a major role in muscle growth which might have been overlooked in the above studies . All the above were indirect studies until the recent study.
What was the study design?
- Twelve healthy untrained young men trained their biceps independently for 15 wk on separate days.
- In one training condition, participants performed isolated biceps curl exercise designed to maintain basal hormone levels.
- In the other training condition, participants performed identical biceps curls followed immediately by a high volume of leg resistance exercise to elicit a large increase in these hormones .
- If the hormone hypothesis were true, the biceps curl plus leg pres group should see greater muscle growth & strength, right.
What were the results of the study
Unfortunately, at the end of 15 weeks there was no significant difference between groups in strength, muscle cross sectional area, & Type 1 or Type 2 fiber area.
Simply put, the increase in testosterone, growth hormone or IGF-1after your workout do not help in muscle growth/strength.This study was the final nail in the coffin and clearly drops the curtain on one of the best known theories of muscle growth .
Practical Applications
- Don’t perform multi-joint exercise like deadlifts, squats, 20 resp squats or leg press for the sake of increasing hormones.
- Don’t keep rest times short or perform high intensity workouts for the purpose of raising hormone levels.
- If your trainer says the program works by increasing hormones, send this article to him
Is Muscle Mass Important For Power Lifters?
BEGINNER | April 28 2010
Powerlifters are usually looked as strong athletes with little muscle compared to bodybuilders. A recent study looked to see what differentiates the weaker lifters from stronger lifters.
What Is Power Lifting?
Three Lifts: Powerfliting involves three basic lifts the Bench Press, Deadlift & Squats. Olympic lifting, on the other hand, involves the clean and jerk and snatch.
1RM: It means one repetition /maximum or the maximum amount of weight that you can lift for one rep.
The person who can do the most amount of weight for 1 rep (1RM) wins the competition. Basically, the strongest person wins the competition.
Muscle not important for power lifters?
Most people think powerlifting or strength has nothing to do with muscle . A few reason why they think are:
Powerlifters are Fat: Bodybuilders are muscular and ripped. So people think it is the training that makes them look like that.
Heavier Weights: Powerlifters usually train with very low reps (1-3) and hence the weight they lift is almost double what they can do if they did 8-10 reps.
Bodybuilders usually train with high reps (8-12) and the weight they use are much lighter. So people think strength is not really related to muscle.
Nervous system: Strength is all about nervous system adaptations and has little to do with muscle.
A recent study looked to see if muscle mass can predict powerlfiting performance.
What was the study design?
The study compared weaker lifters and stronger powerlifters who had competed in powerlifting competitions. None of the lifters tested positive in drug test in the past 2 years.
Stronger lifters were defined as lifters whose wilks score were greater than 417 here as the weaker group were defined as lifters who had a wilks score of less than 370.
They compared anthropometric characteristics like limb lengths, muscle girths, bone breadth and muscle mass.
What were the Study Results?
The study showed that the majority of the significant differences were for muscle mass and muscular girths per unit height and the greater muscle mass contributed to the greater strength levels in stronger lifters.
The study recommends powerlifters should spent more time training to the development of muscle mass most relevant to the three lifts.
Practical Applications
• Strength is highly correlated with muscle mass. You cannot magically gain strength without putting on muscle or vice-versa.
• If your strength is climbing, you are definitely gaining muscle too.
How Much Protein Do You need After Your Workout?
BEGINNER | April 18 2010
It is pretty common to see folks having a protein shake after their workout, but how protein do you really need? Is more protein better?
Why Do You need Protein after Your Workout?
Increase in Protein Breakdown: Although protein synthesis is higher after resistance exercise, it has been clear that protein breakdown can increase enough to cause a negative net protein balance..
An increase in muscle mass is only possible if net protein balance stays positive.
Studies: Number of studies have confirmed that having protein (amino acids) after your workouts will decrease protein breakdown and shift the net protein balance to a positive state. .
More important, Increase in strength and muscle mass has also been observed in the long-term studies.
We know there is a dose response relationship of protein intake and protein synthesis in your muscle. Nevertheless, this hasn’t been looked at until this study.
What was the dose-response protein study design?
This study used 6 trained, fasted young men ( > 4 months to 8 years).
The protocol involved 4 sets of 8-10 of leg press, leg extension and leg curl and then ingested 0, 5, 10, 20 or 40 gm of whole egg protein.
What were the results of the study?
The study showed a steady increase in protein synthesis until 20 gms of protein(8.6 gms of EAA), and then a plateau as shown below.
The study showed no significant increase at 40 gms of protein and showed a significant increase in lecuine oxidation ( protein burned off because it cannot be used) at this point.
Practical Applications
- The study participants were around 190 pounds and trained. So 20-25gms will be sufficient protein after your workouts if you are around this weight category .
- If you are above that weight category or doing a higher volume, 25 -30 gms would be more than enough considering the rate of protein synthesis has an upper limit.
- The study looks at acute adaptations,. The long term adaptations such as strength and muscle mass to such doses are yet to be seen .
NSCA Personal Trainer’s Conference 2010 Review - Part 2
BEGINNER | April 10 2010
Here is the second part of my review of the 2010 NSCA Personal Trainer’s conference held in Las Vegas. you can read the first part here: NSCA Personal Trainer’s Conference 2010 Review - Part 1
Eric Creesey
Eric Creesey is an upcoming and strength & conditioning expert. He is also know to be rehab specialist, especially with baseball players. You can see his articles, books and DVd’s all over the web.
Eric gave 2 presentations. The first one I attended was about Shoulder Rehab in baseball pitchers. This was not good to begin with since it is a personal trainers conference and you don’t get much out of a shoulder rehab lecture for pitchers. And he could have done more to make it more relevant to the audience. He just had one slide up ( a flow chart) and just ran through the exercises and stretches. It was a hands on presentation so maybe that could have been his excuse.
He showed how pitchers tend to have limited ROM in their shoulders ( Internal Rotation) and showed stretches to improve ROM, exercises for scapular stability, thoracic flexibility and so on. He also talked about how breathing patterns, opposite ankle hip restrictions, poor cervical spine function can cause shoulder problems. He says he found the greatest improvement in shoulder ROM with improving thoracic flexibility and he has seen some studies; I haven’t see any though.
The second presentation was titled “Inefficiency vs Pathology”. This was interesting because I had gone through the handouts before and saw all those infamous studies which shows disc herniations, tendonitis rotator cuf tears, and all other problems in asymptomatic people (with no pain). I was looking forward to see how he is going to fix the disconnect because the studies basically shows the weak the structure - pain link and everything he talks about his based on structure deviations causing pain.
His argument was that the people who are free of symptoms in those studies haven’t reached the threshold and was a matter of time that they end up in pain or something to that effect. He continued talking about how you need mobility in your ankles, knees, hips, shoulder & thorax. It is the joint by joint concept by Gray cook( I think Boyle introduced it a T-nation article) where if one joint is weak or tight, the other joint will take the brunt. It is just another hypothesis, mind you.
Shannon Fables
Shannon Fables presented Balance Training “On the Edge”. She was the quintessential cheerful, bubbly group fitness instructor. She talked about how balance is important and showed exercises to improve balance with a BOSU ball and other unstable devices.
Balance training is another one of those areas in fitness which is beaten to death without having a good understanding of the physiological concepts behind it. We have to ask ourselves what aspects of balance are we trying to improve here. For example, we know that If we are on a unstable surface, the visual and vestibular elements are heigtened since there is less feedback from the propiorecptive components. Since most of the task which require balance are reactive or unpredictable in nature , should we do a lot of steady state, anticipatory balance training? How will your balance change if you had biomechanical constraints like limited ankle mobility and so on.
She talked about how her pain went away after she started going barefoot. And hence she thinks going bare feet is the best and hence we all had to do exercises on bare feet. She also gave some anecodotal examples of how bare feet running is the way to go. The barefeet running is still a hypothesis and we should be more careful when we make these sweeping conclusions, especially to a crowd of 40-50 personal trainers.
Susan Kleiner
She presented Protein and Amino Acid supplementation. Though she didn’t have anything new (atleast to me) , this was the best presentation at the conference I thought.
Her presentation was probably the only presentation which I would say had an evidence-base approach to it. She used phrases like. ” The research is unclear”, ” I don’t know”, ” this is a theory or a hypothesis” , ” haven’t come across any research” and so on which were completely missing in other presentations. And I took the time to tell her this after the presentation.
I wish she could have timed it better so that she had more time to get into some of the interesting topics stuff like protein-carb ratio for post workout shake , protein needs for people and so forth. There were a few occasions where I felt like she was trying a bit too hard to promote certain products which had no research to back them up.
There were a lot of questions asked about creatine, protein and other supplements and I wish NSCA had more speakers on the nutrition aspects of muscle growth.
I went to a few more, but I don’t’ want to keep on writing and make it into a 3 part article .It’s already too long for my liking.
Are low reps (1-6) better than high reps (8-12) for muscle growth?
BEGINNER | April 03 2010
The debate about whether high reps or low reps are better for muscle growth has been going forever. In fact, my thesis was on this exact question and I am yet to see any good evidence to favor either side.
Finally, a recent study which compared different repetition ranges sheds some light to the long- standing question.
Why are 8-12 reps better?
Bodybuilders: Bodybuilders always use the 8-12 rep range .Power lifters always use 1-3 repetition range.
Growth Hormone Increase: Number of studies show that 8-12 reps with short rest increases GH significantly compared to low reps.
Based on the above evidence, 8-12 reps is considered the standard recommendation for muscle growth or hypertrophy.
So why is there a debate?
Muscle Growth Studies: Surprisingly, the studies which looked at high reps and low reps show no significant difference in muscle growth.
GH ineffective: The GH hormone hypothesis of muscle growth doesn’t hold water anymore considering number of recent direct and indirect studies showing that exercise-induced increases in growth hormone (systemic hormones) do not help in muscle growth.
Greater Load: As reps decrease, the weight lifted increases. So theoretically greater the weight , greater the potential for growth.
But what about protein synthesis & rep range?
Your muscle increase in size because of an increase in protein synthesis. So the most simple question to ask is does high reps ( 8-12) show greater protein synthesis than low reps?.
Surprisingly, nobody ever bothered to look at protein synthesis and exercise intensity until this latest study.
The study compared different intensities ( 15%, 30% 1RM, 45%1RM, 60% 1RM, 90% 1RM) to see if there is a dose response relationship to weight lifted and protein synthesis. The subjects were beginners and the volume was kept similar in all groups.
What were the results of the study?
- And guess what, there was no significant difference in protein synthesis for the 60%, 75%, & 90% 1RM! Simply put, there was no significant difference for high reps and low reps.
- The study showed the same results for older individuals but the levels of protein synthesis were depressed which further confirms the above results.
- This study finally shows why studies which looked at outcome measures couldn’t find any significant difference in muscle growth with different rep ranges.
What about trained lifters?
In trained lifters, the curve may take either one of the shapes as shown below in the graph.
Practical Application
- There no magic in the 8-12 repetition range for muscle growth. If you are using a weight above 60% 1RM, you are getting the maximum level of your protein synthesis.
- There is no increase in protein synthesis as the weight goes up or the reps decrease. So 5RM is no better than a 10RM to increase protein synthesis.
- Theoretically, a high rep range would work the best for muscle growth considering there is less damage and nervous system fatigue compared to low reps.
NSCA Personal Trainer’s Conference 2010 Review - Part 1
Beginner | March 30 2010
The 2010 NSCA Personal Trainer’s conference was held in Las Vegas on April 7 & 8. For people who are unaware of NSCA, they are the the world’s leading authority in strength & conditioning. In fact, NSCA sets the standards and guidelines in the strength and conditioning field and the rest just follows them like a good dog.
NSCA usually has a number of conferences year round. Their biggest one is usually held in Florida in Summer which is mainly for strength and condition specialists. Anyway, I felt like I should go since I would like to present a topic someday and wanted to meet some of the Trainer’s council members since I happen to be one of them.
So here I am off to Las Vegas.
The conference was for 2 days and went from 8.00 am in the morning to 5.00 pm and each presentation lasted for 90 min. They had 4 presentations each in the morning and evening. All the presentations were repeated several times during the days so that everyone can attend all the lectures.
I will go through each lecturer and a give a synopsis of their presentation..
Anthony Carey
Anthony Carey was the first speaker I attended at the conference. His talk was “ working with clients with musculoskeletal challenges”. He runs a company based on corrective exercises for pain and has a few DVD and books based on it. It was all about the usual how muscle imbalances, structural misalignments and altered movement patterns, all of which create undo stress on your body, resulting in pain.
I have written in the past about how there is very little causative role for the biomechanical model in pain. I wouldn’t say there is none, but the evidence is certainly nowhere to the level of what all these pain experts try to make you believe. In athletic population, the bio-mechanical model might have greater implications.
At the question-answer session, I asked him about the posture pain concept. I asked him why the posture-pain link is pretty weak in the scientific literature and if he has come across any studies which atleast shows you can change person’s posture. He said his “18 years of anecdotal experience has taught him..” But to give his due, he admitted there is not a strong link between posture and pain in the literature after all his talk.
Bill Sonnemaker
This was a hands-on presentation titled “movement preparation”. The concept is that the fascia is structured in the body to work globally(and not in isolation) to facilitate movements. So he had a lot of functional-stretching type exercises that supposedly targets the different fascia tissues in a global fashion. This is supposed to better performance, prevent injury and pain.
I don’t think these dynamic stretching sort of movements will make any changes to the fascia considering even the ability of manual therapists to change the plasticity of connective tissues by applying direct pressures is now seriously questioned.
Guido Van Ryssegem
And I thought my name was hard. The presentation was titled ” Return to Training after Shoulder Pain”. This was one of the best presentations at the conference. He talked about a very relevant topic and everything he had on his slides were referenced.
He talked about how all shoulder injuries have certain things in common such as postural dysfunction, scapular dysfunction, lower trap weakness, scapulothoracic weakness. There is some recent interest in scapulae dysfunctions in people with shoulder pain. But the interesting point is that even after the pain is fixed, the scapular dysfunction still prevails( nice example of correlative evidence) .And I asked his if he had come across any studies which showed the postural and scapulae dysfunctions to improve after the pain has resolved. I haven’t seen any and I was almost sure there wasn’t any. And he said he hasn’t seen any either (atleast he is up to date in his field I thought).
He made some comments though which cut right through his scientific approach and raised my eyebrows. One was about how the best test according to him to observe shoulder dysfunctions was to sit on a table and raise yourself by pushing your hands against the table. What about the validity and reliability of the test, sir?
Conclusion
The part that stood out the most about the conference ,even during the first day, was the lack of critical thinking among the trainers. None of them really bothered to question the science behind some of the concepts presented, and NSCA ,mind you, is all about science.
Anywa, in the next part, I will review Eric Creesey and a few others.
Monitoring Body Weight : A Proven Method to Prevent Weight Gain
BEGINNER | March 22 2010
The best way to lose weight is to prevent weight gain in the first place. Considering the environment, you are bound to put on some weight if you are not bothered about the things that go into your mouth.There are so many approaches to prevent weight gain, but most don’t have any scientific support.
One method that has been told to avoid is monitoring of your body weight. But recent studies shows otherwise.
What is wrong with daily weight monitoring?
It is widely believed that the large fluctuations in daily weight caused by changes in fluid balance can mask real changes in body mass and may discourage people from continuing those behaviors that might cause a loss in weight.
How is daily monitoring a useful method then?
Number of recent studies have shown that monitoring bodyweight to be an effective strategy to prevent weight gain
NWCR Study: One of the several behaviors identified with long term weight loss maintenance in the National Weight control Registry study was frequent monitoring of body weight .To be enrolled in the NWCR, individuals must have successfully lost at least 30 lbs and maintained that weight loss for at least 1 year.
The study showed that 36% of successful weight losers reported weighing themselves at least once a day, and 79% weighed themselves at least weekly.
Freshmen Study: The study showed daily monitoring be an effective technique to help female college freshmen resist gaining weight in an environment that is conducive to weight gain. Unlike the above group, this group represent people of normal weight trying to prevent weight gain.
The graph shows the difference in weight gain of the weight monitoring group and the control group . You can see almost a 6 pound difference between the groups and within the individual.
When interviewed at the end of the trial, the weight monitoring group said that when thy saw the weight increase, they decreased the amount of food they put on their plate, reduced the number of foods they put on the plate, skipped dessert, and even skipped a meal depending on how that change fit into their life style. Interestingly, the study used a simple technique called TMS. The Tissue Monitoring System (TMS) is an algorithm where the trend in daily body weight (over 7 days) rather than daily body weight is used to estimate body weight changes.
Other Studies: Apart from the studies above, number of other studies have looked at regular body weight monitoring. Overall the studies shows that self-weighing weekly or daily was associated with significantly greater weight loss & weight maintenance compared to infrequent self-weighing.
How does frequent weight monitoring work?
Self-regulation: Specifically, an individual who self-weighs often is believed to stay focused on and sensitive to changes in their weight. This creates more opportunities for self- encouragement) of even small weight loss (or weight maintenance) progress.
Also, the individual is able to quickly catch small weight gains before they escalate and make behavior changes accordingly ( diet or exercise) to prevent large weight gains.
The major limitations of the above approach stems from the fact that the studies used weight recalls ( recall biases) and the population was mostly middle aged american white females.
Practical Application
- Frequent weight monitoring helps in preventing weight regain and weight loss. Buy a scale if you don’t have one and weigh yourself daily or weekly
- We are not sure if there is a benefit to daily weighing or just weekly monitoring.
Why Anecdotes/Testimonials Are Unreliable?
BEGINNER | March 16 2010
If you are familiar with this website, I always insist on an evidence-based approach and do not put much value in anecdotes or testimonials. Many people just say science is important without fully understanding why evidence-based approach or science evolved.
Here are some of the reasons for why anecdotes/testimonials are considered the lowest form of evidence and why an evidence-based approach evolved.
Confounding variables
There are too many variables like diet, age, trainee level, genetics, sex that can significantly affect the results of the training program.
“A muscular guy says he does this special program, so I am going to try his program.”.
The problem with this testimonial is that most muscular guys are just genetically gifted. They can do just whatever and eat whatever and still be under 8% body fat.
“That exercise program didn’t work for me”
Here is a guy who has given a decent program but didn’t make any progress because his diet was still the same.
“That program just killed me”
Here is example of 40 yr old guy who just copied a workout from a 20 year old who got great results.
In research, these confounding variables are eliminated by randomizing people into groups, restricting, and matching..
Hidden Data
In testimonials and anecdotes, you only read about positive results. The people who didn’t gain much never bother to talk about it.
“Program X worked worked for 3 of my friends”.
Does that mean X works? What if I show you 5 people (hidden data) for who the program X didn’t work or who dropped out?
In research, the negative hit and the number of people who dropped out are also recorded.
Cognitive Biases
These psychological biases distort reality and judgment and has been extensively studied and confirmed in the psychology field. A few of the biases which can skew reality are memory recall biases, expectancy effect, exposure effect, bandwagon effect and so on. There are over 35 or more of them which becomes relevant depending on the specific context.
“I do high reps with light weights to tone”
This is classic case of bandwagon effect or herd effect where people just follow what others do without analyzing the underlying evidence.
“I know it works. I have been doing this for almost 20 years and there is some research to show it works”
This is an example of the confirmation bias and is one of the most common biases out there. Here people tend to prefer, seek, and interpret information which confirms their hypothesis and neglects the opposing data.This bias is so often seen among fitness guru’s who have a product or idea to sell.
“That diet doesn’t work. I didn’t eat too much ”
According to the social desirability bias, there is a tendency to provide answers which is more socially acceptable /desirable. This type of bias has now been widely accepted in nutritional studies which include dietary recalls.
