There are three things that stand out about this situation that makes it symptomatic of a bigger problem:

1. Tomlo may lose his gym because of his reaction to criticism online. He didn’t like being called out and he has only himself to blame for the way he handled the comments. He is probably not the first, or the last person, who loses his cool online when common sense dictates a measured approach.
2. This is probably not an isolated incident. In fact, you can be sure that right now there are pictures being posted by gym owners of their members that may not be covered by photo release forms or be very flattering to members, if not downright insulting. Frankly, there’s not much anyone can do to stop the deluge of social media posts but that doesn’t mean there are not reasons to be concerned about what gets posted online that uses you.
3. What took so long for this to become an issue? Are people deathly afraid of social media acceptance being taken away? Maybe we are living in a Black Mirror episode. That’s not a good thing.

The Selfie in a Gym Sucks Everyone In

For some reason that is unknown, lots of people feel the need to video or photograph their every activity in the gym and to post it online. That would be great if the people in question were just doing a selfie, but they usually drag in everyone else in the background. Every day, anyone and everyone seems to be a potential extra in someone else’s social media posts. Is that good or bad? Well, it has to depend on the circumstance. You have a right not to like or want to be filmed or photographed although, frankly, there’s not much you can do about it.

You hear the arguments for these selfie records of lifts or workouts: they help you check your form or they help you record a PR or some moment in time when you were doing something that you feel needed to be treasured. The truth of the matter is that you will probably be hard-pressed to find anyone who goes back into their social media timeline and tracks their history of posts. The videos and images come and go. Chris Holder touches on some key topic points by talking about mirror neurons and the scourge of social media coaching.

The good news is that very, very few people see these selfies. With the exception of a handful of social media stars, most people are barely acknowledged by anything but a handful of followers. In many cases, your followers are probably just liking or endorsing a post out of a sense of duty more than any general interest. Still, each to his or her own. The real issue here is the way the background or those around the selfie taker are sucked into the exhibitionism.

The Social Media Treadmill Hurst Everyone

So, selfies are one thing but there’s also the climate of fitness and social media. What is more germane to the Blue Ridge CrossFit story is the pressure on business owners to post on social media. Social media companies like Facebook want you to keep posting and rely on you to be on a treadmill that they control. You feed Facebook. You don’t feed yourself by posting.

Sure, gym owners probably feel like it is good marketing. It can foster some sense of community if done right. It can be informative. It’s not necessarily bad to post on social. However, to get your timeline to resonate and be interesting requires some level of creativity. You get sucked into thinking about how many likes or followers you have. It’s almost like you have to crave the attention and the more you crave it, the more pressure there is on you to post and to hit a home run with your post.

Maybe that is what Tom Tomlo thought. Maybe he was tone deaf and didn’t think butt pics of female members were bad if he was praising the aforementioned butts. Maybe he just wanted to get some more likes and butt pics will do it every time. Who knows and who cares.

The real concern here is the expectation and rights of the gym goer or user. Expectations of privacy, even if they are not legally enforceable, should outweigh any need to dance like a monkey on social media.

You’re Value is Not Determined by Facebook

Social media companies love fitness and gyms and healthy, young bodies. Yup, healthy young bodies. They want the superficial and the instant gratification. Fitness is not political or religious and therefore less likely to create controversy. It’s just beautiful people doing fantastic things. But, it is not real life. In real life, someone may have just gone to a gym and may be very self-conscious of their own selves. They may not like to be seen flopped on the floor after a missed lift because someone just hit their PR in front of them and videotaped the whole thing. There are great coaches who should never be on camera. Not because of how they look or speak but because not everyone is good in front of the camera. If it were otherwise, we’d all have a movie deal.

The Blue Ridge CrossFit fiasco is the tip of the iceberg. You can feel some sympathy because there is an undeniable pressure to be visible and active and popular on social media. For individuals and businesses alike. On the other hand, that pressure creates unrealistic expectations, misunderstandings and infringes on so many other issues of privacy that are only now beginning to be understood.

Social media is really not that old. It hasn’t been around for that long. We are only beginning to understand its impact on us as a society and our psychological well-being. It’s time to do an audit of our social media presence and start thinking about the bigger picture: what’s the value of giving up small pieces of ourselves and laying them out there for everyone to see? That’s going to be a social media choice that you make. What we must have, though, is greater respect for individual privacy.

The post Social Media Fire: Gyms and Butt Pics appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

So you want big muscles. Where do we start? We’ll start with some of the ways that muscles grow through strength training and progressive resistance exercise.

Then we’ll get into some of the theories related to that and the programs that can help you promote muscle growth and variations compared to that.

A Comprehensive Guide to Getting Bigger

So you want big muscles. Where do we start? We’ll start with some of the ways that muscles grow through strength training and progressive resistance exercise.

Then we’ll get into some of the theories related to that and the programs that can help you promote muscle growth and variations compared to that.

Now, this is a big topic to tackle, but I’m going to give you some simple ideas to help you along your way and figure out what works best for you and your lifestyle.

Things like how to get the proper rest and recovery needed as well as trying to figure out, given your age and gender, what will help those muscles grow bigger.

Why Do Muscles Grow and How Do They Grow

The first place we probably can start is understanding the basic principles of why muscles grow and how they grow, factors that affect those things relate to growth and the fundamental notion of getting stronger through progressive resistance exercise.

My experience with it has been varied, and through lots of years of training, I have found that there are things that work well for me and there are lots of experts out there that will tell you all kinds of stuff about how to get bigger and stronger.

But the reality is we have to be our own scientist and figure this out. If we understand some of the basic concepts about how to get bigger and stronger, it’s a lot more effective because we’ve become our own human lab.

It is also important to remember that growing bigger doesn’t mean we build bigger in a linear fashion. We don’t just get bigger all of a sudden or in a progressive way.

There are spurts and stops and sputters, but if we can keep on our goal and stay focused, we’re more likely to begin to see muscle growth. And again why is muscle growth important?

We’ll talk about that as well, and we’ll talk about how over the long term of your life muscle growth is very beneficial for aging and health.

The Theory of Periodization and General Adaptation Syndrome

The overarching theory of how muscles grow is that we must at some point stress our muscles beyond its normal function so that it does something called overreach where we go beyond where we’re normally used to working.

This overreach, whether it is with an increased load or increased volume, meaning some sets and reps, causes the muscle tissue, particularly the soft tissue, of that muscle to tear and break down.

That tear and breakdown are called progressive overload. Progressive overload then works in such a way that general adaptation will occur so; you have overreach and then recovery.

The body typically recovers within 48 to 72 hours after a good solid stressful bout of weightlifting. In that 48 to 72-hour time frame, our body builds up resistance to more stress. This is a standard adaptation for soft tissue skeletal muscle. When recovered we enter a state of super-compensation.

It’s important because during the period of super-compensation we now have a new adaptation to stress, our body actually can handle pressure better, meaning it can handle more work and the soft tissue of the muscle will begin to grow.

General adaptation syndrome suggests that if we have an alarming response to the body or something that stresses us out we will then have a phase of repairing regeneration followed by super-compensation.

If, however, we do too much overreach often we then get exhaustion. So this is how overall we suspect that the body recovers and this is the classical theory we use.

Breaking the Wimpey Muscle Cycle – Teetering the Balance

When we have muscle breakdown due to progressive overload training, we find that the muscle is in need of increased proteins synthesis. This increase in protein synthesis is caused by muscle breakdown.

Muscles break down, and we have lots of swelling that goes on in the interstitial fluid. This is the area in between the cells, and that swelling causes some pain and damage.

It also creates the nitrogens that build up to form the amino acid bonds to become depleted. So we get into what’s called a negative nitrogen balance. This is often seen as metabolic acidosis.

This negative nitrogen balance then has to be compensated for by increased stores of muscle energy, and this expanded store of muscle energy then becomes the impetus for increases in muscular size.

Our body responds to meet the demand, and the workout muscle damage with that swelling happens after a few days. Again the repair is significant because if the fix does not occur, then we don’t get positive nitrogen balance. Without this, we can’t grow that muscle.

So it’s essential to have enough amino acid in the form of protein intake to counter the negative nitrogen balance that happens when we break down our muscles due to increased workload either through higher volume or more sets and reps, or higher weight lifted. So we want to teeter that nitrogen balance or the local amino acid pool to the positive.

The Fatigue Fitness Model

Besides the general adaptation syndrome, the fitness-fatigue model helps us understand the way we respond by watching our heart rate respond to our workout and then recover.

This fitness-fatigue model suggests that once we handle stress our heart will respond, and the quicker we recover, the sooner we will be able to do the next set.

So, often we will work up to a heart rate of 160 or 170 beats per minute during our sets and reps, and then we recover to a heart rate of about 120 beats per minute.

This recovery usually takes one to three minutes depending on our fitness level. Once we recover, we’re ready for the next set. Now, why is this crucial for muscle growth?

