National Personal Training Institute of Dallas

04/04/2023

03/24/2023

In the late 1980s, when smoking was still allowed on some airline flights, California boosted its tax on ci******es from 10 to 35 cents a pack, devoting 5 cents to programs to prevent smoking.

03/06/2023

In his latest SuppVersity guest post, my friend Alex Leaf (leaf-nutrition.com) summarizes the results of Jose Antonio's latest and first long-term high protein diet study ... and yes, that's "high protein" as in 3-4x more than the RDA of 0.8g/kg

01/09/2023

Interval training (HIIT) interferes more with muscle growth than steady-state cardio,
new meta-analysis finds

High-intensity interval training was heralded as cardio 2.0, a better and more time-efficient way to burn fat and develop endurance. "Train like a sprinter, look like a sprinter!"

Except you're not training like a sprinter. You're training like a soccer player. Olympic 100 m sprinters train with sprints of around 10 seconds and then often rest several minutes. HIIT is metabolically much closer to low-intensity, steady-state cardio (LISS) than strength training.

All forms of cardio can interfere with muscle growth, as endurance and strength training adaptations are partially acutely mutually exclusive. It's like trying to develop your body into 2 different directions along the strength-endurance continuum at the same time. This new meta-analysis confirmed that endurance training on average in the literature significantly reduced both type I and type II muscle growth from strength training ( the interference effect AKA concurrent training effect), although the effect on the whole-muscle level was not statistically significant.

Some people argue that the interference effect is not a real thing, despite numerous studies over the past decades demonstrating doing cardio and strength work in the same program can reduce muscular gains. The counter-arguments mostly rely on studies in untrained individuals. As I recently posted, some research finds that untrained individuals can gain just as much muscle from endurance as from strength training. They can get newbie gains from anything the first few weeks. So of course there's no interference yet at that point.

The novel finding of this new meta-analysis of the literature was that HIIT reduced muscle growth significantly more than LISS cardio. The reason for this may be that HIIT is always intensive, so it will always evoke significant endurance training adaptations and those can interfere with strength training adaptations. With steady-state cardio it's easier to stay under the threshold of evoking strong endurance adaptations.

For body recomposition and strength development, I've always preferred LISS cardio over HIIT. The vast majority of my clients never have to do any cardio at all though.

For health benefits or endurance training, HIIT can still be great. To minimize the interference effect, schedule HIIT sessions as far away from your strength work as possible, on different days.

11/17/2022

Red meat consumption does not cause cardiovascular disease,
new systematic review says

Red meat consumption is correlated with cardiovascular disease in many studies. However, people that eat more red meat on average also have a significantly worse lifestyle than people that eat less red meat. They smoke more, they consume more sugar and they're less wealthy. So is red meat or one of these other factors the culprit? Covariate analyses are always limited by knowing the covariate and having it in your data set, among other limitations.

A new systematic umbrella review of reviews used the Bradford Hill criteria to check if the associations between eating red meat and adverse health outcomes are likely to be causal. Their conclusion: "We infer red and processed meat intakes are not causally related to cardiovascular disease outcomes due to consistently weak associations and a lack of coherence with experimental evidence. However, we infer processed meat [...] intakes are potentially causally related to type 2 diabetes mellitus due to consistently strong associations."

One interesting finding was that the relationship between all-cause mortality and red meat consumption failed the specificity test, because red meat intake also correlated with multiple causes of death for which there is no biological plausibility. Red meat intake correlated with accidental deaths, for example. Does eating red meat make you get into car crashes or fall of your roof?

Overall, the researchers argued unprocessed red meat consumption is not inherently unhealthy. However, processed red meat consumption seems to cause type II diabetes, although it's unclear how.

The team of researchers declare they received money from the meat industry to fund their research but the sponsors were not involved in the research itself.