“I was really excited about the program and it worked great”
This is called the hawthorne effect where just by believing in the program the person was doing all the right things that he never did with other programs. He is eating all the right foods, getting enough sleep and so on.
In research, these biases are taken into account and eliminated by having a control group and blinded designs. For example, in double blinded trials, neither the researchers nor the participants are aware of who belongs to which group.
By Chance
Hypothetically, if every bias and confounding variable is taken into account, there is still a possibility that the results were due to mere chance than the program/diet.
In science, the chance is taken care by the p value (p less than .05) as often seen in studies. It means there is only a 5% chance the results were due to chance or accident.
Subjective Outcome Measures
Anecdotal Outcome measures are extremely subjective. For example , judging muscle size by looking in the mirror, waist size, and so on.
“The program worked. I look a lot bigger than I was”
This could be just due to increased glycogen and water accumulation than just actual muscle growth.
“My weight hasn’t changed at all”
They might be losing fat and gaining muscle or just holding water.
This can only be measured with more sensitive & accurate body composition measures.
Can Gaining Too Much Fat Decrease Muscle Gains?
BEGINNER | February 14 2010
It is well known that you have to put some serious weight to add some serious muscle. Bodybuilders often call this the bulking phase where they try to gorge on food and gain as much weight as they can.
The belief is that the greater the weight gain, the greater the calories partitioned to muscle and hence greater the muscle gain. This is why bodybuilders look like fat tubs in the off season.
But it is becoming increasingly clear that higher fat levels can decrease muscle gain.
Is there any evidence to show higher body fat will decrease muscle gain?
Forbe’s Theory: In 1980’s, Forbe’s showed that there is a logarithmic relation between fat gain and lean body mass gain. He showed that the extent of LBM gain or loss depend on the initial body fat in humans and other species.
Basically, lower your body fat, better your muscle gains when you overeat. As you put on more fat, your muscle gain tend to decrease. Lean people show 30-70% of LBM gain and obese people show 30-40% of LBM gain with overeating.
Anecdotal Evidence: There has always been some anecdotal evidence that natural folks tend to gain the most muscle at 10-15% body fat. Beyond 15%, you tend to gain more fat and less muscle.
What is the mechanism behind the decreased muscle gain with greater fat?
Insulin Resistance: The decrease in muscle mass with increasing fat can largely be attributed to the insulin resistance in the muscle with increasing fat accumulation.
The recent animal study was the first to show that increase fat levels can directly blunt muscle protein synthesis via the insulin pathway. Mice fed a high fat diet and loaded (akin to weight training) for 30 weeks. The mice in high fat group put on 31% more weight than the low fat group.
The results showed a significant decrease in the muscle mass and the activation of key members of the muscle growth pathway in the high fat group. (It’s an animal study so take it with a grain of salt)
Practical Application
- If you are trying to bulk, try to stay below 15% or thereabouts of body fat. The higher you go up in body fat, the lesser the muscle gain
- Some cardio on off days can decrease insulin resistance acutely and may help with muscle gain.
Weight Loss Goals: How to Set Realistic Weight Loss Goals
BEGINNER | January 31 2010
It’s New Year again. And just like every new year, many of us have have made some weight loss goals. Unfortunately, for most, this may not be the first or the last time that you set a weight loss goal.
I think we have too many weight loss tips and diet books out there that the fundamental questions about weight loss get lost in the clutter and clamor. In this article, I will try to answer some of the basic weight loss questions which will help you set some realistic goals and understand the weight loss issues better.
When should I worry about losing weight?
I see a lot of people unnecessarily worrying about their weight. So, when should weight loss be a concern for you?
If your BMI >24.6 (overweight)
BMI >30 (obese)
or
If your waist circumference >35 (Women)
waist circumference >40 (Men)
If you are under these values, you are in the risk-free category for obesity-related problems.
As a side note, BMI values are not valid if you are an athlete or have a lot of muscle mass. Click here to find your BMI
I am over-weight. So how much should I lose?
Modest losses of even 5 -10% of your body weight is enough to see significant improvements in your health. Once you have lost the weight and maintained it for 6 months, you can think of losing further. Weight loss of 1-2 lb per week is reasonable and safe.
Why just 5-10% weight loss? Why can’t I shoot for larger weight loss?
You can and you will lose weight. But it has been painfully clear that most people who lose a lot of weight gain most of it back withiin 1-5 years. It is not weight loss but weight maintenance that is the greatest challenge we face. If weight loss is hard, maintaining that new lower weight is even harder. .
Why is it hard to maintain weight? Is it because overweight people are lazy?
No. Never. There is a social stigma associated with obesity and people often falsely associate obesity with gluttony and laziness.
Ever since the recent discovery of the hormone Leptin and other complex physiological mechanisms regulating bodyweight, we have come to realize that obesity is largely dictated by your genetics. Dr. Friedman who discovered leptin writes that the drive to eat for someone who lost a lot of weight is “analogous to consciously holding your breath; inevitably, your basic drive to breath dominates your conscious motivation”
Picture 1: The picture shows the complex regulation of feeding by genetics, metabolism, & behavior.
Our body weight is genetically predetermined to stay within a narrow range (10 – 20 lbs). The further we move from these values, the more powerful becomes our unconscious biological drive to come back to our set weight. This becomes very true in obese and morbidly obese individuals. Environment does play a role but it doesn’t account for the large proportion of marked individual variations within the same environment.
Of course, there are people who lose a lot of weight and maintain it. But they are highly motivated and are the exceptions as evident from the National Weight Control
Registry study.
What about diet composition? Should I do a high carb or a low carb diet?
As we suspected long back, recent studies have confirmed that diet composition matters the least. Whether it’s Atkins, Ornish or South Beach diet, the weight loss differences are negligible after a year.
A recent study which compared different diets and which received quite a few accolades concludes “Reduced-calorie diets result in clinically meaningful weight loss regardless of which macronutrients (carbs, fat or protein) they emphasize”.
I exercise 3-4 times a week. I am still at the same weight. Am I wasting my time?
No. Exercise helps the most in preventing weight gain and has an independent beneficial effect on your cardiovascular and metabolic profile (even without weight loss).
Ok, whatever. Can you just tell me how to lose 10lbs?
Instead of having a numerical goal, let your goal be a realistic behavioral change or a lifestyle intervention. If you make behavioral changes, the numbers can’t help, but follow.
If you want to lose weight ,and more important, maintain that 10lb weight loss, you have to change your food and activity habits. Remember weight loss is temporary, but weight maintenance is permanent. Examples of realistic behavioral goals are “exercising 6-7 days/week for 30 min”, eating more vegetables and fruits, drinking diet instead of regular soda and so on.
How To Maintain The Weight Lost
Miscellaneous | January 16 2010
We now know that 70-80% of the people who lose weight gain it all back. That being said, what are the characteristics of those 20-30% of people who lose weight and maintain the weight lost?.
Why is it hard to maintain the weight lost?
Genetics: 70-80% of your weight is determined by your genes. Though calories in and out is thought to be consciously regulated, there is a powerful, unconscious biological system that tries to maintain your genetically determined weight.
Interestingly,your height is the only heritable trait that is more dominated by your genes than obesity.
So how can you maintain the weight lost?
If genetics plays such a big role is obesity, is it really possible to lose weight and keep it off? To answer this question, The National Registry of Weight Control - the largest prospective study of long-term successful weight loss maintenance- has been tracking people who
- Lost at least 30 pounds, and
- Maintained a weight loss of at least 30 pounds for one year or more
So how did the majority of participants maintain the weight lost:
78% eat breakfast every day: Eating breakfast probably helps in preventing having a big meal later in the day or snacking before lunch.
75% weigh themselves at least once a week: This is pretty interesting considering how people are often advised not to check their weight and go by dress sizes. And there is a few more studies to support frequent weighing to catch weight gains before they escalate and make changes to prevent additional weight gain.
62% watch less than 10 hours of TV per week:Most people think this to be pretty straightforward. But most people tend to snack when they watch TV.
This is an example of classical conditioning effect: It holds that stimuli repeatedly presented before or simultaneously with a given behavior will become associated with that behavior. For example, after repeatedly eating salty snacks while watching TV, simply turning on the set may trigger a craving for potato chips.
90% exercise about 1 hour per day:This seems to be one big factor since we know exercise plays a big role in preventing weight regain than in weight loss. The most frequently reported form of activity was walking .
Most continuing to maintain a low calorie, low fat diet: The low fat is understandable considering how hard it is to maintain a high fat diet diet and at the same time keep it low calories. Studies do tend to show people who start with a low carb diet moving towards a moderate carb diet as the study progresses.
Limitations
The major limitations of the study are:
- subjects are self selected.
- Observational study.
- The subjects themselves report all data.
So we really don’t know which habit contributes the most or if these habits are even really contributing much. You can read more about the study here: National Weight Control Registry
Exercises To Correct Forward Head and Shoulder Posture
BEGINNER | January 09 2010
A forward head or shoulder posture is the most common posture seen among people. So what causes it, what are the benifts of correcting it and how to correct it.
Why people have a forward head posture?
Muscle Imbalance: Based on some clinical evidence, tight pectoral muscles and weak back muscles may lead to a forward head posture. This muscle imbalance could be due to:
- Working Posture: A good example is working on the computer or at your desk with a slouched posture.
- Activities: Repetitive use of the chest muscles more than back muscles, like swimming, too much pushing exercises than pulling exercisesin the gym.
Disease: Osteoarthritis and certain congenital diseases can cause structural deformities in your spine which can really screw up your spine.
What are the benefits of correcting a forward head posture?
The major reasons claimed for correcting posture are:
Prevent/Lower Pain: Correcting a forward head posture may minimize the likelihood of shoulder impingement and prevent shoulder pain. It may also lower pain in people with shoulder impingement
Range of motion: By improving posture, you may increase the range of motion in your shoulder.
Aesthetics: Basically, you will look good with a better posture and this is the best reason in my book to fix posture.
There is very little evidence, almost none, to lowering/preventing shoulder pain by fixing a forward head posture.
What are the exercises to correct forward head posture?
Forward head posture due to muscle imbalances can be corrected by
- Stretching the tight pectoral muscles
- Strengthening the weak back muscles.
Stretching Exercises
The single arm wall stretch was found to be the most effective pectoralis minor stretch in a study comparing different pectoralis minor stretches . Do this for 2 sets for 30sec 3 times/week
Strengthening Exercises
Below are the strengthening exercises. Do 2-3 sets each 10-15 reps 3 times/week.
For Scapula retractors
For Lower trapezius
For external rotators
You can use a cable machine if you don’t have thera bands.
I picked the above stretches & exercises because these were the exact exercises used in the study to change posture. And it is the only study which ever showed a change in posture with exercise.
The Best Triceps Exercise
BEGINNER | December 29 2009
There are plenty of triceps exercises, but which is the very best triceps exercise?
What are the different Triceps muscle heads?
As shown in the pic, the triceps Brachii (cep=head) have three heads (medial head lies beneath other heads) :
- Long head
- Medial Head
- Lateral head
What is the function of triceps muscle?
The major function of triceps or all the triceps head is the extension of your elbow (push your elbows away from you)
On the other hand, triceps long head is a bi-articulate muscle or crosses the elbow and the shoulder joint and hence has the function of shoulder extension (bring the arm to the rear of the body) too.
So which is the best triceps exercise?
- The best tricep exercise will be the one which maximally activates all three heads, especially the triceps long head
- Triceps long head has the greatest volume and length compared to other heads. So you will get the greatest gains if you build your long head than any other triceps heads.
- You can only maximally activate your tricep long head if you keep your arms over head as in overhead extensions & dumbell french press. Triceps exercises which have your arms down like cable pressdowns do not maximally activate the triceps long head muscle.
All the other heads will be activated with just elbow extension; It doesn’t matter whether your arms are over head or not.
Practical Applications
If you had to pick one triceps exercise, the best triceps exercise would be one which bring your arm overhead, like overhead extensions or dumbell french press.
Related
Creatine Increases Dihydrotestosterone (DHT): Is Creatine Bad For Your Health?
BEGINNER | December 18 2009
Is creatine bad for your health? The recent study shows an increase in DHT (dihydrotestosterone) as one of the side effects of creatine and raises some interesting questions about the safety of long-term creatine use.
What is DHT & is it Harmful?
DHT (dihydrotestosterone) is male hormone formed in the hair follicles, testes, prostate and adrenal glands.
Apart from the benefits, DHT is a contributing factor for male pattern baldness and plays a key role in Benign prostate hypertrophy.
Prostate cancer is strongly linked to male hormones, and recently DHT has been associated (not causative) with prostate cancer.
What was the creatine & DHT study design?
The study was well designed to minimize biases and errors.
Double Blinded: The study was double blinded and hence the researchers and the subjects did not know if they were getting creatine or placebo.
Cross over design: As shown in the pic, the study used a cross over design so that every subject receives both creatine and placebo, thereby minimizing the errors and the need for a large group of subjects.
Groups: Subjects loaded with creatine (25 g/day creatine with 25 g/day glucose) or placebo (50 g/day glucose) for 7 days followed by 14 days of maintenance (5 g/day creatine)
What were the results of the creatine & DHT study?
The major findings of the study were:
DHT: The levels of DHT increased by 56% after 7 days of creatine loading and remained 40% above baseline after 14 days maintenance (significant)
Ratio of DHT to T: The ratio of DHT:T also increased by 36% after 7 days creatine supplementation and remained elevated by 22% after the maintenance dose.
The ratio tells us that the increased DHT levels are not because of a higher testosterone levels but a greater conversion of T to DHT.
So is creatine bad for your health?
- Bad News: For the first time, the study shows a significant increase in DHT levels (at loading & maintanance phase), and as mentioned above DHT is contributing factor for male pattern baldness and is associated with prostrate cancer.
- Almost all the studies done on the safety of creatine were short term. Only a handful of long-term studies exist and they only lasted for a year. So the long-term safety of consuming creatine for 5-10 years is still not conclusive.
- Good News: There has been a number of studies in humans showing creatine has no adverse effects, barring the gastric upset in a few folks.
- People have been using creatine for years and we haven’t heard much about people losing hair and getting prostate cancer.
- A high DHT to testosterone ratio do not always mean that you will get prostate cancer. Like all cancers, the cause of prostate cancer is multi factorial and cannot be pinned down to one factor.
- In research, controversial findings like these need to be replicated in other labs before it can be taken seriously.
Reference 1
Prostate cancer prevention trial
Can Exercise or Diet Prevent Abdominal Visceral Fat Gain?
BEGINNER | December 13 2009
Abdominal visceral fa (as showin the picture) is a strong risk factor for cardiovascular diseases and diabetes than fat deposits in other areas.
Both exercise and diet can prevent weight gain. But can both exercise and diet prevent the dangerous abdominal visceral fat gain?
What was the purpose of the abdominal visceral fat study?
The study was done to find if exercise or diet is better in preventing abdominal visceral fat following weight loss
What was the design of the visceral fat study?
- Subjects lost around 25 lbs before the study
- Then they were divided into 5 groups: Resistance training, Aerobic exercise, Diet only, Non-Aerobic Adheres, Non- Resistance adheres.
- After 1 year of follow up, the visceral fat and other variables were measured.
What was the exercise protocol?
The exercise was very moderate. They exercised 2 days/week
Cardio: 40 min at 80% of HR max
Resistance: 1o exercises – 2 sets of 10 reps
What was the result of the visceral fat study?
Though the weight loss was similar in both groups, exercise group gained no visceral fat compared to the diet only group
Practical Applications
- Though weight loss is all about calories in vs out, we can see how exercise is superior to diet in preventing the harmful abdominal visceral fat gain.
- Following weight loss, even moderate volumes (1-2 days of exercise) are beneficial to prevent large weight gains and direct fat deposit away from abdominal area.
Healthy & Quick Breakfast Recipes
BEGINNER | December 09 2009
Write your favorite breakfast recipes in the comments and I will add those in here with pictures. Deal?
Oatmeal Breakfast with Protein and Fruit - 1
How to Hit Your Biceps Long Head & Short Head Muscle?
BEGINNER | December 05 2009
As shown in the picture, biceps brachii is one set of muscles in your upper arm.
Biceps Brachii consist of two heads: Long head & the Short head
Both these heads can be emphasized differently since the long head is bi-articulate (crosses the 2 joints: shoulder & elbow joint.).
Long Head: The long head (& the short head) can be emphasized with incline dumbbell curls. The nice stretch you feel in your biceps when doing incline curls is in the long head.
Short head: The short head can be emphasized by doing preacher curls. Since the shoulder is flexed (or uuper arm is raised) the long head is de-emphasized.
The Best Ab Exercise for Lower and Upper Abs
BEGINNER | November 26 2009
Are crunches the most effective for upper abs? Are there exercises which work the upper and lower abs equally hard? Which is the most effective exercise or the best exercise for upper and lower abs?
A study looked at the most common ab exercises in the gym to answer the above questions. The ab exercises compared in the study were:
Abdominal Crunch
Sit ups
Reverse Ab Crunch
Reverse 30 degree Incline Crunch
Power Wheel roll-out
.Hanging Leg Raises with straps
Which was best ab exercise for upper abs?
For upper abs, the Power Wheel roll-out, hanging knee-up with straps,and reverse crunch inclined 30 degrees are much more effective than the crunches, sit ups and flat reverse crunch
Which was the best ab exercise for lower abs?
For lower abs, the Power Wheel roll-out and hanging knee-up with straps
were the most effective compared to the other ab exercises
Chart: The result of EMG analysis for the above ab exercises.
Practical Applications
- The power wheel roll & hanging knee raises are the most effective exercise for both upper and lower abs
- Bent knee sit-up is the least effective among the ab exercises
- Power wheel rollout showed the least stress on low back muscles.
Power wheel roll-out wins!
How To Make Your Back Exercises More Effective?
BEGINNER | November 23 2009
In real life, pulling muscles (back muscles) are less used than pushing muscles and get less attention in the gym since they are not the mirror muscles. Hence, most folks have a hard time feeling the back or getting the technique right when doing back exercises.
One simple tip to feel your back more is to change your grip.
Over Hand, Thumbless Grip: When doing rows or lat pulldowns, or any other back exercises for that mater, take an over hand grip with your thumb over the bar than under.
The benefits of a thumb less grip for back exercises are:
- You can keep the bar closer to the body, especially in bent over rows.
- You feel the back muscles better.
The drawback is you might find it hard to hold on to the bar when t gets heavy. Chalk or straps usually help here. Try it and report back.
Strength Progression: The Key to Muscle Growth
BEGINNER | November 21 2009
The reason why I picked strength progression is that it is one of the cardinal rules of lifting and probably the most ignored in the gym. How much have you increased the weight lifted in an exercise in the last 6 months? If you have no clue, then keep reading.
What is strength progression?
It is simply the gradual process of increasing the amount of weight you lift in each exercise.
Why is strength progression Important?
Your body is designed to be incredibly efficient: It likes to spend the least amount of resources and energy to keep it ticking
If you are using a 10 lb weight, your nervous system, your muscles and your connective tissue has adapted just enough (and not an ounce more) to lift that 10lb weight. It sees no glory whatsoever in increasing your muscle if you are not bothered to increase that 10lb weight.
If you have been using the same weight you did for months, I will give you a 100% money back guarantee that haven’t made any positive changes to your muscle. It’s sad, but true.
Should I progress in reps or weight?
Once you hit 15 reps, the weight gets really low for the muscle to make any appreciable adaptations. So progression generally in strength training means increase in weights lifted.
Is strength increase important for muscle growth?
Your strength is depended on 2 factors: Nervous system adaptation and Muscle growth.
If your strength is climbing, it’s due to one of these factors, usually both. You cannot really control which factor dominates your strength increase. Hence, if your strength is increasing and you are eating well, you can be rest assured that you are gaining muscle.