This is important for muscle growth because if we want to fatigue the soft muscle tissue by using its energy, we must use up the muscle energy stores called muscle glycogen.

And from there we then need to stress it so that we’ve depleted those stores with muscular fatigue and allow them to recover. Therefore, this muscular fatigue will enable you to recognize when to stop.

You feel your muscles are getting heavy, burning, and tired. When you feel fresh or at least recovered, you are ready to go. So through the fitness-fatigue model, the heart rate is relatively easy to track with lots of different devices and heart rate monitors, etc.

The ability to track heart rate is easily accessible. You know there are lots of ways to do that, but the notion is that if we can watch our heart rate behavior, we then see whether we’re ready for the next set.

One way of training is called EMOM (every minute on the minute training) which can be effective. The EMOM program prescribes workouts of two or three continuous exercises of eight to ten reps and recovery, but new exercises are paired after each cycle, so you don’t overwork one muscle group.

This can last ten to thirty minutes. It takes some forethought, but it is taxing. Also, circuit training, Tabata, or bodyweight training with a working set of 20 to 30 seconds followed by a recovery of 20 to 30 seconds is sufficient.

These are all kinds of training techniques that are designed to help with local muscle fatigue so that when you have to increase the enhanced fitness effect that allows our body to do more work in less time or more efficiently in a set. By doing more work, we will enable the muscle to gain muscle glycogen and store more energy.

The idea is, as we become more fit we take less time to recover, and we take more stored muscle energy into our cells, and the muscles swell through repair, storage, and water.

We make less time also to get to our target heart rate which is usually, as I said previously, somewhere in the 160s and 170s just depending on your age and your fitness level.

How to Apply These Training Principles

By changing my program in some simple ways, I can help with muscle growth again. Muscle growth is partly determined by the fiber type you’re working.

So for instance, if I’m working my calves they are largely type 1 fibers which mean they are designed to go farther and longer and consistently but not as forcefully as other muscles. Other muscles such as our biceps or triceps, which are more fast twitch and generate more force but only for a limited amount of time.

So certain fibers respond better to different types of training stimuli. Type 1 fibers are slow, steady fibers which respond well to fatigue. Whereas our type 2 fibers like biceps and triceps respond to higher loads, faster movements, and fatigue. So again we have to figure out what type of fiber we’re working on that specific muscle. Important to note that our genetics, our sleep, our nutrition, as well as our age all affect whether we will adapt and to what extent.

The other thing that must happen during muscle growth as we are trying to get bigger is we have to have a continued commitment to consistency of the program. You are impatient and want to get bigger, but it happens slowly.

So to stay with your program, and your train of thought, as you work out is important. Bodybuilders will talk about the mind-muscle connection and really what that means is maintaining motivation and intensity for the right amount of weight you’re lifting and the total number of sets. It’s going to be uncomfortable.

Nutrition and rest are essential during this process. Muscle gains likely occur at about .02 % per workout according to one review by Wernbom, so you’re likely not to see muscle growth gains quickly.

This is critical because we all know that you’ve read a million different books but simple nutrition, simple rest and recovery processes are in place that can help us respond to what we want to achieve with muscle growth.

Programming Variables That Enhance Muscle Growth

So what are the basics of how muscles grow? Well, the first notion of how muscles grow is this idea of mechanical loading. We’ll talk more in-depth about it; mechanical loading refers to this idea of putting stress on the muscle and how that tissue responds.

Then greater time under tension helps as well. Local metabolic acidosis, when it occurs, also facilitates this notion of protein synthesis during muscular pump. We see local hypoxia, and we’ll talk all about that and then the total volume of workouts as it increases.

You’ll also notice that muscular swelling, cellular swelling, and muscle growth will occur. And again, it’s not just swelling, its functional changes within the muscle, but it results in enhanced muscle growth.

Mechanical Loading of the Muscle

When a muscle is told to lift weights, it gets stressed. For instance, as we begin to move through it’s extended to it’s short contracted form, think of working on a mechanical assembly line.

The muscle has a duty cycle of work and relaxation. When working out with limited rest, the muscle gets fatigued and thus will need to grow.

Also, muscle growth can be limited by the inefficient movements of untrained muscles and have co-contractors or stabilizer muscles. If you have ever shaken when lifting, you recognize that not all muscles are pulling in the same direction and you may struggle to find a right path of movement. This is because the muscle and nerves that create the motions work to coordinate.

Sort of “a who’s on first” Abbott and Costello dance until good patterns are formed. A muscle is only as strong as its weakest link and the longer the muscle, the more strength you will need to be stressed entirely throughout a range of motion. So long muscles/lever’s mean long movements and we often need to take these to their full extension and flexion.

We hear a lot in current bodybuilding about partial repetitions, and you see this also in powerlifting. In reality, mechanical loading of the muscle is done best through the complete range of motion because we are often said to grow most at her weakest links. So let’s keep that in mind as well.

When a muscle is mechanically loaded there is a stressor, through tension during lengthening and shortening, at the ends of the muscle itself and the little muscle fibers are very damaged at a minimal level.

Once there is a disruption in that muscle, as we said earlier, there is this idea there’s a negative nitrogen balance, a greater need for protein synthesis due to damage and swelling.

If we’re going to repair those broken myofibrils or intracellular fluid that seep out into the interstitial (outside the muscle cell), we then need to have some repair.

That typically happens to muscular swelling or pro-inflammatory markers followed by, within several hours or few days, anti-inflammatory markers that come in and help support the repair and rebuilding of that muscle cell.

There’s also strain and torque on ligaments and tendons. These stresses and strains on the ligaments and tendons also signal the muscle that it must repair and prepare for the new loads that it will experience.

Programs that incorporate 60-80 percent some have even argued that 85% of maximal capacity, are effective at enhancing muscular growth particularly in untrained individuals.

In the beginning, we tend to want to see large muscle movements, and we want to look at a certain number of sets that are reasonably low. Some bodybuilders have suggested as little as eight sets. Others suggest that as many as 15 sets for the beginning bodybuilder for muscle enhancement. The reality is it’s a quality rep that’s more important. Specifically, having proper patterns that are the most important factor for muscle growth when it comes to mechanical loading. Correct form cannot be replaced with extra heavy weight.

If you want to stress the muscle you have to focus on that idea of mind-muscle connection and focus on really contracting the muscle to the full range of motion.

This mind-muscle relationship means that you are imagining the weight lifted and the muscle contracting while lifting this weight.

This connects the sensations with the movement and helps the muscle grower to connect with changes in the muscle sensing fatigue and strain. This enhances contractile force and helps with injury prevention.

The other thing is that you need different angles. It’s also known as pennation, or angle of pull. To attack the muscles with different mechanical loads through various angles of loading, we see an adaptation of that muscle through multiple planes of movement. Again, when we talk about planes of motion, these refer to angles of movement.

Several factors relate to how we adapt to those mechanical modes: age and training status all affect the individual, but we know the neural patterns are laid down, and they’re relatively streamlined within two to three weeks as we become more efficient.

That’s great for human adaptation; that’s bad for muscle growth. So what we need to do then is stress the muscle at different angles so that we can come to a consensus of stressing the muscle overall and not just from one specific perspective of that tissue where it becomes very efficient and uses less muscle force to the same movement.

The key point here is, therefore, if you become too entrenched in one muscle movement pattern your muscles become very efficient and use less muscle force to complete the same amount of weight. Good for us, but bad for our muscle growth.

Time Under Tension

Time under tension refers to the notion that many scientists early on came up with by looking at rodent and avian models where were the muscle was placed under stress, or weight was placed at the end of a muscle, and it was allowed to continue to live, and the muscle would grow in size.

Thus, the notion arose that the longer muscle stayed under tension, the more it grew. Now again this was in avian and rodent studies and not always when these muscles attached to the animal.

So, while we know this as a general concept when we look at how the human muscle grows we know that if you have more extended sets, shorter rest periods in between sets, and you have stress metabolically, that there’s acidosis coupled with a hormonal surge that happens immediately after your workout.

You add testosterone and growth hormone properties combined with cortisol, which is a breaking down the agent of muscle, and the result is recovery is enhanced.

Some scientists recently suggested that maybe the acute responses of hormones aren’t quite as significant as some of the metabolic acidosis, or intrinsic properties, of the muscle but the jury’s still out on that. We do know for sure that repair happens to the cellular matrix, so there’s remodeling an enlargement when the muscle spends time under tension.

If you were to ask, is it better for me at the beginning to go more weight/fewer reps or more reps/less weight, it’s more reps less weight as long as there’s quality of contraction.

There’s also the notion of what about all these different sets, like, pause sets, or overload sets, or isometrics in between to keep the muscle tension building.

You do need some continued muscular tension for there to be a true hypertrophic, or muscle growth, response. That leads us to something else, do muscles grow in size or the number of muscle fibers?