10/06/2022

Bodybuilding cures type II diabetes. Really. A review paper by Shakoor et al. (2021) concluded that the combination of aggressive cutting with high-frequency exercise is one of the most effective methods to cure type II diabetes, one of the top 10 leading causes of death in the world. Full remission of diabetes has been found in as little as 8 weeks(!)⁣

Note that I'm using the word 'cure' here in the colloquial sense of a permanent remission of symptoms.
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Many doctors are still stuck in the pharmaceutical age and think diabetes is irreversible. Nothing could be further from the truth. Lean, muscular, strength training individuals with normal genetics have almost no chance of becoming diabetic. ⁣
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Many people think bodybuilding is unhealthy, but that's only true for drug users (depending on how medically responsible they are) and maybe the last stages of contest prep. ⁣
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Natural recreational bodybuilding has enormous health benefits. In addition to the vast array of health benefits of exercise itself, being lean and muscular enhances your insulin sensitivity enormously, which in turn lowers chronic inflammation levels. Good glucose, insulin and inflammation levels in turn lower your chances of almost every other health condition.⁣

10/02/2022

New research into weight lifting has revealed two insights: that the practice is able to strengthen the connections between nerves and muscles, and that this strengthening can still happen in the later years of our lives.

08/19/2022

TENDINOPATHY TREATMENT ANALOGY

“The more we learn about tendons, the more ridiculous these therapies aimed at "fixing" the pathological areas of tendons seem (PRP, cross-friction massage, infrared light therapy, IASTM). Load it!!”

“There is no change in structure of the pathologic area of the tendon, but progressive loading targets the healthy tissue and it creates more healthy tissue (hence thickening of the tendon).

That's why we TREAT THE DONUT, NOT THE HOLE!”

- Dr Nicole Surdyka

Lookout for some interesting new research on tendons in the Physio Network Research Reviews. Second edition out soon! - https://www.physio-network.com/membership-account/membership-levels/

08/11/2022

Training a muscle 5 days a week is better than once a week with the same number of total weekly sets, a new study finds.

One group did 5 sets of 6 maximal eccentric biceps contractions once a week with 2 minutes rest between sets. The other group did one set of 6 maximal contractions 5 days per week. So one group essentially did a bro split with 6 hardcore sets of eccentric biceps curls once a week, whereas the other group had a high frequency training with one set a day 5x per week.

After the program, strength significantly increased in the high frequency group (+11%) but not the bro split group. The effect size was over 4x greater in the high frequency group and the results held for isometric, concentric and eccentric strength, indicating these findings likely also apply to conventional strength training.

Muscle thickness increased slightly more in the high frequency group in all 3 measured locations as well, but the difference was not statistically significant. The sum of muscle thickness increases was 10.4% vs. 8%.

The higher frequency group likely had better outcomes because they had higher quality workouts. Strength decreased about twice as much during the bro splits as during the high frequency workouts due to the greater number of sets per session, although the difference in total strength output wasn't statistically significant.

When you equate performance and training volume completely - equal reps and proximity to failure - most studies find that training frequency becomes largely irrelevant. However, performance is never equal in practice. It's almost always better with higher frequencies. Training frequency has essentially the same effect as extra long rest intervals in this sense.

The subjects were previously untrained. I did not expect to see significant differences yet in this population, because newbie gains often hit a ceiling effect that masks any between-group differences.

Also, the last muscle thickness measures were taken 3-7 days after the last workout, so the bro split group may have benefited more from muscle swelling still at this time, although the workouts inflicted surprisingly little soreness.

Overall, these results support the potential benefits of higher training frequencies to increase our gains by reducing the effect of fatigue on our workouts.

08/02/2022

Protein is often said to have a higher thermic effect of food, resulting in higher energy expenditure, than carbs and fats, after consumption.

This is true when you only eat 1 macronutrient at a time, but when you combine all macronutrients together, as you would normally do in a meal, the total thermogenic effect is often not equal to the average of the 3 macros consumed in isolation. The macros and other compounds in foods can interact with each other.

In this new study, the researchers tested how much people's energy expenditure increased after consuming a high-carb, a high-fat or a high-protein meal with the same number of calories.

There was no difference in thermogenesis in the 3 hours after the different meals: it was 16-19% for all meals.

This finding is surprising, as other research has found high-protein meals can stimulate greater thermogenesis. The results of the new study are a bit odd on multiple fronts.

Nevertheless, overall, protein's thermogenesis is widely overblown. Another recent study by Oliveira et al. (2020) found that increasing protein intake from 15% to 40% only increased energy expenditure by 81 kcal a day.

Lifters should generally consume at least 1.8 g/kg/d (see my article on the optimal protein intake), but above this point, you don't have to go out of your way to consume more protein to lose more fat. It will majorly limit your diet options for very little thermogenic advantage.