So how should I progress in strength?
There are different ways to progress in weight:
Option 1: Have a repetition range, like 8-10 reps than just 8 reps or 10 reps. When you get 10 reps with a weight, increase the weight by 5 or 10lbs - and now try to get 8 reps. With just one number like 8 or 10, it becomes hard not to be subjective in deciding when to go up in weights:
Option 2: Start at a low weight and keep adding 5lbs to your upper body exercises and 10lb to your lower body exercises every workout. When you cannot increase the weight for 2 consecutive workouts, change the exercise and repeat.
Option 3: If you have been stuck at the same weight for more than 2 workouts, decrease the weight by 5-10% and take 2-3 weeks to get to the previous weight and then break through the plateau.
This is the most popular method if you do not want to change your exercise. It’s basically called an “Intensity deload”.
Option 4: Start at 12 reps and decrease the reps by 2 every 2-3 weeks. So week 1 & 2: 12 reps, Week 3 & 4: 10 reps, Week 5 & 6: 8 reps and so on.
Practical Tips
- Keep a workout log to chart your progress
- Plan your progression before your workouts: Write down a realistic progression goal for each exercise.
Nutritional Tips for Vegetarian Lifters
BEGINNER | November 06 2009
Here are some nutritonal tips fore vegetarain lifters:
Low Total Calories in Vegetarian Diets
It has been shown that energy intake is usually lower for vegetarians than non –vegetarians.
Vegetarian lifters should try keeping a count of their total calories and get more energy dense, low fiber foods.
High Carbohydrates in Vegetarian Diets
Almost 50-65% of the total calories came from carbs for vegans and 50-55% for a lacto-ovo vegetarian.
The high carbs are good for endurance athlete but it is not so great if you into lifting. As you will see, the high carbs minimizes the availability of protein in the vegetarian diets.
Low Protein in Vegetarian Diets
Vegetarian diets generally contain less protein than meat diets. Among lacto-ovo and vegan diets, vegans tend to have the lowest protein intake (around 10-12%).
Meal Combing for Proteins
Since plant proteins are incomplete proteins(lacking or insufficient amount of a few amino acids), food combining is recommended to make it a compete protein.
For example, by combing grains & legumes (rice and beans) in the same meal, you get the missing amino acids and make it a complete protein .
Now it is known that you don’t have to have it in the same meal as long as you have a variety of foods throughout the course of the day.
Low Creatine levels in vegetarians
It has been shown that creatine levels are pretty low in vegetarians.
Supplementing creatine to vegetarian diets has shown increase in muscle and strength significantly. So it won’t be a bad idea to use creatine.
Low Iron Absorption in Vegetarian Diets
Studies have shown vegetarians get ample iron, but iron absorption is impaired.
Consumption of fresh fruits, vegetables and juices rich in vitamin C can enhance Iron absorption in vegetarians.
Low Zinc levels in Vegetarian Diets
Total zinc intake is lower in vegetarians compared to non-vegetarians. Also strenuous exercises increases zinc loss from the body.
Like iron, zinc absorption also seems to be a problem in vegetarians. Soaking beans, grains & seeds increases zinc absorption or bio-availibilty.
Vitamin B12, Riboflavin, D, & Calcium
Vegetarians, especially vegans, are at risk of low intake of these nutrients because the main sources of these are animal products.
Fortified foods like breakfast cereals and soy products are the only source of B12 for vegans.
Can Workouts Designed To Increase Testosterone Increase Muscle Mass?
BEGINNER | October 24 2009
It has been shown that moderate to high volume workouts, using large muscle group exercises & short rest intervals cause an acute spike in testosterone levels.
Theoretically, these acute spikes in testosterone are claimed to increase muscle growth and strength.Let’s see what the evidence says:
Study 1
Injection of testosterone has shown to increase muscle mass & strength.
The increase in muscle & strength was also seen without any weight training exercise whatsoever.These studies clearly show the benefit of testosterone on muscle growth & strength.
Limitations: The studies we are talking about use supraphysiological doses of testosterone which are far greater & incomparable to the exercised-induced tiny spikes in testosterone.
Also exercised-induced testosterone spikes do not change the resting values of testosterone;it only lasts for 45-60 min.
Study 2
Suppression of testosterone has shown to decrease muscle mass & strength in weight training folks
Limitations: The suppressed levels of testosterone in the study reached the levels of hypogonadal individuals.
So the only sensible conclusion we can make from this study is that we need minimum levels of testosterone to maintain/or increase muscle mass & strength.
Study 3
Resistance training increases testosterone receptors
Limitations: That’s well and good, but it is yet to be shown that a workout program designed to increase testosterone is more effective in increasing these steroid receptors compared to a generic weight training workout.
We are also unsure if this increase in receptors contribute to a greater increase in strength and muscle mass.
Study 4
Combined leg & biceps training shows greater isometric strength in biceps compared to just biceps training.
Limitations: This study is some scientific proof to the anecdote of how squats can add inches to your arms. The study showed significant increases in testosterone and isometric strength when leg training was added to the arm training.
However, the study did not measure muscle size, the increase in isometric strength could have been due to neural adaptations, and the mean initial strength was higher in the arm group which skewed the results a bit.
Study 5
Increase in muscle & strength without any exercise- induced increase in testosterone.
Limitations: This study concluded that you only need basal levels of testosterone to promote muscle growth and strength increase.
But it does not reject the possibility that increase in exercise –induced testosterone levels could have increased the muscle growth & strength even further.
Conclusion
What it all means is that we are still not sure if workout routines specifically designed to increase testosterone are effective in increasing muscle and strength than the generic workout routines.
Reference 1
Reference 2
Reference 3
Reference 4
Reference 5
Can Nervous System/ Neural Adaptations Increase Strength?
BEGINNER | October 07 2009
We all know muscle growth will increase strength. But can nervous system adaptations contribute to strength?
Evidence for nervous system adaptations
Beginner’s Strength: It is pretty clear that there is a disproportionate increase in strength during the early phases of training which cannot be explained by just muscle growth. In fact, there is little or no muscle growth during those early stages of a training program (8-10 weeks).
For example, everyone experience pretty big jumps in weight when you started weight training. Or you will see weights going up easily when you try a new exercise. But you will find you are not getting any bigger in that period.
Disuse: As mentioned above, when you stop working out, there is disproportionate decrease in strength which cannot be explained by muscle loss. And this loss of strength is easily recovered with a few days of training.
For example, you will find yourself a lot weaker when you come back to lifting after you take a couple of weeks off . And you might have noticed that you haven’t got any bit smaller or you that haven’t lost any muscle to explain this loss of strength.
Transfer of Strength: It basically means the increases in strength in one task will not necessarily transfer to other tasks which uses the same muscle.
For example, if you use flat bench for your chest and one day if you change it dumbbell chest press, you will find the weights used to be a lot lower than flat bench though they both use similar muscles.
Unilateral Training: When you perform exercises with one leg, strength increases are seen in the opposite leg. The strength in the untrained leg may increase up to 22%. How cool is that? They call it “cross- education”
All the above give enough evidence to suspect the role of nervous system adaptations in increasing strength. The next article will talk a bit about the mechanisms behind these adaptations.
Which is the Most Accurate Body Fat Calculator / Measurement Method?
BEGINNER | September 08 2009
I get often asked about the most accurate body measurement method/calculator. Here we will look at the common body fat percent measurement methods to find the most accurate one
Body Mass Index (BMI)
Body Mass Index (BMI) is just simply weight (kg) divided by height (msquare) and is often used to classify people into categories based on disease risk. Click here to find your BMI
Problem 1. BMI just assumes your body be a tub of fat. So if you are an athlete or someone who lift weights, it just ignores all that hard-earned muscle and might classify as “overweight or obese”. How unfair is that?
Just to be sure, BMI do not estimate bodyfat. Equations are being developed to estimate bodyfat from BMI but the current equations have large errors (>5%) in estimating bodyfat.
Underwater (Hydrostatic) Weighing
Underwater weighing is considered as the Gold Standard among body fat measurement methods/calculators. It is based on the fact that density of muscle is higher than fat and hence muscle sinks and fat floats.
Problem 1. It is based on a two-component model and hence divides your body into two compartments: Fat Free Mass & Fat Mass. Fat free mainly mass includes bone, muscle, water (also glycogen, soft tissues) apart from body fat as shown below.
* Figure shows a two-compartment model and how it divides total body mass.
It assumes fat free mass and fat mass to have a constant density. But it is pretty clear that the density of your muscles and bones do change depending on age, illness, activity, and ethnicity.
If you are 18 and lift weights, your bone and muscle density will be a lot different from a 45 year old sedentary individual.
Problem 2. Fat-free mass is made up of proteins, water, & bone minerals. So if you drink a lot of water before measuring, it can’t help but think it is all muscle (lucky you).
Hydrostatic weighing is used as a standard to even validate other bodyfat measurement techniques. Now tell me how screwed up is that?
Skin Calipers
Skin calipers measures the fat under the skin (subcutaneous) in certain areas to estimate bodyfat. It assumes that subcutaneous fat is proportional the fat inside your body.
Problem 1.Body fat distribution & how well it correlates with the fat inside your body varies based on age, fatness levels , physical activity, and genetics. Some might have more on the thighs whereas others on their abs.
Problem 2. It is based on a two compartment model and hence also has all the problems mentioned above.
Problem 3. There are equations which measures skin thickness from 3, 7, & 9 sites. But, generally, as the measurements increases so does the errors.
Bioelectrical Impedance Analysis (BIA)
BIA is based on the fact that muscle is 72% water and hence is less resistant to the flow of current than fat. Usually BIA is measured by attaching electrode to your wrist and feet and passing a current through.
* Picture shows BIA with electrodes connected and the commonly used hand held & scale BIA.
Problem 1. As you might have guessed everything from drinking a lot of water, emptying your bowels, having more salt in your diet, having a high- carb diet can change the water levels, and along with it your bodyfat.
Problem 2. The commonly seen hand held or scales are called segmental body fat analysers -measures one half of the body -and the equations used in these are yet to be validated.
Problem 3. Since they are based on a two-compartment model they suffer from all the problems associated with a two compartment model.
DEXA
DEXA is slowly replacing to be the gold standard for body composition methods. DEXA is based on a three-compartment model than a 2-compartment model. It can measure the density of fat, bone minerals, and water & protein combined.
Problem 1. This is lot more accurate than the two compartment models but still assumes the density of water & protein. It also has a lot more assumptions which are too technical to make any sense.
Conclusions
- As you can see there are lots of errors & assumptions in the body fat methods/calculators we commonly use. So what really matters more than accuracy is reliability. Can the body fat method you use consistently keep track of your body fat changes “accurately”?
- Find a method that is cost effective, reliable, and easily accessible.
- Skin calipers (measured by the same technician) and BIA (measured under similar conditions) are cost effective, consistent, and easily accessible.
Are Organic Foods More Nutritious Than Conventional Foods?
BEGINNER | August 22 2009
There is a widespread belief that organic automatically means more healthy or nutritious. So what do you really mean by organic food and is it really nutritious than conventional food?
What are organic foods?
Type of Production: Organic refers to the way of production which avoids or largely excludes the use of synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, hormones, and antibiotics.It relies mainly on crop rotations, natural fertilizers, biological pest control, and better animal husbandry.
USDA Approval: In order to bear an organic label, the USDA (United States Dept. of Agriculture) has set some strict government guidelines based on how foods are grown, handled and processed.
Process Label: Organic is not a “label” of safety or health or being natural It is just a process label.
Are organic foods more nutritious?
Not More Nutritious:A recent (2009) systematic review – the biggest and most complete review even undertaken in this subject- looked over this issue and found no truth to the claim that organic foods are more nutritious than conventional foods.
And concluded that the differences that were detected in crops (nitrate & phosphorus) were biologically plausible and are unlikely to be of public health relevance.
Are organic foods more safer?
Lack of Evidence: The study above looked at only the nutritional side of the issues. But there is a complete lack of evidence to suggest that organic foods are safer because it contains less pesticides and insecticides.
A review which looked at safety aspect of organic foods conclude,” At our present state of knowledge, other factors rather than safety aspects seem to speak in favor of organic food.”
Conclusions
- If you are willing to paying more for organic foods because you think they are more “nutritious” than conventional foods, save the money.
- Contrary to the claims, there is no evidence to suggest that organic foods are safer and more healthier than conventional foods.
- If you are buying organic foods because you think they are kinder to the environment and taste better, you do have a point.
Related
Time Magazine Article: Why Exercise Won’t Make You Thin
BEGINNER | August 15 2009
If you been an ardent reader of Exercise Biology, you would have been aware of this before your read the controversial article titled “Why Exercise Won’t Make You Thin” in the August issue of the Time magazine.
I had written an article titled ” Is Exercise or Cardio Exaggerated in Losing Weight” a few months back. And the August issue of the Time magazine talks exactly the same as the article I wrote.
The main points talked about in the article are:
1. People usually compensate for calories burned with exercise by moving less or eating more
2. Muscle burns only 6 -13 calories/kg/day. It’s not 150 kcal as most trainers say!
3. Exercise burns very less calories than what most people believe.
Conclusion
According to the article, it’s what you eat, not how hard you try to work it off, that matters more in losing weight.
How Do You Know If An Exercise Program/Diet Works or Not?
BEGINNER | July 29 2009
The ideal way to test if an exercise program or diet works is to use randomized controlled studies (RCT). But what if there are no studies attempted? How do you pick a diet to lose weight or an exercise program for muscle growth?
You have 3 options:
1. Try it
2. Ask people who tried it
3. Look for biological plausibility
If you rely on the fist option, you will have to quit your job, leave your family, and probably still won’t get enough time to test out everything out there.
The second option is worse. There are lots of variables that determine the success of a program /diet. For example, the success of an exercise program depends on diet, your previous exercise programs, your training level, genetics, and so on. Unless they have everything leveled out, you will be jumping into some ridiculous conclusions.
This leaves us with the last option which is what I recommend.
So what is biological plausibility?
It basically means that the exercise program or diet should be consistent or agree with what we currently know about muscle growth/weight loss. Simply put, it should make some biological sense.
Example 1
You often see ads of special ab exercise equipment claiming to get you a flat stomach or a six pack if you use their equipment. But it is painfully clear in the literature that spot reduction is not possible or spot reduction is biologically implausible.
You have to burn more calories than you what you spend if you wanna lose weight or see your abs.
Example 2
One common misconception that I hear a lot is about eating rice at night. Folks often complain eating rice (or carbs) for dinner is the reason why they put on weight. But this does not make any biological sense. Losing weight or gaining weight is all about calories; when you have you food or how often you have food matters the least.
Limitation of biological plausibility approach
One limitation of this approach is that it is limited to what we currently know about muscle growth/diet. But, mind you, we know a hell of a lot about muscle growth and weight loss. Or, at least, enough to see if a diet or exercise program will work or not.
Conclusion
Instead of looking at a before-after picture or reading testimonials or checking the author’s qualifications, check to see if the diet/exercise program makes any biological sense.
If you are unsure, ask in the Exercise Biology forum.
Related
The Best Workout Program For Muscle Growth?
BEGINNER | June 04 2009
I am often asked if I have tried this particular exercise program like P90X, MaX-OT, Crossfit, HST & so forth. And I say you don’t have to try each and every program to see if it works. As long as the program is based on the fundamental physiological principles of muscle growth (or fat loss) they all work. Or they should work.
So let’s look at the key elements of an exercise program to increase muscle growth?
Weight Lifted: The load or the weight lifted is one of the most important determinants for muscle growth. It is usually expressed as the number of reps.
For muscle growth, 6-12 reps with proper form is considered optimal. If you are doing 20 reps or higher, it is too less weight to cause any significant damage or stretch to the muscle which is what ultimately kicks starts the process of muscle growth.
I have come across come across a lot of programs revolving around light weights and bodyweight exercises. They do burn a few more calories but is below par for stimulating muscle growth. And it doesn’t matter how good the model look – you can’t just change human physiology.
Volume: Not just the weight or load, but how many times you lift the weight or the “time under tension” matters too. Volume is inversely related and secondary to the weight lifted or the load.
Figure: Graph showing how volume and frequency is inversely related to weight lifted
A good exercise program will ensure the right volume; that is, not too much or not too less. So what is that right volume? It can be anywhere from 1-3 sets per exercise. So if you are doing 3 exercises for chest the total volume comes around 3- 9 sets for chest in a workout.
If you are doing 20-25 sets per bodypart per workout, you better be chemically- assisted or someone with incredible genetics. Most people who do a high volume sacrifice load or weight lifted, which is probably the number one priority for a natural lifter.
Periodization: Periodization is based on the simple fact that nobody can workout at their 100% in every single workout. They will soon get hit by fatigue and overtraining symptoms. The harder you workout, the sooner you will hit by symptoms of overtraining.
Periodization helps us to manage or prepare for this fatigue (both muscular & CNS fatigue). A good program will have some sort of periodization built into to it take care of the fatigue.
Some common periodization strategies include changing the weight used, changing the sets & reps, taking a week off, and so on.
Frequency: How many days should you hit a body part in a week? There is some anecdotal and scientific evidence to show that twice a week for a body part or a higher frequency is better than the typical once- a -week routine.
That been said, there might be a subset of people who do well exercising one body party a week. The problem with using a higher frequency is that you just cannot go all out in both the workouts. Periodization becomes absolutely necessary with a higher frequency program.
Progressive Overload: This is the cardinal rule in weight lifting. All the above rules matter the least, if you cannot increase the weight you are lifting. It is also the very reason we use “weight” training.
This is probably the most ignored rule in the gym or exercise programs. If you increase the weights you lift, your muscles can’t help but grow.
Conclusion
There are a lot of programs using a lot of unnecessary scientific jargon and fairy tale theories which might need a background in exercise physiology and research to analyze critically. I feel like the more I know about the field, the harder it is to find a decent program or a fitness expert who is more concerned about improving his knowledge than just marketing and profits.
It may not be the best, but a program which sticks to the above elements will not be too far from the best.
How Does Occlusion Training Work In Increasing muscle?
BEGINNER | May 19 2009
Can we use lights weights and still grow big muscles? It seems you can with occlusion training.
What is Occlusion Training?
Occlusion training involves partially restricting (occluding) the blood flow to the muscle when you are lifting weights by using a tourniquet cuff.
Why has Occlusion Training become so popular?
Lighter Weights: For muscle growth, you need to use heavy weights (> 65% of your 1RM). However, occlusion training with lighter weights (20 -50% of 1RM) has shown to achieve muscle & strength gains comparable to conventional training with heavier weights (around 80% 1RM).
Rehabilitation: Heavier weights are not recommended when you are recovering from injury. Occlusion training improves strength and muscle gains with lighter weights which is beneficial for rehabbing injuries.
Studies: Number of scientific studies have confirmed the above results with occlusion training.
So how does Occlusion Training increase muscle growth?
The major factors that could explain muscle growth with occlusion training are:
Recruitment of Type 2 Fibers: Muscles are made of two types of fibers: Type 2 & Type 1 fibers. Type 2 fibers are the ones which grow easily and make you look big. But Type 2 fibers are only recruited when you go to failure or when you use heavy weights (>80% 1RM).
When lighter loads are combined with occlusion, Type 2 fibers are recruited way early in the set just like when you are doing a heavier weight. So they get naturally bigger.
Increase in Growth Hormone: Lighter loads with occlusion have shown to increase GH levels more than heavy training. But recent evidences have shown increases in GH not to have much benefit for muscle growth.
Metabolic Accumulation: The accumulation of metabolites like lactic acid, hydrogen in the muscle (causes the burn) due to blood flow restriction may help in increasing muscle growth. But we are not sure.
Practical Application
The muscle is usually occluded when you are using heavier weights (> 60% of1RM). But you can occlude or reduce blood flow a bit more with some other techniques.