In most human studies it’s been found that muscles grow in size almost singularly more than what we call hyperplasia, growing in number response because in humans cells it takes quite a bit of strain before hyperplasia can happen.

Greater Metabolic Acidosis

Greater metabolic acidosis refers to the notion that when we have short rest periods, and we continue to do work, our muscles swell. Why do they swell?

They swell because we’ve damaged the cell membranes, we’ve gotten the plasma that seeps out in the interstitial spaces, and as time moves on, we find more and more swelling and pro-inflammatory hormones which limit the range of motion. It’s a protective mechanism, and then we find the anti-inflammatory response that occurs later.

High volume training cycled with moderate volume training seems to exploit the process meaning, as I become more stressed through these higher volumes of work – more sets and more reps – the process of recovery becomes important.

So often multiple sets, three or five sets with higher reps, eight all the way to 20 with short rest periods, seem to be important here as well because remember, we’re trying to deplete local muscle glycogen.

If we were trying to deplete our aerobic energy system, we would in most aerobic training; we would want overall systemic ATP energy production. That happens with metabolism in what we call slow twitch fiber type 1 fiber.

Now we’re also trying to grow muscle we want type 1 as well as type 2 fiber to grow in size, but it’s the type 2 fibers or the fast twitch fibers that seem to grow most and show the most exaggerated adaptation.

Too much work and we cannot adapt either. When too much metabolic stress or acidosis occurs without recovery, we reach a state of overtraining.

This results in all those negative things like muscle soreness, again muscle soreness isn’t always a bad thing, but if we don’t have enough recovery time we do tend to see this notion of overtraining.

You don’t want to get into that state. If you can’t recover, then you can’t train. That becomes a significant variable that we see with muscle growth.

Often people think that if one or two or ten sets are good, then 20 sets are better. If you can’t recover, you can’t grow, and if you can’t grow, what are you doing working out with this idea of increasing muscle mass?

We work toward metabolic acidosis. How do I feel when I start to have metabolic acidosis? I start to feel the burn. This is not a lactic acid burn. That is something completely different.

We now know through science that it’s not lactic acid it’s more metabolic acidosis or ATP hydrolysis that seems to happen. Suffice to say this science occurs so that we can have this next idea which is called local hypoxia.

Local Hypoxia

Local hypoxia refers to drops in local pH or local ionic concentrations so that oxygen stimulates metabolic myogenic or muscle building properties.

When you get that muscle pump, that’s what we want. You can feel your muscle getting tight and engorged with blood, and it heats up like it’s on fire. Sometimes when you can feel that stretch, it is because we have multiple sets with limited rest.

The muscle becomes constricted, and mechanically the muscle pumps up. This pump deforms the nerves and some of the blood flow so that blood accumulates in that muscle and when blood accumulates and then we’re getting muscle pump or what we call reactive hyperthermia. That reactive hyperthermia is a strong stimulant for muscle growth and hormonal expression particularly growth hormones.

Something like five sets of eight reps of bicep curls with 30 seconds of rest in between them is one example of a routine that could induce muscle hypoxia. Larger muscle groups may take more sets so, for instance, if I’m working legs, eight sets maybe or nine sets may be required.

Depending on your training status, if you’re new to training you can probably get away with 5 to 6 sets of your legs but as you become more experienced you want to increase the volume or total sets lifted. That is part of training status and being your own best scientist.

Volume of Work

So the volume of work as a growth factor can be done on one day or across multiple sessions on the same day, and the muscle pump is your goal. So, the volume of work is critical.

Recovery is based on your level of training in the sense that on non-consecutive days going to fatigue is great. Should we go to failure then is this constant notion we talk.

In the beginning, we’re just going to have muscle fatigue. How do you know when a muscle is fatigued? Your muscle starts to feel heavy; you start to notice heavy breathing, and it’s hard to regulate your heart rate. As time goes on and you can handle higher volumes, you’ll notice your heart rate recovers better.

Much like that fitness-fatigue model we suggested earlier, one example of increasing volume of work to enhance growth factors is known as the German volume training method which is often something like ten sets of 10 repetitions with 90 seconds rest.

This is not recommended for young novice or inexperienced lifters, but this is a common sort of practice among bodybuilders who will look at how to increase muscle size and get their whole purpose or point of exercising is to increase muscular size and muscle growth.

If you’re starting out how fast should you expect your muscles to grow? Well, they don’t grow quickly, but you can think of it as a bank: every time you put in a good work out it’s like putting some small change in the bank.

Over time it accumulates, and it’s very akin to what you’ll see if you ever go to Toronto. Toronto has over two million tulip blooms, and they were planted one at a time just like these muscle growth properties, we plan one muscle cell at a time.

Over time, if you’re consistent and you can maintain your effort, you will find muscle growth to be a beautiful thing.

And again it takes work. Muscle growth is not linear; sometimes you grow fast sometimes not much. Early on in your training, you can expect to grow fairly rapidly, but later as you become more advanced, it takes more dedicated work.

You have to be a more dedicated scientist of your own body to figure out what are the magic ingredients and secrets for your body to unlock some of those growth potentials.

Gender and Muscle Growth

We know that muscle is muscle but a muscle bathed in testosterone and estrogen respond differently. Muscles have receptors for growth known as anabolic receptors. Anabolic receptors are greatly enhanced with testosterone as a lock and key system of muscle protein synthesis.

Growth can come with higher intensities, we suspect for, women often because those higher concentrations lead to higher growth hormone factors.

Whereas with men, with muscles bathed in testosterone, moderate to slightly elevated levels of intensity or weight will help those muscles respond.

Imagine too that because of the hormones environments that vary significantly per month with women and not so much with men, there is this idea that maintaining energy balance is different between the two sexes.

Women also seem to be more in tune with pain. In some of our studies in our labs, we’ve determined that women sense pain sooner but tolerate greater pain longer than men.

In fact, one only needs to look at the notion of childbirth to know that to be true. We know that men cannot tolerate the same pain that women do.

That’s not to say we should put women in more pain; it’s just this notion that women experience pain more consistently and more often than men and therefore, because of that, they develop better mechanisms mentally, at least, to handle it, we suspect physiologically as well.

We also know that hypertrophy training seems to be better tolerated by women. This idea of metabolic stress appears to favor some of the environments that are related to estrogen. Testosterone is more of a quick response.

How often men train becomes an issue related to training status, recovery status, and nutrition status. With women, we tend to find that hormones fluctuate significantly within the month, so the timing of heavy training is vital for women, and the type of the work is necessary and related to their cycle.

Age and Muscle Growth

Early in life, working out makes muscles more efficient so, patterns of movement are driven by the nerves. As we work out, we develop sound patterns, and we become more efficient with our movements.

However, as we become more efficient, we end up using less muscle mass to do the same amount of work. So it’s the good and bad of becoming more experienced with weight training.

The good is that you become more efficient; the bad is that you use less muscle mass, so the idea is over time you have to vary the kinds of exercises and frequency.

During optimal growth patterns in development, we tend to see that adolescence and youth have neural development and then later, as they reach mid-teens, late teen years, muscular growth seems to occur.

That’s related to the efficiency of growth hormone during age and training related issues and that as we become older, we find that muscle will respond to hypertrophy, still growing through the mid-20s and even sometimes in the early 30s.

We see that the satellite cells and the mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cells, the things that then begin to ramp up our growth factors. Then the ability for fiber to recover, or whether we are type 1 or type 2 fiber muscle that we’re working out and those muscles will change in their ability to improve based on your age because we have different kinds of collagens and antigens that help us relate to repair.

Early in training muscle mass can accumulate rapidly, but it slows as training progresses. It’s likely that as we grow older mainly after ages 40 and 50, muscle collagen is slower to recover and it becomes less springy or muscles become less able to store the series elastic components of strength to create a forceful contraction.

However, if muscles are maintained properly, we can still see progressive strength increases or muscle size increases only not at the magnitude that we once would have seen in the in our 20s or 30s and but perhaps even in the early 40s.

The other thing is that satellite cells which help repair the damage to cells, and coordinate repair becomes less efficient as we age. As time wears on, we see the activity of the satellite cell being less efficient and even at a much smaller level we then also see something called chromosomal telomeres that become less long as we age. The length of a telomere helps protect our basic DNA of our muscle.

Lifestyle changes like jobs, changes in responsibility and family, and movement patterns and nutrition, all of which become altered as we get older, also affects muscle growth.

Often, job responsibilities lead to higher stress and that higher stress can compromise a very healthy lifestyle. The choices that we make along the way as we get older impact our muscles’ ability to grow when we see chronic stressors from multiple tasks.

As we become older and responsible for more things, or more people, the immune system also seems to be enhanced to some degree and begins to decline somewhat after the sixth decade of life. This is related to muscle growth because as the immune system is compromised so too is our ability to repair and maintain muscle mass.

Another factor that is affected is our fast twitch muscle fiber. These are the kinds of muscle fibers that would catch us before we fall or rapid movements generated for sprinting and getting out of harm’s way.

As we age, these facets of the muscle become less active and tend to atrophy. Interestingly though, in research done on 70 and 80-year-olds, we find that power can be recovered to some degree.

It’s often the quality of the muscle and not just the quantity of the muscle that can be repaired. The quantity of muscle, however, does seem to be genetically related and is also related to the volume of work done during your workouts, so that is an important piece to remember.

However slow twitch fiber, the fibers that are related to longer sets/longer reps, do seem to maintain their protein synthesis rates, unlike the fast twitch muscle fibers.

It is a “use it or lose it“ sort of proposition in that if we continue to train we tend to see protein synthesis rates maintained which is great for metabolism. We want to maintain a high metabolism throughout aging and part of the way that we do that is maintaining higher sets and reps.

Overreach and Recovery Lead to Muscle Growth

But the other thing that happens is we’ll need more recovery. To recap: overreach recovery leading to growth recovery from a workout is related to many things, genetics, training status, nutrition, total exercise volume and then, our ability to handle and manage mental stress.

When we overreach, it teeters your body to fatigue into a negative nitrogen balance or lots of protein breakdown. As we rest, we restore our body’s ability to regenerate and come back from the stressors in training.

This is critical because our body seeks to maintain what we call homeostasis or balance. And if our body maintains positive energy balance we grow. If it cannot keep up with positive energy balance, then we cannot grow so muscle growth is mostly related to our ability to stress and recover.

Then the super-compensation is achieved when we can handle more reps or weight, and from a muscle growth standpoint it means, your muscles begin to hold more muscle glycogen, they contain more cellular water, and they’re swelling, and we often call this increases in lean muscle mass.

What Are the Best Sets, Reps, and Rest Intervals For Me to Grow Big Well?

As we approach this question, let’s examine at least two popular forms of training from some very impressive athletes, bodybuilders, and powerlifters.

To gain muscular hypertrophy, or growing in muscle size, bodybuilders often will employ rep schemes of 3 or more sets of 8, all the way up to 15, sometimes 20 repetitions, with short work to rest ratios.

So, stressing the muscle, giving it time to recover just a bit, and then stressing it again, seems to be a very facilitative way of helping muscle grow.

Powerlifters, who are seeking strength, tend to work off multiple sets with much fewer reps and a higher intensity of weight. So higher intensity being 85 percent of their maximum capacity with a 1:3 to 1:5 work to rest ratio, meaning if a set takes 60 seconds I may need three minutes or five minutes to recover.

So the work is one minute, and the rest is three to five minutes. This is important because this determines how metabolically demanding your work.

I can’t stress this point enough because early on you’ll see people lifting weights in the gym and they’ll hit a good set, and then they’ll rest, and they’ll rest, and they’ll rest.

They’ll drink some water, more rest, and the problem is it doesn’t initiate metabolic acidosis enough, or even local hypoxia. We talked earlier about that reactive hyperthermia response.

Best Sets, Reps, and Rest Intervals For Beginners

If beginning lifters want to get the muscle to grow, muscles must be stressed to fatigue, and some would say failure, but most of the research is suggesting that fatigue is the important starting point. How do you know if you’re fatigued?

If you are doing sets and reps, we know you begin to fatigue when you start to feel heavy limbs or your form begins to get worse slowly. For instance, in a squat if I notice I’m coming up on my toes, or if I notice I’m leaning to one side, or not going down far enough in a deep position.

These factors as we begin to do our sets and reps are neural, we neurally fatigue first before we muscularly fatigue, particularly with what we call fast twitch muscle fiber.

So when you start to program muscle fatigue, it’s important to know that if you didn’t have muscle fatigue, you wouldn’t have anything to rebound.

Progressive fatigue over two to three weeks is a good starting point for one specific workout. Therefore, if you want to try a system of workouts give it two to three weeks and that should tell you whether or not you’re ready to adapt.

However, after those two to three weeks, you may want to switch up the exercises or the sets and reps so that you get continued stress. For very young beginners, if you’re younger than pubertal stage or Tanner Stage 5 development, we tend to see that even one or two sets are enough. Once you hit Tanner Stage 5, effectively puberty, we do see the need for multiple sets and reps with both light loads and moderate loads important for increasing muscle strength and size and eventually muscular hypertrophy.

For beginning muscle growth usually, two to three day split routines seem to work best, either four or six days a week. A potential idea is two days on/one day off or two days on/two days off.

This seems to be where many novices begin. As you increase your capacity to recover from this kind of workout, you can train either more frequently or with more extended training sessions.

New research suggests that more often shorter durations are better. As many as six to nine sessions per week that only last 20 minutes in duration, meaning an hour to an hour and a half, seems to be the optimal amount of time in a gym.

Some researchers have suggested that after 45 minutes of consistent resistance exercise testosterone may peak and begin to wane. If we’re doing moderate to light intensity work, or moderate to light loads, then we might not see that peak until a little bit later in the workout.

Something like a chest/shoulders/tris workout, a back/biceps workout, a legs workout, or a push and a pull day (meaning you would do a push press or a squat followed by the next day of lat pulldowns and a deadlift) could work.

Or alternating upper and lower body workouts are just a few of the ways that we see programs for beginners help to impact muscle growth.

Once the beginning lifters have gone through their first several months of neural and hormonal changes relating to resistance exercise, movement patterns become optimized, and so hormone in protein synthesis factors are now left to enhance muscle growth, not just mechanical strain.

The More Experienced Builder

We seem to see a need for local muscle hypoxia or that idea of a muscular pump, and it’s at this point that sets to failure become more important.

Once you’ve been in your program three months, possibly six months, we then see a need for moving to more optimal or more challenging kinds of workouts, or sets, like sets to failure, drop sets, sets where you’re working in eccentrically enhanced modes.

Beginning with the load above 60 to 80 percent, for the more experienced lifter, it seems to also help with breaking what we call hypertrophied plateaus or when your muscle size appears to top out.

Loads greater than 85 percent of your maximal effort and sets to failure become more stimulating and enhance what we called growth hormone response because there are greater muscle damage and something called insulin-like growth factor or IGF 1.

Some of our research has shown that even after an acute bout of exercise, or something that happens over very short periods of time, you do see an increase in growth hormone and testosterone but interestingly enough you also see an increase in something called cortisol which is a catabolic hormone.

For the more experienced lifter to grow more, you must change the stimulus. If we look back at the basics of bodybuilding, of course, we have to go back to some of the early work of Reg Park and Frank Zane and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

They have given us a six-day split, something like chest, back, legs, forearms, calves and abs then biceps, triceps, shoulders, calves and forearms.

You’ll tend to see these splits in such a way that calves and abs and forearms are done every day, but 5 to 6 sets of 6 to 10 reps of most exercises is what Arnold was very effective in using early on.

Now again, we don’t recommend this for every muscle grower because we have to remember that there were certain chemical enhancements that Arnold was privy to that most of our beginning lifters and even some of our intermediate or more advanced lifters may not subscribe to optimal nutrition.

Optimal nutrition, even with the most experienced bodybuilder, is individual and so making sure you get your proteins and carbohydrates, or as critical as any supplement you may take.

Push and pull days are important, so things like a squat, military press, leg press or dumbbell flies are important on a push day. Like deadlifts, wide pull-ups, rows, Romanian deadlifts and single arm dumbbell rows, are all good exercises on pull days.

Isometric holds are somewhere in the middle. As we said previously, we work on that notion of time under tension, mechanical load and reactive hyperemia responses as a way to grow muscles.

There are more advanced ideas: eccentric overload training has been something espoused by Ellington Darden, who was a bodybuilder around the time of Arnold and believes very much that eccentric overload, or the active muscle lengthening during muscle contractions, is a big promoter of muscle growth and stimulation.

There’s some research to suggest that if you have trained for a while, at least six months to a year, eccentric overloading may be helpful.

If you’re new to it, too much eccentric overloading can create an acute breakdown of too many sarcomeres within the muscle fiber. We have to watch out for the ugly part of rhabdomyolysis which is muscle breakdown.

Forced reps are another thing that advanced growers may include and forced reps simply going to failure, then a few extra. This is a common practice used by the most advanced lifters.

Partial reps, which we see from our friends who do powerlifting, are things like heavy walkouts where you walk out with a heavy weight on your shoulders and let your body adjust to it and then rack it. We also see walkouts, lockouts and rack pulls,

Strongman style training like farmer’s walks, tire flipping, endurance deadlifting is also very important for the advanced lifter to increase stimulation. I might add that variations of the Olympic lifts have been used for the more advanced muscle grower to go for fast versus slow reps, would it activate different fiber types like type 1 versus type 2 fibers.

I think we can see clearly that that is part of what will happen.