- Not relaxing the muscle throughout the set. Or maintain the tension thought the muscle by doing partial movements and/or contracting them hard.
- Keeping rest time between sets short
- Doing a drop set with lighter weights after your heavy set. When you use heavy weight, you are recruiting ALL your fibers from the very first rep.So a drop set can give you some metabolic build up (the burn) which may help in muscle growth.
- Occluding the muscles for more than 5-10 minutes with tourniquets can cause serious muscle damage.
Can Antioxidants Prevent Cancer?
BEGINNER | May 03 2009
You will find a lot of people taking multivitamin, Vit C, Beta carotene, & Vit E to prevent cancer.But the recent cancer prevention studies paints an entirely different story.
Why use antioxidants to prevent cancer?
Prevent Oxidative Stress: Antioxidants can neutralize free radicals or oxidative stress which may cause damage to cells and cell processes , and thereby increase the risk of cancer.
Studies: A large number of epidemiological studies have shown that a diet high in fruits, vegetables, and plants can lower risk of cancer. This same was shown in animals studies and cell culture studies that antioxidants can prevent or delay the development of cancer.
What are the major antioxidants used to prevent cancer?
The major antioxidants used in studies to prevent cancer are: Vitamin E, Vitamin C, Beta carotene, & Selenium.
And did antioxidants prevent cancer?
The results of the studies- spanning three decades of research - have been extremely disappointing to say the least. A few of the recent large trials showed no benefit of antioxidants for cancer prevention.
Other Nutrients: Even other vitamins like folic acid, Vit b6, B12, Calcium, Vitamin D which showed tremendous hope have failed to deliver.
SELECT Study: The biggest blow to cancer prevention was the recently concluded SELECT study (Selenium and Vitamin E Cancer Prevention Trial), which is the largest cancer prevention study . Though very promising, the study failed to show any beneficial effect of selenium and Vitamin E for reducing the risk of prostrate cancers and was terminated early.
Can antioxidants increase the risk of cancer?
Surprisingly, a couple of studies of large studies have shown that antioxidants may increase the risk of cancers.
Increase in Lung Cancer: The CARET study (Beta-Carotene and Retinol Efficacy Trial) showed that beta carotene supplements in smokers increase the risk of lung cancer. The similar results from the Alpha-Tocopherol, Beta-Carotene Cancer Prevention (ATBC) Study and the high incidence of lung cancer in the participants prompted the researchers to stop the study early.
Increase in Prostrate Cancer: In a recent study (secondary findings), the author concluded that daily supplementation with 1 mg of folic acid was associated with an increased risk of prostate cancer.
Why antioxidant studies failed to prevent cancer?
There has been a lot of explanations. Below are the major ones:
- The epidemiological studies that showed benefits had whole foods, which usually is a complex mix of several nutrients. The antioxidant studies used specific single nutrient isolated from food.
- The effects of specific nutrients depend on the genetic make up of the individual.
- A deficiency of certain antioxidants or nutrient might increase cancer risk. Also an excess of the same nutrient may increase cancer risk. A good example is folate.
- Oxidative stress & free radicals are not evil. They have a beneficial effect too.
Conclusion
- The best way to get antioxidants and maybe prevent cancer is eat a lot of fruits & vegetables. The American Cancer Society recommends eating at least 5 servings of these foods every day.
- We don’t have too much evidence to advocate high doses of single antioxidant to prevent cancer. In some cases, excess may increase the risk of cancer.
Weight Loss Drugs & Supplements: Do They Work & How?
BEGINNER | April 19 2009
Everyone seems to have questions like do weight loss drugs & supplements work, are they safe, and if so, how do they work. Here is the run down:
Do weight-loss drugs & supplements work?
Before you understand if they work or not, you have to understand the difference between weight loss drugs and weight loss supplements :
Weight Loss Drugs: They can be either prescription or Over the counter drugs. These are approved by the Federal Drug Administration (FDA). That means, the safety & efficacy of these drugs are proven in clinical studies.
These drugs have shown 5-10% of weight loss (of initial body weight), around 2lb/month with lifestyle medications. Examples are Alli, & Meridia as shown in the picture.
Dietary Supplements: These are not approved by the FDA and hence are not tested in clinical trials. So the safety and efficacy carries a big question mark. Simply put, most don’t work and are not safe.
How do these weight-loss drugs & supplements work?
Suppressing Appetite: Most weight loss drugs work by suppressing the appetite and thereby reducing food intake.
An example is Meridia (sibutramine), which is the only drug approved by FDA for long-term use.
Altering food absorption: These reduce weight by preventing the absorption and digestion of fat in foods.
Alli (Orlistat) which prevents fat absorption is the only over- the-counter drug approved by the FDA to treat obesity .
Increasing Energy expenditure: These drugs (called thermogenics) help by increasing your metabolism or energy expenditure. You can expect 2-3% increase in your metabolism (around 100-150 calories/day).
Ephedrine works via the same mechanism and also by suppressing appetite. FDA hasn’t approved ephedrine as a weight loss drug. Mua Hung – a natural source of Ephedrine- can be found in many dietary supplements.
Conclusions
- Even weight loss drugs work by making you eat less or spending more energy. So don’t think you can eat whatever you want and still magically lose weight by taking weigh loss supplements
- FDA approved Weight loss drugs are proven to work and are safe. Dietary supplements are not.
- Weight loss drugs work best when complimented with lifestyle modifications like diet and exercise.
- Weight loss drugs cannot cure weight problems; get off the drug, and you will gain all the weight back.
Related
Is Exercise or Cardio Exaggerated in Losing Weight?
BEGINNER | April 11 2009
We know there are two ways to lose weight:
- Exercise/ Cardio
- Eat Less
But which is better? 99% of the people overestimate the ability of exercise (or cardio) to lose weight or/and underestimate the importance of diet in losing weight.
They have this notion that if they do cardio 3-4 days/week and eat a bit healthy (and of course eat small meals), they should just easily lose weight.
Is Exercise or Cardio Really Exaggerated in Losing Weight?
Exercise Studies: Research has repeatedly shown that exercise or cardio workout does a pretty poor job in losing weight. Believe it or not, most of the exercise studies ranging from six months to a year show a meager 1-12 lb weight loss. This is no where near to the “1-2 lb/week” we often hear about.
Exercise Studies Supporting Exercise: The couple of studies which did show greater weight loss with exercise had some brutal exercise protocol or had the participants restrict and monitor their diet. For example, one study showed 25lb loss in 5 months (around 1lb/week). And how many hours did the particpants have to train for this? An average of 29 hours per week (yes it’s per week)
So Why is Exercise or Cardio Not Great For Losing Weight?
1 lb of fat= 3500 calories
That is, if you want to burn 1 lb of fat in a week, you have to burn 3500 calories with exercise/cardio in a week.
Now let’s take the example of running since it’s a lot more energy intense than biking, elliptical training or swimming. If you can run at a pace of 5-6 miles/hr, you will burn around 500-600 calories ( for 150-160 lb body weight). So if you run for 7 days at this pace, you will burn I lb of fat. And that’s great. But the problem is that this never happens in reality. Why?
Too Intense: At least, 90% of the people who I see exercise at the gym do not even come close to an intensity of 5-6miles/hr pace. And people who can run at this pace, obviously, won’t have a bodyweight problem in the first place. The same applies for biking, elliptical, stepping or whatever cardio workout.
Joint Problems: Folks who grind their teeth and somehow manage to run 7 days/ week will usually end up with knee pain, especially if they are overweight or obese.
Adherence: It is so hard for someone with a regular job and other priorities in life to exercise 6-7 days/week. Most people drop out soon. And this is clearly shown in exercise studies which show high drop out rates.
Body Compensating: When you lose weight, your body has a nasty habit of compensating by:
- Increasing Hunger: The above weight loss of 1lb/week with running is assuming you are eating the same amount of calories day in and out.Have a small donut (300 - 350calories) - and you wasted 30 - 45min minutes of your running. If you don’t keep an approximate count of calories you eat, it is so easy to overeat and compensate for all the calories you burned with exercise.
- Decreasing Activity: You tend to sit around a lot more than you used to. In research they call it spontaneous physical activity. So you workout but come home and lie on the couch or watch TV or somehow try to move the least.
However, If you can magically overcome the problems above, you can lose weight with just exercise.
Conclusion
- You can lose a lot of weight with just diet and no exercise/cardio.
- A combination of diet and exercise/cardio is the best for weight loss.
- Exercise/cardio becomes more important in maintaining the lost weight than losing weight.
Related
Is Back Squat Better Than Front Squat?
BEGINNER | March 31 2009
Which is better: Back squat or front squat? Back squat is one of those exercises which has a bad ass reputation of being THE best for overall muscle growth in your legs.
On the other hand, front squat is often sidelined as one of those secondary exercises to isolate or emphasize the quads . Or it is considered to be more more of a shaping exercise.
To see if there is any truth to these long-held beliefs, a recent study compared the back squat to the front squat in men and women who were experienced at doing both the lifts.
The study used 70% of their 1RM (maximum weight that can be lifted for one rep) for both the exercises thereby ensuring that they are comparing exercises of similar intensity.
Results
- Though the back squat used a heavier weight, muscle activity recorded in quads, hamstrings and low back was similar in both exercises. In other words, both exercises are equally effective in making your legs grow!
- Compressive forces were much lower in front squats than back squats. High and continued compressive forces on the knee can cause loss of cartilage and result in osteoarthritis (usually pain in the knees).
- Glute activity was not measured in the study.
Conclusion
Front squat is equally good as back squat for your quads and hams. As well, front squat is lot better on your knees than back squat.
If knee health & muscle activation is a concern, try front squats for a change.
Related
How Wide and Deep Should I Go In Squats?
BEGINNER | March 14 2009
There are number of articles and books advocating how deep you should go in squats, how wide your stance, & how should your foot placement be to isolate or emphasize your different quad & glute muscles. So what’s the truth?
Should I Take a Narrow or Wide Stance in Squats?
A recent study compared the EMG activity of 3 different stances: Narrow, Moderate and Wide stance (i.e., 100, 150, & 200% of hip width.)
The study showed that the only difference in EMG activity was in the Gluteus Maximus ( aka your big butt).
A wider stance (200% of hip width) showed greater EMG activity than the other two stance width’s. A previous study showed greater activation of the adductor longus ( aka inner thigh) and gluteus maximus with a wider stance.
How Deep Should I Go in Squats?
How deep should you go in squats? Partial, Parallel, and full/deep squat squat was analyzed for the muscle activity.
The only muscle which showed greater activity with depth was Gluteus Maximus. So if you want a tight ass, go deeper (really hope all the girls read that).
Should I Keep My Feet In or Out in Squats?
You will always see chicks doing squats with their feet flared out to target their inner thighs. Any benefit of playing with your feet?
A study analysed -10, 0, 10 & 20 degree foot position on quadriceps muscle activity in squats.
And guess what, they didn’t find any difference with different foot placements. So stop playing with your feet in squats.
Most of the above results makes a lot of sense. Your quads (Vastus Lateralis, Intermedialis & Medialis ) have very similar origins, and function as a single muscle group. Unlike your gluteus maximus, having a different stancein squats will not change their length, and in turn change their activity.
Recommendations
- Shoot for a comfortable stance in squats
- Take a wider stance & go deeper to emphasize your glutes
- And note that heavier the weight in squats, greater the muscle activity.
Are Your Weekends Making You Fat?
BEGINNER | March 08 2009
A study was done to see if people gained weight or stopped losing weight due to their eating and exercise habits during weekends.Let’s see what they found out.
What was the Study Design ?
There were three groups as shown below, and the duration of the study was a year.
How Was Physical Activity & Food Intake Measured?
Food Intake were self reported by the participants and physical activity was measured using accelerometers.
Self reported measures of food intake and exercise are notorious for handing out some serious false data. But the researchers in this study validated these measures by comparing it with the measurements from Doubly Labeled Water method. The DLW is the most accurate measurement of energy intake and expenditure.
What Were The Results?
The study results were really interesting to say the least:
- Participants on an average ate the most during weekends (Fr-Sat-Sun) as shown in the figure.
- Physical activity levels was consistent on weekdays and weekends or more on weekends.
- Participants in the calorie restriction group stopped losing weight on weekends; participants gained weight in the exercise group during weekends.
- Higher contributions of calories were from fat on weekends than carbs and protein.
Conclusion
- Try to keep your diet consistent on your weekends and weekdays to prevent weight gain or maintain the lost weight. Though few calories (and tiny weight gains), they all add up in the long run.
- Keep an eye, especially, on your fat intake during weekends.
Related
Is Creatine Ethyl Ester Better than Creatine Monohydrate?
BEGINNER | March 06 2009
Is creatine Ethyl ester better than creatine monohydrate to increase muscle growth & strength? A study was done to see if creatine ethyl ester is indeed effective in increasing absorption than creatine monohydrate. Let’s see what the study found out about creatine ethyl ester:
Why Creatine?
Creatine is one of the very few supplements scientifically proven to work. Almost 70% of the studies on creatine have shown significant increase in performance, in the form of muscle, strength ,or endurance. And almso all of them used creatine monohydrate
Why Different Formulations of Creatine?
Intramuscular stores of creatine saturates at 160 mmol/kg dry mass; however, only 20% of users achieve this amount.
Due to this variation in creatine uptake, it has been suggested that creatine alone is not absorbed well enough into the muscle. Hence, instead of just plain creatine monohydrate, several formulations of creatine have been developed in the hope of bypassing the creatine transporter and thereby increasing creatine absorption.
Effervescent creatine, creatine with magnesium, creatine serum were all studied and was shown to be ineffective compared to creatine monohydrate.
Why Creatine Ethyl Ester?
Creatine Ethyl Ester is a new formulation claiming to be better than other creatine forms. Esterification is commonly done in pharmaceutical industries to increase the bioavailability of drugs. Hence Creatine Ethyl Ester is claimed to be abosorbed better than creatine monohydrate or other creatine blends.
Though esterified creatine is unstable in low pH conditions and has been shown to be rapidly degraded to creatinine in stomach acid, manufacturers of creatine ethyl ester claim that it is superior to other forms of creatine ( including creatine monohydrate).
What did the Study Find about Creatine Ethyl Ester?
The study compared 3 groups: creatine ethyl ester, creatine monohydrate, & a placebo (dextrose) group.
- The study found no added benefit of creatine ethyl ester over creatine monohydrate. In fact, even after ingesting twice the amount of Ethyl ester, the serum creatine ( blood levels) levels were significantly higher in creatine monohydrate group than ethyl ester group.
- Also the total muscle creatine levels showed no benefit of creatine ethyl ester over creatine monohydrate.
- In addition, creatine ethyl ester supplementation showed a large increase in serum creatinine levels throughout the study, it was concluded that a large portion of the creatine ethyl ester was being degraded within the GI tract after ingestion.
To make a long story short, stick with creatine monohydrate.
Related
How To Make Your Ab Exercises More Effective
BEGINNER | February 21 2009
In order to understand your ab muscles better, you have to understand your hip flexor muscles. The hip flexors attaches to your spine, pelvis, and your inner thigh bone (collectively called Illiapsoas). From the attachments of the muscles (shown in the picture), you can easily see that flexing the Illiapsaos will bend your torso or raise your legs.
The ab muscle,on the other hand, is attached to the sternum and the pelvis. Thus flexing the ab muscle just rounds the low back.
Common Ab Exercise Mistakes
The first picture shows a conventional sit up. The hip flexors is activated once your torso go past 30 degree of flexion as shown in the left picture. The picture on the right shows the proper form for a crunch (see the rounding of the low back).
The pictures below show a common mistake when doing leg raises. If you are not conscious of rounding you low back, leg raises is a great exercise for your hip flexors. You will often see low backs coming off the pad because of the pull of the hip flexors on the spine.
You have to intentionally round your low back to really work your abs when doing leg raises.
The below exercise is one of the most popular exercise in the gym. Unfortunately, this is another great example of how to engage your hip flexors in your ab exercise. Anchoring your feet or having someone stand on your feet are just different ways to use your hip flexors in your ab exercises.
Techniques to Make Your Ab Exercises More Effective
The techniques below help to inhibit the hip flexors or/and activate your abs better.
The first method is based on the principle of Active Insufficiency. Once a muscle has shortened, it becomes “actively insufficient” (or the muscle is unable to contract further). By keeping your legs wide apart, you have already contracted your hip flexors (llliopsoas)and hence they are unable to aid in hip flexion anymore.
The reason why the knees are bent 90 degree when doing a sit up or a crunch is to inhibit your rectus femoris muscle (also aids in hip flexion) based on the principle of Active Insufficiency.
The second method (also known as the Janda situp) is based on the principle of Reciprocal Inhibition. By pulling on your heels (as shown in the pic), you are contracting your glutes and hamstring, which relaxes you hip flexors and thus isolates your abs better.
The third method involves squeezing a ball between your knees as you crunch. This helps to isolate your abs as both the abs and adductors have a common insertion point.
Picture Courtesy: Braden Sowle
Related
How Many Exercises Do You Need for Your Chest Muscle?
BEGINNER | January 25 2009
How many exercises do you really need for your chest? Let’s see what the chest muscle architecture tells about how many exercises you need for your chest.
Pectoralis Major & Minor: Pectoral major is the largest and the major muscle of the pectoral group, and hence the common name pecs for the chest. Pectoralis minor runs under the pectoralis major and is hidden.
- Though you see them as distinct muscles with distinct names, the point to be noted is that you cannot really isolate pectoralis minor or pectoral major.
- Anytime you work your chest, you hit pectoralis minor & major equally well.
Upper & Lower Chest: Both upper chest (also known as clavicle head) and lower chest (known as sternal head) are involved in most exercises for the chest.
- The fan-shaped architecture and different nerve innervations to both upper and lower chest make it possible to isolate upper chest fibers.
- Clavicular head can be isolated by doing incline press or any movement where the arm is moved across your upper chest, like in incline dumbbell or barbell press or flyes.
If you are isolating upper chest, it does not necessarily mean that you are emphasizing upper chest. In fact, when you do any kind of incline movements you are de-emphasizing the lower chest. If you look at muscle fiber orientation, it becomes pretty logical that the lower chest has to be inhibited in order to keep the arm in that incline position. If the lower chest were to activate during an incline press, the bar will be pulled down by the lower chest fibers.
So a dumbbell or barbell or flye should be enough to hit both upper and lower chest effectively
Inner and Outer Chest: Whatever those bodybuilders say, you cannot emphasize or isolate inner or outer chest . If you look at the muscle fiber orientation, you will see it is impossible. It is just as lame as saying you can isolate upper and lower biceps.
The tight feeling or soreness you feel at the inner chest is due to the converging orientation of the fibers at the tendon and muscle attachment region.
Recommendations
- You only need one exercise to target both upper and lower chest fibers
- Incline movements, like incline press or flyes de-emphasize lower chest than emphasize upper chest.
- You cannot isolate inner or outer chest. If you can, then you can make me pretty too.
When You Should Change Your Exercises?
BEGINNER | January 18 2009
People change exercises every 4-6 weeks with no rhyme or reason because they read it in a fitness magazine.This article is a continuation of the article, Why You Should Not Change Exercises Too Often? So when do you know it is time to change exercises?
Weak Point Training: If you have a weak point or a lagging body part, changing your exercise is a great way to solve the problem.
For instance, if you have weak quads ( front of the thighs), changing squats to smith machine squats would make sense. Another example would be close grip bench press, if you think your triceps strength is holding you back in your bench press. Yet another example is taking a wide grip in bench if you think your chest is weak or you are weaker at the bottom half of your bench press.
Muscle Feel & Stretch: You might have noticed with certain exercises you can feel & stretch the muscle you are working a lot more than with other exercises. If changing, change to exercises which give you a better stretch & feel.