Nutritional Variations

Protein storage, or what we call accretion, is enhanced when available protein is high. Early on some of the studies suggest it’s 1.8 grams per kilogram of body weight for beginners or even higher for well-trained individuals. What does that equate to as a simple rule of thumb: take your weight and put a zero on it and that’s about how many grams of protein you need.

Nutritional variations protein storage accretion is enhanced when available protein is high. So we see that protein synthesis is critical for the muscle grower. Recommendations here include higher protein the more highly trained you are.

It has to be coupled with carbohydrate. Simply protein without carbohydrate will not enhance protein synthesis so; there has to be some reckoning of protein and carbohydrate.

However what kind of carbohydrate is important and a calorie isn’t just a calorie. Many people say calories in/calories out, but that’s not necessarily true when we look at the bioavailability and the bioenergetics of how much energy it takes to burn a quality protein or more fiber-rich carbohydrate.

Protein is the best compliment to carbohydrate and fats particularly when fats are present in things like the avocados, seeds, and nuts. These are all things that are very important for a balanced diet.

What about fried food? Is that something balance, of course not, but if we’re using our heads many of us who are looking to grow muscle often read nutritional publications that suggest that a calorie can be a calorie, all proteins are good, and supplements enhance everything.

Use common sense and remember that your body is the true reckoner of what will work and what may not work. Please be aware of what is going on with your body as you train and eat. Some of the data suggest that 70 to 80 percent of the way you look is related to your nutrition. When we say the way you look, we mean how big you grow and how lean you stay. Is this accurate? Perhaps it is overstated, but the point is important; so your nutrition is important.

The overall best source of protein that we can think of is eggs because they include fats in the way of cholesterol and a tremendously high source of protein.

This has been known for a long time so what do you do if you are someone who has an egg allergy or you’re someone who needs to grow muscle and can’t have this. Are there supplements that can work?

Certainly, there are, but again, from what we know and what you can eat, eggs seem to be the single best source of protein. Cooking thoroughly is essential to avoid salmonella or other kinds of issues related to eggs.

They should be cooked or almost thoroughly cooked so that the protein within them has a carbon structure that you can break down.

The jury is still out on this notion of what about all the studies on chocolate milk. Should I be drinking chocolate milk pre-workout during workout post-workout?

Some of Brad Schoenfeld’s reviews have suggested that the timing of nutrition is somewhat important, but the overall protein intake along with carbs and fats are the most important.

We do see though that some of the studies have suggested that during or immediately after our workouts are the best times for a small protein/carbohydrate supplement to reduce protein breakdown and enhance protein synthesis.

Other parts of it are what about a shake before you go to bed. This is not an uncommon practice for those experienced muscle growers, and this is often important because as we grow, we know that we need to keep that nitrogen balance positive.

Rest and Recovery

Sleeping is the single best form of recovery for a strenuous workout particularly when we’re able to hit deep sleep when the REM cycles kick in. We seem to see one Hertz wave of relaxation bathe the brain and allow the brain to recover.

It’s during that time that we see growth hormone release for recovery, and we see all kinds of positive things that go on and the stress hormones can be reduced from our constant vigilance of the day’s stressors.

Also during recovery, it’s when the disruption of pain that we have if we have overdone it, or mental stress, circumvent our ability to recover well. We need to find a way to best recover, and it appears that sleep is our greatest ally.

Too much disruption leads to overload and constant overtraining. This is when overtraining, or lack of recovery is most seen when we lose REM sleep.

How do we get to be in positive recovery? One of the best techniques is having a constant and consistent routine without using any sleep aids and making sure you’re well hydrated, and you’re sleeping in a cool atmosphere.

Overtraining

Few weightlifters overtrain. More often they under recover and this is an important distinction. True overtraining has some very significant physiological cues like elevated resting heart rate, lack of heart rate recovery after a workout, profuse sweating after a workout within 30 minutes to an hour even after all the work has subsided.

Under recovering affects muscle growth and muscle growth is also stunted when too frequent or too intense training occurs.

Often our young lifters will see if a little is good, much more is better. So, they go in and train for two and a half hours, or they’ll look in the mirror and flex when they’re not in the gym, and they’ll work on those muscle hardening techniques that we can see. However, intense or too much training will stunt muscle growth.

Another issue is mood changes. These can be an indicator of overtraining and tend to be unreliable. Unfortunately some of the studies we did even after sleep deprivation with Olympic lifters we found that while mood changes occur with sleep deprivation, it doesn’t always coincide with performance changes relative to the muscle grower.

What that says is that even if you’re in a bad mood, sorry guys you still have to train. If my mood stays disrupted and it begins to affect my working life, my relationships, that’s when I may be a more overtraining state. Common peeves or hassles do not affect my ability to grow but responsive to it would.

Again elevated heart rate, mental confusion are better tools to look at as a collective to tell us whether or not we are truly overtrained. Pure muscle growers avoid overtraining as much as possible because overtraining can be the enemy of what we’re trying to accomplish.

Muscle Soreness

Another thing that happens as we begin to train is a delayed onset of muscle soreness or exercise-induced muscle damage. Exercise-induced muscle damage is often related to active muscle lengthening or negative work or eccentric work. This is when your muscle fibers are stretched to their limit, and they begin to break and tear down during this time.

We have muscle swelling, or sarcomeres swelling is what it’s often referred to, and it is followed by a tenderness or soreness in muscles and activation of the nerves around those muscles. We have inflammation and increased cellular swelling.

The latest thinking is that electrical stimulation and protein ingestion will help you in recovery when you have had delayed onset muscle soreness or exercise-induced muscle damage.

What about massage? Massage helps move fluid away from the interstitial spaces as part of swelling, but it can also prolong damage. A well-timed massage is very important and probably not immediately after a workout. More often as the muscle has had time to swell and the pro-inflammatory markers have time to work their way out, by then the anti-inflammatory markers are there, and it could be an okay time for your massage.

We also see a new trend that ice may not be as effective as previously thought but research is still trying to get a grasp on whether or not this is the most effective means of reducing delayed onset muscle soreness. Right now the common thinking is that heat after delayed onset muscle soreness has occurred may be the most effective way of stunting that process.

Focal Points

• First, you’ve got to pay attention to the frequency of training. In the beginning, two or three days a week may be enough. And again one of the bodybuilders that I have looked up to is the guy by the name of John Meadows who suggests that you want to train as little as possible so that you get the effect you want. What’s interesting about that is we often think that the more we train, the more effect we get.
• But I like John Meadow’s ideas. We want to train enough to get an effect but not so much that we ruin our effect. Quality reps, proper form, and proper movement patterns promote progressive growth. This idea that if you have an excellent mind-muscle connection, or thinking about actually contracting that soft tissue muscle as you’re going, will promote muscle growth is a fundamental idea.
• Volume or total sets and reps, short rest periods, amount of time and increasing the amount of time the muscle has to do work and moderate loads are critical when you start your workouts. So, progressively increasing the total volume that you do will be helpful. If you stick to the lower end of your sets and reps ranges at first so that you can adapt, you’ll find that progression is fairly quick in coming.
• Sleep and proper nutrition improve muscle growth period. Making sure that quality sleep is there even if it is a 20-minute nap during the day. Depending on the kind of job you do, or if you have children or young children, or you have multiple jobs and different work schedules, finding quality rest can be a problem. Having a routine and having a pattern to your bedtime will help you get that high quality sleep because your body, like anything else if it has behavioral training will begin to adapt. Stick with your system. Don’t just stick with it for three weeks and then give it up. Keep plugging at it. Keep working. Consistency is key here. If you’re not consistent, it will be tough to watch muscles grow because they don’t grow like plants.
• Muscles don’t grow all of a sudden with a little water and a little sunshine, and now, you’ve got muscles. It takes time. It takes effort and what I like to call sweat equity. If you can build that sweat equity with your muscles, you find some significant gains.
• Make sure that if you see signs of increased heart rate, lack of sleep, prolonged soreness, and stress, these are signs you back off the gas. You need to change your routine and have a greater recovery. That’s very important because we don’t want those muscles to be doing all this work at the expense of the rest of your health.
• Finally, the special considerations: frequency of training needs to be based on current training status. If you’re not experienced, you don’t want to train a whole lot of days every week. Particularly if you’re young and you’re just developing neural patterns, a few days a week is enough.
• If you’re post-teen and you’ve already matured, and you’re in your 20s, you may need to train three to four times a week, and that would be good given that you can recover as you get more intense. Multiple times or multiple training sessions a day is not unheard of.
• This is a dedicated lifestyle if you want to truly grow muscle. It takes behaviors that help muscles grow stretching the muscles through the whole workout getting a good muscular pump as part of it. Shortening your work to rest ratios is important. We’re working on that.
• Women can grow muscle but need to consider the unique hormone fluctuations that impact immune response to muscle growth. For instance, if you’re in the middle of your cycle you may grow muscle more quickly. At certain times during your cycle, you may increase water retention. You have to be careful that your ego is not caught up in the scale of what you do, rather the muscle function and staying focused on the notion that if I build it my muscles will grow. Women’s muscles will grow just as men’s muscles do. The difference is the hormone environments that bathe their muscles. In fact, there is some evidence to say that as women get older, the quality of their muscle is preserved better with estrogen than men’s muscles with testosterone.
• As we age, we need more rest in between workouts, and you need to be careful on large muscle group movements as you get older because the joints, the tendons, and the ligaments may need more time to warm up and to recover. We have to be aware of that with muscle growth.
• And finally, muscle growth can occur at any age even in the seventh or eighth decade of life, we can still see muscle growth and again the collagen fibers may be somewhat limited because of the elasticity components and the cellular satellite migration that occurs as we have muscle damage but muscle growth can occur at any age as long as a hormone environment.

References:

1. Chennaoui M, Arnal PJ, Sauvet F, Léger D. ‘Sleep, and exercise: a reciprocal issue?” Sleep medicine reviews. 2015 Apr 30;20:59-72.

2. Hollander DB, Kraemer RR, Kilpatrick MW, Ramadan ZG. “Maximal eccentric and concentric strength discrepancies between young men and women for dynamic resistance exercise.” Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research. 2007 Feb 1;21(1):34.

3. Hollander D, Meyers MC, LeUnes A. “Psychological factors associated with overtraining: Implications for youth sport coaches.” Journal ofSport Behavior. 1995 Mar 1;18(1):3.

4. Howatson G, Van Someren KA. “The prevention and treatment of exercise-induced muscle damage.” Sports Medicine. 2008 Jun 1;38(6):483-503.

5. Reeves GV, Kraemer RR, Hollander DB, Clavier J, Thomas C, Francois M, Castracane VD. “Comparison of hormone responses following light resistance exercise with partial vascular occlusion and moderately difficult resistance exercise without occlusion.” Journal of Applied Physiology. 2006 Dec 1;101(6):1616-22.

6. Schoenfeld BJ. “The mechanisms of muscle hypertrophy and their application to resistance training.” The Journal of Strength & Conditioning Research. 2010 Oct 1;24(10):2857-72.

7. Schoenfeld BJ, Ogborn D, Krieger JW. “Effects of resistance training frequency on measures of muscle hypertrophy: a systematic review and meta-analysis.” Sports Medicine. 2016 Nov 1;46(11):1689-97.

8. Schoenfeld BJ, Peterson MD, Ogborn D, Contreras B, Sonmez GT. “Effects of low-vs. high-load resistance training on muscle strength and hypertrophy in well-trained men.” The Journal of Strength & Conditioning Research. 2015 Oct 1;29(10):2954-63.

9. Schoenfeld BJ, Ratamess NA, Peterson MD, Contreras B, Tiryaki-Sonmez G. “Influence of resistance training frequency on muscular adaptations in well-trained men.” The Journal of Strength & Conditioning Research. 2015 Jul 1;29(7):1821-9.

10. Silva VP, Oliveira NA, Silveira H, Mello RG, Deslandes AC. “Heart rate variability indexes as a marker of chronic adaptation in athletes: a systematic review.“ Annals of Noninvasive Electrocardiology. 2015 Mar 1;20(2):108-18.

11. Tavares LD, de Souza EO, Ugrinowitsch C, Laurentino GC, Roschel H, Aihara AY, Cardoso FN, Tricoli V. “Effects of different strength training frequencies during reduced training period on strength and muscle cross-sectional area.” European Journal of Sport Science. 2017 Mar 8:1-8.

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High-load resistance training has always been linked to greater muscular power and strength, while low-load training can lead to greater muscular endurance. Breaking that down further, high-load resistance training can increase adaptations in the myofibrils, while low-load endurance training concentrates on the mitochondria, the powerhouses of the cells.

One paper published in Frontiers in Medicine took a closer look at the two resistance training methodologies to determine which would lead to better overall results. As the paper stated, “concurrent practice of traditional endurance exercise and resistance exercise regimens to achieve both types of muscle adaptations is time-consuming, motivationally demanding, and contended to entail practice at intensity levels, that may not comply with clinical settings. It is therefore of principal interest to identify effective, yet feasible, exercise strategies that may positively affect both mitochondrial and myofibrillar protein turnover.”

Recent studies have indicated that low-load resistance training can be as effective for increasing myofibrillar accretion and muscular growth. At the same time, high-load resistance training can also increase mitochondrial biogenesis, though to a lesser degree than low-load endurance training.

Regarding mitochondrial stimulation, low-load endurance training has proven the more effective methodology. One study on endurance training recorded “a robust increase in mitochondrial protein synthesis rate after low-load resistance exercise performed with a slow and tonic contraction phase and conducted to volitional fatigue.”

Not only that, but endurance training has been linked to higher ATP energy turnover in comparison to high-load training. Also, “fatiguing low-load resistance exercise conducted with slow and tonic contraction phase or application of external restriction of blood flow to the exercising muscle, has been shown to impose a more pronounced decrease in tissue oxygenation compared to traditionally performed high-load and low-load resistance exercise.”

Low-load, endurance training delivers the same, or better, results as high-load training, but with far less strain on your body.

Low-load, endurance training is less mechanically strenuous, reduces the amount of time required to reach volitional fatigue, reduces the required work volume, and stimulates muscle growth on par with high-load training. Simply put: endurance training delivers the same, or better, results as high-load training, but with far less strain on your body.

Regarding sheer mechanics, low-load endurance training is the clear winner over high-load resistance training. Though there is a certain amount of discomfort (that burn in your muscles when you’re hitting 15-20 reps), it’s very likely more effective for both mitochondrial and myofibril adaptations.

Reference:

1. Groennebaek, Thomas, and Kristian Vissing. “Impact of Resistance Training on Skeletal Muscle Mitochondrial Biogenesis, Content, and Function.” Frontiers, Frontiers, 4 Sept. 2017.

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We all know that exercise can boost your mood and drive away stress. When we engage in high-intensity exercise (such as HIIT), our brains release Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor (BDNF), a protein that can boost cognitive function and relax our minds. BDNF can also protect your brain, repair your memory, and reset your mood.

But in a study on opiod release after HIIT Finnish researchers have found that exercise-induced endorphin release in the brain relies on the intensity of the exercise. According to the data, an increase in endorphins can do wonders to alleviate physical and emotional stress, but first, you’ve got to work through the pain.

The study, conducted at the Turku PET Centre, University of Turku, examined the effects of HIIT training on 22 healthy adults. Positron Emission Technology (PET) was used to measure the levels of radioactivity in the brain after the participants were injected with a radioactive compound. The compound was designed to bond with the opioid receptors in the brain.

Essentially, higher bonding with the opioid receptors was proportionate to a positive mood.

The participants were then subjected to a 60-minute aerobic training workout of moderate- intensity, a high-intensity (HIIT) aerobic workout, and a rest period. PET scans were taken of the frontolimbic regions of the brain (thalamus, insula, orbitofrontal cortex, hippocampus, and anterior cingulate cortex), which are involved in pain, reward, and emotional processing.

Moderate-intensity exercise did nothing to increase binding with the opioid receptors in the brain, but HIIT exercise increased the release of endorphins and other opioid peptides. HIIT also led to increased negative feelings, a result of the higher release of endorphins. However, it ultimately led to pleasurable sensations and euphoria, the other result of endorphins flooding your body.

What does this mean? According to the lead researcher, “Our results highlight that exercise intensity affects endorphin release and that the brain opioid system is involved in both positive and negative feelings caused by physical exercise performed at different intensities.”

The researcher went on to explain, “At moderate training intensities, the pleasurable sensations caused by the possible release of endorphins may promote habitual exercise. At very high exercise intensities, the release of endorphins appears to be linked to increased negative feelings and pain, and may be needed to manage the emotionally and physically demanding challenge.”

So, HIIT will release endorphins into your body, but those endorphins are used to manage the negative feelings and pain associated with the very high-intensity training. Though “such negative feelings may discourage further exercise,” it’s essential that you’re prepared for them when beginning HIIT training. You’ll have to learn to push through the pain and stress of the workout to ultimately experience the high (euphoria) caused by the endorphins produced by the high-intensity nature of the workout.

Reference:

1. Tiina Saanijoki, Lauri Tuominen, Jetro J Tuulari, Lauri Nummenmaa, Eveliina Arponen, Kari Kalliokoski, and Jussi Hirvonen. “Opioid Release after High-Intensity Interval Training in Healthy Human Subjects.” Neuropsychopharmacology advance online publication 16 August 2017; doi: 10.1038/npp.2017.148.

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There are many health risks associated with pregnancy: from preeclampsia to gestational diabetes to incontinence to excessive weight gain. While some of these problems are simply the result of the changes occurring in your body, many are the direct result of unhealthy lifestyle and eating habits before and during pregnancy.