For example, we know chest is the primary muscle used for bench press. But some folks don’t feel a thing on their chest when doing bench press and feel a lot more on their chest when doing dumbell bench press. This could be due to a number of reasons, including individual & exercise biomechanics, propioreception, skill level in that exercise, and so on.
Muscle Architecture: The architecture and biomechanics of the muscle determines how many exercises you should be doing for that particular muscle group.
For example, you need two exercises to target the triceps muscle: One for the long head and the other for lateral & medial head. Long head can only be emphasized effectively if your bring you arm overhead, like in skull crushers.
Trapezius is another example which needs more than one exercise to effectively hit all the areas because of its unique muscle architecture. You can change exercises to focus on the upper , middle, and lower muscle fibers.
De-Loading: De-loading means to unload or to rest. You can deload certain areas of the muscle by changing exercises, and this is the main reason why people feel better when they change exercises, I think.
But this will only work if the exercise you are changing to is working a different area of the muscle than it was with the previous exercise. This is always a hit and miss strategy if you are changing exercises randomly. For example, if you change from flat to incline, you wil be resting or deloading the lower chest muscle. But If you were to change to decline or dumbell press, you will still be still working the lower chest and not deloading.
An ideal or a proper deload will be to take time off from the gym or cut back on your weights a bit.Changing exercises only takes care of the peripheral fatigue and not the systemic fatigue.
Variety: Variety to prevent boredom would be last on my list. Psychological factors do play a role in people sticking with exercises but preventing boredom will not help your muscle grow per se.
If you want to meet certain goals, you will have to do things which you may not like.
Recommendations
- Keep an exercise at least for 12 weeks. It takes a few weeks for the body to learn an exercise and hence for you to use the heaviest weights possible in that exercise. So if you keep changing exercise every 4-6 weeks, your muscles get a lot less stimulation to grow.
- Change exercises but do keep the above points in mind and you will do a lot better than changing exercises randomly.
I intentionally keep my articles really short and to the point, especially a beginner level article. If you think you don’t understand or you disagree with certain points or have suggestions, please feel free to comment below.
Why You Should Not Change Exercises Too Often?
BEGINNER | January 04 2009
If you think you need to change exercises to keep strength and muscle gains coming, you should keep reading.
Why people change exercises too often?
To confuse/shock the muscle: This is the most popular reason for changing exercises. You cannot confuse or shock a muscle, period. It is physiologically impossible.
Muscles are passive tissues that contract when told to do so. It doesn’t have a brain of its own to get confused. It is as stupid as saying if you pull an elastic band in a different angle you confuse and shock the band.
Muscle Magazines said so: Most of the changing exercises concept come from muscle magazines (for example the Weider muscle Confusion Principle).
- Most models are genetically gifted and use “real” supplements. Unlike naturals, they can do whatever they want and still grow.
- They need to put out a magazine every month. New exercise pictures are a great way to fill magazine pages every month.
Why you should NOT change exercises too often?
Learning Curve: Every exercise has a learning curve called Neural Changes or Adaptations (nervous system adaptations). It is just like learning to ride a bike. You get better at whatever you do with practice.
This learning period take a few weeks or a few months depending on the exercise & the skill level.
Muscle Increase: The muscle increase is minimal during the time when body learns to do a new exercise. Muscle increases largely come after the neural changes plateau as shown in the figure.
Figure: The neural changes plateau after 8-20 weeks. And then the muscle growth becomes more prominent.(Reference 1)
So if you keep on changing exercises every 4 or 6 weeks, the body never gets a chance to increase the muscle involved in that particular exercise. By the time your learning curve (or neural adaptations) plateaus, you unfortunately jumped onto a different exercise.
Strength Increase: The strength increase you experience in the learning period is mainly improvement in skill or neural adaptations than due to muscle growth. This disappear once you stop doing that particular exercise.
Recommendations
- Keep 2-3 basic exercises for each body part, like incline bench press, dumbbell press for chest and rotate them. This way you don’t have to stick with one exercise.
- You can change single joint exercises like dumbbell curls, chest flyes and so on. The neural adaptations are minimal for single joint exercises.
- If you hit a plateau in an exercise, it is time to re-analyze your program and diet and not to change the exercise to “shock” your muscles..
Related
How to Prevent ACL Injuries
BEGINNER | December 21 2008
ACL injuries are the most common knee injuries and ACL injury prevention studies have shown a reduction of ACL injuries from 60% to 80%. This has been shown in male and female athletes from various sports and across different age groups.
A ACL Injury Mechanism
K Key elements of ACL injury prevention program
Now let’s see the key elements of an ACL injury prevention program based on the latest studies.
Technique
1. Proper landing technique: Landing softly on the forefoot and rolling back to the rearfoot, emphasizing knee and hip flexion on landing and with lateral (cutting) manoeuvres. Two-feet landing is encouraged where possible & they should aim to achieve the “knee over toe position.
2. Proper deceleration & cutting: Rounded cut manoeuvre instead of a sharp or more acute angle during the cut. One step stop deceleration pattern should be avoided and replaced with a three-step quick stop
3. Avoiding excessive “caving in” at the knee: Keeping the knee feet in a straight line when landing and squatting as shown in the pic. The angled knee & feet line shows the wrong way.
Strength & Power: Intervention programmes should focus on increasing hamstring, gluteus medius and hip abductor strength with neuromuscular training, plyometrics, and agility exercises.
Identify Players at Risk:The drop vertical jump test should be used to identify players at risk. Athletes who land with caving in knee motion should perform neuromuscular training before sports participation.
Figure: Subjects were instructed to drop off the box (31 cm) and immediately perform a maximal vertical jump for 3 repetitions.
P PEP Program
In 1999 the ACL “PEP Program: Prevent injury and Enhance Performance” was developed in Santa Monica, California. This ACL prevention program consists of warm-up, stretching, strengthening, plyometrics and sport-specific agilities.
The benefits of PEP for ACL injury prevention are:
Cost effective: On-field warm-up program that requires only traditional soccer equipment (cones and soccer ball).
Time: It’s done 2-3 times a week over the course of the 12-week soccer season and is 20 min in duration.
Adherence: The programme is designed as a warm-up, hence adherence rates are higher and the element of neuromuscular fatigue does not affect the performance of the therapeutic exercises
Evidence-Based: Scientifically proven to dramatically reduce ACL injuries in women soccer players.
You can learn more about the PEP program and download a copy of PEP Program. The PEP was developed for scoccer players, but it can me modified according to your sport.
True Bodybuilding
BEGINNER | December 20 2008
Three years ago, Lee Spievack sliced off the tip of his finger in the propeller of a hobby shop airplane. In 4 weeks his finger grew back with all the flesh, blood, muscles, & nail.
This is no science fiction: It is all part of the advancements made in the feild of regenerative medicine. This what I call True bodybuilding . Watch the video to believe it.
5 Greatest Recent Nutrition Discoveries
BEGINNER | December 16 2008
The list is from a one- day symposium held at Wageningen University, Netherlands . The participants included 128 Dutch scientists working in nutrition or related biomedical and public health fields. They came up with 17 nutrition discoveries which they felt have enormously impacted our lives.
I am just including just the top 5 discoveries from the list.
1 Folic acid prevents birth defects
This discovery vanished all the lingering misconceptions of how having a well balanced diet provides enough of all nutrients.
Folic acid is a B vitamin. If a woman do not have enough folic acid BEFORE she is pregnant, the baby can have spine and brain defects (neural tube defects or NTDs). These birth defects can cause lifelong disability or death.
Women need to take folic acid every day starting before they are pregnant to help prevent NTDs.You can either have a multivitamin, folic acid pills, or bowl full of fortified cereals that has 100% of the daily value (DV) of folic acid per serving every day.
If you wait till you find out you are pregnant, it is too late. These birth defects often happens within the first few week of pregnancy, often before a women knows she is pregnant.
2 Health effect of trans fatty acids
The effects of trans fatty acids is now known universally and deserves to be in the top five. Now there is a direct relationship between diets high in trans fat content and LDL (“bad”) cholesterol levels and, therefore, an increased risk of heart disease.
The Food & Drug Administration decreed that as of 2006, manufacturers must break the trans fats category out of the total fat listing on the labael. So now you don’t have to look for words like “shortening,” “partially hydrogenated vegetable oil” to check for trans fat in your food.
3 Nutritional regulation of gene transcription
How the availability of nutrients, like fat, glucose, cholesterol, protein impact the activity and expression of genes is slowly unfolding. For example, Saturated and trans-unsaturated fatty acids raise and unsaturated fatty acids lower LDL cholesterol via gene transcription.
Molecular biology has come a long way to pin point specific transcription factors and genes which can affect metabolism and certain diseases.
4 Progress in measuring energy/calorie intake
Doubly labeled water technique is now used for accurately estimating energy/calorie expenditure and intake. This technique showed that traditional dietary history and questionnaire methods severly underestimated energy intake.
The paradox that the more obese a person is, the less they appeared to eat had puzzled scientists, but it now with the advent of doubly labeled water technique it is ever so clear that obese people are obese because they eat more.
I hope Gary Taubes- the author of Good Calories, Bad Calories -will stumble upon this technique one day. His main argument in the book is in the 1960’s studies showed how people were obese, ate less. Really?
5 Fat tissue as an endocrine organ
Fat is no longer considered a passive, unwanted piece of blubber. Now we know that leptin, the most important hormone, which regulates appetite and body fat levels is secreted from your fat cells.
Leptin is proportional to your body fat and low levels of leptin signals hunger to your brain. High Leptin levels are usually found in in obese people, suggesting that they are insensitive to leptin, rather than having low levels of leptin.
Leptin was followed by tumor-necrosis factor-a, adiponectin, resistin, and other hormones that were found to be secreted from fat tissue as shown in the pic.
The discovery of these hormones and how fat tissue act as an endocrine gland has given us important insights into understanding obesity, diabetes, atherosclerosis and other diseases.
How Many Ab Exercises should I do?
BEGINNER | December 06 2008
From what I have seen, most people know plenty of different ab exercises. What is lacking in people’s ab routine is proper balance of different ab exercises so that you have equal emphasis on all the muscles in your trunk.
Anybody who hangs out in our ab area will see crunches and sit ups being the most dominant exercises in any ab routine. Without proper muscle balance in your routine, you are setting yourself up for postural deviations, and maybe injury, in the long run.
So how do you ensure proper muscle balance in your ab workout: A simple method is to divide your exercises to movements. The basic trunk movements are: Flexion, Extension, Side Flexion & Rotation.
Flexion
Flexion is basically rounding your back. Most ab exercises, like sit ups, crunches, sit ups with a ball, & leg raises fall in the flexion category. No muscle in the human body has endured so much torture and pain as the rectus abdominus (front ab muscle). And there is no end to it seems.
Tight abdominal muscle can pull your rib cage down and give you a hunch back posture which is common in many folks.
Extension
Extension works your lower back and is the opposite of flexion, as in leaning back or arching your back. Unfortunately, this movement is the most ignored in the gym. Functionally speaking, your low back is part of your trunk musculature. 85% of the adults end up with low back pain in their life. Strengthening your low back is one way to sneak into that 15%.
Side Flexion
Side flexion or Lateral Flexion involves side bending.
If you do one exercise for all the above movements, you covered every inch of every muscle in your trunk. If you need variey, and everyone does, do these movements in sitting, standing, lying, or hanging. Exercise variety is as easy as that.
Conclusion
- Your assignment is to divide your ab exercises into the above movements and see which movement is lacking and which is over emphasized.
- Add or subtract exercises or sets until you attain the right muscle balance, harmony, joy, and world peace.
Pic Coutesy: Maggie Thompson
Related
Functional Movement Screen
ADVANCED | November 29 2008
I read Gray Cook’s book - Athletic Body in Balance- 3-4 years back and it was my favorite book for a while. I have seen his videos and thought he was miles ahead of all the so-called rehab experts in the strength & conditioning field then. I remember Eric Creesey, now one of the well known strength & conditioning coaches, arguing for static stretching when Gray cook at that time was talking about mobility and compensatory movement patterns. These concepts were pretty much unheard about 3-4 years back. But now it seems like everyone talks about compensatory movement patterns and mobility and stability concept.
Anyway, I always wanted to learn more about it and my college was ready to pay for it. So there I went to attend the FMS 2-day seminar. The speaker was Brett Jones and he has worked with Gray Cook and made a couple of DVD’s with Gray Cook.
What is FMS?
Functional Movement Screen (FMS) screen consists of seven different tests to assess movement patterns which are thought to be the fundamental movement patterns or foundations of human movement.
The Seven different tests consist of Deep Squat, Hurdle step, In line lunge, Push up test, straight leg raises and a few others. FMS was developed by Lee Burton and Gray Cook. You can read about FMS here: FMS
What is the basis of FMS?
Gray Cook explains in his book about how these are general motor programs and specific motor programs, and these general programs forms the basis of specific programs .So if these general or fundamental patterns are faulty, the specific ones will be faulty.
These faulty movement patterns or compensatory movement patterns can be due to tight or weak muscle or coordination (motor control) issues.
The faulty movement patterns or movement asymmetries cause mechanical stress- resulting in cumulative microtrauma - and thereby injuries. So treat the cause and not the source.
What FMS Claims?
FMS can identify people who are at risk of injury, and by correcting these faulty movement patterns can alleviate injury and even improve performance.
My Thoughts
The concepts of FMS are nothing new. I can easily see the concepts being influenced by Feldenkrais, Florence Kendall, and Shirley Sahrman’s Movement Impairment Syndrome. His work is heavily influenced by Sahrmann and he mentions her book in his reference section. It is basically motor control or movement re-education which is the basis of Alexander Technique and Feldenkrais which originated in the 1800’s.
One of the problems I see with FMS is in the basic concept of FMS: faulty movement patterns cause mechanical stress- resulting in cumulative microtrauma - and thereby injuries
First, who determines what is faulty and which is optimum? There is some evidence of certain patterns can predispose you to acute injury like ACL injury and stuff. But beyond that is just hard to conclude that there exist certain postures or movements which are ideal or optimal.
Also, why should mechanical stress causes by faulty movement pattern always lead to microtruama and injury? Why can’t tissues just positively adapt and get stronger just like a normal biological tissue. If indeed faulty movement patterns were the cause of injury, all those cerebral palsy patients, stroke victims, people with neurological disorders and amputees should be in complete pain. There are double amputees who run faster than most of us and still feel no pain. The compensations and asymmetries are 100% in these amputees and they should be crying out loud in pain than running around. Maybe that movement pattern is “ideal” for them and the tissues have adapted to it.
Even in a simple sport like running and which has been studied to death, the cause of over use injuries is still inconclusive. Excessive running distance, too high of a training intensity, and rapid increases in weekly running distance or intensity has been identified most often as risk factor for running injuries. There is NO biomechanical & anatomical factor that has reliably shown to correlate with a specific type of injury though you often read about abductor weakness, arch height and so on.
Another issue is how these movement patterns, if fixed, can carry over to movements on the field like running or jumping. Unless they are given specific instructions and training on running or other specific movements, these global patterns will not carry over to the specific movements on the field or in your daily movements. Your habitual postures and movements, whether faulty or not, will always be dominant.
Another issue, and a big one, I have with FMS is the lack of scientific evidence. Logic & common sense does not always pan out in research. He showed 2 studies abut FMS which predicted injury in firefighters & NFL players. The firefighters study showed decreases in injury compared to a control group after the intervention. But the intervention had a lot more than corrective exercises as in FMS. They were instructed the right way to lift and use proper work place ergonomics and so forth.
I couldn’t find the said NFL study on pubmed for some reason. The study showed that athletes who scored less than 14 (total of 21 points) on FMS were 11 times likely to get hurt than players who scored above 14 points. That’s pretty huge if you are an NFL player. If you are not, then there is nothing much to be excited about. You cannot extrapolate data from elite level athletes to the average joes, high school athletes, or even college level athletes.
If you are unaware, research is always population, gender and sport specific. I guess not many people who attend these seminars are aware of it nor care. As long as they know there are studies showing some benefit, they are all merry. They are more impressed by logic and anecdotes. And he had plenty of both.
There were 2 studies done on high school football athletes and marathon runners which did not support FMS. And guess what, they weren’t on the slides.
Conclusion
Personally, I think it is a good screening tool for elite levels athletes in sports like football, rugby, handball which involves a lot of high force, high velocity, and unpredictable movements which can test the limit of joint mobility and stability.
Using the screen on the lay person or a runner and saying he WILL get hurt if he cannot deep squat or move beautifully (symmetrically) is either just sheer ignorance of the complexities of injury and pain or just marketing at its finest.
Types of stretching: Static, Active, Dynamic, PNF & Functional Stretching
BEGINNER | November 25 2008
What is the difference between static, active, dynamic, PNF & functional stretching? Which type of stretching is better and how to do these stretches. All questions answered below.
Static Stretching
As the name suggests, static stretching involves holding a muscle at the stretched position for 20 -30 seconds. No additional benefit has been shown to extend the stretch for more than 30 seconds.
Static stretching is best done after your workouts. It has shown to decrease strength and power if done immediately before weight training. The stretch is held when you feel a nice stretch ( or slight discomfort) until you feel the muscle relaxing.
In the picture, a common hamstring stretch called the straight leg raise is shown.
Active Stretching
Active stretching involves stretching the muscle actively. In other words, you are holding the stretched position with the opposing muscle group. You muscles are playing an active role in holding the stretch position.
In the picture example, the hamstrings are stretched by using your quadriceps (opposing muscle). You cannot hold this position for more than 5-10 seconds. She is only using her hands for support and is not holding the leg up with her hands.
Dynamic Stretching
Dynamic stretching is similar to active stretching. However, in dynamic stretching you don’t hold the stretch. You are always moving or dynamic.
Dynamic stretching is not the best for improving flexibility. But it is good way to warm up for your sport and has shown to improve performance.
PNF Stretching
Propioreceptive Neuromuscular Facilitation (PNF) is said to use receptors to improve the neuromuscular (related to nerves & muscles) response of the body. The flexibility gained can be maintained by doing PNF stretches of minimum one repetition for at least 2 times a week. There are different ways to do PNF: Contract relax, Contract-Hold relax and so on.
Usually, PNF is performed with the help of a partner. But you can do it on your own with a towel for resistance. Atleast if you get hurt, you have only yourself to blame.
To perform a hamstring PNF stretch, stretch till you feel a slight discomfort, contract the hamstring isometrically (without moving) for 3-5 sec, relax the muscle and slowly deepen the stretch using your quadriceps (opposing muscle). Repeat the cycle 3-4 times. Try it, it just sounds complicated.
PNF yields greatest gains and is the fastest way known to improve the range of motion or flexibility.Recent studies have shown that there is nothing neural or propiorecptive about PNF and is due to an increase in stretch or pain tolerance. So forget the term “PNF”.
Functional Stretching
Functional Stretching is something which came out recently. Most of the strength coaches now lean towards functional stretching to improve flexibility in their athletes. Athletes mainly use free weights and not much machines because of the theory of specificity. The theory says that strength, coordination, speed, & balance is highly specific to the movement.
Based on the same theory, if you want the newly gained ROM to show up in your movements (or have the strength and coordination), the stretching should be functional or specific. Since most movements are ground based (or standing), it makes a lot of sense to do lower body stretches standing on your feet.
In the picture, the increase in flexibility or ROM may transfer better to running or other movements since it closely mimics those movements (But this is just a theory and yet to be proven I believe)
Conclusion
- Use static or PNF stretching if the muscle is really tight. Better to avoid static stretching before your workouts. Functional stretching is a better option to PNF & static, atleast theoretically.
- Use dynamic stretching as warm up rather than static stretching.