However, according to an article from the Journal of American Medicine Association, physical exercise during pregnancy can have significant physiological benefits. But these benefits aren’t limited to you alone—your baby will benefit as well.

In the past, doctors advised against high-intensity exercise for fear of risking the fetus’ health. Pregnant women were also encouraged to eat more to meet the demands placed on their body by the pregnancy. Unfortunately, this often led to excessive weight gain, gestational diabetes, and higher infant birth weight.

However, the new study indicates that “moderate exercise during pregnancy is safe and beneficial for both mother and baby.” Some of the benefits provided by exercise include:

• Lower fetal macrosomia risk
• Reduced risk of pre-eclampsia
• Less chance of gestational diabetes
• Prevention of excessive maternal weight gain, as well as high infant birth weight
• Reduction of lower back pain, urinary incontinence, and pelvic pain

What About The Baby?

What about the baby, you may ask? According to the research, “there is no risk of premature birth, low birth weight or fetal distress; provided that the mother has no medical or obstetric contraindication for physical exercise.”

The study goes on to lay out a simple guideline to follow for exercising during pregnancy: a combination of resistance and aerobic training. Resistance training increases muscle mass, while aerobic training focuses on eliminating body fat. Yoga and pilates are also worth considering, though more for the stress and pain-reducing benefits.

Exercise 20 to 30 minutes, most days of the week. This ensures more than the minimum 150 minutes of exercise per week recommended by the WHO, leading to improved health.

What Exercises To Avoid During Pregnancy

High-intensity exercise (above 90% MaxHR) can increase fetal risk, but moderate-intensity exercise should not produce adverse effects.

Workout no-nos include long-distance running, isometric contraction training, jump training, intense weight training, exercises that involve lying on your back for extended periods, impact exercises, and exercises that carry the risk of falling.

Begin after the first prenatal visit. Exercise should be started between week nine and twelve of pregnancy and can continue as late as week 38 or 39. Follow these guidelines, and you’ll keep both yourself and your baby healthy during your pregnancy.

Reference:

1. Perales M, Artal R, Lucia A. “Exercise During Pregnancy.” JAMA. 2017;317(11):1113–1114. doi:10.1001/jama.2017.0593.

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Sugar has been linked to a broad range of health problems: from diabetes to obesity to inflammation to acne to an increased cancer risk. In Britain, adults consume approximately double, and in the U.S. triple, the recommended level of added sugar for additional health benefits (5% of energy intake), with sweet foods and drinks contributing three-quarters of the intake.”

Now, findings from a study on sugar intake from sweet food and beverages, common mental disorder and depression, have linked high sugar intake to common mental disorders such as depression. The observational study collected data from more than 23,000 people. The researchers analyzed the subjects’ diets, asking them to fill out a questionnaire to assess their food intake frequency and mood.

The data showed that men in the top third of sugar intake had a 23% higher chance of common mental disorders within just five years. Worse, the risk of developing the disorders was independent of other factors. Diet, health behaviors, socioeconomic, demographic, adiposity (body fat percentage), and disease had little effect on the men’s increased chance of developing common mental disorders (including depression) within five years.

Sugar May Act Like A Drug

One theory about the impact on mood is that sugar may act like a drug, like cocaine, giving you a high, and making you crave high sugar products, like junk food and sweet treats, over other foods.

You may be thinking, “Well, wouldn’t depression, anxiety, and other common mental disorders play a role in sugar intake? After all, stress eating or comfort eating can lead to an increased consumption of sugar, right?”

As the study discovered, neither common mental disorders nor depression predicted the changes of sugar intake. Comfort or stress eating played no role in the subjects high sugar consumption, despite the fact that high sugar consumption led to the development of common mental disorders.

“We found an adverse effect of higher sugar intake on mental health cross-sectionally. Further, we found an increased likelihood of incident common mental disorders in men and some evidence of recurrent depression in both sexes with higher intakes of sugar from sweet food/beverages.”

This research drives one important point home: high sugar intake is dangerous for your psychological health. The data proved that there is a direct connection between high sugar intake from sweet foods/beverages and mental/psychological health problems.

The researchers stated, “Over years and decades, it could be that those susceptible to depression tend to increase their sugar intake. With a high prevalence of mood disorders, and sugar intake commonly two to three times the level recommended, our findings indicate that policies promoting the reduction of sugar intake could additionally support primary and secondary prevention of depression.”

Despite the researchers’ findings, according to Dr. Anika Knuppel, there are still many questions that remain unanswered. For instance, whether sugar makes us sad, whether it affects men more than women, and whether it is sweetness, rather than sugar itself, that explains the observed associations. What is certain, though, is that sugar is associated with a number of health problems, including tooth decay, type 2 diabetes, and obesity. So cutting down on sugar is probably a good idea, regardless of whether it causes mood disorders or not.

Reference:

1. Anita Knuppel, Martin J. Shipley, Clare H. Llewellyn, Eric J. Brunner. “Sugar Intake From Sweet Food And Beverages, Common Mental disorder and depression: prospective findings from the Whitehall II study” Scientific Reports 7, Article: 62887, 2017. Doi:10.1038/s41598-017-05649-7

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Protein is the most important part of our diet. Not only does it contribute to new muscle growth, but it carries out chemical functions in the cells, coordinates biological processes, stores energy, and protects existing muscle mass.

Age-related muscle mass decrease, also known as sarcopenia, is one of the most significant contributors to aging. As we grow older, our muscle mass decreases, which in turn reduces the amount of energy available for use. This leads to less strength, stamina, and endurance.

According to a review published in the journal Frontiers in Nutrition, adding more protein to your diet is the best way to reduce this age-related muscle loss. The study states that the current recommended daily protein intake of 0.8 grams per kilogram of body weight is insufficient to prevent sarcopenia among the elderly.

Why is that? Simple: this recommendation is for all adults above the age of 19. It’s grading on the curve, not taking into account the unique nutritional requirements of the elderly. Just getting those 0.8 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight will not be enough to protect senior citizens from losing muscle mass as they age.

So How Much Is Enough?

According to the review, elderly people should increase their protein intake by a whopping 50%, up to 1.2 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight.

But it’s not just the amount of protein that matters—the review states that the focus should be on leucine, one of the three branch-chain amino acids that play an important role in building new muscle tissue.

The elderly need more leucine to build muscle proteins. To get more leucine, milk-based proteins—like yogurt, milk, cheese, and whey protein—are highly recommended.

You Need To Exercise.

Of course, there’s one more important recommendation: you need to exercise.

As the lead author says, “I do think that it’s more important to emphasize somewhat like the protein message that being physically active and engaging in whether it’s physical activity in a leisure time, walking or gardening that sort of thing or actually going to the gym and doing structured exercise has a similar effect as protein. It is essentially anti-sarcopenic.”

RDA figures were set as a base that should be achievable and were not designed for optimal nutrition, so to speak. The issue of quality is pretty important, more so than not with protein, but we really don’t have any standards to apply to the general population. There’s a long way to go to providing effective and sound nutrition advice to people across the spectrum.

Reference:

1. Stuart M. Phillips. “Current Concepts and Unresolved Questions in Dietary Protein Requirements and Supplements in Adults.” Frontiers in Nutrition, 2017; 4 DOI: 10.3389/fnut.2017.00013.

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Or is it? According to a new study published in the International Journal of Obesity, your body’s resting energy expenditure should change with weight loss, but that during dieting the extent of that decrease is greater than would be normally attributed to what is happening to your body. This process is called adaptive thermogenesis and leads to markedly reduced efficiency of weight So, the trick with diets is to attenuate adaptive thermogenesis.

It may be a good idea to lay off the diet every now and again if you want to see real results.

A team of researchers funded by the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) of Australia gathered two groups of participants to undergo a reduced-calorie diet. For sixteen weeks, the participants reduced calorie intake by 33%. However, one of the groups only followed the diet for two weeks before taking a two-week break, repeating this cycle for thirty weeks so they still ended up with sixteen weeks of dieting.

After the diet, the researchers examined the results and found that the intermittent dieting group lost more weight during their diet period. Not only that, but they were better able to maintain the weight loss after the diet finished. They lost eight kilograms more than the control group during the six months after the study period.

The lead researcher explained why this happens, “When we reduce our energy (food) intake during dieting, resting metabolism decreases to a greater extent than expected; a phenomenon termed ‘adaptive thermogenesis’ — making weight loss harder to achieve. This ‘famine reaction’, a survival mechanism which helped humans to survive as a species when food supply was inconsistent in millennia past, is now contributing to our growing waistlines when the food supply is readily available.”

On the flip side, diets that only last one to seven days did not prove as effective for promoting and maintaining weight loss. It was only after the diet was sustained for two weeks at a time that the body adapted effectively. Intermittent days of fasting and feasting “were not any more effective than continuous dieting.”

Want to kick your weight loss efforts up a notch? Try intermittent dieting—two weeks of dieting followed by one to two weeks of normal eating. Not only will this make it easier for you to adapt to the new eating habits, but it can encourage better long-term results as well.