- Maintain the arch in your back and keep the non-stretched leg straight and toes pointed upright.
- Always remember to breathe while streching. Stretching shouldn’t be painful.
Now go stretch.
Related
How Much Protein Do You Need for Muscle Growth?
ADVANCED | October 24 2008
This debate about high or low protein for muscle growth has been going forever. According to my exercise physiology textbook and my professors, the Recommended Daily Allowance (RDA) of protein for strength athletes is 1.2 to 1.8 kg/bodyweight. And hence there is no rhyme or reason to consume more protein than the RDA levels to gain muscle mass or strength.
Now let’s see what’s wrong with current guidelines for protein and why you need more protein than the reccomended guidelines.
Why should you eat more protein than the recommended guidelines for muscle growth?
Protein & Recommended Dietary Allowance (RDA): The RDA is defined as the “estimate of the minimum daily average dietary intake level that meets the nutrient requirements….” Though the term “recommended” clearly sounds like optimal, the RDA for protein is defined as the “minimum” amount of protein to prevent deficiency and not the optimal amount for health (.8 kg/bdy weight).
In fact, the recent Dietary Intake report (2005) recommends 10% -35% protein of daily energy intake for adults. Protein intake based on this 10-35% of energy levels is more than twice the current RDA of protein. Lately, there has been a growing consensus among nutritional experts that the current RDA of protein is clearly inadequate for optimum health & function.
For strength athletes, the RDA of protein is 1.2 -1.7 kg/bdy wt. Again these values are based on the “minimal” intake of protein required to attain nitrogen balance. Nitrogen balance is used commonly to measure protein requirements.
Basically, a positive nitrogen balance means that you are in a state of anabolism or you are putting on some muscle. A negative nitrogen balance says that you are losing muscle. And if you are “in” nitrogen balance, it simply means you are neither losing nor gaining muscle(hope you didn’t miss the gaining part).
So eating protein based on RDA for strength athletes theoretically will only help you maintain the muscle you have.
Protein & Nitrogen Balance Method: Finding protein requirements with the nitrogen balances method have numerous limitations: It underestimates N losses from sweat, exhalation, the urea pool, and overestimates N intake. For example, nitrogen excretion from urine is used as an index of N excretion. But studies have shown excretion of N through sweat can go up by 150% with exercise.
So the studies might showing a greater protein balance might actually be lower since they are underestimating N loss & overestimating N intake.
As I mentioned earlier, the RDA recommendations are based on these nitrogen balance studies where the end point is nitrogen balance. In essence, these studies automatically assume that there is direct correlation between nitrogen balance and relevant physiological end points like strength & muscle growth. Ideally, muscle or strength should be the end point when protein requirement for athletes is determined.
So these N balance studies are not much reliable in estimating the optimal protein needs to put on muscle.
Protein & Muscle Mass Studies: Studies which did look at protein intake and muscle mass did show significant increase in strength and muscle with high protein whereas some did not. The researchers suspect the following reasons why some did not show an increase in muscle with high protein.
- The studies were of short duration and hence the small increments in muscle did not reach statistical significance and /or the existing muscle measurement techniques are not sensitive enough to record these minor changes.
- There are too many variables involved, like diet, sleep, work, training volume, fitness levels to determine the optimal protein intake for athletes from studies.
Protein & Health Concerns: There no evidence of high protein to cause any sort of health concerns in people with normal renal function. And since there are studies which did show increase in strength & muscle with high protein, it is better to be on the higher end of protein.
40% of calorie intake is considered the cut off since beyond these levels it gets harder to get adequate amounts of fat and carbs. 40 % for an 80 kg athlete will be 3.75 g/kg.
Protein & Energy Intake: It has been shown that your total energy or calorie intake can have a greater influence on muscle mass than just your protein intake. Simply put, if you are not eating enough calories, it is quite impossible to be in positive nitrogen balance and gain or even maintain muscle even with sufficient protein. You might have to go for higher protein to be in a positve balance.
A number of studies have shown greater fat loss while maintaining muscle mass on a high protein diet compared to low protein diets. So that is yet another reason to stay on the high protein band wagon.
Conclusion
Looking at all the above issues, the risk vs benefit, and the anecdotal evidences in favor of high protein, it makes no sense not to eat more protein than what the RDA reccommends for muscle growth.
My Protein recommendation for muscle growth & strength: 2.75 - 3.25 g/kg of body weight (1.25 - 1.50 gm/lb of bodyweight).
To gain serious muscle, hover around the lower end.
To maintain muscle or gain some muscle on a diet, stick to the higher end.
Related
How to Workout With Bands
BEGINNER | October 23 2008
Most people do not have time to workout or don’t feel comfortable working out in a gym or with people around. I think using bands in your office or home is a great way to start working out in your comfort zone. Try this at your office or home. These bands will not cost you more than 5-10 dollars and you can always increase or decrease the resistance by wrapping it around a couple of times. Or you can buy a thicker band.
The below workout is just a basic template which works the major muscle groups. You can do a lot more different exercises with bands.
Advantages of using bands
1. Bands are cheap
2. Unlike dumbbells or barbells, you can take it along wherever you go.
3. Can perform exercises with bands which are almost impossible with a dumbbell, like rows or pull down.
4. A variety of exercises can be performed with bands. Even you can come up with some of your own.
Disadvantages of using bands
1. Hard to keep on progressing on resistance with bands.
2. Bands can snap. And it hurts.
The exercises below are pretty self explanatory.For the Pushing & pulling band exercises, I have A & B. You can either do them in the same workout or alternate A & B every other workout. If you have any questions, do ask.
Pushing & Pulling exercises with bands: A
Pushing & Pulling exercises with bands: B
Leg exercises
Arm exercises with bands
Frequency: 2-3 times/week First 2 Weeks: 1st Set: 4 Reps | 2nd Set: 8 Reps Second 3 - 6 Weeks: 1st Set: 4 Reps | 2nd SET: 8 Reps | 3rd SET: 12 Reps Cool Down: After the workout, do some light stretching, arm swings, or walking for 4-6 min. Note: Progression is the key: When it becomes easy, buy a band with greater resistance or join a gym. Pic Courtesy: Jill Klegin
Does One A Day Weight Smart Supplement Work for Weight Loss?
BEGINNER | September 30 2008
I see this product every time I go to Walmart. And I have seen people talking about One a Day Weight Smart supplement on internet boards. Let’s see if this one has anything interesting to talk about. Or One a Day Weight Smartis it another useless fat-loss supplement wrapped in glossy papers?
One a Day Weight Smart Supplement Claims
- One A Day Weight Smart enhances your metabolism with EGCG (green tea extract).
- One a Day Weight Smart converts food to fuel with extra Chromium and key B vitamins
One a Day Weight Smart Claim 1
One A Day Weight Smart enhances your metabolism with EGCG (green tea extract)
A decrease in metabolism occurs with diets and/or when people lose weight. This is mainly attributed to the decrease in muscle mass. Exercise is one way to increase the metabolism; another way is to take natural herbal nutrients. Green tea is one such product and is one favorite ingredient in most weight loss supplements.
Green Tea mainly contains contain caffeine and polyphenols. In the past the increase in metabolism was credited solely to the caffeine content in green tea. But it is now shown that the metabolism increase with green tea is greater than of an equivalent amount of caffeine. Hence the increase in metabolism with green tea was partly attributed the polyphenols in green tea. Out of the several polyphenols, the most active one is the EGCG (Epigallocatechin gallate).
So does EGCG conatined in One A Day Weight Smart really enhance metabolism?
- The couple of studies which showed reductions in body fat with green tea extracts used green tea extracts & caffeine rather than just EGCG used in One A day Weight Smart.
- The dosage used in most studies range from 400 - 1200 mg of green tea extracts compared to 60 mg used in One A Day Weight Smart. The study which showed an increase in metabolism used 270 mg of EGCG compared to 27 mg in One A Day Weight Smart
- A recent study in 2005 which used 1000 mg (27mg in One A Day Weight Smart!) of green tea extract couldn’t find any noteworthy increase in metabolism nor decrease in body fat (1).
Conclusion 1
EGCG contained in One A Day Weight Smart will not enhance metabolism.
One a Day Weight Smart Claim 2
One A Day Weight Smart converts food to fuel with extra Chromium and key B vitamins.
A review of all weight loss studies using chromium showed around 1kg loss in a period of 6-14 weeks. If you missed it, that’s .2kg/week!
The claim of conversion of food to fuel with chromium and B vitamins with One A Day Weight Smart only happens to be true if you are born in Mars. This effect is yet to be seen in earthlings.
Conclusion 2
Chromium & B vitamins in One Day Weight Smart will not convert food to fuel
Conclusion
One A Day Weight Smart supplement will not help increase metabolism nor convert food to fuel and thus help you lose weight or fat.
Eat an apple once a day instead.
NOTE: These product claims have been changed if you go to One A Day Weight Smart supplement website. Their older claims can still be seen in other websites, like Amazon. Understandable, since they had to pay 3.2 million in fine to the Federal Trade Commission for making unsubstantiated claims.
Free Weights vs Machines
BEGINNER | September 20 2008
Should I use free weights or machines? Simple question, but the debate has been going on forever. Here is my take on the debate.
Benefits of Free Weights
Transfer of strength: You don’t sit on a chair when you lift your grocery bag; you don’t use a back support when you load your luggage in the over head cabin, then why sit with a back support when you lift weights?
Athletes using free weights, training concepts called functional training and movement training are all based on one single theory called Theory of Specificity. The theory says loud that strength, speed, balance, & coordination are very SPECIFIC to the movement.
Simply put, the more similar the exercise to the movement or skill you are trying to improve, the better the carry over or transfer. So if you want to transfer the strength you gained in the gym to the outside world, then use free weights or exercises which are similar to what you do in real life. It is usually called “functional strength”.
Variety: With 2 dumbells, you can do 100’s of exercises. On a machine, you are just stuck with one exercise. If you have been using machines all your life, there is some pretty good evidence to show that you are a boring person (just joking).
Add some free weights and spice up your workouts.
More muscles: When you use free weights, the body is using a lot more muscles to balance and coordinate, especially your core. So you are getting more bang for you buck or something similar.
Benefits of Machines
Isolate muscle: The benefit of “more muscles” with free weights comes with a price. The more muscles you use to balance and stabilize, the less you are able to isolate a muscle and use more weight.
Leg extension machine (the machine shown in pic), for example, can isolate and load your quads better than you can ever do with free weights. And the more the loading, the better it is for muscle growth.
In short, the more the balancing and stabilizing required, the less the loading. Keep this in mind when you do all those cool exercises on the swiss & bosu ball. Life is full of compromises, isn’t it?
Safer: This is pretty straight forward. Machines are much safer than free weights for a beginner and older individuals. That been said, anyone can learn to use basic free weight exercises in a few weeks.
Conclusions
As is often the case with most training debates, there is no right or wrong. It all depends on your goals and other factors.
If you are an athlete, I would stick with mostly free weights. If you just want to get in shape, it doesn’t matter what you use. If you are older, I would recommend you to use more of free weights because of all the improvements in balance and functional strength.
A general recommendation would be to exploit both free weights and machines.
Related
How Many Reps & Sets for a Beginner?
Why & How To Warm Up for Weight Training?
Ab Exercise Myths
BEGINNER | September 14 2008
Ab Myth 1: Do not use weights for ab exercises.
I see this myth all the time in the gym, but see no logic whatsoever. If you use weights for biceps, chest and every other muscle, why not use weights for abs? Your abdominal muscle is no different than the rest of the muscles in the human body.
If you can already see your abs, using weights can only make them look a lot better. If it is under a thick layer of fat, your focus should be on your diet and cardio than ab exercises in the first place.
The only ones who should stay away from weights for abs are those have a lot of fat around their abs; doing abs with weights can make their stomach look bigger as the muscle grows underneath. This is probabaly the number one ab exercise myth.
Ab Myth 2: High reps will tone your abs.
Spot reduction is the most well known myth in fitness. Ironically, you see people in every gym across the world trying to “spot reduce”. You cannot lose fat from a specific area on your body by exercising that specific area, period.
Women have more fat on the back of their triceps & hip; men have more fat on their low abs and low back. It is simply because that’s how we are wired genetically and is not because you do less exercise for these specific body parts. So it doesn’t really matter whether you do low, medium or high reps for your abs, or for that matter any other muscle.
When you start losing weight (eating less and doing cardio), the body gradually loses fat from those stubborn areas, including your abs.
Ab Myth 3: Doing abs on a stability ball will improve balance.
The use free weights by athletes, functional training and movement training are based on one theory called the theory of Specificity - It says strength, balance, & coordination is very specific to the movement.
Simply put, if you want to get better at running, you run; if you want to get better at running on a treadmill, you run on a treadmill not outside. The more close the exercise to the movement or skill which you are trying to improve, the better. So if you lay on a ball and do crunches, you will only become more balanced lying on a ball and doing crunches. The balance you gained lying on the ball won’t carry over to other activities, like running or walking.
Ab Myth 4: Hanging leg raises work your lower abs.
Anatomically speaking, there is no lower or upper abs. The rectus abdominis is one single muscle. They are called upper and lower abs because they are innervated by different nerves and hence could be emphasized differently. And even if they could be emphasized, leg raises do not do a good job.
The major function of the rectus abdominis muscle is flexion or rounding of your spine. If you are just raising your legs without rounding your spine, you are mainly using a different muscle group called hip flexors. This is simply because ab muscles are not attached to your legs and hence abs in no way can raise your legs. The burn you feel from leg raises is mainly from the hip flexors which run deep below the lower part of the abdomen.
If you want to emphasize lower abs, make sure your round your spine when you bring your legs up. The same applies for upper abs too.
Starting College & Strength Training
BEGINNER | August 23 2008
Welcome to college. Just like each one of you, even I couldn’t help trying to look good for the opposite sex. Whatever they say, you cannot just ignore the way you look. Here are some tips which could have made it atleast easier for me then, I think:
Realistic goals: Setting goals is easy; setting realistic goals is hard. It is so easy to look at models and bodybuilders in muscle magazines and dream of becoming one. However, the reality is that most of them have some incredible genetics or are on some banned “supplements”, or most likely both.
Even if you get there (and some of us will never), the question is how long can you maintain that low level of body fat and still have a normal life. If you think it is easy, just ask a natural bodybuilder.
That been said, everyone can look a lot more impressive than they are now if they start working out and eating healthy. Atleast now you won’t feel that bad when you look at those pictures.
Shaping & Toning: You will a read lot more terms like these which means a lot of nothing. There are only two things that you need to worry about in the gym:
1) Muscle growth
2) Fat loss
You can look good if you get either one of the above. But you will look great if you can get both.
Pump, burn & feel: Pump, feel, burn are all good, but if you don’t over load or increase the weights you are lifting, there is no reason for your muscles to grow. Most people get caught up with the minuatae, like number of sets, reps, feel, changing exercises and so on, but just ignore the cardinal rule of weight training – that is increasing the weights you are lifting.
Keep a workout log and try to increase the poundages whenever possible. If you hit a plateau, then start worrying.
Shaping Exercises: You cannot shape your muscles; shape is genetically predetermined (blame it on your mom & dad if you want). If anything, you can only make them bigger.
Quit doing all those fancy exercises thinking that you are going to look like Jennnifer Lopez. If it indeed were possible, all men on this planet would look like Arnold Scwharzenneger. Every magazine will have a new exercises to “shape your thighs & butt” every month. If you think about it, what else can they change every month? Human physiology do not change every month, right.
Supplements: I have been through it too. Which supplement gets you a six pack the fastest? 99.99% of the supplements out there are made to make money for someone and not to get you in shape. The only proven ones are protein and creatine. Even those can only help if you put in the work and eat right. If there is a supplement that makes you work hard and eat right, buy it.
There is a lot more to write. But I am keeping it short.
Conclusion
On a final note, I would say, or as they say, don’t miss the forest because of the trees. We workout, we go to school, we work just so that we can have a happy and healthy life. Don’t get so caught up in how you want to look. Even hollywood stars who are at the pinnacle of looks and money kill themselves because they are unhappy. So enjoy the process - enjoy working out, enjoy the friends you make at the gym, enjoy eating healthy, enjoy learning, and you will slowly find your self looking good even without a mirror.
Which is Better for Health: High Carb or Low Carb?
ADVANCED | August 17 2008
The effect of changing the macronutrient composition (protein, carbs & fat) to increase weight loss hasn’t shown anything to be excited about. It has been shown again and again that it is the total calories that matter and not the amount of fat and carbohydrates in the diet. However, the amount of protein, fat & carbs in diet has clearly shown to have an effect on cardiovascular disease markers, like insulin resistance, LDL & HDL, & triglycerides.
So if you had a choice will you pick a high carb or a low carb diet?
High carb or high fat?
It sounds pretty logical to assume that the easiest way to lower cardiovascular risk markers (triglyceride levels, VLDL, and so on) is to lower fat intake and increase carbohydrates in your diet. However, studies seem to show the exact opposite.
Number of intervention studies have shown people on a high carb diet (60-75%) to have significantly high levels of cardiovascular risk markers compared to a high fat diet (30-45%). And this has been shown in lean, obese and insulin resistant individuals.
It was believed that conversion of carbohydrates to fat only happens if people are in a positive energy balance and if they are eating insane amounts of carbs. But new isotope techniques have shown that the conversion of carbs to fat, though small, can even occur when the intake and expenditure are balanced.
But there is more to the story.
Low glycemic or high glycemic carbs?
So low carbs are better than high carbs, but can the type of carbs impact your cardiovascular risk markers? The earlier studies which did show increase in triglycerides and other markers used simple sugars as carbohydrates, which has a high GI (glycemic index). Apparently, the increase in triglycerides and all the bad stuff which happened with the high carb diet studies was due to the high GI carbs and can be eliminated with low GI and/or fiber rich diet. Though a low GI seems to be beneficial, there is no conclusive evidence to show that glycemic index of foods is highly important for healthy individuals. And there is a lot of controversy regarding the classification of foods based on GI.
The concept of glycemic index appears to be more important for insulin resistant and diabetic folks. High insulin levels with high carbs can, atleast theoretically, worsen the metabolic profile seen in insulin resistant and diabetic folks. As long as you are not chugging sugar and fruit juice for your carbohydrates, you don’t have to go crazy on low GI foods as some do.
Saturated or unsaturated fats?
Now let’s see if different fats have an independent effect on these above markers.
Lowering saturated fat and transfat and/or replacing saturated with unsaturated fats (polyunsaturated/monounsaturated or both) has shown to improve insulin resistance, lower cholesterol and LDL, increase HDL and lower risk of coronary heart disease.
As long as the fat is not exceedingly high (which makes it difficult to control calories), it is clear that the quality of fat matters a lot. Though there is some substantial evidence for polyunsaturated fatty acids (fish, canola oil, olive oil) for lowering heart disease, for some reason, routine dietary advice ( for ex., the nutrional pyramid) seems to emphazise the quantity rather than the quality of fat in the diet.
Conclusion
From the available data, it is not really clear if the general recommendation of 55-60% carbohydrates ( high carb) for healthy individuals is the optimum ratio for general health. And considering the prevalence of insulin resistance and the easy accessibility to high GI foods and drinks in our society, I would personally lean towards a moderate carb (40-45%) diet.
General Recommendations
1 | Keep your saturated fats below 10%.
2 | Keep your total fat level betwen 25-45%.
3 | Most of your fat should be from unsaturated fats, preferrably omega-3’s (fish, canola oil, olive oil)
4 | Limit your cholestrol intake
5 | Get your carbs mostly from vegetables, fruits, legumes and whole grains.
6 | And don’t forget to exercise.
Reference 1
Reference 2
Reference 3
Reference 4
Reference 5
Reference 6
Related
How Do You Know if You are Healthy or Not?