Reference:

1. N M Byrne, A Sainsbury, N A King, A P Hills, R E Wood. “Intermittent energy restriction improves weight loss efficiency in obese men—The MATADOR study.” International Journal of Obesity, 2017; DOI: 10.1038/ijo.2017.206.

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Every day, millions of scientists around the world spend their time researching, studying, evaluating, and analyzing. They produce thousands of scholarly articles and research papers every month, publishing them in journals to share with the world.

But how many people actually read that information? As one piece in the British Medical Journal states, “knowledge management has started and ended with the publication of an article, or the rare chance of a lecture or speech at a conference attended by other researchers.”

There is so much information at our fingertips—information on every aspect of fitness, exercise, diet, and health, but if that information is never accessed, studied, and used, it’s never going to improve life. It’s of the utmost importance that the knowledge obtained via these studies is translated, disseminated, and shared.

Thus, the social media culture has bred a sort of intelligent ignorance wherein people believe they know something because they heard, read, or watched a video about it.

The sad truth is that evidence-based practices are always going to compete with the popular or trendy on our modern social media. Many people will believe their favorite celebrity when they say a diet or workout plan works, and they’ll never think twice about researching to find out what scientific literature has to say on the subject. Thus, the social media culture has bred a sort of intelligent ignorance wherein people believe they know something because they heard, read, or watched a video about it.

It’s up to each of us to go beyond the easily consumed content available online today and dig into the facts behind everything. When you read an article that swears by a certain fitness routine, spend some time researching the science that is used to make those claims. When a diet product sweeps the world with its magic pill benefits, take a cold, hard look at the data to back the product up. Don’t swallow information just because it’s presented in a clear, easy to read way. It’s worth the effort to know the facts behind the claims, the raw scientific data.

As the review says, “research has to be of great quality before knowledge translation, and sharing becomes relevant.” Low-quality information readily available online is not a reliable source of knowledge. Instead, you need to rely on the high-quality information found in scholarly articles, research papers, and published studies. This is the sort of information that has gone through all the rigorous scientific methods, rather than some guru or fitness expert spouting their latest theories about health and wellness.

Reference:

1. Kotila, Karen, et al. “From knowing to doing: it takes a village.” Br J Sports Med, BMJ Publishing Group Ltd and British Association of Sport and Exercise Medicine, 1 Oct. 2017. 

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Our bodies are designed with a simple hunger mechanism: hunger pangs trigger the desire to eat, and when our stomach feels full, it’s an indication that we’ve had enough to eat. Pretty simple, right?

Hunger Equals Eat. Full Equals Stop Eating.

Unfortunately, this isn’t always the case. According to a new study published in Psychological Science, these associations (hunger equals eat; full equals stop eating) might be learned in reverse. The result: feeling full can cause you to eat more rather than less.

The study took 32 rats and put them through a daily 30-minute conditioning session over the course of 12 days. After being fed, the rats were put in a box that had a lever that fed them tasty treats when pressed. For the following four days, the rats (who hadn’t been fed and were hungry) were put in the same box with the same lever, but the lever produced no treats when pressed.

When the rats were placed in the box again, they were far more prone to pressing the treat-producing lever when they were full rather than hungry. The previous 16 days had conditioned them to believe that the feelings of fullness were a signal that they wanted something tasty. It didn’t matter that they had eaten their fill—they wanted the treats.

But that’s not all. According to the research, “This relapse pattern emerged even when food was removed from the cage before both the learning and unlearning sessions, indicating that the rats’ internal physical states, and not the presence or absence of food, cued their learned behavior.”

You may think, “I’m not a rat; I’m not going to react that way.” Well, the truth is that learned behaviors exist among all animals, including those of us that walk upright on two legs. Our body may drive our food-seeking behavior based on actual physiological needs (genuine hunger), but internal cues and conditioned behavior can also affect our food-related behavior.

The lead researchers explained, “A wide variety of stimuli can come to guide and promote specific behaviors through learning. For example, the sights, sounds, and the smell of your favorite restaurant might signal the availability of your favorite food, causing your mouth to water and ultimately guiding you to eat.”

These stimuli don’t trigger your hunger pangs—hunger is a physiological response. Instead, it will trigger your cravings for something delicious, and that’s the type of response that leads to excessive calorie consumption, weight gain, and ultimately obesity.

Reference:

1. Scott T. Schepers, Mark E. Bouton. “Hunger as a Context: Food Seeking That Is Inhibited During Hunger Can Renew in the Context of Satiety.” Psychological Science, 2017; 095679761771908 DOI: 10.1177/0956797617719084.

The post Are Feelings of Hunger and Satiety Physiological or Learned? appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Wearable technology is all the rage these days. From smart watches to heart rate monitoring T-shirts, to shoes with fitness trackers built in, sports garment manufacturers are always trying to find new and creative ways to marry style and comfort with technology.

One scientist took a closer look at wearable tech from a unique angle: where to wear the tech, rather than what sort of tech to wear. His research examined the practicality, comfort, and of use of wearable tech based on a few factors:

Body movement and mechanics

The wearable devices shouldn’t hinder full range of movement and might be best when placed on parts of the body that don’t move (such as the chest, upper back, or waist).

Movement sensing

In direct contrast to the previous factor, this one is needed for the sensors (such as accelerometers) to function. If the wearables are placed on a body part that doesn’t move much, the sensor won’t be able to detect the full scope of movement and motion. Sensors placed on the lower back, arms, legs, hands, and head will prove most effective at detecting movement.

Type of sensor

A heart rate monitor needs to be located at the wrist, neck, or immediately above the heart. Blood glucose monitors are worn at the waist. Respiration monitors are usually placed over the chest cavity to monitor expansion. The placement of the sensor is usually determined by its purpose.

Proxemics

Proxemics is a human’s perception of self-size. The distance from the body portrayed on this body map indicates how far from the body a wearable device might extend and still be naturally considered part of the person’s self-size awareness. Items extending beyond this distance from the body might take a period of time for a person to adjust and account for the object within their personal self-size envelope.

Social Acceptability

It’s socially unacceptable to use touch-based interactions on regions of the body associated with body waste elimination or sexual activity unless the technology was intended to aid in these bodily functions.

The research is fascinating and provides a glimpse into the most effective ways to incorporate technology into modern clothing. The full range of body maps can be found on this Georgia Tech wearable technology page.

Reference:

1. Zeagler, Clint. 2017. “Where to Wear It : Functional, Technical ,and Social Considerations in On – Body Location for Wearable Technology 20 Years of Designing for Wearability.” In International Symposium on Wearable Computers. Maui, Hawaii. doi:10.1145/3123021.3123042.

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The term middle age spread refers to the amount of weight gained by men and women once they hit the big 4-0. Not only do they pack on a few pounds, but their body fat percentage tends to rise as their lean muscle mass decreases. This is often due to a lack of activity, a decrease in hormones, a slower metabolism, and a decrease in energy output.

One study took a closer look at the middle age spread to see just how much of a threat it posed. A team of researchers at the University of Jyväskylä collected more than 1,000 middle-aged (34 to 49 years) participants and divided them into three groups:

1.  Maintainers, who didn’t increase their daily step count.
2.  Decreasers, who took fewer steps than average every day.
3.  Increasers, who increased their daily step count anywhere from 1,000 to 2,000 steps per day.

Both men and women saw an increase in their BMI during the four years of the study. During this time, close to 50% of the participants maintained their step count, while an additional 25% increased their step count by 1,000 steps per day. These activity levels led to an increase in BMI—visible, though not drastic or unhealthy. On the flip side, those who increased their step count by more than 2,000 steps per day either maintained their pre-testing BMI or saw a decrease in body fat.

Get Fitter or Fatter as You Age

No, that doesn’t mean necessarily going to a gym or forcing yourself to take up jogging or cycling. According to the lead researcher,

“The steps accumulate on many instances during the day, if you give it a chance. One does not necessarily need to go for a walk every day to increase the daily step count. Instead, attention should be paid to choices in everyday life. Does every trip need to be made by car or could some of them be done by foot, or could the stairs be taken instead of the elevator.”

The trend in physical activity looks good. International studies have shown that physical activity generally decreases along with age, but here it increased. Even though step counts in general look good, it should be noted that the amount of passive people who take less than 5,000 steps per day did not change significantly during the research period.

It seems like even the simplest things can’t drive some people to adopt healthier practices.

Reference:

1. Kasper Salin, Mirja Hirvensalo, Costan Magnussen, Risto Telama, Nina Hutri-Kähönen, Jorma Viikari, Olli Raitakari, Tuija Tammelin. “Changes in Daily Steps and Body Mass Index and Waist to Height Ratio during Four Year Follow-Up in Adults: Cardiovascular Risk in Young Finns Study.” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2017; 14 (9): 1015.

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