Are 8-12 reps the best for muscle growth?
ADVANCED | August 09 2008
The most effective rep range for muscle growth? Strength and fitness organizations, exercise physiology textbooks, and fitness magazines have all gladly accepted 8-12 reps or repetitions as the scientifically established best rep range for hypertrophy or muscle growth.
But now it is ever so clear that the 8-12 reps range has nothing special besides some faulty science supporting it.
Now let’s see on what scientific basis this particular repetiton range was shown to be the best for muscle growth and where the so-called science gets unscientific.
Evidence for 8 - 12 reps: The Growth Hormone (GH) Hypothesis
Growth hormone (GH) is anabolic in nature.
Growth retardation is seen in Growth hormone (GH) deficient adults whereas increased growth is seen with over secretion of growth hormone. Gains in muscle and strength in growth hormone deficient individuals after growth hormone (GH) administration is commonly observed. Further, growth hormone (GH) is also shown to be effective in preventing muscle lose in catabolic conditions, like burns.
All the above observations easily lead to the assumption that GH plays a major role in muscle growth.
Since 8 - 12 reps were used by bodybuilders and 1 - 4 reps by powerlifters, the researchers suspected the 8-12 reps to be causing a greater release of GH than 1- 4 reps and thereby making those muscle bigger.
And guess what? As they suspected, a greater GH response was seen with moderate weight with short rest periods compared to heavier weight with longer rest period. For example, one study reported that performance of 20 sets of 1RM produced a slight increase in GH, whereas a substantial increase in GH was observed following 10 sets of 10 repetitions with 70% of 1RM.
And thus the 8-12 reps was scientifically proven to be the ideal rep range for muscle growth, and as they say the rest is history.
Now what is wrong with the GH hypothesis?
Now let’s look through some of the holes in the GH hypothesis:
Metabolic Stressors: Activities that stress the metabolic pathways like hyperventilation, breath holding, hypoxia and even nicotinic acid ingestion have been shown to significantly increase the secretion of GH.
And none of these activities has even remotely shown to increase or even help muscle growth. Have you? (1)
Correlation: Though 8-12 reps with shorter rest periods showed the greater GH release, it is only correlative evidence at best.
It does not necessarily mean that it is the increased GH that is causing the muscle growth. There could be many hormones and protein that are at a higher level or even at lower level that could affect muscle growth in appositive way. And mind you, there is no study to show 8-12 reps/repetitions to be better than other rep ranges for muscle growth.
GH Injection: The ideal method to study if the increase in GH indeed causing the increase in muscle growth is to inject Growth hormone (GH) and study the results.
Number of studies has looked at healthy older individuals with GH administration and exercise, but most of them showed no increase in muscle mass nor strength. The studies which did show an increase in lean body mass was revealed to be due to increase in water retention and connective tissue growth than actual increase in muscle. The same (or no effect) was also shown in young men and experienced weight lifters too (2, 3).
The inability off growth hormone (GH) even at physiological and at supra physiological doses to elicit muscle growth is more than enough evidence to doubt the efficacy of those tiny spikes of GH with exercise on muscle growth.
Local Growth Factors: The biggest blow to the GH hypothesis was the recent discovery of central role played by local factors in muscle growth. And these local factors are the reason why injecting GH and other methods to raise GH haven’t really worked as expected.
It is pretty clear now that these local factors, like MGF (Mechano Growth Factor) and IGF-1 (Insulin-like Growth factor) in the muscle can exclusively regulate muscle growth without any help from systemic GH. Animal studies have shown substantial increase in muscle growth even after the GH axis was surgically removed.
In humans, GH deficient adults and even elderly with low GH & IGF-1 levels are able to increase muscle mass with resistance training. These local factors are so potent that researchers have already been working with ant-doping committee to prevent MGF abuse. (I will write more about these local factors in upcoming articles) (4).
Practical Application
If anything above makes any sense, then there is no reason to hold on to 8-12 reps as the best or the most effective for muscle growth. No reason, as well, to hold on to practices, like breathing squats, 20 rep squats, and working out on an empty stomach to raise growth hormone and thereby gain some muscle.
Reference 1
Reference 2
Reference 3
Reference 4
Reference 5
Reference 6
Cardio Machines: Workout in Style
BEGINNER | August 06 2008
Of late, it has been pretty clear that the word exercise has been replaced by entertain in the fitness industry. As someone said (by me), “give me entertainment, and I will give you exercise”. If you can enterain them, they will be more than happy to exercise for you. And this seems to be the driving philosophy of these 21st century exercise machines. You will be forgiven more than once if you mistook these spectacular machines for some time-machine from space age movies.
There are a lot of companies churning out new products every couple of years. But the cardio industry giants are Life Fitness, Precor, & Star Trac.
I just have the commercial products here which are technologically and aesthetically a few steps ahead (obviously more expensive) than their home or consumer products. Since ellitpicals and treadmills are the most popular, I just didn’t inlude steppers & bikes.
Life Fitness
Life Fitness boasts a 30-year history of making cardio machines which is unmatched in the industry. Their latest high-tech 95X series have set a really high standard for the cardio industry.
A few of the new features include, Ipod Compatibilty, virtual trainer, 15’ LCD touch screen, customized programs and landscape views. You can charge your IPOd, display your music list on the treadmill console and even play your songs on the console without have to fiddle with your Ipod. The USB drive capabilty save your workouts and to help track your workouts on your computer. If you need help with the machine or love someone to talk motivations, wake the virtual trainer. Bored with display, change it to a mountain veiw and try to conquer it. And did I tell you it is touch screen?
Precor
Precor is another leader in cardio machines. Unlike Life Fitness, they have nothing new to show off. The console is pretty straightforward. You have your speed, incline and all the usual stuff.
Star Trac
Star Trac is one company which has gradually moved up to take a place along Life Fitness & Precor. Besides Life Fitness, Star Trac is only other compnay to have a touch screen, Ipod Compatiiblty, and landscape views. (I couldn’t get any pictures of the console here).
So if you ever seems to get bored while doing cardio, it is time to try out these cuties.
How Many Reps & Sets for a Beginner?
BEGINNER | July 16 2008
How many repetitions or reps and sets should I do is one of the most common questions beginners have. And as always, the common answers are usually confusing. By the end of this article, you will learn the optimum number of sets and reps you should be doing as a beginner.
How many reps for a Beginner?
General rep recommendation? Beginners are always advised to start with 8 -12 repetitions or reps. Mainly because the weight is light and this reps range is best for muscle growth.
Why are 8-12 reps NOT ideal for beginners? Learning proper technique becomes critical for a beginner. Beginners should be more concerned about perfecting their form than worrying about muscle growth and strength.
- Too much burn: The 8-12 repetition range increases the lactic acid accumulation and brings the “burn”. The more the burn, the harder it is to focus on proper form, especially for beginners.
- Long set: An 8-12 repetition is a long set. The longer the set, the easier it is to loose your focus (and your form) The only benefit of using an 8-12 reps range is that it gives your lots of practice (of course with bad form).
Ideal rep range for beginners? So the best range for beginners would be 6 - 8 reps.
This will minimize the burn, keep the set short and will also give you enough practice with the movement.
What the heck is a rep range? A rep range (like, 6-8 reps) will give you an objective measure of when to go up the weights compared to single reps number (like, 6 reps/repetition).
For instance, you start with 45 lb for 2 sets of 6 reps. Now keep using the same weight for your workouts until you can do 2 sets of 8 reps. Now you know that your strength has gone up and you should use a heavier weight.
How many sets for a beginner?
Compared to reps, the question of number of sets seems to be more complicated. Some say one set is best while others say more sets are better.
Luckily, for beginners, both research and anecdotal evidence have shown 1-2 sets are all that is required.
Things to remember about sets & reps
- Don’t go to failure on these sets. This will ruin your form and defeat the whole purpose. You do not have to go to failure on your sets for your muscles to grow.
- Though they say certain repetition/rep ranges are better for muscle and for strength, there is very little evidence to support this. You can do 6-8 reps and still grow some big muscles.
Related
Why & How to Warm up for Weight Training
Free Weights vs Machines
How to Workout With Bands
How Do You Know if You are Healthy or Not?
BEGINNER | July 02 2008
How do you know you if could end up with diabetes, stroke, high blood pressure, certain cancers, high cholesterol and osteoarthritis? Of course, these diseases are associated with obesity or overweight. But how do you know if you are just overweight or obese or just normal? Can you have a normal weight and still be at risk for the above diseases?
In this article, we will use two simple steps to know if you are healthy or not: Measurement & Assessment.
Measurement
There are three key measures which indicate you risk of having diseases like diabetes, high blood pressure, stroke and so on. Let’s look at each.
Body mass index (BMI): BMI is number calculated from your height and weight, which shows if you are normal, overweight or obese.
How to measure BMI? Use the equation below to find your BMI. Or use the table (values are in pounds and inches) to find your weight level or BMI.
Table. Find your weight at the bottom of the graph. Go straight up from that point until you come to the line that matches your height. Then look to find your weight group.
Waist circumference: Weight is not the only risk factor; The location of your fat on our body is another risk factor and even more important that body weight.
How to measure waist circumference? Place a tape measure around your abdomen just above your hip bone. Make sure that the tape is snug, and is parallel to the floor. Exhale, and measure your waist.
Other risk factors: Besides weight & waist circumference, there are other risk factors too. Do you have any of these risk factors?
high blood pressure (hypertension)
high LDL-cholesterol (“bad” cholesterol)
low HDL-cholesterol (“good” cholesterol)
high triglycerides
high blood glucose (sugar)
family history of premature heart disease
physical inactivity
cigarette smoking
Assesment
Find your BMI or your weight classification from the table below and read across:
Now, remember that this table above gives only your disease risk relative to your normal body weight.
To find the absolute risk, you have to include the Other risk factors besides BMI & circumference. You have a high absolute risk factor and needs to lose weight and treat your risk factors urgently, if you are:
Obese (BMI > 30).
Overweight (BMI: 25 - 29.9) AND 2 or more risk factors.
Waist Greater than 40in (M) /35 in (F) waist AND have 2 or more risk factors.
Things to remember
- BMI do not take into account your muscle. So if you are an athlete or have a lot of muscle, BMI will not be accurate.
- Waist circumference is an independent predictor of disease risk. In some populations (Asian Americans and Asians) and older folks, waist circumference is a better predictor than BMI.
- You can be at normal body weight, but if you waist circumference is more than the recommended, you are still at risk.
Conclusion
Your BMI, waist circumference and presence of other risk factors determine you risk of getting serious diseases. If you know any of your friends or dear ones who you think can use this article, send it to them.
How Many Calories Should I have to Lose or Gain Weight?
BEGINNER | June 26 2008
Losing weight or gaining weight is all about calories. It doesn’t really matter what you eat or when you eat. If you don’t agree, I would recommend you to read my article The Best Diet for Fat LossFor people who agree, let’s move on:
How do I find my daily caloric expenditure?
In order to find how many calories you should have to lose or gain weight or your maintenanace calories, you first need to find out how many calories you are spending during a day or your daily calorie expenditure. Daily calorie expenditure consists of three components:
Daily Caloric Expenditure= Basal metabolic rate (BMR) + Diet-induced Thermogenisis (DT) + Activity-induced thermogenisis (AT). We will look at each as we go along.
Figure 1: The pie chart shows the percentage contribution of each component to your daily calorie expenditure.
How do I find my Basal metabolic rate (BMR)?
Basal metabolic rate is the number of calories you burn to maintain your vital functions such as breathing, pumping blood, maintaining muscle and nervous system and so on.
The ideal way is to use an indirect calorimeter to find your basal metabolic rate (BMR), but it is clearly impractical. So forget the ideal way. The other option is to estimate or predict your BMR using a population specific equation: We will use the Harris-Benedict Equation, which is specific for sedentary and moderately active individuals (I have slightly changed the original equation to use lbs and in., but the equation remains same):
Table1. The equation to find your basal metabolic rate (BMR).
For example, I am 5’8”.To convert my height from feet to inches, multiply with 12. That is, 5 ft * 12 = 60 in. So, 60 in+8 in = 68 in.
Weight = 160 lb.
Height = 68 in.
Age = 29 yrs
So my BMR (Men) = 66.47 + 6.23 *(160)lb + 12.67 * (68)in - 6.76 * (29)yrs
BMR = 66.47 + 996.8+ 861.56 - 196.04
BMR = 1925 - 196
BMR = 1729
How do I find my activity-induced thermogenisis (AT)?
Activity- induced thermogenisis (AT) is the number of calories you burn while exercising, walking around, watching TV and so forth.
To calculate your activity induced thermogenisis (AT), multiplying BMR with the appropriate Activity Factor from the table below.
Table 2. Activity factor to find you activity-induced thermogenisis (AT). For example, my AT is 1.5 1.5 (AT) * 1729 (BMR) = 2594 calories. So my AT = 2594 - 1729(BMR) = 865 calories.
How do I find my diet-induced thermogenisis (DT)?
Diet- induced thermogenisis (DT) is the number of calories you spend for digesting, absorbing and storing all that food you eat.
Diet- induced thermogenisis (DT) is usually 10% of the BMR (.1 multiplied by your BMR).
For example, DT = .1 * 1729(BMR) = 173 calories.
Daily caloric expenditure
Therefore, Total Caloric Expenditure= Basal metabolic rate (BMR) + Diet-induced Thermogenisis (DT) + Activity-induced thermogenisis (AT).
So my Daily caloric expenditure = BMR + AT+ DT = 1729+865+173 = 2767 calories.
Conclusion
That is all. If I want to lose weight, I eat slightly less than my caloric expenditure. To gain weight, I eat slightly more than my daily caloric expenditure.
Related
The Best Diet for Fat Loss
BEGINNER | June 22 2008
I ain’t no psychic. Nor do I know how to read minds. But I do know that we all have some chubby little fat to lose. No matter what “those” people say, if you think you look fat in the mirror, the only objective way to unfat yourself is to lose weight or stop using the mirror. Losing weight is easy (Ok, at least theoretically).
What is the problem?
Picking a diet from a myriad of diets to lose that weight seems to be the hardest part these days. There is the Atkins diet, South Beach Diet, The Zone diet, The Paleo Diet, The warriors diet, The GI diet, The 3-hour diet, The Mediterranean diet, The metabolic type diet, The French Diet and many more, and a few more. And what do they all have in common?
They all are least 200 pages long and claim to be better than the rest! I know it’s complicated, and they do write to make it even more complicated. Fortunately, our body likes to keep things simple and uncomplicated.
The human body goes by some simple rules when it comes to losing or gaining weight. If energy intake is less than the output, you will lose weight; and this is the fodder for all diet books out there.
How diets work?
All they do is “trick” you into eating less instead of directly asking you to eat less.
Low carb diets work by making you eat less carbs. And carbs form a big part of your meals. Anytime you scoop such a big chunk from your meal, you tend to eat less.
Low fat diets work by making you eat less fat. Fat is more calorie dense than carbs and protein and hence the less you eat fat, the less calories you take in. Also there are other diets which stuff you on lots of high volume, low calorie foods, like vegetables so that you end up eating less of calorie rich foods.
The diet based on glycemic index (GI), makes you eat low GI carb foods than high GI foods to prevent those insulin spikes, and minimize hunger and in turn helps you eat less. And yes, portion control works along the same lines too.
Figure: A simple balance scale explains weight loss and weight gain.
Why some diets work and some do not?
But a good question is if it’s all about calories in and out, how come some people do well on certain diets and some don’t?
And I would say it basically comes down to hunger control. Some folks tend to manage the hunger much better with certain diets and hence have better adherence. Whereas some folks are miserable on certain diets and soon quit.
Most of it has a lot to do with physiological and environmental factors. For example, low carb diets, like Atkins might be the worst choice for someone who indulges in physical and mental labor, like a college student or an athlete. Without carbs, they are always tired and hungry and their performance in school or in their sport goes down; it’s just a matter of time before they start gorging and breaking the diet. These folks need energy and they will do much better on a high carb or a moderate carb diet.
On the other extreme, some folks get those uncontrollable cravings, mood, and energy swings with a high carb diet and tend to eat a lot more than if they had been on a low carb diet. Most often they are people whose body type doesn’t respond well to insulin (insulin resistant individuals). It requires a little bit of trial and error from your part to see where you belong.
Another good question is how come some people start losing weight on a diet but then start to plateau or gain weight?
Almost all diets do not make you count calories. Probably because they know humans are inherently lazy, and hate diets that have us count and calculate; or just simply diets which make us work harder. Only a handful of diets emphasize calorie counting. Weight Watchers is one of them, but even they use a point system to save you from the hassle of counting calories. Also to make matters worse, the more you lose weight, the better the body fights back. And this is very true whatever diet you follow.
One cool way the body fights back is by ramping up hunger. For instance, someone follows an Atkins diet and has lost a lot of weight. But now he is not losing/ is gaining weight though he is eating very few carbs. How come? The obvious reason is that his hunger signals have gone up as they should have, and he is compensating it by eating more of “allowed” foods in the diet like protein and fat and thereby taking in more calories. Anyhow, the best diet is one which helps control hunger and thereby contrl calories the best. Or simply put, the best diet is the one that you can stick to.
Conclusion
Now, as they all do, I will give an outline of the main points we discussed: no matter what they say diets work by making you eat less, individualize your diet based on your life style and body make up, and try to keep an approximate count of calories if you ever decide to maintain the lost weight.
Related
Is HIIT the Most Effective & Efficient Program for Weight Loss
Which Equation to Calculate My Daily Maintenance Calories?
ADVANCED | June 21 2008
Understanding how to find daily maintenance calories and Resting Metabolic Rate (RMR/BMR) is vital if you are trying to lose weight. After reading the whole article, you will have a better understanding of calculating daily maintenance calories (and RMR) and the issues revolving around it.
What are maintenance calories?
Maintenance calories are the number of total calories you burn during a day or your daily caloric requirement.
As shown in the pie chart 1, It can be broken down to three pieces:
Daily Caloric Expenditure= Resting Metabolic rate (RMR) + Thermogenic effect of food + Activity thermogenisis
As shown below in pie chart 2, activity thermogenisis can be further divided into two: Exercise activity thermogenisis + Nonexercise activity thermogenisis.
Why is calculating RMR so important?
From the first pie chart it is pretty clear that Resting Metabloic Rate (RMR) forms a big chunk of your daily maintenance calories (60 -70%). If that’s clear, then the importance of accurately calculating RMR to find your maintenance calories becomes easily clear.
Why is measuring or estimating RMR a problem?
RMR or Resting Metabolic Rate is the number of calories you burn to maintain your vital functions such as breathing, pumping blood, maintaining muscle and nervous system at resting conditions.
Measuring RMR:Measuring RMR accurately requires the use of an apparatus called indirect calorimetry. It’s not just you, but most can’t afford that expensive piece of equipment. So forget about the measurement option of RMR.
Estimating RMR:The second and our last option is to estimate RMR. Fortunately, different equations have been developed to estimate or predict your RMR. Unfortunately, there are problems associated with each of them.
- Equation Errors: As is the case for any estimation or prediction equation, it comes with a load of errors.
- Number of equations: Over 138 different equations have been developed by over 40 different authors to estimate or predict RMR.
- Population specific: Population specific means these equations will only stay valid if they are applied to populations for whom these equations were developed in the first place. So an equation developed for obese will give large errors if used on a normal healthy individual. Or an equation developed for younger folks for RMR can result in different numbers for an older person.
So which RMR equation should I use?
Normal healthy individuals:Harris-Benedict equation was the first equation to be developed and still is used widely for normal healthy individuals, even in clinical settings. I must add that though it reads BMR (instead of RMR), the measurement conditions were for RMR and hence it is technically RMR.
Table 1.Harris-Benedict equation
Overweight & Obese Individuals:
Mifflin / Bernstein/Robertson & Reid equations
Mifflin is also used for normal individuals and sometimes believed to better than Harris - Benedict (established in 1919) since it is relatively recent and hence it represents our current life style. That been said, there is no single best one as each has shown to better than the other in different studies. So pick the name you like the most.
Table 2. Mifflin’s equation
Athletes & active individuals
Cunningham equation
Studies have shown fat-free mass to account for almost 80% of the variation seen in RMR. So it makes a lot of sense to calculate RMR based on fat free mass (FFM). And guess what, Cunningham uses FFM as the predictor variable to estimate RMR. Cunningham used the data from the Harris-Benedict study to formulate the equation.
Table 3. Cunningham’s equation
Though both used non athletes in the Cunnigham study, considering the life styles in those days the participants (year1919) could easily represent active individuals. This was kind of confirmed by a study done on endurance athletes (active individuals): In the study, only Cunningham, predictions (followed by Harris-Benedict equation) fell within the accepted range.
However, again I remind that these equations are population specific. And a specific equation to calculate RMR for weight lifters or bodybuilders (greater FFM and less fat mass) is yet to be formulated.
NOTE: Lest you forget, along with RMR, you have to calculate the thermic effect of food and activty thermogenesis to get your Total Caloric intake.
Conclusion
I hope now it is clear that there is no single best equation to estimate Resting Metabolic Rate or RMR. For most, the Harris Benedict or Mifflin would work just fine. If you know your body fat percentage and if you are quite active, Cunningham should be your first choice to find your RMR.
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Why Older People Should Do Weight Training?
BEGINNER | June 20 2008
If you think you are getting old, you better read it. If you think age is just a number, I would recommend you to read (just in case).
What is the problem?
It has been pretty much established that there is a 1-2% decline in your muscle mass beginning in your fourth decade. This loss of muscle with aging was such an important finding that they even came up with a pet name for this phenomenon – they called it “sarcopenia”.
So why is muscle loss a problem with age?
The loss of muscle with age has been associated with a number of health problems:
Functional independence: Most of your day-to-day activities are dependent on your physical strength. Ironically, strength is exactly what you lose as you get older. Your strength and power are directly proportional to the muscle mass you carry. So the less muscle you have, the less you move around(or function) without others help. Makes sense?
Falls would come under this category too. Falls in the elderly results in a sharp decline in functional independence and overall quality of life. Again reminds us of the significance of maintaining your strength and muscle with age.
Bone density: This one is pretty clear. Your bone strength and density is highly depended on your muscle mass (and strength).
Obesity:Muscle mass is said to be the largest contributor to your resting metabolic rate (the amount of calories you burn doing nothing). Now I partly see why people find it harder to stay lean or keep the weight off as they get older.
Critical Illness: Loss of muscle mass is a major problem for people suffering from critical illness like cancer, traumatic injury, burns and so on. There seems to be more than a doubling of protein needs in these folks. And folks with limited reserves of muscle seem to respond pretty poorly to these stresses (even to the extent to affect survival).
Figure: A model of the age-related muscle loss (sarcopenia) and how it effects daily function. The reduced physical activty further worsens muscle loss through a postive feedback loop.
So how do I increase my muscle mass?
Good question. The best and the simplest way to increase muscle mass is by weight training.
What are the other benefits of weight training?
There are other benefits of resistance training which are less talked about:
Diabetes: Improvement in insulin sensitivity was always believed to be only effectively possible through endurance exercise. Now, number of studies have shown improvements in blood glucose control with weight training. In fact, a recent head to head comparison of weight training and endurance training showed weight training to be more effective in improving glucose control than endurance exercise. Also, improvements in blood lipid profile were only seen in the strength training group which made the researchers to conclude weight training to be an important intervention for diabetes.
Blood Pressure: Recent studies have clearly shown weight training to be effective in lowering blood pressure. There is some debate about the increase in arterial stiffness (could be bad) with resistance training, but the research is not really conclusive.
Depression and Sleep disorders: Weight training has been shown to alleviate depression symptoms and improved sleep. Both of these problems are pretty relevant to elderly.
Sub-maximal Endurance: The increase in sub-maximal endurance is generally a sought out benefit of walking, jogging and running. Weight training has also shown to improve sub-maximal endurance to a similar extent, if not more. There have been some concerns over weight training attenuating endurance training adaptations. But this has been disproven by quite a few studies which showed no loss of endurance adaptations when strength training is combined with endurance training.
Conclusion
Considering the potential benefits of weight training in improving function, reducing chronic diseases, increasing strength and muscle mass, and even improving endurance capacity, weight training could be better than aerobic exercise, particularly for the elderly.
Anyway, to make a long story short, weight training is good for you, and is now shown to be even better if you are older.
Related
Why & How To Warm Up for Weight Training?
How Creatine Works?
ADVANCED | June 17 2008
How Creatine Monohydrate works? Out of the thousands of supplements out there, creatine and protein are the only two which has been scientifically proven to work ti increase muscle mass growth and strength.
What was the purpose of the creatine study?
The mechanism by which creatine helps in improving strength is pretty clear; however, the effects of creatine in increasing muscle growth/mass and its underlying mechanisms are still questioned. Hence the study was conducted to find out how creatine helps in increasing muscle mass.
What do we know & do not know about creatine?
Water Retention: Creatine has shown to pull water into the muscle which obviously makes the muscle look bigger. This unique ability of creatine seems to have convinced many that the increase in muscle mass with creatine intake is simply due to water retention.
Muscle Fiber Growth: Nonetheless, studies have clearly shown a significant increase in actual muscle cross sectional (across all fiber types) with creatine intake plus strength training.
This creatine study not only shows an increase in fiber cross sectional area but also for the first time reveals an important mechanism behind this increase in muscle mass with creatine intake.
What is that unique mechanism of Creatine?
Understanding this unique mechanism will also reveal why I picked this study or why creatine is rightly called the “poor man’s steroid”.
Unique Creatine Mechanism: Unlike other cells in the body, muscle cells (or muscle fibers) are multinucleated. Considering how a muscle cell is way larger and complex than the rest of the cells in the body, it makes a lot of sense to have more than one nuclei to control the complex tasks in the muscle.
For instance, if your favorite restaurant was a muscle and the cooks the nuclei, it’s pretty safe to say that the number of cooks sets the limit to the size of the restaurant. Similarly (or somewhat), the size of your muscle is ultimately limited by the number of nuclei you have in your muscle.
Simply put, you cannot grow bigger muscles without additional nuclei to take care of the extra muscle.So where do we get these nuclei from?
Figure: A muscle fiber with nuclei shown in blue and satellite cell shown in red.
These muscle nuclei sprouts from specialized cells around the muscle called satellite cells. So any increase in satellite cells means some of these cells could be “blossoming” into new nuclei.
Anabolic steroids have clearly shown to increase the number of satellite cells and muscle nuclei even without any strength training stimulus to facilitate the addition of nuclei. Now, guess what happens when you combine steroids with training.
What were the results of the Creatine study?
- Creatine intake along with training was shown to cause a substantial increase in the number of satellite cells and myonuclei compared to strength training alone and strength training with protein intake.
- Further, creatine intake with resistance training showed the greatest increase in muscle fiber size compared to other groups.
What was the creatine dosage?
- Loading Phase: Creatine monohydrate loading (4 times a day) for 7 days.
- Maintenance Phase: creatine (6gms) was supplemented once everyday with carbohydrates (14 gms) for 15 weeks.
Anyhow, to keep a long story short, creatine works in increasing muscle mass, and it works really well too!
Related
- Creatine Increases Dihydrotestosterone (DHT): Is Creatine Bad For Your Health?
- Is Creatine Ethyl Ester Better than Creatine Monohydrate?
- Why & When You Should Have a Protein Shake
Why & How To Warm Up for Weight Training?
BEGINNER | June 16 2008
Warm is an integral part of your workout, be it cardio or weight lifting. But many either skip the warm up or just do it wrong. If you think you are one of them, you need help:
What is a warm up?
In simple terms, any sort of activity intended to prepare yourself for your exercise or sport.There are two types of warm up:
Passive warm up: Passive warm up involves warming your muscle or core temperature with saunas, hot baths, warm clothing, and heating pads. Since there is no activity, it is called passive. In contrast, and as you guessed, an active warm involves an activity to raise your core or muscle temperature.
Active warm up: Active warm up can be further divided into types: General warm up & Specific warm up.
A General warm up includes walking, jogging, and calisthenics, hereas the specific warm involves activities which are specific to the sport or the exercise you are preparing for.
A Specific warm up could be short sprints before sprinting, 1 or 2 sets of light-weight bench press before your bench press or stretching your hamstrings (or back of your thighs) before running.
Why warm up?
If you believe in improving performance and preventing injuries, a warm up is always recommended.
Quite a few studies have shown performance increments in the form of increased strength, power and speed in short term (less than 10 seconds) and intermediate (greater than 10 but less than 5 minutes) performances. Research has also shown improvements in endurance events which lasts for more than 5 minutes.
Table: Some of the benefits of warm up are credited to these specific effects. Though universally accepted, the injury prevention part of warm up has less been less convincing in research. And it is beyond the scope of the article to go into these issues. Anyhow, the most recent review on stretching and warm up, do recommend warm up and stretching in preventing injuries.
How To warm up?
Now that you know the basics, I know you can’t to wait to warm up. Here we go:
General warm up: 5- 10 minutes walking, jogging, cycling
Specific warm up: 1, 2 or 3 sets with lighter weights than your work sets on that specific exercise.
The specific warm up provides additional benefits to those provided by general warm up by increasing your nervous system activation. Some people tend to skip the general warm up and start with the specific warm up, and that is fine.
Figure: A typical strength workout (chest emphasis) highlighting warm up set’s intensity and sequence. As shown in the figure, the intensity of warm up should gradually climb. For example, if you are using 100 lbs for dumbbell press, use 50 lbs for the first warm up set and 75 for the second warm up set. Be specific in your warm ups. If you are doing 6 reps for your work sets, keep your warm up set-reps between 6 and 8. If using 10 reps, keep the warm up set.
How to Cool down?
As shown in the figure, you should end your workout with a nice little cool- down. As the name sounds, it “cools” you heart rate and blood pressure back to normal.
A cool down becomes critical for people with heart disease. These folks increase their chances (at least theoretically) of cardiac complications if they miss their cool down.
Things to remember
- As the name sounds, warm up should just be a warm up: Make it too intense, and your work sets or main sets will suffer.
- Always have a recovery period between your warm up and work sets to replenish your energy, and to flush out by- products of reactions in the muscle, like lactic acid and H.
- Use passive techniques to raise or maintain the temperature produced by a active warm up, especially if there is a delay between the warm up and task and/or the weather is cold. A sweat shirt would very well work.
- If ever in doubt about the number of warm up sets needed, pick the larger number!
Why & When You Should Have a Protein Shake
ADVANCED | June 10 2008
It has long been known that weight training changes protein balance positively. Research has also shown that amino acids and/or proteins can acutely do the same, though to a much lesser extent.
What was the purpose of the Protein study?
Combining resistance training and supplementation of amino acids and/ protein shake immediately before or after strength training has shown to have an additive effect on protein synthesis compared to strength training alone. Long- term studies have shown this acute increase in protein synthesis to translate over to gains in strength and muscle mass. Also, addition of carbohydrates to the protein shake mix has shown to have a further cumulative effect on protein balance possibly due to a decrease in protein breakdown.
However, most proteon shake studies have some minor problems:
1) Almost all protein studies required the participants not to consume any nutrients for 2 or 3 hours before or after their workout which is obviously not a normal pattern of eating.
2) Most studies, barring a couple, have looked at the acute effects over protein synthesis and haven’t looked at the long term effects of supplement timing in terms of strength and muscle mass.
3) They never compared the strategy of timing protein shake around your workout with the consumption of the same protein shake at other times during the day.
This study, however, has neatly dealt with all the above problems.
What was the Protein study design?
There were two groups.
Pre-Post Protein Group: The Pre-Psot protein shake group consumed a supplement (1 g.kg body weight) containing protein/creatine/glucose immediately before and after their workout.
Morning-Evening Protein Group: The Morning-Evening protein group consumed the same dose of the same protein shake in the morning and late evening. All participants had at least 6 months of training experience and the workout was high intensity, using mainly compound exercises with free weights.
What were the ingredients in the protein shake?
The protein shake was devised to contain 40 grams whey protein, 43 grams of glucose, trace fat and 7 grams of creatine per 100 grams of supplement, and subjects were told to consume 1 gram/kg bodyweight of the powder ONLY on workout days. The protein shake dose and ratio were consistent with previous research on post workout protein nutrition on the same topic.
Figure 1: The protein shake supplement ratio for a 176 lb (80 kg) subject (~ 1 gm per kg of bodyweight).
What were the results?
As expected, the Pre-Post protein shake group that timed the protein shake immediately before and after their workouts experienced significant increases in muscle mass and strength (bench press and squats) compared to the Morning-Evening protein group. Also, creatine and glycogen content was higher in the Pre-Post protein group.
Figure 2: Strength gains (in pounds) for the PRE-POST protein shake and MORN-EVE protein shake group.* shows a significant difference.
Anyhow, the point I am trying to make is that the next time you drink a protein shake, it might help to bother about WHEN and WHAT you are drinking.
Related
Cardio on Lifting or Non- Lifting Days?
ADVANCED | June 05 2008
Endurance training (or cardio) remodels your body to be more energy efficient (or fuel efficient) - it is akin to a super car which gets better and better mileage, the more and the more you drive. On the on the other hand, strength training makes you faster, stronger and bigger but lowers energy efficiency (fuel efficiency).
What is the Problem?
Besides a few studies, most have shown strength adaptations to suffer when endurance training (cardio) is combined with strength training
There has been a few mechanisms proposed to explain this limit set by endurance exercise on strength gains.
- Concurrent endurance and strength training can increase the workload and make you overtrained, and cut into strength adaptation.
- Another mechanism is endurance training can convert fast fibers into slow fibers and reduce the number of fast fibers, which could play a major role in limiting strength and muscle development.
- Glycogen depletion has been proposed as another mechanism behind this phenomenon.
Now that I have introduced the concept and mechanisms, let’s go back to the question of whether cardio should be done on lifting on non-lifting days. The mechanisms above do not really help in answering our question because they are chronic adaptations and their influence doesn’t change with changing the days you do cardio. So the question remains - but not for too long:
What is the Solution?
ATP is the energy currency of a cell: Just how money is vital for us, so is ATP for a cell. We keep track of our money, but who keeps track of the ATP in the cell? This highly important job is done by an enzyme called AMPK, and it is rightly termed as the ‘energy sensor’ of the cell.
The good news is that AMPK is always activated with endurance exercise (bcos of the high energy or ATP needs for endurance exercise) and most endurance adaptations are purported to signal through AMPK. The bad news is that once AMPK is activated it shuts of anabolic events, like protein synthesis to prevent further loss of energy or ATP.
AMPK activation has shown in both animal and human studies (not yet conclusive in humans) to play a causal role in reducing protein synthesis. The blunting of protein synthesis during resistance exercise and after endurance exercise is now shown to be partly due to AMPK activation.
Figure1: Molecular representation of how cardio blunts strength training adaptations via AMPK
If this—AMPK due to cardio blunts protein synthesis—makes any sense, doesn’t it make sense to keep your cardio and strength training as far apart as possible?
This would make a lot of sense sense if AMPK is activated and only stayed elevated for a few hours. Fortunately for us, AMPK in human studies has shown to have a short life, and tends to return back to basal levels after 1-3 hours of endurance exercise.
Conclusion
In short , AMPK blunts protein synthesis and cardio increases AMPK. So keep your cardio and weight workout far apart, like on seperate days or morning/evening.
Note: AMPk activation in muscle is localized as shown by one-legged training studies. So it might be better to keep your cardio adjacent to upper body lifting days. As well, have your high-intensity cardio days and strength workouts far apart since AMPk activation is time and intensity dependent. Again, having a pre-workout shake becomes all the more important considering that extra cellular events, such as glycogen, glucose, and creatine phosphate availability, besides ATP depletion, can negatively influence AMPK activation,
For endurance weenies trying to increase endurance adaptations, the approach of having carbs before and after endurance sessions may not be a good idea because they are inhibiting the activation and activity of AMPK, which plays a major role in endurance training adaptations.
*AMPK: AMP- activated Protein Kinase
*ATP: Adenosine TriphoshphateIS HIIT the Most Effective & Efficient Fat Loss Exercise Program?
ADVANCED | June 01 2008
It is pretty well established that exercise alone (without any dietary intervention) does a poor job in losing weight. Dietary intervention or diet has been shown to be significantly more effective in losing weight than just exercise alone. But what about HIIT or interval training? Is interval training or HIIT more effective & efficient in losing weight than regular cardio?
What was the purpose of the HIIT study?
Most exercise programs for weight loss consist of some sort of cardiovascular activity at a moderate, steady-state intensity for around 30 - 45 minutes. In this recent study, the researchers compared the current exercise guidelines for weight loss with an exercise protocol which involves brief, high-intensity exercise followed by brief slightly longer low intensity exercise (HIIT or interval training).
This type of high intensity intermittent training (HIIT) is popularly known as Interval Training. An earlier study had shown HIIT/interval training to be more effective than regular steady state cardio, but the study involved 45 min of exercise, 5 times a week which could be highly demanding for sedentary overweight individuals. Hence the researchers opted for a less demanding version of the same HIIT program:
Figure: Summary of the HIIT study
What was the HIIT study design?
There were two exercise groups (HIIT & Steady State) and a control.
High Intermittent intensity training (HIIT) protocol:Each subject performed 8 s of sprinting and 12 s of turning the pedals slowly for 20 - 30 rpm for a maximum of 60 repeats of sessions. The subjects started out with .5 kg resistance and worked as hard as they could during the 8 sec sprint. Subjects started with as little as 5 min of conditioning phase and gradually increased it to a maximum of 20 min. Once an individual could complete the 20 min at .5 kg resistance or the heart rate decreased due to increased fitness, the resistance was increased by increments of .5 kg.
Steady state exercise (SSE) Protocol:The subjects exercised at 60% of the Vo2 peak. Subjects started the program at his intensity for 10-20 minutes and gradually increased it to a maximum of 40 min of exercise per session.
The points to remember are both groups (HIIT & Steady State) maintained their workload as their fitness improved by increasing the resistance, both had a warm up and cool down session, and both raised their workload and time in a progressive manner.
What were the HIIT study results?
Interestingly, despite exercising half the time, HIIT subjects lost 11.2% fat ( about 5 lbs) whereas the SSE subjects experienced no fat loss! Mind you, it’s only 5 lbs in 15 weeks which still shows the ineffectiveness of exercise alone in losing weight.
That been said, 5 lbs is a significant amount if you scan the relevant scientific literature. According to the 2006 Cochrane review on exercise, the average weight loss was 1-1.5 ( 3lbs) with a follow up between 3-12 months. The study do note the presence of responders and non responders: participants who were the leanest lost the least amount. If you take out the non- responders, the mean fat loss was much greater, around 8 lbs.
Both protocols decreased fasting insulin levels (measure of insulin resistance), but the effect was significantly greater for HIIT compared to SSE.
What are the potential mechanisms of HIIT?
Notably, Total Energy expenditure for both groups remained pretty similar. So how did the HIIT report greater fat loss compared to SSE?
The researchers assume that the changes in HIIT may have been influenced by underreported changes in diet. As other studies have shown, HIIT may have suppressed appetite or decreased attraction to energy rich foods. Another explanation is that this type of intense exercise may result in increased fat utilization for the HIIT group.
Anyhow, atleast this study does shows that high intensity intermittent training (HIIT) is more effective & efficient than steady state cardio to keep your body fat in check.
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